North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

I suppose it was a similar scene that he had witnessed. But in my own experience I never saw anything remotely resembling the marvel of that desert-kindled flame that brought black night.

It grew dark rapidly. There was no moon. The stars flocked out. In the obscurity the slight noises of the wind grew insistent; the cries of the camels in the darkness sounded weird. The road became much worse. We dipped into pools, and as we advanced the tract was entirely flooded. We went at a snail’s pace, the horses finding their way in the level waters that stretched out like a lake in the gloom. It was full night now. The water was at the hubs, and with a lurch it came in on the carriage floor. We stopped, for it was clear we were off the raised ground of the route on one side or the other. Yussef had been very uneasy, as he might well be, for two of the White Brothers had been drowned the previous week, travelling somewhere in this wide waste. He threw his burnoose up and knotted it, and drew up his garments beneath, and waded out to determine the lay of the slopes. Then we turned to the rising side, and after a hundred feet got onto the floor of the route again and kept it till we had passed the flooded tract. There were two or three Bedouin camp-fires on the west, and once we heard the sound of many voices in the darkness round one of them. Yussef, who was constantly in movement, asked me if I had a revolver, and where was it? It was very handy. “Bon!” he said, with satisfaction. But nothing could long distract my attention from the magnificence of the sky. There was not a cloud. Sirius was in the east, and Orion rising; and one by one I picked out the heaven marks of my boyhood, north and west; but they shone with a splendor, a molten luminousness, a size and lowness undreamed of, and the lesser constellations were obscured by the multitude of starry lights—it was my first view of the desert sky at night. The whole heaven was nebulous with scintillating sparks and milky drifts, innumerable around and about the old leaders of the flock. It was a revelation of the starry universe. I was brought back from my reverie by Yussef’s whole-souled ejaculation—“Voilà! vieux Biskra!” as he sank back with a long sigh of relief into his seat. The oasis was dark before us, and we were soon going by the earthen walls of the silent village and passing under the tall black palms that bordered the starred sky with their fronds, and caught the old constellations in their tops, from which Orion, eastward, lifted himself free in heaven. It was the end.

But how many times since then have the sights of that drive come back to me! When I think of Esau and Ishmael, of Mizpah and Goshen, I live over again the panorama of that winter day. It was not a scene I had beheld; it was a vision.

II

The dunes lie to the west of Biskra. They are real sand-hills; one can climb on them, there are echoes to be waked, and the plain stretches finely to the mountains behind; but it is the forward view that holds the eye. The altitude is not great, but high enough to give a perch something of the commanding power of a cliff prospect over the sea, and the dunes themselves reminded me vaguely of the Ipswich sand-hills of my own coast and their sterile sea-views. The magical thing in the desert is its unexpectedness; it is not at all like what one would have thought. It is not to me oceanic; but in those first days, owing to the moisture of the air and the wetness, it was more so than at a later time. At some hours and under some lights the desert from the dunes had touches of an April sea, fragments of its color; it was blue—not with the solid blue of ocean, but with ethereal tints, insubstantial veils, like inland August haze, or, to speak exactly, with the moist blueness of March. A brilliant March over stretches of melting snow crust by the sea is the bluest of all months; the sky and the ocean are deeply tinged, and the trickling waters of the snow surface reflect the heaven through pale gradations of the universal hue, which, though nowhere intense, has great luminous volume; it is a blue world. I suppose it was the low moisture rising from the desert that took the reflections in bands and spaces; the scene showed at times vast, distant lakes of pale azure, violet lagoons, strips of fallen sky, indigo outlooks—far away —and all in that almost aerial tone, insubstantial, watery, spring-like, infinitely soft and delicate. From the heights of El Kantara, at the mouth of the pass that looks down on Biskra, such a scene is superb in the morning air, and one might well think he was going down to the roads of an inland sea unlike all others; and from the dunes, in certain weather conditions, though on a far lesser scale, one has this vision of the blue desert.

But it was not the blue desert that made the dunes a leaf in my book of memory; it was a brown little Bedouin boy on a sand-hillock whom I observed on my way home. I made his acquaintance. He was about ten years old; his ragged, earth-colored garment blew round his sturdy bare legs; he was capped with black hair, and his small herd of goats fed beside him. He was shy, and his stolid, great eyes looked up at me—those young Arab eyes, expressionless, but which a touch of joy irradiates, seeming to liquefy their shallow light, making them soft like a caress. He was willing to be acquainted. I fed him with chocolate, and extracted from him the four French words he knew; but, notwithstanding the good offices of Chèrif, whom I had with me, the best educated of the guides, and now the master of the French-Arab school there, our conversation was mostly confined to mutual kind looks. I left him after a while, and a few moments later, as I was walking toward the carriage, he began to sing. I turned. There he stood, erect on the hillock against the desert slope and the low sky, with unloosed voice. The high treble rose with a certain breadth and volume; but its quality was its intensity. I would not have believed the silent little fellow had so much voice in him. “What is it?” I said. “It is for you,” said the polite Chèrif; “it is to thank you.” “What does he sing?” I asked. “Un chant d’amour” replied Chèrif; and I could get no more from him except “blue eyes” and “l’amour.” I looked up at the boy’s earnest face, as he sang bravely on, and listened; and when he had stopped we drove away, and the high treble began again on the hillside.

The Arabs sing much, but this was the first time I heard song in the desert. I always think of the desert silence as embosoming such song, like the hum of insects in the grass; though it may be rare as a bird’s wing, it is there in the great spaces; the desert, to my imagination, is a song-laden air, like Italy; but the Italian is garden song, the desert is wilderness song; the Italian is human, the desert song seems almost a part of nature, a part of the desert. I remember the Bedouin flutes and the low rhythms of the road and the camp; but when I take up a book of Arab song, I see the vision of the Bedouin boy on the hillock among his goats, carolling his chant d’amour.

III

It was the time of the April fêtes at Biskra, and I went out in the delightful warmth of the early afternoon to see. There were to be races, but I was especially attracted by the promise of a falcon hunt. A long line of white-robed Arabs streamed into the country fields, and I drove amidst them by a quiet road shimmering with dust, and when I turned by the great pen where the horses were kept, into the enclosure, the crowd was already assembled. It was a large, open plain whose side-lines were defined by the crowds of spectators who did not enter. In the field were many scattered groups. French soldiers, lining the course, and a squad gathered on a neighboring hill gave the picturesqueness of military color to the scene; a little group of soldier camels enlivened the foreground; and everywhere were boys leading fine horses, venders of all sorts, velvet-eyed children in gala clothes, grave Arab men. I wandered over to where a company of white Mzabites, girt with brown cords, sat in a circle, with guns in their hands, and a superb banner on a staff floating over them, and to the place where the Ouled-Naïls—some forty of them—displayed their charms and ornaments with holiday faces. It was an animated scene of waiting—festal, decorative; native and European soldiers, pawing horses, prancing cavaliers, crowds of white-robed Arabs, with ample spaces. The carriage of the caïd of Biskra, drawn by two beautiful mules, stood next to me; he was a grave old man, a mould of courteous dignity, and with him were some young children in gay vests—a charming party. But the brilliant note of color was given by the red cloaks of the caïds and sub-caïds, blowing in the wind as they rode here and there on beautiful and spirited horses. Then there was a drawing in to the course, and the races went on—tense moments of excitement as the horses sped by, pauses and waits, like races everywhere.

One scene stands out from the memories of that day. It was just before the hunting with the falcon began. It was a great and solemn scene, fit for a painter’s eye, but no earthly canvas could hold it. The landscape lines were all low and long, immense in extension, the rigid lines of the desert firm and broad. The scheme of composition was one of horizontal planes. In the eastern sky the pink range of naked rock, the Aurès, cut the liquid blue with its almost rosy edges, a bank of color reaching far away into the distance; in the foreground, perhaps half a mile off, a second line of red-toned sand-hills notched the range low down; beneath them, and below the horizon line of the earth, stretched a long row of white-robed Arabs massed standing in a continuous line, and grouped together as in a bas-relief. Every figure was distinct in the brilliant light poured from the descending sun on the vast distances round about. I had never seen humanity and nature posed in just that way. It was a processional bas-relief, immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock; it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief; the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment, the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing than I have elsewhere observed. This scene was a supreme example of my meaning and of the artistic intuitions involved; it simplified my perceptions and also universalized them. I saw in it the arts of Egypt on which the immensity of nature still rested, as truly a desert art as the Moorish arabesques at Tlemcen. It was under this splendid and glowing entablature that the black falcon was loosed in air.