To this Andalusian infusion is also traced the charm of the manners of the Tunisians, that gentleness of breeding, softness, and urbanity, blended with an immovable dignity, which is so indescribable a racial trait. It is not the least foreign thing about them, and adds to the fond of mystery that they exude; for, notwithstanding all that can be seen or told, or gleaned from the past, mystery is of the essence of the traveller’s impression at his first contact with the Arab race. It is a silent landscape, a speechless folk, an incommunicable civilization; it is not only the closed mosque, the secluded house, the taciturn figures strange in garb and pose, immovably contemplative; but their life—all that they are—seems a closed book in an unknown tongue, a scroll unrolled but unintelligible. The feeling of racial mystery is intense, and all external impressions lead the traveller finally back to that—the insoluble soul of the race. It is not merely Islam. These shores from the dawn of knowledge have been one of the most fertile couches of the animal, man; here the young barbarian has been born and bred, and passed away, through all the centuries, and every civilization of the West has been seeded in conquest, and has flowered in cities, typical capitals, and withered away, leaving among the native race its ruins in their fields, in their blood, on their faces—like the Christian cross still tattooed on Kabyle foreheads. It is a race that assimilates but is not assimilated. It has taken the color and form, more or less impregnated with the spirit, of the genius of Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, France; it has felt the impact of Greek, Norman, Spaniard; but it was ever a race of inexhaustible resistant power, independent, tenacious, rebellious. It was never submerged or exterminated. It is a fine race. Tunis is one of its cosmopolitan cities, where it has drunk of every foreign stream and influence, has been civilized, softened, informed—a city of the various Mediterranean world, with great colonies of other folk in it, Italians, Jews, Maltese—a New York, as it were, on its own scale. In old Tunis, Arabized as it is, the desert race is itself only an infusion; yet so persistent is the ideal of race on its own soil, and so nomadic is the provincial population, that one feels the presence of that old racial soul, rightly or wrongly, into which the strength of the desert and the mountains has passed, which never breathed the breath of Europe, which remains in its own loneliness as in a fastness. It attracts and perplexes the human mind that would fain make acquaintance with it, but is oppressed by a feeling of impotence. And the exquisite personal demeanor of the Tunisians is enigmatic in its impression; it is like the charm of some Chinese painting or scroll that only emphasizes the unintelligibility, the incommunicability of the too variant spiritual past. With such delightful manners, such identical refinements of taste, it would be so easy to be friends! But no; it is more rational to think of it all as an artistic growth of a foreign culture, a part of the lovely Andalusian inheritance of the land.
To a mind with a historical background it is odd to find Tunis so completely a modern city. The Andalusian tradition is unconcentrated, and slight in its elements of reality, in things; its full experience is rather an imaginative memory; and of the times before that there is nothing left. In the suburban country there are more, though few, relics of past ages, but there the memory works more freely. One recalls, looking off to the sea-towering Mountain of the Two Horns, that on one of those peaks rose the ancient temple of Baal. The harbors of Carthage are fascinating to the eye of the imagination; but the specific remains there are scanty and mediocre; they arouse no reaction deeper than thought; and in the museum of Carthage one dwells most on the curious fact that what little has come down to us of that far-off life has found its way only by the grave itself; here, as in so many places, the tomb has been the chief conservator of life in its material aspects and what may be inferred from them of the soul of dead populations. It is rather in the neighborhood of the Cathedral that memory expands, for beside the near home of the White Brothers, who have spread their mantles and left their bones throughout the Sahara, a noble mission nobly done, here survives the only recorded anecdote of the history of this ridge, that must have been the place of innumerable tragedies—the marvellously vivid Christian story of Saint Louis’s death. The narrative is as fresh and poignant as if it were written yesterday; and on the spot one likes to remember that the chivalrous and good French crusader and king is a Moslem as well as a Christian saint. It is a symbol of peace and conciliation. The past, however, is here a barren field. Antiquity is felt, not in the survival of its monuments, but in the sense of the utter waste, the annihilation of the past, the extinction that has overtaken all that human life and its glory and struggle—Punic, Roman, Visigothic—the emptiness of the place of their battles, religions, pleasures, buildings, and tombs. It is all débris; it is of the slightest—little archæological heaps and pits in a vast horizon of silent sky and sea. The mind becomes merely pessimistic, surveying the scene; the mood of fatalism invades it—the mood of the frozen moon and the solar catastrophe—floods of the eternal nothingness—a mood of the pure intellect; and one is glad to come back to some nook like Ariana, a village midway between Carthage and Tunis, where ruin becomes again romantic and human. The very roses bloom there as in a deserted garden of long ago. It was there that the Hafsides, the rulers of the golden age of Tunis in the thirteenth century, had their country-seats—fair as the paradise at Roccada, where one “was gay without cause and smiled without a reason”—surrounded by gardens, with great lakes shadowed by pine and cypress, and gleaming with kiosks lined with marble and faience, with ceilings of sculptured wood gilded and painted, and cooled by the fresh waters of many fountains. The love of the country was always a trait here—an Arab trait—the rich like to get out of the city to some place of quiet, privacy and repose, such as La Marsa to-day by the sea near Carthage. The sense of the reposeful country mingles with that of the beautiful city in the past as well as now; and the Hafsides were great civilizers, builders, favorers of trade, patrons of the arts and of science. Their works and their gardens are gone alike. Time drives his ploughshare often and deep in an African city; and it is not alone on the green and shining levels of the suburban country, with its great spaces and imperial memories, where every maritime and migratory race has written some half-obliterated line of history, that the mountains look on the sea, and there is a great silence; but ruin is a near neighbor in the city as well. How many nooks and corners, full of the romance of places left to decay! That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die, and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.
What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to withdraw and enjoy? or is it a new world, a new mode of human life, with its own perceptions and intuitions and valuations, a new form of the protean existence of men on the earth, with another memory, psychology, experience? Whatever it be it is a spell that grows.
VII
I like to pass my afternoons in the shop of the perfumer in old Tunis. I come by covered ways, where the sunlight sifts through old rafters on stained walls and worn stones, and soon discern in the softened darkness the low, small columns wound with alternate stripes of red and green—bright clustered colors; down the winding way of dimmed light in the narrow street opens on either side the row of shallow shops, shadowy alcoves of bright merchandise; and there in the heart of old Tunis, each in his niche, canopied by his trade and seeming an emanation of the things he sells, sit the perfumers. A throng passes by, now dense, now thin—passes forever, in crowds, in groups, in solitude, rarely speaking; and over against the silent movement sit the merchants—tranquil figures in perfumed boxes—whose business seems one long repose. A languid scent loads the dusky air.
Just opposite the venerable Mosque of the Olive, an isle of sanctity still uncrossed by the heathen Frankish sea, right under the shadow of its silence-guarded doors, stands and has stood for centuries the shop where I love to lounge away hours that have no attribute of time. My host—I may well call him so, we are old acquaintances now—salutes me, his robe of fading hues detaching the figure from the background as he rises; his serene face lightens with a smile, his stately form softens with a gesture, he speaks a word, and I sit down on the narrow bench at the side, and light the cigarette he has proffered, while his only son quickly commands coffee. How well I remember years ago when the child’s soft Arab eyes first looked into mine! He is taller now, beautifully garbed in an embroidered burnoose; and he sits by me, and talks in low tones. What a relief it is, just to be here! What an ablution! The very air is courtesy. There is no need to talk; and we sit, we three, and smoke our cigarettes, and sip our coffee, with now and then a word, and regard the street.
A motley street, like the bridge at Stamboul—a provincial form of that unfathomable sea of human faces; and, here as there, an unknown world in miniature, diverse, novel, brilliant—the African world. The native predominates, with here and there a flash of foreign blood, round-faced Sicilians, Spaniards whose faces seem in arms, French in uniforms; but always the native—every strain of the littoral and the highland, every tint of the desert sun: black-bearded Moors of Morocco, vindictive visages; fat Jews of Djerba laughing; negroes—boys of Fezzan or black giants of the Soudan; Arabs of every skin, hints of Gothic and Vandal blood and the old blond race long before all, resolute Kabyles, fair Chaouia, Touaregs with white-wrapped faces, caravan men, Berber and Bedouin of all the land; women, too, veiled or with children at the open breast. That group of Tunisian dandies—how they stroll! olive faces, inexpressive, with the jonquil stuck over the ear, swinging little canes, clad in fine burnooses of pale blues or dying greens or ashy rose! Those bare-legged Bedouins, lean shoulders looped in earth-brown folds—how they walk! Every moment brings a new challenge to the eye. What life histories! what unspeaking faces! how closed a world! and my eyes rest on the shut gates of the ancient Mosque of the Olive over against me; I feel the spell of the unknown sealed in that faith, this life—the spell of a new life of the spirit of man, the mystery of a new earth-life of his body.
One falls into revery and absent-mindedness here, as elsewhere one falls asleep; but not for long. A lady, closely veiled, stands in the shop with her shorter, low-browed attendant. I hear low syllables softly murmured; I am aware of a drop of perfume rubbed like dew on the back of her hand just below the small fingers, not too slim; I watch the fall of the precious, twinkling liquid in the faceted bottle; I mark the delicate handling of the small balances. It is like a picture in a dream, so still, so vivid in the semi-darkness of the booth. She is gone, and the fancy wanders after her—whither? The boy’s taleb, his teacher of the mosque school, passing, sits down for a moment—an alert figure, scrutinizing, intelligent, energetic. There has been some school excitement, some public commotion; master and boy both scan the last paper with eagerness. I ask about the boy’s lessons; but with a kind look at my young friend, and a half reply to me, he puts the question aside, as if one should not say pleasant things in a boy’s hearing too much. He is soon off on his affairs; and other friends of the shop come and go, not too often, some hearty, some subtle, but all cordial, merchants who would woo me away to other shops behind whose seemingly narrow spaces lies the wealth of great houses—oh, not to buy, but only to view silken stuffs, trifles of wrought silver, things begemmed, inlaid sword and pictured leather, brass, mosaic, horn, marvels of the strong and deft brown Arab hand in immemorial industries; the wealth of a large world is nigh, when I please—it is but a step here to Samarcand or Timbuctoo; but I say, lightly, “Another day.”
I love better to sit here, flanked by the huge wax tapers, overhung by the five-fingered groups of colored candles, amid the curiously shaped glasses and mysterious boxes, the gold filagree, the facets, the ivory eggs—and to breathe, only to breathe, diffused hidden scents of the rose and the violet—jasmine, geranium—essences of all flowers, all gardens, all odorous things, till life itself might seem the perfumed essence of existence and the sensual world only an outer dusk. Oh, the delightful narcotism! I was ever too much the Occidental not to think even in my dream—I am conscious of the feeling through all—“What am I, an alien, here?” But it is sweet to be here, to have peace, and gentleness, and courtesy, young trust and brave respect, and breeding; it is balm. The darkness falls; the passer-by grows rare; it is closing time. There is a drop for my hand now, for good-by. The boy companions me to the limit of old Tunis. It is good night. It is a departure—as if some shore were left behind. It is a nostalgia—a shadowy perception that something more of life has escaped, of the irretrievable thing, gone, like something flown from the hand. And as I come under the Gate of France into the lights of the brilliant avenue, I find again him I had eluded, whom I heard as the voice of one standing without, saying: “What am I, an alien, here?”—I am again the old European.