Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.

The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.

Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field. But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.

But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body; they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master, subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.

The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching, passionate-shrewdly, toward dusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of dew and of love.

Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.

. . . . . .

This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued—whence our word Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain. Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles: smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps its perennial victims living.

At the bottom of the Oued is the town.

The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water, flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.