North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence, the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like sand-storms, peace without fruition. It is on this life, and issuing from its mortal senses, that there falls the impalpable melancholy and intimate sadness of the desert. The formlessness of the vague envelops all there; it is the path of the unfinished, the illimitable; it is the bosom of the infinite where life is a momentary foam. Mystery is continuous there, a perpetual presence. Its human counterpart, its image in the soul, is la rêve, the dream, reverie, as changeful, as illusory, that takes no root, fades, and vanishes. It is not a merely contemplative sadness; it is a physical melancholy. The oases are full of fever, of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force, and age comes like night with a stride. Death is the striking of the tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand, and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand.

The desert gives new values to life. It is a rejuvenation of the senses, a perpetual renaissance. The fewness of objects and their isolation on the great scene increase their worth to the eye, and in the simple life all trifles gain in meaning through receiving more attention; the pure and bracing air invigorates the whole body in all its functions, and the light is, in particular, a stimulant to the eye. The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water is a music that reverberates in all their nerves; fruits hanging in cool shadows, flowers, groves—it is la vie, the great miracle, again dreaming the beautiful dream in the void. After the hamada, the desert route, it is paradise. It is impossible to conceive of the sensual intensity of this delight, of its merely bodily effervescence. The Arabs are a sensual race, and the desert has double charged their joys with health and hardship; their poverty of thought is partly recompensed by fulness of sensation. The oases are not gardens in the European sense; they are rude and arid groves and orchards and fields, with a roughness of untamed nature in the aspect of the soil; and the desert everywhere is savage in look, with the uncared-for reality, the nakedness, and the wild glory of primeval things. Yet I have never known habitually such delicacy and poignancy of sensation. The wind does not merely blow, it caresses; the landscape does not smile, it mirrors and gives back delight; odors and flavors are penetrating; warmth and moisture bathe and cool; there is something intimate in the touch of life. There is a universal caress in nature, a drawing near—something soothing, lulling, cadenced—felt in the blood and along the nerves, a volupté diffused and physical; for there is a flower of the senses, as there is a flower of the mind, as refined in its exhalation, in the peace of vague horizons, in wafted fragrances of the night, in luminosities of the atmosphere, in floating vapors of morning, in the dry bed of the oued under the moon, in the pomegranate blossom, in the plume of the date-palm flower, in all evanescence, the companionship of some little thing of charm, the passing of a singing voice. The desert is rich in those mysteries of sensation that remain in their own realm of touch and eye and ear, reverie and dream. It is a garden of the senses; and the wild flavor of the garden gives a strange poignancy to its delights.

This sensuality prolongs its life in the higher faculties; it penetrates and impregnates the mental consciousness; memory and imagination are strongly physical; the soul-life itself is deeply sensuous. It is, in this primitive psychology, as if one should see the coral insects building up beneath the wave the reef that should emerge on a clear-skied world. The desert music reveals this most clearly. Sensation, as has been often said, enters into the arts in varying degrees. Literature is the most disembodied of the arts; its images are most purely mental and free from physical incarnation; then, in order, painting, sculpture, music include greater actuality of sensation by virtue of which æsthetic pleasure, as it arises from them, is more deeply drenched in physical reality. The senses are preliminary to the intellect; that is why the arts precede the sciences in human evolution. The desert dweller has no sciences, and his only art is music, which itself is in a primitive stage, being still characteristically joined with the dance in its original prehistoric union. The Arabs sit, banked on their benches, apathetic, gazing, listening, while the monotonous rhythm of the dance and the instruments rises, sways, and terminates, and begins again interminably. What is their state? It is an obsession, more or less profound, of memory and imagination, retrospective or prospective experience, felt with physical vagueness, defined, vivified, and made momentarily present by the swaying dancer in the emotional nimbus of the music. It is the audience at only one remove from participation in the dance, contemplative but still physically reminiscent of it. The dances are of two general types: that of the negroes, a physical hysteria, full of violent gesture, leaping, and loud cries, the barbaric paroxysm; the other that of Arab origin, a voluptuous cadencing to a monotonously responsive accompaniment. The desert dweller is a realist; his emotions, his desires have not transcended the facts of life; his poetry, so far as it exists, and there is a considerable amount of it, is one of simple and positive images. Mysticism, in the intellectual sense, the transformation of the senses into the spirit, does not exist for him; not nearer than Persia is the mystic path which leads to the ecstasy of the soul’s union with the divine, of the Bride with the Bridegroom; the desert knows nothing of that Aryan dream. Sensation remains here in its own realm; and its summary artistic form is music, itself so physically penetrating in its method and appeal. The music of the desert is to me very attractive; it engages me with its simple and direct cling; snatches of carolled song, the humble notes of its flutes, the insistence of its instruments fascinate and excite me. It is the music of the senses.

The sensuality of the Arabs also found other climaxes, in love and war. It is the intensity of their passion and of their fighting which has charged their history, as a race, with its greatest brilliancy; and at their points of highest achievement a luxurious temperament has characterized them, which has made an Arabian dream the synonym for all strange and soft delights. The desert in its degree has this mollesse, physical languors, exhaustion; but its home is in the oasis-villages. The true nomad contemns the oasis-dwellers as a softened, debilitated, and corrupt race; the life of the nomad is purer, hardier, manlier; he is the master; the oasis pays him tribute. The life of the senses, however, in either form, passes away; vitality ebbs the more swiftly because of its rapid and intense play; pallor falls on the sensations, they fade, and joy is gone. Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes; in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands, but before it always the infinite.

Yet, fascinated though I was, I was aware of some detachment. Sweet was the renaissance of the senses—what brilliancy and joy in their play—merely to look, to breathe, to be! To have come into one of the titanic solitudes of nature, comparable only to ocean wastes and amplitudes of the sky, and to dwell there, far from the mechanic chaos, the unbridled egotism, the competitive din—what a recovery of the soul was there, of human dignity, of true being! and to find there a race still in a primitive simplicity, unburdened by thought, not at warfare with its mortal nature, the two poles of the spirit and the body married in one sphere—and to feel the rude shepherding of nature round their nomad lives, inured to hardship, but swiftly responsive with almost animal vitality to her rare kindlier moods and touches—it was a discovery of the early world, of ancestral, primeval ways. It was a refreshment, a disburdenment, an enfranchisement; and it was a holiday delight. Yet over these simplicities, austerities, and wild flavors there still hung a moral distance, something Theocritean, the mood of the city-dweller before pastoral charm. To sit in the café in the throng of Arabs with the coffee and the dance, to muse and dream on the mat alone, to lie apart in the garden and be content—it was a real participation; but in the background behind, in the shadow of my heart, was the old European though eluded. This life had the quality of escapade—to see things lying crumbled and fallen with none to care, to be free of the eternal salvage of dead shells of life and thought—a world so little encumbered with the heritage of civilization! How many years had I spent, as it were, in a museum of things artificially preserved in books, like jars—in the laboratory of the intellectual charnel-house! The scholar, accumulating the endless history of human error, has no time to serve truth by advancing it in his own age; he lives so much with what was that he cannot himself be; his inheritance eats him up. The crown of Western culture is apt to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely religion is a revelation of the soul, not to it. This is a doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul, man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul, a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age, and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made visible. It is not to me interesting as scientific truth is, a thing of worth in the realm of the abstract, but rather as artistic truth is, a vital expression, something lived. What a reality it had here in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden, in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God, only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not simple. Yet if the leopard could change his spots, if one could lay off the burden of thought, lay staff and scrip aside, and end the eternal quest, nowhere else could he better make the great refusal and set up an abiding-place as in this nomad world. Its last word is resignation; peace is its last desire.

The desert world is a dying world. That is the sadly shadowing, slowly mounting, fatally overwhelming impression that grows on the mind and fills it. Death is the aspect of the scene; sterility, blankness, indifference to life. Inhospitality is its universal trait and feature. It is as hostile to animal and vegetable as to human life—its skeleton lakes without fishes, its drifting valleys without birds, its steppes without roving herds. Its oases are provisioned with water and bastioned with ramparts against the eternal siege of the sands; to preserve them is like holding Holland against the sea. The mere presence of man, too—what is human—shares in this aspect of death. I have mentioned the cemeteries, mere plots of extinction, anonymous, without dates, leaving nothing of degradation to be added to the sense of hopelessness, futility, and oblivion. The dwelling-places of the living are hardly more raised above the soil or distinguishable from the earth they crumble into—typically seen in those ksour of the south, cracked, with gap and rift, dissolving in ageless decay and abandonment, mere heaps over the underground darkness of passages and cells—or here embosomed in a great silence, full of solitude and secrecy, the life of the palm garden, of the great heats, of the frigid nights; always and everywhere with the sense of an immense desolation, denudation, and deprivation. The life of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay; and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.

A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world, where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the will of Allah. It is not strange to find fatality the last word of Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained, if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. They are all forms of that fatality which the desert seems almost to embody in nature, to exercise in the lives of its children, and to implant in their bosoms as the fundamental fact of being. Fatality is in the outer aspect of things and exhales from the inward course of life; melancholy, impotence, immobility accumulate with the passage of years; effortless waiting, indolence, prayer, contemplation—these are the shadows in which is the end. This mood of the despair of life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs, its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. Here life takes on its true proportions at the end—all life; it is an incident, a little thing in the great scene. A dying world, a dying race, a dying civilization, truly; but the old European, the wise pessimist in the shadow, has seen much death; to him it is but another notch on the stick. To me, personally near to it and fascinated in my senses still, it is très humain, exciting, engaging; and the melancholy that penetrates it ever more deeply and mysteriously does not interfere with its charm, its blend of delicacy and hardiness, of spirit and sense, of freedom and fate. I have a touch of the heart of the desert-born. “If love of country should perish from the earth,” said my soldier-poet, “it would be found again in the heart of the Bedouin.” No race is more attached to the soil, or so consumed with home-sickness for it. The Bedouin loves the desert.

II

A strange thing to me was the absence of any political state. There has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change of head men present an aspect of such primitive simplicity and independence that they might be thought freemen’s institutions of an ideal purity; on the other hand, the absence of any political centres of concentration forbade the formation of a nation. The recognition of the tribal blood-tie conserved groups, smaller or larger, with a greater or less sense of unity; but feud was the natural condition of these units, extending to the smallest and even into families, and in the larger world political history found only hordes hastily massing for temporary ends and dissolving in a night, or empires of facile conquest and loose tributary bonds, of the nature of a primacy rather than a sovereignty, and without long continuity of life. Public order, with its correlatives, security and peace, was little realized, and, however ideal local institutions might seem within the group, it was, viewed largely, a barbaric world.

A very pure democracy in its primitive form prevailed. All men were equal before Allah, and the condition of equality generally obtained also between man and man. Inequality belongs to civilization; the absence of that, and especially the lack of security for wealth and its inheritance, of an official class of state functionaries and a clerical hierarchy, and pre-eminently the lack of knowledge, removed main sources of that differentiation which has stratified modern society. There was a noblesse of the sword and also of religion, grounded originally on descent from Mohammed or more generally and powerfully here in the West from some Marabout, but neither class was really separated from the people. The only effective source of inequality was virtù—real ability. Tradition made it the glory of the Arab noble to dissipate his patrimony in gifts to his friends and to rely on the booty of his own hand for himself. Ignorance, besides, is a great leveller, and poverty is the best friend of fraternity; liberty was native to the soil. It was a society where all men had substantially the same ideas, customs, and desires, thought and acted, lived, in the same way. It was a natural democracy, and inbred; and to-day this trait is one of the most striking and refreshing that a sojourn among its people brings to notice, for it is a real democracy, unconscious of itself, vital, and admirable in its human results.