North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

I stepped out on the sidewalk after dinner, on a broad avenue with trees. At the brilliant crossing carriages were passing with drawn screens; and, as they drove slowly by, fingers held back the curtains, and from time to time glimpses of women’s figures were disclosed of quite a different type from any within doors—ladies of wealthy native families taking the air, and curious to see the French streets by night. So I learned that it was the eve of Leilet-el-Kadir, the twenty-sixth of Ramadan, the night of power commemorating the descent of the Koran on earth, a grand Mohammedan feast; and I went forthwith into old Tunis on my first voyage of discovery. Festivity reigned. On every hand were lights of all varieties; the minarets aloft were outlined with them; in the narrow streets they were as the multitude of the stars for number, colored and clustered, hung and looped and festooned, flaring and lanterned, a fine illumination in the obscurity; and under them an animated throng of all ages, beautifully dressed for the occasion—a city, a race, and a faith en fête.

I sat down at last in the café-crowded Place Halfouine, one of the principal open spaces or squares of the old city, not large, and surrounded by low, rather mean, buildings. It was a nightscene, closed in by shadows, the foreground brightened by irregularly placed open cafés with tables outside and benches within, all completely filled with men, drinking, smoking, playing at simple games, quite orderly, without boisterous noise or muscular disorder, or joking—admirable public behavior. It charmed by its novelty—costumes and persons, mass without individuality—the scene of a new land. What folly to think that there are no more worlds to discover! The scene was to me as if no one had ever looked on it before. I observed the faces, the attitudes, the doings of this strange people as if I had just landed from another world; and I would gladly have stayed longer, but, with the early closing habits of Moslems, the square began to thin, and I went with the rest through the fast-emptying street with a glad feeling that in a world, now grown altogether too small and neighborly, I had happened upon one last true relic of the “far away.”

It was four days later, however, that the true holiday came, the feast of rejoicing after Ramadan is over—Little Bairam. It is celebrated at Tunis with special zeal. The morning streets were overflowing with men and children in their best apparel; but the latter, in particular, beautifully attired. Such gold jackets, such tiny burnooses, such scarlet and crimson, turquoise and emerald—and pinks! Such chubby fat faces in their barbaric borders of clothes—or delicate, refined features, stamped with race, set off by their greens and blues! Such vivacity, too; pure childish fun and pleasure in a national holiday! There were strings of open carts of the rudest construction—like tip-carts for gravel—completely filled with these children heaped up like nosegays, their brilliancy of color set off by the rudeness of the common cart. This seemed one of their principal pleasures—taking a ride. But there were others. In a packed cross-street I was addressed by two gallant lads of perhaps fifteen, who were selling tickets at an entrance; with faces and figures full of hospitable welcome to the stranger, they invited me in, and I went. Inside was a small, barn-like theatre with a curtain, a stage and an audience; and there I saw “the shadows,” pictures thrown upon a screen, and the histrionic art was thus practised with lifelike effect. I had read of “the shadows,” but I never expected to see them. I came out after a while, and the boys saluted me with very cheerful and animated smiles as I passed them. I spied another show a little farther on; and this, undaunted by my former experience, I also entered. It was the puppets—also a traveller’s treasure-trove—the French gendarme was the universal and unpitied victim, and the plots were realistic incidents from things as they are. The audience was almost wholly of children, from six years or less to twelve or more, many of them with nurses or attendants; they took an active and even excited interest, and did the necessary reckonings and sums which the transactions on the stage called for, and shouted out the answers as at a school exhibition, it might be, though the transactions in question were not of a sort ever shown at an American school, and would have evoked much remonstrance; but the children were very happy through it all, thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact. I went behind the curtain and saw the puppets engineered; and I left the little theatregoers with fresh ideas of juvenile amusements.

So all the morning I passed among the gayly decked crowd, with one and another small adventure, always handsomely treated, aided, saluted. A people of kind and gentle manners, old and young; and I am glad that I first saw them so fortunately in their days of pleasantry and taking pride in their own. The experience threw an atmosphere of cheerfulness over the land and the people, and softened many a darker scene of their common days, of their penury and hardship—their load of life. I could always think, even when all was at its worst, that they still “had seasons that only bade live and rejoice,” when many went bravely clad and fed full, and the whole city was vivid with a spirit of general joy. The fixed expression of the crowd was one of resigned patience under habitual control; the gayety, the happiness, the holiday were relieved on a grave background—a temperament, a character, an essential living, unknown to me, something secret, profound. It was my first true contact with Islam. One way, at least, by which a religion may properly be measured is by its efficient power on those who profess it; certainly the Moslem faith is very effective on its believers; the sincerity of that faith is the first thing one learns about it in practical observation. How often since then have I gathered with them at this and other fêtes, and seen the carpeted streets and tapestried walls, the solemn processions, the robes of state, the fine horses, the men and the arms, all the barbaric display; illuminations, fireworks, parades; but I have never been so struck, as in these first Tunisian days, with the spirit of gentle happiness that made my earliest impression of the race as I met it on the shore of the sea.

III

Ranging through the country by rail, I found one of the oldest lands of earth wearing the signs, familiar to my eyes years ago, of the American West. It seemed, at times, like an hallucination of memory with odd differences, such as one might have in a dream. Now and then one came to a larger and well-gardened station, some watering-place of the richer citizens in summer; or to a thriving seaport; but, in general, the stops were at way stations, as in all thinly populated districts—a simple crossing of the long gray roads, with a few buildings for the business of the line, vast spaces round about, possibly slightly improved, with fields or orchards or little groves, a crowd of loafers hanging on the gates or fence of the enclosure to whom the arrival of the train was the day’s event, a farm wagon of modern make, with horses, awaiting some expected passenger and driving off to some home lost in the expanse; in a word, the impression was of colonial things, of the opening up of a country, of reclaiming the soil. What one really saw everywhere was a frontier.

In the newspapers there was the same absorbing theme—colonization; the local news, the daily happenings were characteristic of an agricultural, industrial, commercial life of the nature of an invasion of the waste. Here large depots for machinery were rising; there men of broad enterprise, or syndicate companies had planted olives, or corn, or vines, on a vast scale over miles of territory; further on, a new line was making accessible the phosphate wealth of Gafsa. Modern civilization, mechanism, communication, organized exploitation, penetrating a new country, was what one felt, as if that region were truly new like a savage land. Yet how many times civilization, in one or another form, has rolled over it! In reality, it is one of the most ancient beds of the human torrent, bare and forsaken as it looks now. And now it is again a new frontier—the place of the invasion of a new era by a new race with new designs.

This impression, nevertheless, is mainly a thing of the mind, of recollection and observation; to the eye it is not so noticeable, such is the extent of the natural spaces, the contour and atmosphere of things held in these far horizons, the new temperament of that landscape, and so characteristically native still is the aspect of indigenous human life not yet displaced. The earth has the look of the wild. Whatever may have formerly been its culture and occupancy, all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains—melancholy tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant sun—edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them—temples, courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph, theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant detail, as on the sea—or like animal life in nature, indifferent.

IV

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, crisscrossed with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin—with a cemetery; it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable—it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and débris—the eternal potter’s field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons.