George Edward Woodberry

“ Death is the striking of the tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand, and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand. ”

“ From this broken ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature, grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity, is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. ”

“ Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes; in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands, but before it always the infinite. ”

“ What a reality it had here in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden, in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God, only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not simple. ”

“ I knew it as one recognizes a lighthouse on a foreign coast, so single, so unique it was—the leap of the red dunes up the defile, fierce as a sword thrust of the far desert through the mountains. That was Africa—the untamed wild, the bastion of nature in her barbarity, the savage citadel of her splendid forces to which man is negligible and human things unknown. The dunes are golden-red, tossed like a stormy, billowing sea; they charge, they leap, they impend—petrified in air; an ocean surf of red sand, touched with golden lights, frozen in the act of the wild wind. ”

“ The first words of the struggling soul in its dim self-consciousness, amid the throes of impotency and defeats of effort, world-wide are: “It is written.” The will of nature, the will of Allah, the will in which is our peace, however the formula be read, is the deepest conviction and last resort of humanity in the stage which it has not yet known, if it shall ever know, to transcend. Fatality stares from the face of the desert, and drops from the lips of its wandering race like leaves from the dying forest. ”

“ It is a strong life. It is the desert world.
It is under these lights that one contemplates the wretched human lot in the wild glory of nature. The grandeur of the natural scene—the miserable life of men—no eye can miss that contrast over all these horizons. The splendid force of nature, visible in all its energies, on a scale of sublimity, triumphant, the master of the world! But life—it is la misère. Look at the crouching tent, irregularly striped with brown and white, wool and camel skin, pitched under the crest of the great yellow dunes or in some wrinkle of the rock face of the waste. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He cannot be cloistered; he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him; five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.
The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Here on the race-course it was a show; there in the sands it is a native custom, vivid and gallant with the spirit of a race—a flower of desert chivalry.
What had drawn me to the fête was the desire to see the Arab temperament in some of its violent manifestations. One habitual trait of Arab life to the eye is the repose of its figures, seated or in motion; the grave courtesy, the immobile posture, the public dignity—the decorum. But, speaking of the race, this is the repose of a tropic animal; it wakes to an instant intensity of action, to a tiger violence. ”

“ The dunes lie to the west of Biskra. They are real sand-hills; one can climb on them, there are echoes to be waked, and the plain stretches finely to the mountains behind; but it is the forward view that holds the eye. The altitude is not great, but high enough to give a perch something of the commanding power of a cliff prospect over the sea, and the dunes themselves reminded me vaguely of the Ipswich sand-hills of my own coast and their sterile sea-views. The magical thing in the desert is its unexpectedness; it is not at all like what one would have thought. ”

“ It invades the spirits with its prolonged weirdness; it awes and saddens. And all at once we emerge from a deep ravine—oh, la belle vie!—a sea of dark verdure makes in from below, like a fiord, among the naked mountains round it—silent, mysterious, living, the green of the palm oasis; and swiftly, after that stop, we dip into the black gorges beyond Moghrar, more sombre, sinister—valleys of the color and aspect of some strange death, the incineration of nature in her own secular periods, the passing of a planet. ”

“ Camels, too, far away in almost any direction, loomed up, solitary and ungainly as harbor-buoys on a windless morning tide. On all sides lay the sharp black outlines of oasis clumps of palm-trees, distinct, single, solid, each a distant island, with miles to cross before one should land on its unknown shore; and behind us the range of the Aurès seemed to block out the world with the wild beauty of its precipices, which made one cliff of all the north as if to shut out Europe. It was like a wall of the world. All about us was the desert ”

“ It was a processional bas-relief, immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock; it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief; the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment, the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing than I have elsewhere observed. ”

“ I am never lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a volupté without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature ”

“ This mood of the despair of life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs, its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. ”

“ That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die, and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.
What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to withdraw and enjoy? ”

“ 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. ”

“ She does but incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial æons 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! ”

“ Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence, the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like sand-storms, peace without fruition. ”

“ The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water is a music that reverberates in all their nerves ”

“ There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. ”

“ Even in the sands of the south about Tougourt, where every line the eye rests on is a curve and softens on the eye and lulls it like a diapason of great rhythms, this austerity is not lost from the desert scene. It is the nude in landscape—not mere nakedness of earth, but landscape sculptured and modelled in grand harmonies of line and color; and however it may become fiery with light and heat and darken with the violence of heaven, it always retains its look of bare and solitary power. There is no softness in the race either. ”