The life of the tent is on the outer margin of observation, though it is the nomadic life of the land. Where the natives gather together in villages one sees them more nigh. In a Europeanized place like Biskra, the native quarter of the town—not the village, which lies in the oasis—takes on the look of a ghetto. There, in the street, in the market, one sees the poverty of the Arabs, the slender pittance of their days, wherever the humble wants and lean provision of their life emerge to public view; and Biskra is a place of great prosperity. There are many villages in the Rir country, however, that are quite untouched by the European. They have not the look of dilapidation and misery of the ksour of the Sud-Oranais, scarce distinguishable from the soil, dark and fallen warrens; but they are only a degree removed from that, and their life must be analogous. Arab poverty you may see anywhere in the land, but the full sense of it comes and sinks in only when one has broken the blank wall of the secrecy of such a village, and in some outlying place of their own, in the sand and the sun, gone into their houses. When a poor Arab enters his house it is as when some animal leaves the life of the forest for his hole in the ground.
One day I went up to El Kantara, the station at the mouth of the pass above Biskra, whose superb view, so often described, first gives to the traveller the measureless vision of the warm-toned, sterile lands, an empire worthy of the sun, and unrolls before his eyes for vague leagues the red and yellow earths, spotted by the black of the oasis-green—the desert’s “panther skin,” in the old Roman’s phrase. In the gorge below lies a great palmerai with three villages, and there I wandered all one winter day. I entered one of them—the first I had ever seen—and passed among the low houses through the narrow lanes. They were made of sun-dried mud—a continuous blank wall with rough-boarded entrances. It might have been a low line of rude stables. There was hardly any one in the streets; occasionally a figure came into view, and passed out of sight. There was intense silence—the silence of night—broken perhaps by the sound of a hammer, or a muffled voice in some interior. The streets were slimy and foul. It was desolation—nothing. It was depressing. The bright sun shone upon all; the cold, vivid green of the palmerai lifted its eyebrow masses against the stone of the cliffs and the intense blue of the sky; in the silence it might have been a dead village, a ruin in some abandoned land, like Yucatan. The strange sadness which is here so often felt and seems to exhale from the desert landscape, which is independent of brilliancy or gloom, a feeling so intimate as to be almost physical, like the languor of heat, lay on everything. It was la tristesse, which is universal in the desert, the pathos of “something far more deeply interfused” and infinitely sad; it lurked in the air, the silence, the distance, in the light—everywhere.
I went into some of the houses. They were obscure. The shadows, the damp earth smells made them seem like caves in the ground. They were bare, rude, humble beyond description. I would not have believed that a man who had seen the sun could live in such a cellar-like abode. I was not naturalized then, not subdued to the land; it was a shock to my sensibilities; but later I would stand in such a place and, like my soldier-poet, feel glad that it was not Paris or Marseilles. One easily detaches himself from civilization if the desert talks to him long. One room stamped itself upon my memory. It was a dark, bare bedroom; the bed was made of rough timber, the unstripped bark still on its four posts; there was little else in the room. But on the walls there were three or four beautifully written Arab texts—verses of the Koran.
“So near is heaven to our earth,”
I thought, instinctively varying the line to the case; it was an unconsciously bitter jest. It sometimes seems that devotion in races is in proportion to the fewness of the blessings that the lord of heaven and earth gives to his wandering creatures, and this was in my mind. But that bare, earth-walled room with its texts is my most vivid symbol of Arab piety. It is a believing race.
I remember when the reality of their belief first struck home to me. I was driving on the high plains below the peaks of the range on their northern side, returning from Timgad, that magnificent ruin of a Roman city of high civilization which still lifts erect its vistas of columns over the strewn ground of the abandoned plain, and in its vacant desolation brings back to me more vividly than Pompeii, with a greater nobility and dignity, with a finer imperialism, the great Roman world. I had seen it diminish and sink in the low sunlight, and drop behind. Night had long fallen over the uninhabited, long, Colorado-like, starlit slopes where we drove. It was bitter cold, and I had just drawn another sweater over the head of my Arab boy beside me. Suddenly he said with quick and earnest tones: “Le bon Dieu will take care of you.” I was startled by the intensity of the unexpected voice. “Le bon Dieu,” I said; “what do you mean?” The boy gazed at me steadily. I could see the gleam of his deep eyes in the starlight. “Le bon Dieu,” he said, and nodded up to the sky. That nod was the most convincing act of faith I ever saw. It was plain that he believed in God as he believed in the reality of his own body. I fell silent, thinking in how marvellous ways we are taught; for the boy taught me something. And as the earthen room with its texts is a symbol to me of Arab piety, the boy’s gesture is my symbol of Arab faith—la foi.
I emerged from the obscurity into the brilliant silence of the day; but I could not shake off my oppression. The strange sadness, whose nature I have hinted at, which belongs to the desert, was beginning to make itself known to me. It does not come from the land; it is exhaled from the human spirit in contact with its mortal fate. It may be felt anywhere on the earth; but its home is in the desert. It is sometimes more defined amid the ruins of old cities, or where great tragic events of the race have left their traces on the scene or in the memory—sunt lacrimæ rerum. Here it is indefinable, a mood—mentem mortalia tangunt; something that haunts the brilliancy before the rainless eyes of the race of men who do not lament any particular catastrophe or weep an unusual loss; a half-unconscious sense of the spirit penetrated and impregnated with having lived, with a feeling of its common lot, its universal fate. It marries with the monotony of things, of life. What monotony of life must be here! Who could understand such lives! I felt a darkness under all that I had seen of Arab existence. There is another side, an underworld, beneath what appears on the surface. Read the annals of Arab war, of Arab love, of Arab rule. What cruelty, what baseness, what rapacity! What a power of hate! No pen can tell the horrors of their warfare, their lust for blood and pain, their delight in carnage and savagery. It is the same with the story of their amours—violent, unmeasured, remorseless—explosions of life. The natural happiness of the race is in these things. So they paint the paradise before the French came, when “the true believers divided their time between love, hunting and war, and no one died without having known the drunkenness that an adored mistress or a day of powder gives.” In the race at large, what lower forms does this heritage of the wild take on! One may read the books, hear living tales, share in actual scenes, and so come to stand in the fringes of their experience and temperament; but he does not penetrate into the Arab soul.
I wandered all day in the palmerai and along the river bank, loitered and forded and climbed, and enjoyed sun and wind and prospect; but the echo of the morning sadness did not leave me, nor did it fade from the atmosphere. The desert life had laid its hand upon me. Later, day after day, as I stood in its lights and shadows, and began to understand, the desert moods grew at once more precise and more commingled, and one among them all seemed to absorb the others. It was the feeling of fatality in all things. It is sympathetic with the drift of my own consciousness. In my common days the sphere of our forethought and volition seems small. Our freedom is no more than a child’s leash from the doorstep. We are embedded in an infinite body of law and circumstance; not much is trusted to ourselves alone. Within this narrow range human liberty is a creation of civilization, a partial dethronement of the tyranny of nature without, and of impulse within, a victory of knowledge, invention, and conscience. Submission is written all over the desert world, which is still in touch with the savage state. There man yet remains in large measure the slave and sport of nature and of his own unreasoned vital instincts. It is true that our diminished and shorn personal liberty in the state is a tame wine to the rich vintage of the freedom of the barbarian to kill, to rape, to rob—to eat up his neighbor and all that is his. The barbarian is the true superman, that monster of an all-devouring and irresponsible self-will. The soul of the desert is not barbarous, but emerging from barbarism; it is on the way to some command of nature and to self-rule, and is rich in the ferment of life forces and in personal adventure; but it knows the iron net of necessity in which it is enmeshed. How extraordinary it is to observe that it is from the freedom of desert life that fatalism emerges in its most rigid and thought-vacant form! The first words of the struggling soul in its dim self-consciousness, amid the throes of impotency and defeats of effort, world-wide are: “It is written.” The will of nature, the will of Allah, the will in which is our peace, however the formula be read, is the deepest conviction and last resort of humanity in the stage which it has not yet known, if it shall ever know, to transcend. Fatality stares from the face of the desert, and drops from the lips of its wandering race like leaves from the dying forest. It is the period of all their prayers.
Moods of the desert, which are also scenes and visions! the infinity, the solitude, the monotony; la misère, la foi, la tristesse; fate, peace! They are not words, but things; not thoughts, but experiences; not sentiments, but feelings. On the page they are shadows; there they are realities.