North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

We passed through a little garden to the foot of the fall. It was a grotto scene. The water issued in masses from low cavernous walls and recesses over whose broken floors and spurs it poured. It was not a simple waterfall, however, that we had come to see, but a succession of cascades that fell from shelf to shelf far up the precipice. The whole scene was robed in new-fallen snow, and the way wet and slippery; but the ascent was easily practicable by a path that led up the incline, with many a gyration, often dipping into the bed of a flowing stream and mounting by the rocks in the midst, often too steep and slippery to climb without the friendly aid of bushes, grasping hands and canes. But one scrambled up, and the running water underfoot, snow and icy slides, only gave a wild tang and gentle touch of adventure to the rather breathless labor; and every little while one stopped and looked below into the deepening ravine, or approached the falling waters in some new aspect, till we came out at the summit of the upper cascade, where it poured beautifully down in the midst of a cirque of pointed rocks that rose from an indescribably fantastic mass of juts and hanging eyries, as it were, all clothed and thick with vegetation, vivid and bathed, inexpressibly fresh, trees and shrubs and flowers and vines, an exuberance of plant life; and the glittering cascade fell spraying far into its rocky heart and sent back mellow music from the depth. “It is a landscape of Edgar Poe,” said my companion. I was startled for a moment, but a glance assured me that the aptitude of his remark was unknown to the speaker—it was only a spontaneous tribute to genius, which perhaps the casual presence of an American had helped to germinate. But, indeed, the impression of the scene could hardly have been better given than in those words. It was “a landscape of Edgar Poe”—just such a one as he would have chosen as the scene of one of his romances, as my companion went on to say; it was sui generis, fantastic, a marriage of the garden and the wilderness, not without a touch of diablerie, the suggestion that would make of such a retreat the haunt of Arabian fancy, primitive tragedy, and enchanted legend. It had the formal character of romance and the atmosphere of natural magic; a place where unearthliness might find its home. That was the Poesque trait that the random suggestion, perhaps, overdefined. This scene, however, was not all, as, indeed, our ears warned us; and crossing a narrow crown of land toward the muffled roar, we saw another falling river; the slender column of wavering waters came from a great height, sprayed and united, and rushed with a flood of force and speed to join the waterfall below; it had the beauty of something seen against the sky, in contrast with what was seen below against the earth; it was a unique combination, and the only time I have ever seen the junction of two rivers by the waterfall of one flowing into the waterfall of the other.

We went by an upper path to the high viaduct of a railroad that crosses the deep glen at that point, and thence commanded the broad expanse of the seaward plain with its near amphitheatre of mountain ranges, and Tlemcen lying below on its headland among its orchards. The reason why it grew up, and stood for centuries, was plain; it is the key of the country. It seemed, and is, a garden city; and as we walked or scrambled down the looped pathway over the terraced face of the hill on that side, and drove on round the circuitous road and back on our track to the city, I was most struck by the endless orchards lying beneath us on the bottom-lands at the foot of the ravine, and others through which we passed; and during all my stay I saw them—orchards of orange, lemon, almond, peach, and pear, and apple trees, and olives, and especially cherries, in profusion everywhere, and among them the constant sound of running waters from the springs.

III

The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town, was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated, their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above, tipped with a stork’s nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful as English abbeys.

I wandered on through a country district over which was scattered a native village, but in the main an open region. It was remarkable for the number of old trees it contained; and, indeed, hardly less striking a feature of the landscape of Tlemcen, in general, than its garlanding orchards is this grouping of old trees, though it is rarer. The whole African coast affords specimens of trees of great mass and age. I remember one such on the eastern borders of Algeria that I found among the fields, deep in the country; or rather I was guided to it by the Arab children I had gathered in my train, and especially by one Bedouin shepherd lad who had left his wandering herd to follow me, and they insisted that I should see the sacred tree. It was a monarch of the vale—one of a group of three; massive in foliage, long of limb, great of girth, horizontal in aspect, a leaning, almost fallen, tower of the forest. It looked as if centuries were indifferent to it—it was so old. It was a holy tree, a marabout, as they called it; and bits of cloth, strips of rags, fluttered from its boughs, where they had been placed as votive offerings by the poor people of the district. I was told that I should put some copper coins on the bough or in the hollow, for an offering and to have good fortune, for no one would take them, and I did so, glad to pay my devoirs and wondering inwardly how long it was since my own far ancestors had joined in tree-worship. It was the first time I had ever seen a sacred tree, one actually worshipped, and it touched my imagination. At Tlemcen I saw no tree so fine as that; but there were several that bore a patriarchal resemblance; and in the morning stroll I speak of I found a grove of them, not close together, but spread out over the open landscape and nigh enough for neighborhood. They were terebinths, old ruins of the vegetable world, with that same horizontal reach and earth-bowed air—they might almost seem on their knees in some elemental adoration; age filled them; in that cemetery—for it was a cemetery—they were monumental. It was a quiet landscape; cattle were grazing here and there; three or four ruined koubbas with broken arches and fallen walls rose at intervals, once stately monuments, for this was the burial-place of the royalty of Tlemcen in their empire years. Not far away, on a knoll, in a place apart, was the shrine of the first patron saint of the city, then Agadir—for Sidi bou-Médyen was a later comer, and saints, like dynasties, have their times and seasons, and this cemetery of the City-Gate was old before his hillside began to know the furrow of death. The first patron, Sidi Wahhâb, a companion of the Prophet and a comrade of the conqueror, lies under the terebinths. Pointed by a magnificent tree, I passed along its shadow down a shelving, stony way to a little garden of roses; there, in the hollow, sunken in the surrounding soil by its antiquity, I found the grave of Sidi Yaqoub, walled, but open to the sky—a lovely place, with the rose and the terebinth and the sky. This cemetery of the City-Gate was a kind of spiritual outpost for protection; the saints, indeed, camped about all the gates to guard the city in their death; nor was it altogether in vain; it is related of at least one prudent conqueror that he carefully inquired as to number and virtue of the saints who lay at the various gates, as if they had been modern batteries, and selected for attack that postern where least was to be feared from the ghostly artillery. The position at the spot I have described was uncommonly strong.

I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing, tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering combination of gardens and tanneries—a dilapidated, ruinous way it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of Sidi’l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children, and the touch of a child’s story hangs about his legend. When the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian’s nightly call for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from the outer darkness: “Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without except the wretched Saint Bonbon.” The repeated miracle found the ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall, which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in the shelter of another of those secular trees—a carob, this time; and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal, partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes with the translucent onyx columns of the nave—low columns with Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages ago of the lamp of art.

IV

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn, smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives, and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone, some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population; the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and children along with it and the people who were necessary to its subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town; and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering, had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however, was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.

I found little of interest in the detail except that splendid tower, which was a spectacle of ruin; it commanded the scene by its single and solitary figure, and was imposing to the eye and to the mind. It was a minaret, but of a different order from any I ever saw. It stood in the middle of the façade of the mosque, which was entered by the central door of the minaret, massively crowned by concentric arches over the portal; and this base was continued above, in the upper stories, by a bolder and more solid construction than usual, with ornamental details fitted to its severe lines, with a balcony halfway up, and at the top a group of small Gothic arches. It was thus more like a cathedral tower in aspect, position, and use; and in its majestic ruin it seemed such. The treatment of the surface, however, was altogether Moorish. The material was a beautiful rosy stone; and, overlaid on this, one still saw the half-obliterated green and blue lights of the incrusted work like a dull peacock lining. The discreet relief of this ceramic ornament on the rose stone, used as a ground and having its own warm and massive effect in the harmony of tints, must have made a superb example of that mosaic art of color which treated great surfaces like a jewel box. But what a marvel it is to find the camp of a horde of Berber tribes, in the confusion of a fierce and bloody siege, a foyer of the great arts—of architecture, delicate sculpture, and mosaic color! All those onyx columns that have so delighted me were brought from these ruins and reset in their new places in Tlemcen. What an interesting group of impressions a few days had brought me, here! not one city, but a nest of cities, like a nest of boxes—or like Troy, superposed one on another: Pomaria, Agadir, Tagrart, Mansourah, Tlemcen. A necropolis of saints; a mountain-pleasance of fountains, orchards, grottos, the haunt of pigeons and fruits, rich in the privacy and delights of country life; a land of campaigns, and Berber dynasties, and sieges! I began to feel the inadequacies of my schoolboy geography and college histories, the need of a new orientation of my ideas to serve as a ground-plan for my knowledge of the people and its past, the race-character; and, on my return, I sought out the book-shop—an excellent one—and purchased all the little city could tell me about itself.

V