North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

When I went out at night the streets were dark; lamps here and there gave a feeble light, stores were open, there were groups about. The cafés I dropped into were not full, unless small, and were all very quiet. There were long bubble pipes to be had, and silent Arabs smoking them; but I contented myself with coffee. It was not interesting, and I went to the Italian-Greek theatre. This was a small hall, but of considerable size, and full of Sicilians and Greeks. They were a hardy looking company, not to say rough. On the stage a girl was being tied to a tree by some Turks; it was a pantomime, and the plot went on and the daring rescue was effected to the satisfaction of the audience. While the stage was being prepared anew, there was the sound of a row at the door. Instantly on either side of me there was a movement and thrust of those hard faces and strong shoulders, like the lift of a dark wave at sea; it reminded me of a mass-play at football, in the old game, only it was bigger, darker, tense; it was fighting blood, always keyed for sudden alarm and instantly ready en masse. The little crowd, serried head over head, paused a moment, as an Arab came forward and made a short speech, explaining the trouble. The men fell back to their seats. The play was going on now—it was a variety performance—with two girls singing songs, and the rescued maiden of the pantomime came down to collect pennies. It was curious to see the changing expression on the faces of those men and boys. They had been hard faces, with Sicilian sombreness in repose, rugged with life, with something dark and gloomy in them; now they broke into smiles, their eyes shone and laughed, as she passed among them, they were glad to have her speak to them—it was sunshine breaking out over a rough and stormy sea. There was a dance now; and so the scenes went on till I came away and Absalom piloted me through the dark and deserted ways to the hotel. It was closed of course, but I was not prepared for what followed. There was a great undoing of bars and turning of locks, and I stepped in over the body of a sleeping negro and waited till his companion did up the fastenings. They seemed to me sufficient for a fortress; and, not content with that, these two negroes slept all night on the floor next the door. It was like a mediæval guard room.

II

We were finishing our late nooning at the café which pleased me best near the little park with the old Roman statues by the sea, where the handful of resident Europeans liked to take the air at evening. I was engaged in my favorite occupation of regarding the street. The little room was crowded with natives seated close, quietly gaming or doing nothing; Turkish officers rolled by in carriages; there was continuous passing; a half-dozen gamins played in the street, the most eager-faced, the most lithe-motioned of boys, the most snapping-eyed Jewish bootblacks, quite beyond the nimble Biskris of Algiers reputed to be the kings of the profession in the Mediterranean; on the other side of the street a flower seller was, as always, binding up violets interminably in his lean hands. It was a pleasant scene; but I lazily consented when Absalom suggested that we drive out to the Jewish village. We crossed the street to the cab-stand. I am not good at bargaining, and I am impatient at the farce or tragedy, as the case may be, of a guide beating down a cabman; but my feelings toward Absalom were different. I frankly admired him as he stood in his plain dignity, perfectly motionless, with a long-stemmed rose at his lips, a beautiful half-blown dark bloom with the curves of a shell in its frail, firm petals; and when the figure had dropped deftly and almost noiselessly from fifteen francs to six, “it is just,” said Absalom, and seated me in the carriage with the double harness.

We passed into the pleasant vistas of the oasis, rolling over the red roads with the tumbled earth walls and by the deep-retired houses and the orange gardens, and the air was full of the fresh balm of spring. It was a smiling, green, and blossoming world, and it was good to be alive. I knew it was just such a world that such villages are in, and this one was native to the oasis and partook of its qualities; but it seemed to take only the rudest and roughest of them and to carry them down. It was a disheartening sight. I had never seen so wretched a Jewish village. The houses, the people were of the poorest; and not in an ordinary way. The village was a fantasy of poverty, a diablerie. The faces and forms, attitudes, occupations of the people, their mere aggregation, depressed me in a sinister way. Some of them were sharpening sickles on old bones; and others, women with earrings, were working at some primitive industry with their toes, using them as if they were fingers. The little place was thronged and busy as an ant-hill; but the signs of wretched life were everywhere, and most in the bodies of these poor creatures. I was glad to be again in the garden and grove of the roadside, and amid the wholesomeness of nature, as we drove off to the centre of the oasis.

There we found a great house, that seemed to be of some public nature, built on the top of a high, bare hill. It belonged to a pashaw, and its roof commanded the whole view of the oasis and its surroundings. It was somewhat like a rambling summer hotel in aspect. We were admitted as if there were nothing uncommon in our visit, and I mounted to the roof and saw the wide prospect—the white city and blue sea behind, the ring of the palmerai about, the gray desert beyond—and on coming down was taken to a large and rather empty room with a balcony. There Absalom told me that the pashaw, who seemed to be the city governor, would be pleased if I would lend him my carriage, as he had an unexpected call to go to town. Shortly after the pashaw came in. It was evident that Absalom regarded him as a very great man. He shook hands with me, and was gravely courteous; but he understood very little French, and real conversation was out of the question. He ordered coffee, gave me cigarettes, and took me out on the balcony, pointing out the desert mountain range, Djebel-Ghariane, of which there was a fine view, and other features. We drank our coffee, and after perhaps twenty minutes of polite entertainment he took my card, shook hands in a friendly spirit, and bade me good-by with an au revoir. I sat alone looking out from the balcony toward those distant mountains over the great desert, smoking the cigarettes he had left me, and thinking of that vast hinterland of fanatic Islam before my eyes, so jealously guarded from exploration, where the fires of hatred against the Christian nations are systematically fed, while a victorious proselytism is sweeping through the central negro tribes, reclaiming them from fetich worship to “the only God.” The carriage was not gone long. We drove back at once, and I found the flower seller by the cab-stand still twining those endless bunches of violets, and jonquils and narcissi, in the sinking sun.

That evening we spent at the Turkish theatre. It was better furnished than the Sicilian. Palms decorated one side of the stage, and large flags draped the back. The centre was occupied by a group of three women of whom the one in the middle was plainly the prima donna. She was a striking figure, tall, and, in her dress, attitude, and expression, of the music-hall Cleopatra type. A high, gilt crown rested on her abundant black hair; her eyebrows were straight, the eyes liquid, roving, and full of fire, the mouth and other features large, the throat beautiful and firm; a white veil descended from the crown on either side, ornaments were on her arms and feet, she wore a flashing girdle, but the effect of her person was not dissipated in jewels or color; her figure remained statuesque, linear, and so much so that there seemed to me something almost hieratic in her pose, as she stood there, with the crown and the veil, motionless, the whole semi-barbaric form finely relieved on the broad stripe of the beautiful flag behind. This was when she was in repose; when she sang or danced the effect was quite different. I was not her only admirer. There were a hundred or more men in the hall—no Europeans. They were smoking, talking, moving about in their seats freely, with an indolent café manner, and the performance went on with long waits. The lady of the stage was a favorite; men threw cigarettes to her and engaged her in conversation from the floor, and she would fling back a sentence to them. There was one admirer beyond all the rest. He sat in the centre near the stage, a splendidly appointed youth from Alexandria, garbed in the richest red, with a princely elegance and mien, a gallant; cigarettes were not for him—he stood up and threw kisses with both hands vociferously and numerously; he left no doubt as to his sentiments. Once or twice he attempted to rush the stage, but was restrained. He would go out, and come back loaded with flowers for ammunition. He had a negro rival off to the left, also finely apparelled, but no match in that regard for the Alexandrian red, though he held his own in the attention of both the audience and the queen of the stage. Meanwhile the numbers of the performance lazily succeeded one another; there was music on the zithern and mandolin, the tambour was heard—songs, dances, other girls. It was all perfectly blameless; and, indeed, in my judgment, the Arabs have a stronger sense of public decorum than the northern barbarians at their play. I saw the entertainment out and went to my castle.

III

A drive in the oasis was always worth having; the sky was the purest blue, it was brisk desert air in the nostrils, and notwithstanding my misadventure with the Jewish village I yielded to Absalom’s programme and went to see how the negroes fared at their own rendezvous. It was a lesson to me not to prejudge even a trifling adventure in a new land. The sight was piquant. The village was a little collection of conical roofed huts with brush fences round each one; a few palms feathered the sky over it, and groves of them made the horizon lines, except where the sparkling sea stretched off beneath the bluff. The place was alive with women and children in striped burnooses and nondescript folds, whose rough edges and nutty colors seemed to belong to the complexions and stiff hair, of all varieties of turn, that one saw on every side. They were very poor people, of course, but their miserable state did not make so harsh an impression as in the case of the Jewish village; there was a happy light in their faces and a fitness in the environment of hut and brush under the palms in the sun which made the scene a part of nature. It was a bit of equatorial Africa transplanted and set down here—a Soudanese village in its native aspect, even to that touch of grimace, as of human nature laughing at itself, which negroes have in their wild state. I had a flash of such an experience at Gabès; in the oasis, just below the beautiful sweep of the cascades, there suddenly sprang up before me in the bush a young negress, as wonderfully clad as unclad. It was as if a picture in my geography had come to life. I might have been in a jungle on the banks of the Niger. It was the same here; the degrees of latitude seemed to have got mixed; the scene belonged much further south under a tropic sky, and I lingered about it with interest and curiosity.

Then I turned to the market close by—not a great market like that of the city but the oasis market. It did not cover a large space, but was prettily situated, and banked at one side by a fine palm grove, which gave it character and country peace. There were two or three hundred people there, scattered among the usual squares of goods and vegetables, variegated with straw work, skin bottles, and Soudanese helmets; but there was an uncommon number of animals—camels and cows, sheep and goats. There was slaughtering going on near the palm grove. It seemed that the purchaser picked out the particular sheep he preferred, and it was made mutton before his eyes. It reminded me of Greek Easter days. The scene, however, was by no means sanguinary; it was a country fair amid the quiet palms asleep in the blue—the life of the people in their own land in their ancestral ways.

IV