Read Ebook: North Africa and the desert by Woodberry George Edward

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Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times; but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is "a forest of columns" of antique make, and in this it is an example of a general practice. Original building came slowly into being, and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called, the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself, was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out; for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez, Marr?keck, and other points still await thorough examination and study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-M?rin prince in his reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.

The Berber princes ruled over a border state continually at war, and their city retained the rudeness of the nomad life; they were kings of a master-warrior caste among the other elements of the population, but with a pride in public works and a delight in decorative luxury, a capacity for civilization and elegance, which transformed them into accomplished princes of Andalusian culture, like their neighbors. In realizing their ambitions they were, however, dependent on the aid of their neighbors; they obtained both workmen, architects, and in some cases material already wrought, from Spain, and especially from the lord of Andalusia, Abou'l-Wal?d, who sent them the ablest artisans he could command. The legend that the bronze plates of the door of the mosque of Sidi bou-M?dyen were miraculously floated there from abroad doubtless contains the truth that they were brought from Spain. Some of the tiles are of foreign manufacture. The art, whether in spirit, style, or skill, is to be looked on as an importation, though it achieved its works on the spot. It affords admirable examples, and they are of uncommon purity, since each newcomer did not restore and refashion older work in current modes of later skill or taste, but left it, as the Arabs will, to its own decay; this art is seen, therefore, very often just as it was in its first creation save for the ravage of time.

It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert builders, and they treated structural elements--the column, the arch, the dome--decoratively; these were subordinated to a decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the line--arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric patterns--squares, polygons, circles--symmetrically arranged, and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main feature of the art was in its color--mosaic. It is true that the lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue, and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes, so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived; and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily, was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the lineal decoration are few--disks, stars, and the like--and in the floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly, the colors of the mosaic are few--manganese-brown, white, copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these few elements--colors and patterns--is unrestricted by any limit, they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable, which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.

The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is different--it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact, its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable, the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom--whether in line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a "disembodied joy," too, as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight, as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and clad in the evanescence of nature--life not too seriously valued, sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.

I went out into the night on my last evening and wandered in the dark streets till the falling gleam of a Moorish cafe drew me into its shadowy spaces, where I drank a cup of coffee, listening to sudden snatches of native music and observing the swarthy and stalwart Arabs where they were banked up on a sort of high stage at my left. It was a characteristic but dull and lifeless scene. At a later hour I visited the moving pictures. The large, obscure shed was jammed full of rough-looking men and boys, French soldiers in many colors, and Arabs in hanging folds, with life-worn faces, often emaciated; but I noted as a general characteristic that self-contained, self-reliant immobility of countenance that is the type of border men; it was the crowd of a frontier town. I went back to my hotel under the keen midnight sky at last, thinking of the long and crowded life of the historic past in this old caravanserai of the desert tribes, of the scenes of which I had been reading--the Koran-led army, the battle of the women, the palace feasts, night-long, where pages swung rose censers among the guests and the revelry ended with the morning prayer; of the great figures--the scholar-saint, Sidi bou-M?dyen, the ascetic revolutionary, Ibn Toumert, the Berber shepherd boy who found a kingdom, the world conqueror by the sea at Mahdia, the young princes drowned; of the desert courage that had flashed here, a sword from the scabbard, of the desert piety that had here flung away the jewel of life a thousand times, of the generations of desert idealists who in the crowded schools had walked the way of light as it was vouchsafed to them; and in the waking reality of the French border town, whose night scene had depressed me, it seemed an Arabian dream.

FIGUIG

FIGUIG

I woke, in the train, on the high plateaus. Dawn--soft green and pallid gold, luminous, then dying under a heavy cloud while faint pink brightened on the sides of the great horizon--opened the lofty plain, boundless and naked, thinly touched with tufts of vegetation; as far as one could see, only the elements--color, cold, swathing wild herbage on rugged soil; and far off, alone, the haze of an abrupt mountain range. It was the steppe beyond Khreider. The vast, salt chott of El-Chergui, that streaks the middle of the steppe with its waste and quicksands, lay behind; but its saline arms still clung to and discolored the surface, and whitened the view westward with dull crystalline deposits. This wide blanching of the gray and red soil striped and threw into relief the rigid scene--aridity, vacancy, solitude, from which emerged the still grandeur of inanimate things. It was the characteristic scene of the high plains--a vague monotony, colored with sterile features flowing on level horizons. As the train ascended nature seemed still to unclothe and uncover, to strip and peel the land; but not continuously. From time to time the steppe lapsed back to a thicker growth of tough-fibred alfa, whose home is on these plains, and bore other dry, sparse, darkish desert plants upon reddish hummocks; on this pasturage distant herds of camels browsed unattended, as on a cattle-range, in the wild spaces fenced by rolling sands; then the climbing train would soon pass again amid low dunes. Few stations, at long intervals; isolated, meagre, they seemed lost in the spreading areas, mere points of supply; the most important was but a village, with sickly trees; but they took on an original character. They were fortified; obviously built for defence, with sallies and retreats in their walls; guarded casemates obliquely commanding all avenues of approach and the walls themselves; doors that were meant to shut. It was a railway in arms, a line of military posts, or blockhouses, as it were, on an unsettled border. The sight gave a tang of war to the silence of the uninhabited country, and reminded one of unseen tribes and of the harsh frontier of Morocco over opposite, south and west. Slowly the mountains sprang up; one had already drifted behind, Djebel-Antar; and now the peaks of the Saharan Atlas, rising sheer from the plain a thousand metres, lay on either hand, bold crests and jutting ranges--Djebel-A?ssa on the left, the Sfissifa on the right in the southwestern sky, Djebel-Mektar straight ahead. We had passed the highest point of the line at an elevation of thirteen hundred metres, and were now on the incline and rapidly approaching the last barrier of the Sahara. We were soon at the foot of Mektar. It was A?n-Sefra, an important military base.

The train winds on in the bright morning air by a shining koubba, dark palm tufts, and the high, silent tricolor, and goes down the oued, turns the mountain, passes into the rocks, a strange scene of stormy forms and sterile colors, and makes from valley to valley by sharp curves, from oued to oued by deep cuts, piercing and grooving its passage to lower levels through the range of the ksour. Almost from the first it is unimaginable, that landscape. It is all rock in ruins, denuded and shivered, shelving down, disintegrating; fallen avalanches of rotten strata; every kind of fracture; whole hills in a state of breaking up into small pieces, pebbly masses, bitten, slivered. We traverse broken, burnt fields of it, all shingle; expanses of it so, beneath walls cracked and scarified; we curve by scattered bowlders of all sizes and positions, down valleys of stones; new hills open, sharp-edged, jagged--continuous rock. All outlooks are on the waste wilderness crumbling in its own abandonment; all contours are knife-edges; the perspectives are all of angles. In the near open tracts lie relics and remains, mounds, mountains, and hills that have melted away; steep lifts on all curves; and on the sky horizon, following and crossing one another, saw-toothed ranges, obliquely indented with sharp re-entries, or else acute cones and rounded mamelons: the whole changing landscape a ruin of mountains being crumbled and split and blown away. It is an elemental battle-field, where the rock is the victim--a suicide of nature. In this region of extreme temperatures with sudden changes--burning noons and frozen nights, torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall--the fire and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and d?bris; near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are serried, the surfaces calcined. It is an upper world of the floored and pinnacled rock, an underworld shivered and strewn with its own fragments, a "gray annihilation"--of the color of cinders. I imagine that the landscapes of the moon look thus.

We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud, whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the plots are filled with trees--fig-trees, old and contorted, with their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned earthworks--scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of bones are heaped and left here like the potter's shard. The sun beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave--"whither thou goest." And it is not sad--no more than the naked mountains of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is one with them--it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin, hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber, secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It is a world that has passed away.

The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky; the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.

We came without further incident to the line of scattered palms, amid a very broken country, where the ascent makes up to Figuig, enclosed in a double circle of walls. Figuig is the name of the whole district. It includes a lower level where is the ksar of Zenaga and its vast palmerai, and a higher level on which are scattered the other six ksars amid their gardens. All are built of sun-dried mud, as are also the two walls, the inner being furnished with round towers at frequent regular intervals. We went on amid a confusion of gardens--fruit-trees with vegetables under them, such as beans and onions, and plots of bright barley in the more open places, but mostly palms, with little else, all springing out of the dry mud; we were past the ruinous-looking stretches of the brown, sunbasking wall, and began to be lost in a narrow canyon, as it were, up which the rude way went between the enclosed gardens. There was hardly width for our horses as we rode in single file on the uneven, climbing path that seemed something like the bed of a torrent, and indeed every now and then water would break out from underground and pour down like a cascade or swift brook, with a delicious sound of running streams. On either side the garden walls rose a great height far over our heads, and above them brimmed branches of fruit-tree tops with the splendid free masses of palms hanging distinct and entire in the bit of blue. We seemed to be walled out of a thick, fertile, and beautiful grove; but they had only the same dry mud for their bed that was under our feet in the narrow, tortuous way. The sun had begun to be hot before we left the plain, and now, in spite of the shelter of the walls, the heat began to make itself felt; there was the dust of the country, too, which, slight as it was that day, is omnipresent; so, being both very thirsty, my friend and I dismounted at a place where the running water came fresh from the yellow ground, and we drank a very cooling draught of its brown stream. It is the scene that I remember best. It was like a defile in a narrow place; the way broadened here by a bend in the steep ascent; one saw the brimming gardens below, and the view was closed above by the turn of the walls; and there, in the hollow, my friend and I leaned over the cascading water and, turning, saw the spahi, as he tightened the girths of my saddle which had loosened, under those walls, brown in the shadow and an orange glow in the sun, with the spring green starred with white blossoms like a tender hedge above their yellow tops, and the leaning palms in the blue. It had a strange charm; and the water made music, and it was solitude, and everything there was of the earth, earthy--and beautiful.

We dismounted in the middle of the street, half blocking the way with our horses, by a caf?, whose proprietor, a humble and life-worn old man, set himself to prepare us a cup of the peculiar Morocco tea that is flavored with mint. There were a few passers-by, and I busied myself with my camera. The caf? was a mere hole in the wall, of preternatural obscurity, considering its small size and shallow depth; the furnace and the teakettle seemed to leave hardly room for the old Arab to move about. I found a camp-stool and sat down opposite the low, dark opening, and, the tea being ready, was drinking it with much relish; it was truly delicious with its strong and fragrant aroma of mint, and was also uncommonly exhilarating. I was thus engaged when two particularly ill-favored Moors, each with a long gun over his shoulder, appeared, and planted themselves, one on either side behind my shoulders, as close as they could get without actually pressing against me, and gazed stolidly and fixedly down at me. I paid no attention to them, but drank my tea, and from time to time dusted my leather leggings with my little palm wand. It was a picturesque group: my friend in his shining white uniform, unarmed, leaning carelessly against the wall in the sun, the tall spahi opposite in the shade regarding us, the two Moors hanging over me motionless, and no one said a word. After a while they seemed to have had enough of it, and went away with a sullen look.

A few minutes later we came out on a crowded square, full of shops, men working at their trades, others lying full length on the ground; it was a small but busy place--not that much was being done there, but there were people, and occupations, and human affairs. It was the gathering seat of the assembly of the elders, before whom the affairs of the ksar are brought for judgment. No one paid us the slightest attention; and after looking at the little stocks of leather and grains and odds and ends, and glancing at the reclining forms that gave color and gravity to the ordinary scene of an Arab square, we entered again on the darkness and somnolence of the winding streets, where there was no sun nor life nor sound, but rather a retreat from all these things, from everything violent in sensation or effort or existence; places of quiet, of cessation, of the melancholy of things. We emerged by a mosque, and near it a cemetery on the edge of the ksar--such a cemetery as they all are, blind, dishevelled heaps of human ruins marked by rough, naked common stones, the desert's epitaph on life, inexpressibly ignominious there in the bright, bare sunlight. We mounted and rode down through gardens, as at first, on a ridge that commanded now one, now another view of the palm and orchard interiors with their dry beds, a strange mixture of barrenness below and fertility above, a rough but pleasant way; and all at once we saw the great palmerai stretching out below us in the plain, like a lake bathing the cliff, a splendidness of dark verdure; black-green and blue-black lights and darks filled it like a sea--cool to the eye, majestic, immense, magnificent in the flood of the unbounded sunlight, a glory of nature. It was a noble climax to the strange scenes of that morning journey; and soon after we dismounted to make the steep descent on the gray-brown rock of the cliff. The two boys, who had rejoined us, brought down our horses, and we left the half-fallen towers and crumbling walls in their yellow ruin behind us, with the young Arabs still looking, and rode through the hot desert to Beni-Ounif.

This was the mysterious Figuig of old travellers. I had seen it, but it still seemed to me unrealized, though not unreal. A vision of palm-topped garden walls on crumbling mountain paths; of a wind-blown, sunburnt high plateau; of a sun-drenched gully of a street with a strange-windowed, lonely ruin looking down on horses that hang their heads; a maze of darkened passages with a sense of lurking in the shadows, of decay in the silence, of apparition in the rare figures; a closed city of hidden streams and muffled noises, walled orchards and shut houses, sunless ways, yet held in the sun's embrace, the high blue sky, the girdling mountains, the open desert; and with its stern and rocky gardens of the dead, too; a soil and a people made in the image of Islam, impregnated with it, decrepit with it, full of lassitude and melancholy and doom, mouldering away; yet set amid living fountains, lighted by placid reservoirs where the tall palms sun themselves in the silent waters as in another sky; queen, too, of that dark-green sea of the palmerai, a marvel of nature; and last a vision of long-drawn walls and dismantled towers crumbling in the red sun. It is so I remember it; and it seems rather a mirage of the desert imagination than a reality, a memory.

"Would I like to go to the theatre?" I repeated, for it was an unexpected invitation. "You might not think so, but there is a theatre at Beni-Ounif," said my friend. So it appeared that the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement, and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children, two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. "The tricolor goes well with the palm," I said to myself, as I turned to look at the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color; there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen soldiers before. I never saw such faces--mature, grave, settled, with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy and weary; they had endured much--it was in their pose and bearing and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and death--one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the impression I felt at the sight--faces into which life had fused all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do and bear and withstand--the fruit of the desert air, long marches, terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.

The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune, error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be, incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases, I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors; and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts, I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works, drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity, turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.

It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the soldiers' lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of paradise--incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One cannot know the soldiers' desert life without some experience; but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers' books, such as one that is a favorite companion of mine, "Une Promenade dans le Sahara," by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs d'Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif, thinking of soldiers' lives, friendless men--

"Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan."

It was a brilliant morning. I went to the edge of the desert and looked off south with the wish to go on that all unknown horizons wake, but which the desert horizon stirs, I think, with more longing insistence, with a greater power of the vague, than any other; for there it lies world-wide, mysterious, unpenetrated, and seems to open a pathway through space itself, like the sea. All true travellers know this feeling, the nostalgia for the "far country" that they will never see; it is an emotion that is like a passion--mystical, and belongs to the deep soul. The desert horizon, like the sea's, at every moment breeds this spell. But as I turned back, with the sense of the chained foot, my disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that I was to companion my friend, who had been ordered to Tonkin; and I had timed my departure to go with his detachment on its way north. As I went down to the train my Arab boy, with the infinite hopefulness of such attach?s, brought me a dead wolf, if by chance I would like it; but I could not add it to my baggage, whereat he was sorrowful, but was comforted. The station presented a lively scene--many soldiers in their white duck trousers and red caps; there was a band; the air was filled with good-bys and laughing salutations; the car windows grew lined with leaning forms and intent faces; the music struck up, high and gallant, and with the last cries and shouts we were off on the line.

TOUGOURT

TOUGOURT

We were quite happy voyagers, the three of us. Ali, on the box, sang from time to time some cadenced stave, careless as a bird, in a world of his own; indeed the drive was an adventure to him, for, as I afterward found, it was his first going to Tougourt; and had not Hamet, almost as soon as we started, lifting one intent, burning glance straight in my eyes--it was the first time I had really seen him, as a person--told me that I had brought him good luck, for that night his wife had borne him a boy? He was content. A fine figure, too, was Hamet; he answered, as no other guide but one I ever had, to the imagination; he filled my dream of what ought to be. A mature man, rather thick-set, with a skin so bronzed that in the shadow it was black, with the head of a desert sheik, noble, powerful; when he moved he seemed still in repose, so sculptural were all the lines of his figure, such dignity was in every chance attitude; he seemed more like some distinguished aid to attend me than a guide. His white burnoose fell in large folds, and as he threw it partly over me in the first cool hours, he disclosed some light, white underdress over whose bosom hung low a great gold chain with beads under; a revolver swung in a leather case, rather tightly drawn below his right breast with a strap over the shoulder; white stockings and slippers completed his garb. We talked of trifles, and the conversation was charming, not too fluent--talk of the road; but what I remember is my pleasure in finding again what often seems to me that lost grace of a fine natural demeanor in men. It is of less consequence to me what a man says than is his manner of saying it, and speech is not of the lips only, but of the whole man; and, in my experience, it is the unlearned who are also unspoiled, that, all in all, say things best. And ever as we talked or were silent the horses went on, the brilliant bare line of the Aur?s sank slowly down, and round us was the waste of rock with its fitful tangle of tamarack and drin, the sea of sand with its ridged breadths, the near or distant horizon lines as the track rose and fell; and with the hours the panorama of the road began to disclose itself.

The road was really a broad, camel-trodden route on which the carriageway, winding about, found going as best it could; the railway that will some time be had been surveyed along it, and the telegraph-poles that already bore the wire far beyond Tougourt into the desert were seldom far away. On the earlier part of the journey the going was excellent in that dry season. It was not a lonely road, though for long stretches it was solitary. Over the brink of a rise suddenly would spring up a half-dozen human figures, sharp outlines on the blue sky, and a flock would come tumbling after as if clotted about their feet, and there might be a donkey or two; it was a Bedouin family on its northern migration to the summer pasturage. What an isolated fragment of human life it seemed, flotsam tossing about with the seasons, as little related to anything neighborly as seaweed, yet spawning century after century, living on, with the milk of goats, in such a waste; and how infinitely fresh was the simple scene! one or two men, a boy, women, children, and goats tramping in the desert toward water and green food, a type of humanity for ages--and it was such a wretched subsistence! But what a bodily vigor, what a look of independence, what a sense of liberty there was there, too! Now it would be two or three camels with the canopy in which women ride, with flocks, too, and more men and boys, more warmly clad, with more color and importance--some wealthier head man with his family going the same northward journey. Or, as the carriage crested some ridge, we would see miles ahead a long line creeping on toward us--a trade caravan; and after a while it would pass, the camels pouting in high air, under the loads of balanced boxes or bales laid across them, lumbering dumbly along in the great silence, like convicts, as it always seems to me, from another sphere of existence.

Many creatures give me vividly this impression of having haplessly intruded into a state of being not meant for them. The turtles in the swamps of my boyhood, leaning their sly and protruded heads out of their impossible shells, the fish that have great staring eyes in aquariums, frogs and toads and all centipedal sea creatures, are to me foreigners to life, strays, misbirths, "moving about in worlds not realized," and all grotesque forms of life--even human deformity when it becomes grotesque--wake in me something between amusement and pity that they should be at all. I feel like saying as a guide, wishing to correct a friend of mine, once said: "Monsieur, you are a mistake." But of all such creatures, the camel fills me with the most profound and incurable despair. He is the most homeless-looking of all creatures. He has been the companion and helpmate of man from the dawn of human life, and our debt to him through uncounted ages and in places where the human lot has been most penurious and desperate is untold; but man has never been able to enlighten him; he looks, on all occasions and under all circumstances, hopelessly bored with existence, unutterably sick of humanity. There is a suicidal mood in animal life, and at times one can see glimpses and intimations of it surely in the eyes of animals; the camel embodies it, like a stare. I wish they were all dead; and when I see their bones in the sand, as I often do, I am glad that they are gone and have left the ribs of their tabernacle of life behind them by the wayside. Every desert traveller writes a little essay on the camel. This is mine. I will not modify it even for the sake of the meharis that come down the route, overtaking us from Biskra; they are the racers that have just competed in the yearly trial of speed from Tougourt--aristocrats of the species; they have a clear gray tone and slender delicacies of flank and skin; all day they will be speeding ahead and dropping behind us; the desert is their cloth of gold and they its chivalry--splendid beasts they are, as native to this blown empire of the sand and the sun and the free air as a bird to the sky--and they lift their blunt noses over it with unconquerable contempt. It is amazing how the creature, supercilious or abject, refuses to be comforted. There is no link between him and man. If you seek a type for the irreconcilable, find it in the camel.

It is said that one meets his enemy in every place, and every traveller experiences these surprising encounters that prove the smallness of the world; but I better the proverb, for it is a friend I meet in the most solitary places. On the loneliest road of Greece a passing traveller called out my name; in the high passes of Algiers I came face to face with a schoolmate; and, however repeated, the experience never loses its surprise. Surely I had seen that gaunt figure pressing up on a stout mule from the head of the fresh trade caravan that was just approaching; that face, like a bird of prey, that predatory nose before the high forehead and bold eyes--yes, it was Yussef, my guide of years ago, with welcome all over his countenance and quick salutations to his old companion. He was a caravan man now, for the nonce, and coming up from the Souf. How natural it was to meet on the desert, with the brief words that resumed the years and abolished the time that had sped away and renewed the eternal now. But we must follow the meharis, slim forms on the horizon ahead, and we went on to overtake them at A?n Chegga, a mere stopping place, where there was on one side of the way a sort of desert farm, and a relay of horses waiting for us, and on the other a small, lonesome building by itself where we could lunch from our own stores. The sun was hot now and the shade and rest grateful; but we had a long way to go. With thoughtless generosity we gave our fragments of bread to some adjacent boys, and started off rapidly with the fresh horses on the great plain.

The road was lonelier than in the morning hours; the solitude began to make itself felt, the silence of the heat, the encompassment of the rolling distances, the splendor of the sky. There was hardly any life except the occasional shrub, the drin. I saw a falcon once, and once a raven; but we were alone, as if on the sea. Then the Sahara began to give up its bliss--the unspeakable thing--the inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large, and what a sense of effortless elemental power--of nature in her pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought is there so near to fact--a still fresh imprint in consciousness; thought and being are hardly separate there; and there nature seems to me more truly felt in her naked essence, lifeless, for life to her is but an incident, a detail, uncared for, unessential. She does but incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial aeons of her existence, it is a lifeless universe that is, and on the desert it seems so. This is the spectacle of power where man is not--like the sea, like the vault of heaven, like all that is infinite. What a repose it is to behold it, to feel it, to know it--this elimination, not only of humanity, but of life, from things! The desert--it is the truth. How golden is the sunlight, how majestic the immobile earth, how glorious the reach of it--this infinite! And one falls asleep in it, cradled and fascinated and careless, flooded slowly by that peace which pours in upon the spirit to lull and strengthen and quiet it, and to revive it changed and more in nature's image, purged--so it seems--of its too human past.

It was late in the afternoon. Hamet roused himself as we passed down to Oued Itel and crossed its dry bed, and Ali ceased from his vagrant music as the horses breasted the slope beyond. We came out on a high ridge. It was a magnificent view. The long valley of the great chotts lay below us transversely, like a vast river bottom; far off to the northeast glittered, pale and white, Chott Melrir, like a sea of salt, and before us Chott Merouan stretched across like a floor, streaked with blotches of saltpetre and dark stains of soil. The scene made the impression on me of immense flats at a dead low tide, reaching on the left into distances without a sea. It was a scene of desolation, of unspeakable barrenness, of the waste world; its dull, white lights were infinitely fantastic on the grays and the blacks, and the lights in the sky were cold; the solitude of it was complete; but its great extent, its emptiness, its enclosing walls of shadow in the falling day crinkling the whole upper plane of the endless landscape round its blanching hollows and horizontal vistas below, stamped it indelibly on my eyes. I was not prepared for it; it was an enlargement, a new aspect of the world. This was the southwestern end of the chain of chotts, or salt wastes, that lie mostly below sea-level and are the dried-up bed of the ancient inland arm of the sea that washed this valley in some distant age; they stretch northeasterly and touch the Mediterranean near Gab?s and the suggestion is constantly made that the sea be let into them again by a canal, thus flooding and transforming this part of the Sahara. It may some time be done; but there is some doubt about the lay of the levels and whether such an engineering feat would not result merely in stagnant waters. Meanwhile it is a vast barren basin, saline, and in the wet season dangerous with quicksands, unsafe ground, a morass of death for man and beast. The ridge where I stood commanded a long view of this sterile and melancholy waste; but I did not feel it to be sad; I only felt it to be; it had such grandeur.

We went down by a rough descent and began the crossing of the chott before us, Merouan, on its westerly edge. The road ran on flat ground, often wet and thick with a coating of black mud, and there was the smell of saltpetre in the air; the view on either side was merely desolate, night was falling, it began to be chill; and by the time we reached the farther side the stars came out. It was a darkened scene when we rode into the first oasis of young palms, without inhabitants, which belonged to some French company. It was full night when we emerged again on the sands; a splendor of stars was over us and utter solitude around; it was long since we had seen any one, and as the second oasis came into view it looked like a low black island cliff on the sea, and as deserted. We drove into its shadows by a broad road like an avenue, with the motionless palms thick on either side, as in a park; there was no sign or sound of life. It was like night in a forest, heavy with darkness and silence, except where the stars made a track above and our lights threw a pale gleam about. This oasis, which was large, also seemed uninhabited; and we passed through it on the straight road which was cut by other crossing roads, and came out on the desert by the telegraph-poles. The going was through heavy sand, which after a mile or two was heavier; our hubs were now in drifts of it. Hamet took the lights and explored to find tracks of wheels, and the horses drew us with difficulty into what seemed a route; in ten minutes it was impracticable. We crossed with much bumping and careening to the other side of the telegraph-poles, and that was no better; forward and back and sidelong, with much inspection of the ground, we plied the search; we were off the route.

We drove back to the oasis thinking we had missed the right way out, and on its edge turned at right angles down a good road; at the corner we found ourselves in the dunes--there was no semblance of a route. We returned to the centre of the silent palm grove, where there were branching ways, and taking another track were blocked by a ditch, and avoiding that, coasting another and ruder side of the grove, again at the upper corner of the oasis struck the impassable; so we went back to our starting-place. Hamet took the lanterns and gathered up his revolver and set out apparently to find the guardian, if there was one. It was then Ali told me he had never been to Tougourt before; Hamet was so experienced a guide that it was thought a good opportunity to break in a new driver. These French oases across the old route, with their new roads, were confusing; and Hamet had not been down to Tougourt of late. The silence of the grove was great, not wholly unbroken now: there were animal cries, insect buzzings, hootings, noises of a wood, and every sound was intensified in the deep quiet, the strange surroundings. It was very late. We had spent hours in our slow progress wandering about in the sands and the grove in the uncertain light. Hamet was gone quite a long time, but at last we saw his waving lantern in the wide dark avenue and drove toward him. He got in, said something to Ali, and off we went on our original track, but turned sharply to the right before issuing from the wood, down a broad way; we were soon skirting the western edge of the oasis; branches brushed the carriage; the ruts grew deep, the track grew narrow, the carriage careened; we got out, the wheels half in the ditch, horses backing. Hamet threw up his hands. It was midnight. We would camp where we were. The route was lost, whatever might be our state; and I did not wonder, for as nearly as I could judge we were then heading north by east, if I knew the polestar. We were on the only corner of the oasis we had not hitherto visited; the spot had one recommendation for a camp--it was a very out-of-the-way place. The horses were taken out, and each of us disposed himself for the night according to his fancy. It was intensely cold, and I rolled myself in my rugs and sweaters and curled up on the carriage seat and at once fell fast asleep.

An hour later I awoke, and unwinding myself got out. It was night on the desert. Ali was asleep on the box, upright, with his chin against his breast. Hamet lay in his burnoose in the sand some little distance away. The horses stood in some low brush near the ditch. The palm grove, impenetrably black, stood behind, edging the long, low line of the sky; there was a chorus of frogs monotonously chanting; and before me to the west was the vague of the sands, with indistinguishable lines and obscure hillocks, overlaid with darkness. Only the sky gave distance to the silent solitude--such a sky as one does not see elsewhere, magnificent with multitudes of stars, bright and lucid, or fine and innumerable, melting into nebulous clouds and milky tracts, sparkling and brilliant in that keen, clear, cloudless cold, all the horizon round. I was alone, and I was glad. It was a wonderful moment and scene. Hamet stirred in his place, and I went back to my post and slept soundly and well.

I woke at the first streak of dawn. Two beautiful morning stars still hung, large and liquid, in the fading night, but the growing pallor of daybreak already disclosed the wild and desolate spot where we had fortunately stopped. Drifts of trackless sand stretched interminably before us; the young palms showed low and forlorn in the gray air; the scanty brush by the ditch was starved and miserable; everything had a meagre, chill, abandoned look. As soon as it was light we reversed our course, and re-entering the oasis hailed a well-hidden group of buildings with a koubba that Hamet seemed to have discovered the night before. An old Arab gave us our bearings. We were seventeen kilometres short of Mra?er, the oasis which we should have reached; and now, making the right turn-off, we saw in another direction over the sands the black line of palms toward which we had gone astray. We soon covered the distance to Mra?er, which was a large oasis with a considerable village and a caravanserai whose gates were crowded with camels; here we got a very welcome breakfast, but we did not linger, and were quickly out again on the desert on the long day's ride before us.

Since we passed the chott we were in the valley of Oued Rir, along which is strewn a chain of oases like a necklace as far as to Tougourt and beyond. We were really on the crust of what has been well called a subterranean Nile, formed by the converging flow of two Saharan rivers, Oued Igharghar and Oued Mya, whose underground bed is pierced by wells and the waters gathered and distributed to feed the oases. There are now forty-six of these palm gardens that lie at a distance of a few miles, one from another, spotting the arid sands with their black-green isles of solid verdure, making a fantastic and beautiful landscape of the rolling plain of moving sands, with many heights and depressions, stretching with desert breadth on and on under the uninterrupted blue of the glowing sky. The district has long been a little realm by itself, sustaining with much toil the meagre life of its people and periodically invaded and subdued by the great passing kingdoms of the north. Its prosperity, however, really dates from the French occupation. At that time the oases were dying out under the invasion of the unresting sands that slowly were burying them up. The French almost at once with their superior skill sank artesian wells, and the new flood of water brought immediate change. The number of the inhabitants has doubled; the product of dates, which are of the best quality, has increased many-fold; and new oases of great extent and value have been planted by French companies. This is one of the great works of public beneficence accomplished by France for the native population; and evidence of prosperity was to be seen on every hand all the way.

The route for the most part was sandy with occasional stretches of rock, often a beautifully colored quartz, whose brilliant and strange veins harmonized well with the deep-toned landscape; but the eye wandered off to the horizon and drifts of sand, as the heavens began to fill with light and the spaces grew brilliant; in that vacancy and breadth every detail grew strangely important and interesting; a single palm, a far glimmer of salt, a herd of goats would hold the eye, and, as the day grew on, the deceptive atmosphere gave a fresh touch of the fantastic, playing with the lines and forms of objects. We passed from Mra?er, leaving these island oases on the horizon as the route threaded its way more or less remote from them, and at intervals we would touch one--a palm grove on the right, and the village by itself on higher dry ground to the left. Two of these villages, of considerable size, were entirely new, having been built within two years; they were constructed of the sun-dried mud commonly used, but they did not have the dilapidated look of the ksar; they were clean and fresh, a new home for the people who had abandoned the old, unhealthy site that they had formerly occupied, and had made a new town for themselves; and Hamet, who told me this, said other villages had done the same, and he seemed proud of their enterprise and prosperity.

Here, not far from the route, I saw what was meant by the invasion of the sand. The oasis on its farther side toward the desert was half blown over with the white drifts of it that made in like a tide; the trunks of the palms were buried to a third of their height in it; the whole garden was bedded with it, and as we drew away from the place, looking back, the little oasis with its bare palm stems resembled a wreck driving in the sea of sands. Elsewhere I saw the barriers, fences of palm leaves and fagots, raised against the encroaching dunes, where the sand was packed against them like high snow-drifts. The sand grew heavier now, and as we came to Ourlana, about which palmerais lay clustering in all directions, the horses could hardly drag through the deep, loose mass up to the low building and enclosure where was our noon stopping place. The resources of the house were scanty: only an omelet, but an excellent one, and coffee; bread, too, and I had wine. The family, a small one with boy and girl, whom chocolate soon won to my side, was pleasant, and there was a welcome feeling of human society about the incident; but as I lit a cigarette and watched the fresh horses put in--for here we found our second relay that had been sent ahead some days before--I saw that, if the population seemed scanty, it was not for any lack of numbers. A short distance beyond our enclosure, and on a line with it, in the same bare sandy waste, stood another long building with a great dome, evidently a government structure, and at right angles to it before the door was forming a long line of young children; it was the village school--these were the native boys marching in to the afternoon session, for all the world like an American school at home. I had not expected to see that on the Sahara. I photographed it at once--a striking token of modern civilization; and I saw no happier sight than those playful little Arabs going to school.

We dipped ahead into the oasis by the long lines of palms lifting their bare stems far overhead and fretting the sky with their decorative border of tufts. Here and there were fruit trees, and occasionally vegetables beneath, but as a rule there were only the palms rising from bare earth, cut by ditches in which flowed the water; there was no orchard or garden character to the soil, only a barren underground, but all above was forest silence and the beauty of tall trees. It was spring, and the trees had begun to put out their great spikes and plumes of white blossoms in places, and the air was warm and soft. A palm fascinates me with the beauty of its formal lines; where two or three are gathered together they make a picture; a single one in the distance gives composition to a whole landscape. This was, notwithstanding the interludes of the oases, a continuously desert ride, and I remember it mostly for its beauty of color and line, and a strange intensity and aloofness of the beauty; there was nothing human in it. It seemed to live by its own glow in a world that had never known man; the scene of some other planet where he had never been. There was, too, over all the monotony and immobility of things, a film of changefulness, a waver of surface, a shifting of lights and planes; it was full of the fascination of horizons, the elusiveness of far objects, and the feeling of endlessness in it, like the sky, was a deep chord never lost. It was beyond Ourlana that I noticed to the southwest, a mile or two away, three or four detached palms by a lake; their tall stems leaned through the transparent air above a low bank over a liquid, mirror-like belt of quiet water, a perfect oriental scene. It was my first mirage; and two or three times more I saw it that afternoon--the perfect symbol of all the illusion of life. How beautiful it was, how was its beauty enhanced framed there in the waste world, how after a while it melted away!

Oasis after oasis dropped from us on the left and the right, and in the late afternoon we were climbing a sharp rise through the deepest sand we had yet encountered, so that we all got out and walked to relieve the horses, and ourselves toiled up the slope; and soon from the ridge we saw a broad panorama like that of the day before; but instead of that salt desolation, here the eye surveyed an endless lowland through which ahead ran a long, dark cluster of oases, one beyond another, like an archipelago; and Hamet, pointing to one far beyond all, on the very edge of the horizon, said: "Tougourt." We descended to the valley, passing a lonely old gray mosque, or koubba, of some desert saint by the way--very solemn and impressive it was in the failing light, far from men; and we rolled on for miles over land like a floor, as on a Western prairie; and the stars came out; and at intervals a dark grove went by; and we were again in the sands; and another grove loomed up with its look of a black low island, and we passed on beside it. I thought each, as it came in view, was our goal, but we kept steadily on. It was nigh ten o'clock when we saw, some miles away, the two great lights, like low harbor lights, that are the lights of the gate of Tougourt. Ali was perceptibly relieved when we made sure of them; for they were unmistakable at last.

Then, in that last half-hour, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. The whole sky was powdered with stars; I had never seen such a myriad glimmer and glow, thickening, filling the heavenly spaces, innumerable; and all at once they seemed to interlink, great and small, with rays passing between them, and while they shone in their places, infinite in multitude, light fell from them in long lines, like falling rain, down the whole concave of night from the zenith to the horizon on every side. It was a Niagara of stars. The celestial dome without a break was sheeted with the starry rain, pouring down the hollow sphere of darkness, from the apex to the desert rims. No words can describe that sight, as a mere vision; still less can they tell its mystical effect at the moment. It was like beholding a miracle. And it was not momentary; for half an hour, as we drove over the dark level, obscure, silent, lonely, I was arched in and shadowed by that ceaseless, starry rain on all sides round; and as we passed the great twin lights of the gates, and entered Tougourt, and drew up in the dim and solitary square, it was still falling.

I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel, which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau, with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky. A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.

Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the entrance to the old town and the mosque--a precinct of covered streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange, dark mode of man's animal existence. This was a typical desert town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages; and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than of its everlastingness.

We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true Sahara stretched round us--the roll of the white sands, motion in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams, is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands; south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that side, too, was a native village--dreary walls of sun-dried earth with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground shaped perpendicularly and squared--windowless, sealed, forlorn. I entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for the distances were short.

In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a caf? in the market square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed. On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front, was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths, or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was a butcher's stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground, and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group as at a fair--vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps, utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and there--turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old, poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards, chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant, and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that was falling from the darkening sky--a sombre scene; and when I came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place was a microcosm of the desert world.

The room was rather large, with the furnace and the utensils for coffee in the corner near the entrance; four or five musicians, on a raised platform, were discoursing their shrill barbarian art, but it pleases me with its plaintive intensity and rapid crescendos, in its savage surroundings; a bench went round the wall, and there were tables, at one of which Hamet and I sat down, and coffee was brought. There were not many in the room--a sprinkling of soldiers, mostly in the blue of the tirailleurs, Arabs, old and gray-bearded, or younger and stalwart like Ali, whom I had lost sight of and now found here, much more attractive than I had thought possible, with a desert rose in his mouth and a handsome comrade. A few women with the high head-dress and heavy clothes they wear were scattered about. Close behind me, and to my left, was a wide entrance to the dark shadows of the half-lighted court whose cell-like rooms I had inspected in the morning, and men and women were passing in and out, singly and in groups, all the evening. For a while there was no dancing--only the music; but at some sign or call a full-grown woman, who seemed large and heavy, began the slow cadence and sway of the dance. I had often seen the performance, but never in such a setting; at Biskra and in the north it is a show; here it was a life. She finished, and I beckoned to a young slip of a girl standing near. She came, leaning her dark hands on the table, with those unthinking eyes that are so wandering and unconcerned until they fill with that liquid, superficial light which in the south is so like a caress. I offered her my cigarettes, and she smiled, and permitted me to examine the bracelets on her arms and the silver ornaments that hung from her few necklaces; she was simply dressed and not overornamented; she was probably poor in such riches; there was no necklace of golden louis that one sometimes sees; but there were bracelets on her ankles, and she wore the head-dress, with heavy, twisted braids of hair. A blue star was tattooed on her forehead, and her features were small but fine, with firm lines and rounded cheek and chin; she was too young to be handsome, but she was pretty for her type and she had the pleasant charm that youth gives to the children of every tint and race. She stood by us a while with a little talk, and as the music began she drew back and danced before us; and if she had less muscular power and vivacity than the previous dancer, she had more grace in her slighter motions. She used her handkerchief as a background to pose her head and profile her features and form; and all through the dance she shot her vivid glances, that had an elasticity and verve of steel, at me. She came back to take our applause and thanks, and talked with Hamet, for her simple French phrases were exhausted; there was nothing meretricious in her demeanor, rather an extraordinary simplicity and naturalness of behavior; she seemed a thing of nature. The room began to fill now; three women were dancing; and she went over to the bench by the wall opposite, and I noticed a young boy of eight or ten years ran to sit by her and made up to her like a little brother. There were three or four such young boys there.

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