VI
ON THE MAT
I
IT was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café, and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me, were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark, sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white robes. They were smoking kif—a translucence of gold in their clear, bronze skin, a languor of light in their immobile gaze, content. The garden made off before me, topped with palmy distance; the silent street, to one side, was out of sight, as if it were not. It was a place of peace. I had finished my coffee and dates. I filled my brier-wood. The May heat was great, intense; and I settled myself to a long smoke, and fell into reverie and recollection.
How simple it all was! That praying Arab—what an immediacy with God! What a nonchalance in the dreamy pleasures of those delicate-featured youths! What a disburdenment was here! I had only to lift my index-finger to heaven dying, to be one of the faithful; and the fact was symbolic, exemplary, of the simplicity of Islam. It makes the minimum demand on the intellect, on the whole nature of man. I had but lately placed the faith in its true perspective, historically. Mohammedanism, the Ishmael of religions, was the elder brother of Protestantism, notwithstanding profound differences of racial temperament between them. The occidental mind is absorbent, conservative, antiseptic. It is not content, like the Mohammedan, to let things lie where they fall, disintegrate, crumble, and sink into oblivion. Western education fills the mind with the tangle-foot of the past. Catholicism was of this racial strain. It had a genius for absorption. It was the melting-pot of the religious past, and what resulted after centuries was an amalgam, rich in dogma, ritual, and institution, full of inheritance. The Reformation was an attempt to simplify religion and disburden the soul of this inheritance in so far as it contained obsolete, harmful, or inessential elements; many things, such as saint’s worship, art, celibacy, were excised. Mohammedanism, ages before and somewhat differently placed, initiating rather than reforming a faith, was an effort of the desert soul to adapt to itself by instinct the Semitic tradition of God that had grown up in it, and to simplify what was received from its neighbors. The founder of Islam was more absolute and radical in exclusion than the reformers in elimination. Islam had a genius for rejection. Mohammed, with the profound monotheistic instinct that was racial in him, affirmed the unity of God with such grandeur and decision that there was no room in the system for that metaphysical scrutiny of the divine nature in which Catholic theology found so great a career; on the other hand, with his positive sense of human reality, which was also racial, he shut out asceticism, in which Catholic conscience worked out its illustrious monastic future. He had achieved a reconciliation between religion and human nature in the sphere of conduct, and he had silenced controversial dogma in its principal field in the sphere of theology.
A creed so single and elementary had no need of a priesthood to preserve and expound it. There was no room for a clergy here, and there was none. The Reformation diminished but did not end the priest; Islam suppressed him; yet there remained much analogy between Mohammedanism and Protestantism in the field of religious phenomena in which the priest is embryonic. Protestantism is the best example in human affairs of the actual working of anarchy; and, in proportion as its sects recede from the authority and organization of the Catholic Church, it presents in an increasing degree, in its individuality of private judgment and freedom of religious impulse, the anarchic ideal of personal life. Islam offers in practice a similar anarchy. I was struck from the beginning with an odd resemblance to my native New England in this regard. It, too, has been a Marabout-breeding country, with its old revivals, transcendentalists, new lights, Holy Ghosters, and venders of Christian Science. Emerson was a great Marabout. The Mormons, who went to Utah and made a paradise in the desert, were not so very different from the Mzabites who planted an oasis-Eden in the Saharan waste. The communities that from time to time have sprung up and died away, or dragged on an unnoticed life in country districts, are analogous, at least, to the zaouias scattered through this world of mountain and sand. In many ways my first contacts with the faith were sympathetic. The faith that had no need of an intellectual subsidy, that placed no interdict on human nature, that interposed no middlemen between the soul and God, woke intelligible responses in my agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts; here, too, was great freedom for the religious impulse and toleration of its career; and I saw with novel interest in operation before my eyes the religious instinct of man, simple in idea, direct in practice, free in manifestation, and on the scale of a race. It was the desert soul that was primarily interesting to me—its environment, its comprehension of that, its responses thereto; and, examining it thus, its religion seemed a thing intime and scarcely separable from its natural instincts and notions.
What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. There is, too, a harmony between these few elements in their superb singleness and his lowly mind; not much is required of him, and that little is written large for his understanding; he takes things in wholes. His mind is primary, intuitive, not analytical; he does not multiply thought, he beholds; and this vision of the world he lives in, a wonderfully grand and simple world, suffices for a religious intuition as native to him as the palm to the water-source. The palm is a monotheistic tree. Monotheism belongs to the desert. The faith of the desert is a theism of pure nature, unenriched by any theism of humanity, of the human heart in its self-deification; it is a spiritualization of pure nature worship, whereas Christianity, at least under some aspects, is the grafting of a human ideal on an old cosmogony. The God of the desert is an out-of-doors god, like the Great Spirit of the Indians, who had no temples. No mosque can hold him; there is no altar there, no image. He cannot be cloistered; he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him; five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.
The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. The impression it thus made upon me was profound, and amounted to an annihilation of the past. The freshness of the wilderness, as the discoverer feels it, lay there; it abolished what was left behind; the Old World had rolled down the other side of the mountains. Life in its turmoil and news, its physical clamor and mental clatter, life the distraction, had ceased. It was not that silence had fallen upon it; but the soul had gone out from it and returned to the silence of nature. There is no speech in that rosy ring of mountain walls, in the implacable gold of the sands undulating away to the blue ends of earth, in the immutable sky; they simply are. In the passage of the winds there is stillness. It is not that there are no sounds. The hush is of the soul. Monotonous? Yes. That is its charm. Monotony belongs to the simple soul; and what is monotone to the eyes of the desert dweller is monotone in the ideas and emotions of his psychology. Repetition belongs to Islam; its words and rites, its music and dances are stereotyped, something completely intelligible, identically recurrent, like tales that please children—the same stories in the same words. Prayer and posture, formula and rhythm, endlessly renewing the same idea and the same sensation—they imprint, they intensify; desert moulds, they help the soul to retain its conscious form. The larger mind that discriminates, analyzes, and explores, may tire of this; but it also finds in such a solitude, full of silence and monotony, a place where the soul collects itself, integrates, and has more profoundly the sense of its own being.
The desert is not only the generator and fosterer of the desert soul in its spiritual attitude, its practices and processes, by the larger and universal elements in the environment, but in more detailed ways it provides the atmosphere of life. It is strangely sympathetic with the dweller upon its sands. He is a nomad; and the desert is itself nomadic. The landscape is a shifting world. The dunes travel. The scene dissolves and rebuilds. The sand-hills lift a sculptured mountain edge upon the blue, swells like the bosom of a wave, precipices and hollows like mountain defiles, outlooks, and hiding-places in the valleys, and the surface shall be finely mottled and delicately printed and patterned with lace-work as far as the eye can see. The wind erases it in a night, hollows the hills and fills the hollows; it is gone. The oases disappear; they are like islands sinking in the sea of driving sands; you see their half-sunken trees like ruins buried beneath the wave, still visible in the depths. The face of the land is ephemeral; to leave the route is to be lost. And after the wind, the light begins its play. The lakes of salt and saltpetre, the lifeless lands, the irremediable waste—ruins of some more ancient and primordial desolation, the region cursed before its time with planetary death—change, glitter, disclose placid reaches of palm-fringed water, island-paradises, mirage beyond mirage in the far-reaching enchantment, strips of fertility like lagoons on the mineral mud as when one sees a valley-land through clouds. The heat gives witchcraft to the air; size and distance are transformed; what is small seems gigantic, what is far seems beside you; a flock of goats is a cavalcade, a bush is a strange monster. To the nomad in those moving sands, in that air of illusion and vision, in those imprecise horizons, the solid earth might seem the stuff that dreams are made on. The desert is a paradox; immutable, it presents the spectacle of continuous change.