North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VIII

TRIPOLI

I

ABSALOM ENGLAND, a tall grizzled Arab and sea-pilot, saluted me on the deck. The combination of names, race, and occupation might have seemed peculiar to me once, but I was proof against any African vagary. He was a land-pilot now, and took charge of me and mine. I did not lose my liberty, but I had unknowingly parted with all responsibility for myself; thereafter, except in consular guard or barred in my hotel, I was under his incessant watch and ward. I even began to have some value in my own eyes, seeing at what a price I was rated, and could easily have fancied myself a disguised soldan with an inseparable follower. He treated me as something between a son and a sheik. But at the moment, to my unforeseeing eyes, he was only a dark, respectful Arab, with a weather-worn and open-air look, black with many summers, a strong type of a fine race, and with a terrible cough that shook him.

We passed the Turkish officials and sank like a bubble in the variety and vivacity of the land, always so noticeable when one comes from the sea. It was pleasant to be in a city once more; there was noise and movement and things to look at; and almost at once the gray mass of a magnificent ruined arch, half buried in the street, lifted its dark and heavy stones, bossed with obliterated faces and grimy sculpture, among the paltry buildings; a grocery shop with its bright fruits and lettered boxes seemed to have nested like a swallow in its lower stories. It looked like a worn, old ocean rock in that incongruous tide of people and trade—once the proud arch of Marcus Aurelius. A few moments brought us to what elsewhere would have been an obscure hotel but was here the chief hostelry—a house with an interior court as usual, a few chambers opening on dilapidated galleries in a double tier, and rude stairs leading up. Seyd, a Fezzan negro boy, showed me to a tumbled room. It was an unpromising outlook even for a brief sojourn. I went at once to the French consul. The other powers have consuls, except that America at that time had none; but owing to the old position of France as the protector of all Catholics, her representative is pre-eminent in the eyes of the Mohammedans—he is “the consul.” The Consulate was a very fine old Arab house; a magnificent dragoman with negro guards received me in the great silent court and led me up the broad stone stairway to the large and beautiful rooms where I was to feel myself so pleasantly at home. Then Absalom and I fared forth.

I found myself in a true African street with a new trait. It is astonishing what originality crops out in the bare and simple things of this land; one thinks he has seen all, and by some slight shift of the lights something new emerges and is magically touched—the real and common made mysterious, the daily and usual made visionary, the familiar unfamiliar once more. It was a narrow street, vaulted from side to side, and its fresh atmosphere was bathed in that cool obscurity which in this land of fierce and burning rays is like balm to the eyes; and, besides, this street was painted blue, which was to add a caress to the softness of the light. This was the slight and magical touch. A stream of passers went down and up the centre of the blueness; the little shops on either side strung along their bright and curious merchandise of the museum and the fair; and the shadowy, azure-toned perspectives framed each figure as it came near, with flowing robe or dark haik and burdens borne on head and shoulder. The place had an atmosphere all its own, that stays in the memory like perfume. I loved to loiter there afterward, but then we had a goal; and we came at last by flights of steps to the market on the great space near the sea. I had seen the people by the beach from the steamer and wondered at their number; and that was why I had come.

It was by far the greatest market I ever saw. It was truly metropolitan. I went among the plotted squares of merchandise and rows of goods spread out in great heaps and little piles, and along by the small tents islanding their foreign treasures. To tell and name it all would be to inventory a civilization: cloths and finery and trinkets; grains in sacks, amid which I wandered nibbling hard kernels of strange savors, trying unknown nuts and dried fruits; utensils, strange-cornered knives with curves of murder, straight, broad blades; slippers and caps; what seemed to me droves of cows—it was so long since I had seen cows—camels and donkeys; vegetables—bulbs, pods, and heads; things to eat, bobbing in pots and kettles; leathers, hides, straws. It was an improvised exposition—everything that the desert hand produces or manufactures of the pastoral kind or that the desert heart has learned to desire of migratory commerce brought from far away. The grass market especially attracted me with its heaped-up bales of alfa, where camels were unloading the unwieldy and enormous burdens balanced across their backs; and so did the Soudanese corner, with odd straw-work, deep-colored gourds, and skin bottles.

But the stage was the least part of the scene; in this play the crowd was the thing. There were familiar traits, but in its wholeness it was a new crowd. I scanned them as an explorer looks at an unknown tribe from the hills. There was nothing here of Tunisian softness, mild affability and elegance, not the simple and peaceful countenances seen in the Zibans, nor the amiable cheer and brusque energy of the Kabyles, nor the blond beauty of the Chaouias, nor even the forbidding face of the Moor; here was a different temper—the spirit of the horde, the fierté of the desert, the rudeness of nature, borne with an independence of mien, a freedom of gait, unblenching eyes; true desert dwellers. I think I never felt the full meaning and flavor of the word, autochthonous, before. They were the soil made man. There was also, beyond the tough fibre and wild grace of the free life, another impression, which owed perhaps as much to the feeling of the stranger there as to anything explicit in the crowd—a sense of something fierce and hard, an instinct of hostility, of disdain, the egotism of an alien faith master on its own fanatic soil.

This crowd, which fascinated me by its vitality and temper of life, was clad in every variety of burnoose and haik and head-gear; here and there was a crude outbreak of color, as if some one had spilt, and soiled, aniline dyes at random, but the general effect was sober—brown earth colors, mixed blacks and grays, dingy whites, a work-a-day world. There were many negroes. I had already added much to my knowledge of negro types, but here I annexed, as it were, new kingdoms of physiognomy. These men were strange as the tropics: some amazingly long-waisted, some Herculean in measure or extraordinarily lean and bulbous in the shoulders—new species of human heads. Arabs and Berbers, mingled with the mixed blood of half a continent, made the bulk; and here and there stood some richer personages, heavily robed, superbly turbaned, merchants from Ghadamès and from further off, where the desert routes spread fanwise from the Soudan to Timbuctoo, opening on the whole breadth of equatorial Africa, Lake Tchad, and the Niger. For Tripoli has been for long centuries a sea-metropolis—it is now the last sea-metropolis—of the native desert world; hither still comes the raw wealth of Africa, with all the old train and concomitants of caravan, traders, and robber instincts; and here are most variously and numerously gathered the representatives of the untamed tribes. It is the last Mediterranean home of the predatory, migratory, old free desert life. This market, I knew, was the direct descendant of one of the world’s oldest trading-posts, for the early Phoenician merchants established a commercial station here, as they coasted along exploring the unknown world; it was on this beach they landed, no doubt; that was long ago. This market was the child of that old trading-post. It was a wonderful scene there, under the crumbling walls in the blazing sun by the quiet sea.

Late in the afternoon I drove out into the oasis, which is a suburb on the southeast of the city. We were soon in the midst of it and passing along by the familiar scene of palm groves, with fruit trees and vegetables and silent roads. It was a more open country than usual, and there was an abundance of gardens with houses in them; it had more the character of suburban villa life, a place of retirement from the city, than any oasis I had seen. The soil had much red in it, and this gave a strong ground-color over which the greens rose darkly on the blue. The tall wells—the guerbas—were a common feature in the gardens, for the oasis is watered in the old way by means of a pulley arrangement between two high standards over which runs a rope worked by a mule or camel or other beast of all work, which tramped to and fro beneath as the goatskin bucket rose and fell. I visited some of these gardens, picked oranges, and wandered about and talked with the laborers. We came out on the desert sharp as the line of a sea beach, cut by the palms; there was a fort or two on the edge, and the hard, barren waste swept away with the finality of an ocean toward the far distant mountain range southward. Two Turkish officers rode up from the route; they were fine figures, splendidly horsed, and looked very real. On the way back we saw many Turkish soldiers, sturdy, capable men, badly clothed but military in every way. I was more interested in the groups and solitary figures returning from the market to their homes, the Bedouins with sticks in their hands or over their shoulders. How they walked! What an erectness in their heads! What an élan in their stride forward! Strangely enough, they reminded me of the virgins of the Erechtheum, the caryatides. I have never elsewhere seen such a pose. How like in color to earth, too, with their browns and grays on the strong tones of the roads they walked along! It was the clearness before twilight, and all the lines of the landscape were lowered and strong in the level rays; the palmy roads, the soldiers, the Bedouins made a picture fuller of life than one usually sees in an oasis. One felt the neighborhood of the city.