North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

TLEMCEN

I

SNOW in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like a broken hillside—it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room, bare, narrow, but clean, which reminded me curiously of such accommodation as one used to find in western Kansas towns thirty years ago, fit for the seasoned traveller, but without superfluities,—frontier-like, a border lodging; and the impression was deepened and vivified when I descended the rude and confused stairway and found the private-family dining-room, with the only fire—olive-knots burning reluctantly on a small hearth. A French officer, hanging over it, made room for me, and in a moment two other officers appeared, heavily clothed with leather and capes, prepared, as I gathered, for a long ride in the country. It might have been a hunting scene in Colorado, in the early morning, except for the military color, the foreign physiognomy and the French coffee we were drinking; it had the traits of rude vigor, hardihood and weather that belong to an outdoor life.

It seemed more natural to go out into the snow than not, and so I found an Arab and went. Our path led us a short way through streets of Sunday quiet, and soon broke by a city gate into irregular country, picturesque from the beginning with ruined masses of old ramparts. The road was bordered with trees and hedges, a lovely road even in the snow, and soon it was apparent that we were passing through the midst of an old and extensive cemetery with cypresses, cactus, fig-trees, here and there an immense carob-tree, and olives and locusts, diversifying the uneven lines of the slopes; and everywhere, as far as one looked, neglected graves, shrines in ruins, koubbas—small, square, dome-covered memorials of the saints—dilapidated and with broken arches, the débris of centuries of devotion and mortality. It was quite in keeping; for I was myself on pilgrimage, where for seven centuries the faithful Moslem of the land had preceded me, to the holy tomb of Sidi bou-Médyen, the patron saint of the little city. As he ended his earthly travels on one of these neighboring slopes—and he had wandered through the Arab world—he exclaimed: “How good it were to sleep in this blessed soil the eternal slumber!” and so they buried him there. It was a place of immemorial consecration; in early times of the faith a body of pious Moslems had been cloistered near by, and already in that age in these fields the “men of God” had their resting-places about which the Moslems liked to be buried, as old Christians used to wish to lie in holy ground about the church. It was even then a place of pilgrimage, and a village grew up about it, and ruins of minarets and mosques still lie there; and later, about Sidi bou-Médyen’s shrine, another village was built among the encumbering graves, for he was a famous saint and many pilgrims came there, and now the inhabitants say pleasantly: “We have the dead in our houses.” The landscape is thus a place of tombs; but it is enchanting, and one sees at a little distance terraced mountain edges, thick gardens of olive, the pomegranates, the ancient fig-trees, masses of foliage and vines, abounding fertility and freshness, green and flowering with spring; and sown all along the tree-sheltered road the low and humble ruins of mortality.

I entered the village—the road ran a mile or more through such a scene—and climbed the steep way to the wooden door through which one comes into the precincts of the saint’s tomb with its attendant mosque and school. I did not anticipate a mausoleum; I was familiar with such shrines and knew what I should see; but the square koubbas, with their white domes, which one sees everywhere in the fields, on the hilltops, all over this lonely country, give a grave and solemn accent to the landscape, and I felt the reverence of the place, remote and solitary, where so many thousand men had warmed their life-worn hearts in the glow of the faith. In the antechamber, adjoining the shrine, Moorish arches fell on four small onyx columns of beautiful purity, resting on the tiled floor, and just at my feet was an ancient holy well whose onyx edge was deeply cut by the wearing of the chain that had given water to twenty generations of those who thirsted for God. As I turned, the room of the shrine was open before me—heavy with shadows, almost dark, while the light struggled through vivid, dull spots of colored glass, blue, green, red, on the obscurity where I saw the raised coffin, swathed with silken stuffs and gold-wrought work and thick with hanging standards; another coffin, with the body of the companion and disciple of the saint, stood beside, more humbly covered, and there were candles, chandeliers, suspended ostrich eggs, lanterns, and banal European objects, the common furnishings of shrines. I lingered a while with the sombre and thoughtful respect natural before a sight so very human, so impregnated with humanity. I noted the votive offerings on the door, bits of silk and tangled threads, which attested the humility of the estate of multitudes of these poor people—remnants of fetichism; and the strips of painted wood upon the walls of the antechamber, with ordinary Mohammedan designs, rude scrawls of art.

I issued into the court, in the raw snowy air, and crossed the narrow space to the mosque. It was a magnificent portal that rose before me through the falling flakes, raised on its broad steps as on a base, and lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe arch more than twenty feet in air; a high entablature expanded above. The whole surface of the gateway was covered with arabesque work in mosaic faience to the architrave, bearing its dedicatory inscription in beautiful architectural script, and with enamelled tiles above—all in sober colors of white, brown, yellow, and green—and finely wrought in Moorish designs; it was a noble entrance. I passed within its shadows, and found myself in a stately porch, richly ornamented, the lateral walls overlaid, from a lower space left bare and severe, by delicately arcaded work in stucco as far as to the springing of the stalactite ceiling of the cupola, whose central points gave back the reflected snow-lights from below; massive bronze doors, sombre, rich in shadowy tones, filled the fourth side—their plates, riveted to the wood, chiselled and overspread with large, many-pointed stars engaged in an infinite lineal network of that old art, in whose subtility and intricacy and illusory freedom of control the Moorish decorative genius delighted to work. The momentary sight, as my eyes rounded out the full impression of the porch I stood in, was, as it were, a seizure; the novelty—for I had never before seen this art in its own home—the refinement, the harmony relieved on the sense of mass and space, the seclusion, the winter lights without, the cool and sombre peace, combined to make a moment in which memory concentrates itself. It was an Alhambra chamber in which I stood; and the first realizing sight of a new art, like that of a new land, is a vivifying moment, full of infinite possibility, almost of a new life for the artistic instincts. I shall never forget the moment nor the place where the spell of the Andalusian craftsmen first thus seized me in the slowly falling snow.

The way led me on into the arcaded court, and then the hall of prayer, under the arches of its crossing naves, to the ornamented recess sunk in the further wall, the mihrab, which is the Moslem altar and guides the hearts of the people, as they pray, toward Mecca. Its arch rested on two small onyx columns, with high, foliated capitals, exquisite in their romantic kind; and above and about ran the arabesque decoration in plaster and all over the walls of the mosque and the surface of the Moorish arches, whose intervening roofs were ceiled with sunken panels of cognate but diverse design—a beautiful garniture of wandering lineal relief, like the veining of a leaf, netted in geometrical forms, emboldened with lines of cursive script, flowing with conventionalized floral branch and palms, varied, repeated, interlaced. The architectural masses and spaces defined themselves with firmness and breadth in contrast with this richly elaborated surface; there seemed a natural unity between the design and the decoration, as of the forest with its foliage; through all one felt the effect that belongs unfailingly to the mosque—a grand simplicity. I wandered about, for a mosque charms me more than a church; and then I turned to the médersah, or college, adjoining its precinct, with its central court lined with scholars’ cells and its hall for lectures and prayer beyond. It was pleasing to find a college under the protection of the saint. Sidi bou-Médyen was himself a scholar, bred at the schools of Seville and Fez; he retired to the anchorite’s life on these hills while yet a youth, and being perfected in the friendship of God, admitted to ecstasy and invested with the power of miracle, preached at Baghdat, professed theology, rhetoric, and law at Seville and Cordova, and opened a college of his own on the African shore at Bougie, then a hearth of liberal studies, where his tall figure, his resonant, melodious voice and flowery and fiery eloquence gained him a great name; it was thence he was summoned by the reigning prince of Tlemcen on that last journey on which, nearing the city’s “blessed soil,” where his divine youth was passed, he died. It was quite fit that a college, as well as a mosque, should be raised and perpetuate his name near his tomb. I left its portal and passed down by the stairway to the court, and gazed up at the minaret, decorated above and wreathed with a frieze of mosaic faience, that lifted its three copper balls at its culmination, dominating the little group of sacred buildings on this hill, so characteristic of the Moslem faith and past; and its slender and guarding beauty was the last sight I saw as I went down through the narrow way and issued into the village road. A tall, grave Arab youth, standing in the snow, offered me a great bunch of violets, which I took; and in the clearing weather I began my walk back through that broad orchard cemetery, with its endless human débris under the light fall of snow—arch and mound and wall among the trees, while brief glints of sunshine lightened over it. Cemeteries are usually ugly; but this is one of the very few that I remember with fondness, perhaps because here there was no effort to delay the natural decay of human memory. Death is as natural as life, and here it seemed so; there was no antithesis of the fallen ruin and the blossom springing in the snow, but a tranquil harmony. It is so that I remember it.

II

Later in the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove with a French gentleman—we were mutually unknown—to the cascades lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a spacious prospect; and the near view in which we drove by a rising serpentine road was finely mountainous—dolomitic crags on the right, and on the left a deep ravine denting the plain whose gently sloping plateau had many a time been a chosen battle-ground. Birds flew about the heights and verdure clothed the scene. The geological formation lends itself to numerous living springs; the upper limestone rests on sandstone, which in turn lies on marl and clay, and the mountain rainfall is thus caught in natural reservoirs, which issue in innumerable outlets in the porous surface. These successive ranges of the extreme North African shore are, in fact, a continuation of the hills of Grenada, with which they form a great half circle, centred at Gibraltar, and with its hollow turned toward the Mediterranean; it is the country of the Moroccan Riff, and the character of the landscape on the African side is precisely the same as in Spain—it is Andalusian scenery. As we drew near our goal, the rocks took on more distinctly the picturesqueness of outline, due to long erosion; they had a look like natural ruins high in air, and opposite, just beyond the cascades, a superb cliff mountain filled the lower sky.