|The Sight of the Desert|
The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the division and the boundary, was abrupt.
A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but very habitable and sown with large cities, living and dead. There are behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone, unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand that blows and shifts under the wind.
|The View of the Desert|
On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer I began to pick my way carefully downward.
|The Oasis|
I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found first the railway, and then the strong high road which the astonishing French have driven right out here into nothingness.
|The Arab Riding|
I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the hills, for it is their native place.... |The Ksar| Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring ksours which they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the sun.... This is how it will end.”