North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

The Aïssaouas are an order of magicians and are widely spread from Morocco, where they have their centre at Meknèz, through Algeria and Tunis. Their founder was Sidi Mohammed-ben-Aïssa, of whom many marvellous miracles are related, but all are of the nature of prestidigitation; the association is, indeed, in some ways, a guild of that art. Its repute, however, among the Moslems, has its roots in the old magic of Africa, and rests on the habits of superstition which are the common ground of the veneration of the miracle-working Marabouts. The Aïssaouas claim immunity from many mortal ills. Nothing that they may eat—scorpions, stones, glass—can harm them; poisons are innocuous; wounds close at once and disappear. They are naturally the physicians for such ills in others, and are snake-charmers and wonder-workers. They are very nomadic in their habits, and go widely through the land. Many wild reports are current of their rites at their fêtes, of their sacrificing animals and tearing the flesh in pieces and devouring it raw; but these and other like things are traits of the orgiastic state in the lower stages of civilization everywhere.

It was a faint shadow of the primeval that I had seen. That human cry, mixed with the sharp cymbals and the drums, frantically wavering and receding, was an echo from the central forests far inland; and that fire with the pot was the ghost of fetichistic rite, perhaps the oldest altar of mankind. The scene, the swaying figures, the intoxication of the body, the atmosphere, belonged to the earliest psychic experiences of the race. It suggested the invisible superstition that lays over and fills the present minds of the populace and the desert dwellers. I found the little boy on the street the next day, and he recognized me. I examined his mouth closely, and there was only a white roughness, like a scar, on the inside of his cheek and a scratch on the outside. He became very friendly; and my pleasantest memory of the Aïssaouas is of his street-boy figure standing on the desert, a quarter of a mile or more down the railway track, where he had gone to get near to my train and give me his last good-by with waving hands.

VI

The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover, is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color, élans of the soul and poems of the eye, with which they are in conscious contact. It is a more intimate tie, and something that passes within—purifies, refreshes, and releases. The brain ceases to act; the nerves are put to sleep; the fever is over. The Old World has receded far away; years, decades have passed, dropping their burden of oblivion on all that was, and especially on what was acrid and fiery in the past. It is a return to nature in which she seems to have cast out devils. The senses bring their messages, but they have lost their material utilities. The soul rests in its sensations as a bird floats in the air. It is a foretaste of Nirvana. Thought has ceased; duty is silent; labor has vanished; and the life that is deeper than these and of which they were but mortal fragments, “unconcerning things,” resurges, vibrates, flowers. What a relief! what a transmigration! and what a new sense of vitality—almost of a new sort of vitality! It is the repose, the silence, the concentration of being within—the peace. In the Western world one may attain this at times; the desert imposes it as the habit of the soul that yields itself to its influences. But it is more than this. The cerebral weight is lifted and the physical life resumes its natural lethargies. It is not really lethargic. It is a new kind of existence—the life, unburdened by thought, that has moulded the fine physical nature of this race abounding in energies. What a sense of freedom, of nonchalance and timelessness! What a vigor as I draw in this pure air! The world without a thought has a life of its own, a strange vivacity; it is rich with fresh and unexpected pulses of being; and this renewal and invigoration does not come whip-like, as in the north, with a bracing winter stroke on the blood and nerves; but like a caress, with a softness and a secrecy, a tenderness of the solitude, something almost voluptuous.

These are the words of a desert lover and make no claim on the credence of others; but no words can express the peace, the liberty, the vitality I felt in my desert voyages. The symbol and image of the mood and life I describe is to me the palm-tree. No other tree has ever so influenced my spirit except the cypress in a very different way. I would go out to the oued in the morning, for I could not spare to the day the initial sense of largeness, the tranquil desolation, the sea suggestion of the river bed, with its lonely koubba; and, as the sun warmed, I wandered into the palm gardens of the oasis, and sat on the rough soil, and, as it were, adored the palms. I would lie there for hours, and the sun shone above them. Occasionally Arab workmen would pass near, or a boy or a guardian would come and sit beside me. Otherwise there was only the solitude, the unbroken silence, the repose. The gardens are rude and unkempt, with earth ditches and humps of ground, and an arid look, except where the vivid green of some cereal here and there beneath the palms, or the softer form and foliage of low fruit trees amid their towering stems, give a brighter and more delicate touch to the general scene. There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. Even in the sands of the south about Tougourt, where every line the eye rests on is a curve and softens on the eye and lulls it like a diapason of great rhythms, this austerity is not lost from the desert scene. It is the nude in landscape—not mere nakedness of earth, but landscape sculptured and modelled in grand harmonies of line and color; and however it may become fiery with light and heat and darken with the violence of heaven, it always retains its look of bare and solitary power. There is no softness in the race either. Their bodies are cast in hard lines, but often with great physical beauty. There faces are, indeed, seldom of the nobler type; but their fine brown hands, their clear torsos and throats, the curve of strength and elasticity in their firm backs and limbs, with the weathered and sun-toned skin, their fierté, their perfection of repose, are objects of delight to an eye that values bodily beauty. To me this splendid vigor and careless abundance of the human beauty of life is one of the elements of the land. They have muscles of steel and lines of living bronze. It is daily art—art brought down from the vague of fancy and out of the museum to live with. The palm is like the land and the people; there is no softness in it; it is the most virile of vegetable growths. Its trunk, its leaves, its sway—but I will not trust myself to describe it. I am never lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a volupté without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature; and, in the world without, the palm over there symbolizes it for me.

The soldier-poet, Lieutenant Charles Lagarde, whose “Promenade dans le Sahara” I have already mentioned as at once the most realistic and best-portrayed book of the Sahara with which I am acquainted, well describes the palm:

“A monumental tree, puissant, royal; it shares in perfection form, majesty, elegance. Its isolated trunk fills a frame of five leagues and peoples a solitude. Its lift toward heaven has a magnificent simplicity, and it raises also the levels that surround it; it enlarges by contrast the vast sheets of sand on which it elongates at sunset its slender and unmeasured shadow. In groups it has attitudes full of grace; among the tufted shoots rise the unequal and diverging trunks which in turn depress and proudly hold up their plumes. The wind in the palms has strange modulations. Its oscillations have I know not what of the voluptuous; it is the sultana that sways, an attentive slave. The tempest tests it without shaking it; it bends like a bow and springs back with the strength of a sword-blade. All in it breathes primordial energies, and chants the canticle of the Orient.”

VII

The crudities of the desert have a charm all their own. There is a wild flavor not only in the life but in the nostrils. The strong saltpetre smells, impregnating the air for leagues, the earthy scents of the marsh-like and sodden soil, the odors of cattle, are stimulants; they recall the whiff of salt marshes by the sea, the tarred ropes of wharfs, the sharp fragrance of rolled seaweed on the beaches, aromas of low tide, in days of long ago. They are both prophecies and memories. They wake my boyhood blood and are a renewal of long slumbering appetites. I want salt in my life, an acrid savor. The desert dispenses with unnecessary refinements; all pruderies cease; nature returns. Nature is clean; the wind and the sun are great scavengers; even death is no longer a corruption, but a negligible detail. The skeletons of the camels in the sands have nothing macabre; they are there as the tamarisk and the drin are there, objects of the sands, like floating spars at sea, wasting away in the great deep; they show the way that life has gone. Even the dogs, with their paws on the carcass, tearing the flesh, seem ordinary; the brutality ceases in the primeval naturalness of the act in the scene. It is the will of nature that rules there in the wild, and is accepted almost without notice. It is the same, too, with human life. Poverty, hardship, privation, lose half their repugnancy; it is only when men dispense them that they revolt us; humanity accepts necessary suffering with little appeal. The eye hardens, the heart stiffens; the fibre of an older world forms in us. It is a veritable return to nature. Old instincts awake; old powers of endurance come back and bring with them old moods of patience; old indifferences appear. Cruelties of man or nature are incidents. A new resistance is unlocked in the body, in the spirit. It is a strong life. It is the desert world.

It is under these lights that one contemplates the wretched human lot in the wild glory of nature. The grandeur of the natural scene—the miserable life of men—no eye can miss that contrast over all these horizons. The splendid force of nature, visible in all its energies, on a scale of sublimity, triumphant, the master of the world! But life—it is la misère. Look at the crouching tent, irregularly striped with brown and white, wool and camel skin, pitched under the crest of the great yellow dunes or in some wrinkle of the rock face of the waste. There are a few sacks of barley and dates, a scanty provision for the future, heaped at the foot of the pole; a wooden plate or two, cups, an earthen pot; ropes, a goatskin of water, mats of alfa or other grass to sleep on. The wife, with a babe on her back and others tumbling about, toils through the day, draws water, boils the pot, weaves, bears the heavy burden. The boys go with the herd, the man to his labor. The night is an uneasy watch. The master sleeps, some weapon near by, his head on the little sack that holds the women’s trinkets of coral or silver, or other trifles of value to them; if there is money, it is buried. The yellow dog with the pointed teeth growls, and howls, and barks—a jackal, a thief. Such is the day and night of the tent, the nomad life, moving from place to place with the seasons, subject to all weathers, threatened by violent winds and sudden torrents, and often flitting day by day and leaving no trace. When a stay is more prolonged a hedge of fagots fends the tent from the wind, and gives a slight protection against nocturnal attacks of other wanderers. One sees the tent; it is a common object, and gives up its bareness at a glance; but one cannot realize its life. It is too near to the soil, to the deprivations and insecurity of animal life. What humility in its joys and pains! What parsimony! What a place for age, which comes rapidly here, and is isolated in its uselessness! Death reaps in it as in a harvest. The weak, the old, the stricken, in this life of continual contingency, go quickly away, and are as quickly forgotten. It is the life. The infant mortality is enormous, like the death-rate of creatures that spawn in order that the race may survive.