In the afternoon I went with Absalom to visit a school I had heard of in the Jewish quarter, a pious foundation, the bequest of a wealthy Jew, for the education of poor boys. There were about five hundred of them there, bright-eyed, intelligent, intent, as Jewish boys in their condition usually are. The buildings were excellent, properly furnished, with the substantial and prosperous look of a well-administered educational enterprise. I visited several rooms, saw the boys at their desks and classes, heard some exercises, and talked with the professor in charge. I noticed a tennis-court on the ground. Altogether, I was more than favorably impressed by what I saw, and the mere presence here of a well-organized charity school on such a scale was an encouraging sign. It was surprising to me to find this establishment and the technical school at Tripoli, where I had certainly not anticipated seeing anything of the sort, nor was this my only surprise. I had thought of Tripoli as a semi-barbarous country almost detached from civilization, a focus for Moslem fanaticism, a place for Turkish exiles, a last foothold of the slave-trader, and such it truly was; but it did not present the aspect of neglect and decay that I had imagined as concomitant with this. The old gates of the city had recently been removed; outside the walls there was a good deal of new building going on, which was a sign of safer and more settled life as well as of a kind of prosperity; the roads were excellent, and in a Turkish dependency that is noticeable; in some places new pavements had been laid. In other words, there was evidence of enterprise and public works, of modern life and vitality; and this impression was much strengthened by my experience of the two schools. It is true that I never lost the sense of that strangely conglomerate crowd that passed through the streets, that mixed and fanatic people. I indulged no illusions with respect to the populace en masse. The state of things, however, seemed to me by no means so bad, with these stirrings of civilization, of betterment, of a modern spirit in the city, and I was frankly surprised by it.
My surprise melted away some months later when, on opening my morning paper in America to read of the Turkish revolution, I saw that the Vali of Tripoli was among the first of the exiles to sail for Constantinople; and I observed that, later, he had an active part in the government of the Young Turks. He and Hassan Bey had been doing in Tripoli what they had been exiled for wishing to do on the Bosphorus. Then I understood.
VI
It was night. Absalom and I were in the Arab quarter, on our way to see some Soudanese dancing. There were few passers in the deep-shadowed, silent, blind streets that grew darker and seemed more mysterious as we penetrated deeper into the district. We had gone a considerable distance. From time to time a man would meet us, and then another. We seemed to be going from precinct to precinct under some sort of escort. I noticed that Absalom had many hesitations; once or twice he refused to go further, and there was something resembling an altercation; then he stopped decisively, and would not budge until some one whom he desired should come in person. We stood, a group of four or five, waiting in the obscure passageway for some ten minutes. At last the man came, a tall Arab, with a look of rude strength and superiority. He was the chief, and we walked on with him in that dark network of corners and alleys. I was beginning to think it a long distance, when we turned under a heavy gateway into a dark, open court, as large as a small city square, with houses round it like tenements. A kerosene lamp in a glass cage flared dimly on one side, and there were a few figures round the court; but the scene soon took on a livelier aspect.
The chief began collecting his men in the centre, and numbers of people emerged from the houses and sat on the edges near the walls of the houses. They were a rough-looking crowd, evidently very poor and badly clothed, and there were many that made a wild appearance squatting there in the darkness. Two policemen, attracted by the commotion, came in, and a street lamp was transferred into the court. There was now quite a gathering in the centre, where a fire had been built by which three men were seated; some sort of incense was thrown into it, and a light smoke with a pungent odor began to be lightly diffused through the court. There must have been as many as seventy in the crowd round the fire, and at least a couple of hundred spectators crouched about the sides; it was more of an exhibition than I had expected, and from the corner where I sat with Absalom and two or three attendants the scene began to be weird. Then the drum beat in the middle; the men, all of whom had clappers, lifted them in the air, falling into line, and immediately one of those wild, savage chants shrilled forth, rising and rising to an acute cry and falling monotonously down, increasing in volume and mingling with the noise of the sharp clappers and the drum—an infernal din. The chant of the Aïssaouas, that I had heard in the desert, was “mellow music matched with this.” And, from the first moment it never stopped; it was ear-piercing as it reverberated in the closed court, and at first it was confusing.
The dance began with a procession in double file round the fire, with the three men seated by the smoky flame. It was a slow walk timed to the rhythm of the voices and the clappers, gradually increasing in speed and becoming a jump, with violent gesticulation, twisting, and long reaching of the arms and legs, while the human cry grew shriller and more vibrant and rapid in the emotional crisis of the excitement. Round and round they went, and from time to time the line would break into parts as the men turned to the centre just before me. There were three persons who seemed to be leaders: one, whom I named the Hadji because he answered to my idea of that word, another dervish-like, and a black man. The dervish interested me most. He was the head of his group, and as he came between me and the fire, standing well forward from his band and well in toward the fire, he would whirl, and then reverse, whirling in the opposite direction; and—he and the procession moving forward all the time—he would fall limply forward toward his men almost to the ground, recover, and fling himself backward, rising high with his clappers spread far over his head. It was a diabolical posture; and, as he stood so, his leaping followers bowed down to him, kneeling almost to the ground but not touching it, and flinging themselves erect far back with arms spread. I wondered how they kept their balance in that dancing prostration. Then the group would pass on, and the next come into play—the Hadji, the black man—with the same ceremony, but without the whirling. Round and round they went interminably; the chant rose and fell, the march slackened and quickened, and every few moments there was this spasmodic rite of the salutation and prostration at the height of the dance.
The ring of spectators, crouched and huddled round the court, sat in the imperturbable silence and apathy of such audiences. The edges of the scene were an obscure mass of serried, half-seen forms under the house walls, filling the space rather closely; the smoke of the incense, with which the fire was fed, hung in the air, and Absalom said it was good for my eyes; the only light was the blaze of the flame upon the dark, moving forms in the middle, and the two street lamps over them, and the night-sky above. It was an unearthly scene, with those strange figures and heavy shadows; and the fearful din made it demonic. I do not know what the dance was, its name or origin; but it seemed to me to be devil worship, a relic of the old African forest, a rite of the primitive paganism and savage cults of the early world. The three dark men by the fire with the drum, the grotesque, fantastic ritual of the bowing and kneeling procession, the atmosphere of physical hysteria and muscular intoxication, the monotonous, shrill cry in which the emotional excitement mounted—here were traits of the prehistoric horde, of a savagery still alive and vibrant in these dancing figures. It was as if I were assisting at a worship of the Evil One in a remote and barbarous past.
After a while I began to take notice of particular individuals in the dancing mass. I was specially attracted by three who seemed uncommonly strong and tireless and made a group by themselves. They were poorly but distinctively clad. One was in black, with loose arm-sleeves showing his bare skin to the breast; one was in white, with an over-haik of black divided down the back, which streamed out; the third, who was very tall and lank, one of the tallest figures there, was in blue, faded and worn; and, as they danced, of course the folds of these garments spread out on the air, showing their bare legs in free motion. Their heads were closely covered with white, except the mouth and eyes—not merely covered, but wrapped. I turned to Absalom, and said, “Touaregs.” He looked at them, as I picked them out for him, and said, “Sì, signor,” for he always spoke to me in Italian. I had wished much to see some Touaregs, and, though I had seen men with covered faces, I had never been quite sure. They are the finest race of the desert, first in all manly savage traits, bandits of the sands, complete and natural robbers, fierce fanatics, death-dealers—the most feared of all the tribes. They cover their faces thus to protect them from the sand, for they are pure desert men. I smiled to think that at my first meeting with the terrible Touaregs I found three of them dancing for my amusement; but I looked at them with the keenest interest. They were certainly superb in muscular strength. At the end of an hour they showed no weariness; and there was a vigor in their motions, an elasticity and endurance that easily distinguished them from the others. I watched them long. They were perfectly tireless, and the dance called for constant violent muscular effort. I shall never forget that group, whose garb itself, thin and open, had a riding look, and especially the man in the blue garment, with long, gaunt arms and legs, who fell forward and rebounded with a spring of iron.
There were some changes in the method and order of the motions, but the dances for the most part were merely new arrangements of the same jumping and kneeling performance. I sat in the awful din of it for two hours, interested in many things, and rather pleased, I confess, at being alone in such a company. One gets nearer to them so in feeling; with a companion of the same race, even though unknown, one stays with his race. I left the dance still in the full tide of vehemence and glory of uproar, overhung by the light pungent smoke and dissonance, with the obscurely crouching throng in the low shadows, and as we lost the sound of it in the deep silence of the dark lanes, where we met no one, I think the night of an Arab city never seemed so still. A man with a lantern went ahead to light the way which was black with darkness; Absalom and the headman went with me, and a negro followed behind. They attended me to the door of the hotel, and it was a striking night scene as I stood in the hallway, the negro guards roused from their straw mats looking on, and shook hands with the strong-faced, rough-garbed headman who had had me in his protection that night.