Chapter V: Part 5

The mountain fastnesses of the Aurès, seldom penetrated by the stranger, are the home of a race, the Chawia, which possesses remarkable characteristics. In the main a branch of the aboriginal Berbers, they have been preserved by the seclusion of their mountains, like their cousins the Khabyles, from any Arab admixture. But there is little doubt that they represent also the débris of the Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine colonies driven to the hills by the Arab invasion. Even so were the last remnants of Romano-British civilization driven to the highlands of Wales and Cumberland before the Anglo-Saxon hosts. In their features, their speech and their customs, the Chawia betray their classic origin. Many travellers have dilated on the beauty of their women:—"their well-featured countenances, fair-curling locks, and wholesome ruddy looks." Their language is full of Latin words. “They observe the 25th of December as a feast, under the name of Moolid (the birth), and keep three days’ festival both at springtime and harvest. They use the solar instead of the Mohammedan lunar month, and the names of the months are the same as our own.” In the peculiarities of this isolated people, for which I cannot personally vouch, we seem to see the germ of some of Mr. Rider Haggard’s romances.

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_VIII—THE ALLURING OASIS_

El-Kantara—The Gateway of the Desert—Biskra—Its attractions—The
dancing-girls-"Hichenstown"—A garden and a vision—Railway extension—
Conquering Mohammedans—Sidi Okba—The Arab’s point of view.

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“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst.” _Barrack-room Ballads._

From the watershed to the north of Batna the descent by road or rail is rapid to El-Kantara, where the mountain chain is riven by a deep and narrow gorge. It is called by the Arabs _Foum-es-Sahara_, the Mouth of the Sahara. The scenery is very striking; Nature is here in a theatrical mood; the mountains are bare and rugged and of a rich yellow hue, and as one emerges from the gorge the _coup d’œil_ is magnificent. Immediately in front is a lovely oasis, rich in palms and fruit trees, offering a delicious contrast of greenery to the rough weather-scarred rocks above. Around and below, to the southward, are the rugged foot-hills of the Aurès, and beyond all the great illimitable sea of sand. This is one of those rare places of the earth where nature seems to set herself of deliberate intention to produce an effect. And nothing is wanting to its success; nothing is superfluous. No one could have planned a more fitting, a more impressive, a more romantic, gateway to the desert.

We continue to descend by the river, which is soon to meet its doom in the sand, through a strange country which suggests in its apparent absence of design the effect of some vast catastrophe,—"the quarries of an enormous desolation." From the seamed and wrinkled and time-worn cliffs, with their endless repetition of narrow buttresses, stand out weird pinnacles as might the ruins of a fantastic castle, or the fangs of some huge primeval monster, “the dead bones of the eldest born of time”; while the floor of the valley is covered with curiously regular pyramidal heaps, which bear the semblance of man’s fashioning. Such a landscape might serve for a poet’s or painter’s Inferno; such may be the scenery of the moon. Little by little we leave this nightmare of the foot-hills and emerge into the plain. We pass several little oases, and traverse sandy areas with scanty scrub. The river, or its bed, is ever with us, with here and there an oleander growing on its banks. Where water can be led away from it, a little ground is irrigated, and corn is sown. But ever we are tending to the open desert. And at last, when we have passed completely from all contact with the hills, and know that we have attained the great Sahara, at last we come to Biskra.

It is a little difficult to analyse the charm of Biskra. The charm is great and the attraction strong. They do not lie altogether in the brilliance of its sunshine, in the shade of its palms, in the richness of its colouring, in the exuberance of its life. These things we may meet elsewhere. Biskra has other qualities; it is barbaric, African to the core, tropical in its intensity.

Biskra is barbaric. To one entering by rail or road its trim streets and squares, and housing himself in a hostelry which might be anywhere within the bounds of the civilized world, this is a hard saying. Yet he may soon perceive that its veneer is very thin and understand that it is very transitory. A hot wind from the desert in April, and it is gone, and the real Biskra will reassert itself. But even during the months of the incursion of the _hiverneurs_, the barbaric note is never absent; to the ear that listens it is predominant; it rings more shrill by force of contrast. The troops of snarling camels, with their loads from the Great Beyond, the clash of African musicless music, the thronging crowds of jostling races in its markets, the hooded figures crouched motionless round its cafés, the bedizened native harlotry which stalks unashamed,— nay, proudly as mistress of the town,—in its streets; all are there to mark its essential savagery. A few hours ago in the upper lands behind the desert gateway we breathed the chill atmosphere of Europe; at Biskra we have passed the bounds; sun and sky and earth and man and outrageous woman combine to tell us that at last we have entered Africa.

It may be that therein lies Biskra’s attraction to the jaded European. It is all a little unnatural from the European point of view. There is a sense of walking on the slopes of a volcano, or of playing with fire; and if we may believe our novelists, European nature under its influence tends to eccentric and eruptive manifestations. Yet its frequenters exhibit little outward sign of disturbance. German tourists, arrayed indeed as if about to combat a Touareg onslaught, yet read novels peacefully in the pleasant seclusion of the hotel garden; the Kodak fiend stalks his prey; the traffic in post cards goes merrily along; but we cannot escape an uneasy feeling that this nonchalance is a cloak. Perhaps the novelists have got on our nerves.

Biskra consists of a modern French town and garrison, and several more or less distinct native villages grouped together on a large oasis, a strip of cultivated ground between three or four miles in length, with an average width of half a mile. It contains an immense number of palm trees, the chief source of wealth in the great Sahara. There is abundant water from springs, and during winter from the river, which conveys the snows of Aurès to the desert, and is finally lost some miles further to the south. It has a swarming native population, of every North African race, and every hue. There is obviously a very great infusion of negro blood; no doubt because Biskra is situate on a highway of the nations, at a point where the caravan routes from the extreme south reach the mountain lands of Barbary. These natives of various races are collected in great numbers in the morning market, and throng the neighbouring cafés throughout the day, where squatting figures play interminable games of dominoes and backgammon. Conspicuous in the crowd are the dancing girls of the Ouled Naïl tribe dressed in tawdry finery, hung with barbaric jewellery and masses of gold and silver coins, their hair mixed with wool and plastered with grease, their faces tattooed and darkened with _khol_ and _henna_. These women delight their patrons with their _danses à ventre_ in the Cafés Maures at night, and later sit— waiting and watching—on little balconies in the street which is assigned to them. Many attempts have been made by French and English writers to shed a halo of romance over these unfortunate beings. The whitewashing of the harlot is a common literary pose. The story that they come to the desert towns to earn their dower and subsequently return to their own tribe and marry may have some foundation; such a procedure is not unknown in other parts of the world; but to judge from the appearance of some of them they are a long time thinking about settling down.

It may, at any rate, be said of these girls that they are not a mere “exploitation of local colour,” got up for the benefit of the tourist. They are a genuine native product, flourishing no less in the oases of the Sahara seldom visited by Europeans than under the shadow of the hotels of Biskra. Their _danses_ excite their native admirers to great enthusiasm, they often provoke furious jealousies, and are sometimes the object of extraordinary prodigality. Some of them appear to affect an air _très grande dame_. “Celles des Ouled-Naïl qui sont de grande tente apportent dans leurs relations avec leurs visiteurs toute la générosité et la délicatesse que comporte leur origine. Il suffit d’admirer une seconde l’épais tapis qui sert de lit pour que le serviteur de la noble prostituée apporte à son amant d’une minute, dès qu’il a regagné sa demeure, l’objet qui l’avait frappé.”[8]

Footnote 8:

Guy de Maupassant, “Au Soleil.”

Biskra may be compared with a Nile town such as Luxor, if one can imagine Luxor without the river, without the temples, and, it must be added, without the flies. But it is a desert town, the town of an oasis, born of springs of water rising in a dry place, and it revels in the desert sun and sky. It is most pleasant when the sky is cloudless and the air still. But its beauty is greater when a moderate wind is blowing and light clouds are passing. Then are glorious deep blue shadows thrown on scarred cliffs of the tawny Aurès range. The tower of the Royal Hotel is a vantage point from which to view Biskra and its landscape. Thence you may note the extent of the oasis, the belts of palm trees in the distance which mark the existence of other oases, and miles to the south the dunes of shifting sand which to the imagination of most of us represent the real Sahara. Especially beautiful is the scene at sunset. The changing lights on the mountains, the ruddy glow all around, the peculiar quality of transparency in the sky when the sun has set, and perhaps Venus appears and hangs like a lamp between earth and heaven,— only in the desert may we behold these last glories of departing day. The shady, bird-haunted garden of this hotel is a very haven of shelter when the desert wind blows strong and raises the light dust of Biskra in the street without. It is surrounded on all sides by the hotel buildings built in the spacious Oriental manner with corridors opening to the garden and pleasant balconies above.

Biskra of the tourists, _urbs circumcurrentium_, is in a fair way to rechristen itself Hichenstown. The novelist and his not very edifying story pervade the place; they are thrust at you everywhere with damnable iteration. And the worst of it is that however mawkish the book it has undeniable power, and if you are unfortunate enough to have read it you will be unable to avoid recognizing at every turn the scenes in which the much-longing-to-be-loved heroine and her uncouth lover played their parts. You will probably not have been in the town many hours, perhaps not many minutes, before a guide will accost you and produce with much dignity a visiting-card of Mr. Hichens, on which something is written. If you express neither interest nor emotion he will regard you with a mixture of incredulity and pity. What are you here for but to worship at the shrine of the marabout Hichens? Hichens has made—or marred—Biskra, and Biskra is not unmindful. There is little or nothing to guide you to in Biskra, wherefore is it full of guides. They are an ever-present nuisance. The easier course is to engage one, he will at least keep off the others; if you have more grit you may set out to prove yourself unguidable; every guide’s hand will be against you at first, but you will reap your reward. You will have no difficulty in hiring a guide when you really want one, and he will respect you the more. The Arab is no mean judge in such matters. The authorities have endeavoured to mitigate the nuisance by licensing certain men to act as guides; but they have not altogether suppressed the unauthorized, and the licensed merely give themselves additional airs. Silly sentimental visitors have aggravated matters, and have, moreover, turned many of the boys and girls into impudent beggars. Books have actually been written embodying the views on life and religion of these petted striplings; their remarkable inaccuracies in serious matters suggest that the youth of Biskra is not averse from “pulling the legs” of its amiable patrons. It is all rather sad. But the debasing effect of the inconsiderate tourist is not peculiar to Biskra.

The garden of Count Landon is botanically interesting, and a delightful refuge from glare and dust and importunity. It is not in the ordinary sense a garden; it is rather a great plantation or shrubbery divided by winding paths. The excessive neatness of these paths, built of hard mud and carefully sanded, rather spoils the effect of the wilderness to an English eye. There is abundance of running water, and the palm, which likes to have “its toes in the water and its head in the sun,” flourishes exceedingly. With it are many bamboos, peppers, oranges, and various species of _ficus_,—the usual subtropical assemblage. I observe no tree-ferns; yet the conditions appear very suitable. It is one continuous jumble; there is no attempt at grouping, which would perhaps have produced a more noble and more natural effect. But as you come suddenly here or there to the verge of this thicket, you are startled and delighted by the contrast of mellow shade within, and the shimmering glare without;—a contrast quite after the manner of Biskra, which revels in the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Those who come to the desert in search of peace and quiet may find themselves in the plight of the guests of a Swiss innkeeper who advertised: “My hotel is recommended to those in search of solitude; thousands come here in search of solitude every summer.” But in the garden of M. Landon you may be at rest, and dream dreams and see visions, as I did. I had been reading certain modern French writers who are concerned to prove that the inhabitants of this country, the _indigènes_, are not Arab at all. They don’t deny the Arab conquest, but hold that the claim to have “come in with Okba” is as empty a boast as among us is the assertion, “We came over with the Conqueror.” They are arguing to a case. If the native is not of Semitic origin there is hope for him. He has been more or less Christian before, so he may be Christianized again, or anti-clerical radical socialized, or whatever is necessary to make him an up-to-date Frenchman. But with all their theorizing nothing is effected. The Arab,—or Berber,—goes on in his Arabian,—or Berberic,—way, unmoved by any attraction of French politics and irreligion. How is he to be broken in? A chance remark of an American fellow-traveller opened to me the great discovery. History supplies other instances of idle words changing its course. There is to-day a great civilizing influence at work on cosmopolitan lines such as the world has never seen before. It has already profoundly affected some of the greatest of human interests,—religion, commerce, and clothes. It will ultimately bring about the abolition of war, because no one will have time to fight. It is permeating the most unlikely quarters; if I mistake not my German neighbours this evening at dinner were continually alluding to it; and what Germany thinks to-day, Europe will think to-morrow. The Arab, or Berber, must be brought into the movement. He must play golf. My American friend informed me that golf has changed the habits of the American business man. It appears that since Columbus arrived this individual has never taken any exercise; he has sat in his office glued to his desk from dewy morn till long after sunset. All that is over, and in a moment. At 3 p.m. he now furtively affixes to his office door a notice, “Back in ten minutes,” and is off to the American Sandwich. Saturday is a whole, not a half, holiday; and Sunday has become a day of especial unrest. If in the twinkling of an eye such a slave of ingrained habits may find salvation, need we despair of the poor Arab, or worry ourselves about his pedigree? To all appearance he is usually short of a job; his posture of seemingly permanent repose is explained to me as one of waiting till his dates are ripe. Golf will alter his whole attitude of mind as of body. Local conditions are most favourable. The Sahara contains the finest sand-bunkers in the world. The creation of greens is merely a matter of sinking Artesian wells, a laudable process on which the French Government is already embarked, but with no full appreciation of its real significance. Temporary club-houses of galvanized iron would meet all requirements for the present. At once the Arab’s (I must continue to call him the Arab, in spite of my French authors) distinctive dress would go. No one who has not put it on can realize in what a cuirass, in what folds, he is involved. As he is he could never hope to drive a decent ball. Array him in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and putties (I observe that his French conquerors are greatly affecting putties) and his aloofness disappears. At a stroke he enters the world-movement; Colonel Bogey will oust the Lord Okba; and when Hadji ben Mohammed ben Yakoub comes over to represent the Biskra and North Sahara Golf Club at St. Andrews may I be there to see him win.

A little way further south than the garden of Count Landon, on the Touggourt road lie the scattered native hamlets known to the French as _La Vieille Biskra_, the crumbling houses of a ragged population. Here is the very _ne plus ultra_ of Arab untidiness. But the play of sunbeams through the palm trees’ grateful shade turns squalor into beauty. Arab villages are often half in ruins. Their irregular construction of blocks of dried mud gives them the aspect of the homes of animals rather than of men,—the creation perhaps of some gigantic ant. When it rains they not infrequently fall down. And the labour of rebuilding is not lightly undertaken.

Biskra is soon to lose its present distinction as the end of the railway line. The rails are being rapidly laid towards Touggourt, 212 kilometres to the south, a desert town where splendid gardens flourish beneath the shade of 200,000 palm trees. The irrepressible motor-car has already stirred its dust. The prudent Michelin guide describes the road thither as _piste carrossable mais imprudente à suivre par mauvais temps_. You are advised to take mats to lay down in the softer places for the car to run over. But what happens in the event of a serious breakdown is not explained. When the rail is finished the enterprising tourist may pass by Biskra as a mere wayside station and continue to the end. But he may be only going farther to fare worse. It does not appear that the distant towns of the Sahara present any special points of interest beyond their existence. Yet perhaps there are some to whom the desert calls as to others the veldt. But they will stick to their camels and their mules, and merely use the railway extension as a jumping-board for further explorations.

To him who strives to peer beneath the obvious surface nothing in Biskra is more significant than the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie. It stands in the main street close to the luxurious Royal Hotel, hard by the quarter of the Arab cafés and the street of the Ouled-Naïl dancing-girls, a symbol of the eternal amidst the evanescent, a protest for God against the Devil and the world. And it looks south. Thousands of miles away, across the vast expanse of the continent, another statue looks north. Rhodes and Lavigerie, two types of our civilization, further apart in intention and in ideals of human conduct than are their statues, look forth over Africa from their separate standpoints, the Africa for which each spent his strength. Both worked to bring to the Dark Continent the accumulated wealth of light to which Europe is heir; they drew perhaps on different departments in the great storehouse; they directed the illumination to different points; but to evolve order from chaos, to substitute freedom for tyranny, to impose peace even, if need were, by the sword,—these were the objects which both pursued.

The neighbourhood of Biskra is rich in memories of Sidi Okba, the barber of the Prophet, and the first of the Arab conquerors. It was he who pushed westward from Kairouan through Barbary to the Atlantic, having defeated the Berbers under Koceïla and other chieftains. Arrived at the shore of the ocean he raised the standard of the Prophet crowned with the crescent, and indicating with it the course of the sun from its rising to its setting, dashed forward and breasted the waves with his horse, crying, “God of Mahomet, were I not stopped by the waves of this sea, I would go to the ends of the earth to carry the glory of thy name, to fight for thy religion and to destroy those who will not believe on thee!” On his return journey he was attacked by a force of Berbers under Koceïla near Biskra and killed with three hundred of his followers. He was buried in the oasis which bears his name, and his tomb is an object of pilgrimage and veneration.

But the Berbers, if they had killed one leader, did not succeed in maintaining their independence. That they adopted the invaders’ religion is not very surprising. Their previous religions seem to have sat lightly on them: idolaters, pagans, converted in numbers to Judaism, orthodox Christians, Donatists,—they had been all in turn. The dogmatic simplicity of Islam is summed up in the words, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God.” It only demands a belief in this one God and the veneration of Mahomet, last of the prophets, invested by God with the mission to bring back men to the religion of the ancient patriarchs and to the acknowledgment of the Unity of the Godhead. It is completed by belief in three revealed books, the Bible, the Gospel, and the Koran. It denies the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ, who is regarded only as a prophet, but allowed to have possessed a special nature.

The simple formula of Mohammedanism was not very difficult for a man with no prejudices to accept. It meant, of course, more than appeared from its positive assertion; it was directed alike against the Trinitarianism of the Christians and the idolatry or image-worship of pre-Mohammedan Arabians. In its rejection of anthropomorphism it stands on a high intellectual plane; and it is one of the marvels of history that such an abstraction as the God of Mahomet should have been sufficient to rouse the Prophet’s followers to their pitch of conquering enthusiasm. Races beaten in battle no doubt easily accepted its primary proposition. “People follow the religion of their kings,” says an Arab proverb. But there was more behind. The Prophet attached to his religious doctrine a very precise ethical code, a moral system admirable on the whole in its exposition of the duties of man to man; yet in its permission of polygamy regarding women as inferior to men. And on the political side he united the functions of the priest, the judge and the king. It follows that however enlightened the main basis of Mohammedanism it is fundamentally opposed alike to Christianity and to modern theories of democratic government and the equality of the sexes. “Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other,” says the Koran.

After the manner of organized religions all sorts of complicated additions have been made to the originally simple rule of the Prophet, which enjoined prayer, ablutions, fasting, abstinence from wine and the flesh of the pig. These accretions are largely concerned with the veneration of saints and the exorcising of spirits. Among the former not the least is Sidi Okba, canonized rather, we may suppose, for his prowess as a conqueror and his zeal as a propagandist than for any peculiar sanctity of life.

The oasis of Sidi Okba lies about twenty-one kilometres south-east of Biskra. The road crosses a level plain, and is at present in a rather rough condition, but is being re-metalled. The drive is a pleasant one, with the long line of mountains on the left fading away into a blue distance; on the right the desert with an occasional oasis marked by its group of palms. As we approach Sidi Okba the dark belt visible from Biskra takes shape. The little town lies in the midst of an immense group of date-palms, of all sizes, some of great age; one has the honour of being described as the oldest palm in Africa. Sidi Okba has not been in any way Europeanized, it is still the unadulterated East; its houses built of mud, of one story; its streets narrow, winding and very unclean. It appears to be greatly over-populated, and the mass of its inhabitants to be very poor. The streets are thronged with men, but scarcely a woman is to be seen. The stranger, who will do well on this occasion to bring a guide, will be quite unmolested, and to all appearance totally disregarded. A main street full of little shops, curious and interesting, leads to the market-place, which is the very climax of Arab untidiness. Sidi Okba is not a place for the squeamish.

The chief object of interest is the mosque, which is considered to be the oldest Mohammedan building in Africa. It is a square building surrounded by a portico, with a flat roof supported on twenty-six rudely carved columns. The saint’s tomb is contained in a little chapel which it is unlawful for the unbeliever to enter. The mosque and its porticoes are greatly resorted to by students and pilgrims; it contains little cells in which they are lodged, and endowments have been created by pious benefactors for their support. There are many present to-day: here a single student reading laboriously a passage of the Koran written on a wooden slab; there a little group of doctors squatting in a circle apparently discussing a knotty point, but in reality only capping each other’s quotations from the sacred book. In an adjoining room is the usual Arab school—a number of boys surrounding a seated master who is armed with a long cane, and yelling their lesson (the Koran again) with all their might. It is all very far apart from the workaday western world. Yet even into this very shrine of esoteric Islam has the West edged its way. On the walls of the mosque hang highly-coloured prints of the holy cities of Arabia, Mecca and Medina. My guide pointed them out to me as objects of interest. In the corner of the view of Medina I noticed the words, “All rights reserved. The Cairo Punch.”

On one of the pillars is engraved in early Cufic characters the grandly simple inscription, “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nafè. May God have mercy on him.” The wooden door of the mosque is very finely carved in a curious design. It is said to have been brought from Tobna, in the high plateau of the Hodna, and to have been formerly covered with precious metals and jewels, which were sold for the benefit of the mosque; but this may be doubted.

To obtain a view of the township and the oasis you may ascend the minaret. Here your guide will not accompany you. Arabs object to any prying eye surveying their roofs, which are the resort of their women. They have perhaps grown accustomed to the irrepressible European, who will always go to the highest point at all hazards; he is also beneath their contempt, and in any case will depart and be no more seen. With one of their own countrymen it is different; he may be the European’s servant, but he is a fellow-religionist and not a mere animal like his employer. So the European is tolerated with a shrug. For the office of _muezzin_, the custodian of the mosque, whose business it is to ascend the minaret and call the faithful to prayer, a blind man with a brazen voice is in much request. If not actually, the _muezzin_ is conventionally blind. So he will light a candle to guide you up the dark staircase, and accompany you to the top. The town lies below you and all around,—a curious collection of square mud boxes. On many of the roofs are basket-work erections, which are explained to you as the framework of tents, in which the inhabitants sleep during the great summer heats. Over the heads of countless palm trees your eye ranges to the desert, bounded on the north by the cliffs of Barbary, limitless to the south. And southwards you will gaze till you grow weary of immensity.

Perhaps nowhere more than at Sidi Okba, under the shadow of the great conqueror’s tomb, may you feel the haughty disdain of the Arab. He stalks past you apparently in utter unconsciousness of your presence. You belong to a civilization which for the moment has conquered his in war. Allah has willed it. But you represent with your anthropomorphic religion, your abominable demeanour and social arrangements, especially your own lack of dignity and the licence you allow to your women, all that he holds most accursed. You attach undue importance to human life in this world; and this leads you into a ridiculous state of worry about trumpery matters of sanitation and so forth, which are quite beneath the notice of a man concerned with the higher mysteries of the universe and considerations of eternity. Your grovelling disregard of the really great things gives you leisure to devote yourself to such trifles as trade and transport, and so you grow rich, which is rather to your discredit than the reverse. Wherefore the Arab expresses his contempt for you by the supremest indifference, striving only to preserve the hem of his robe from contact with the unclean.

The ordinary traveller will perhaps leave Biskra with no great regret, however much he may have found of interest in his visit. But to those rare spirits among us who endeavour to repair the mischief caused by our first parents, Biskra presents very special opportunities. There is very little to see, and nothing whatever to do; it is a capital place for sitting in the shade with a brilliant sky above. The Garden of Eden is an Oriental ideal; these Arabs who exist in contemplation of their palm trees are striving to live up to it. It is not at all an English ideal. The primeval curse lies heavy on the Englishman; he has made the best of it and has come to regard work as a virtue. Not only by the sweat of his brow must he earn his living; by the sweat of his brow must he achieve his pleasure. A paradise in which he could not knock a ball about or kill the other animals were no paradise to him. Yet even among our strenuous people there are emancipated individuals, to whose simple needs a sunny climate and regular meals at a comfortable hotel suffice:—

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse,”

such will find a congenial resting-place.

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_IX—THE SAHARA_

The desert in imagination and reality—Underground water—Artesian
wells—Mozabites—Touaregs—The camel—Recent developments—Railway
projects—The Army of Africa.

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“I’ve in the desert with these eyes beheld
The hurrying pilgrim to the slow-stepped yield;
The rapid courser in the rear remains,
While the slow camel still its step maintains.”
THE GULISTĀN.

Everyone, it has been said, has his own Sahara. For many of us perhaps the geography lessons of childhood left an impression of an ocean of shifting sand, sometimes separated from the sea by a narrow strip of cultivated land, sometimes extending to the very shore, from which majestic lions, appropriate lords of the inhospitable desert, gaze pensively at the setting sun. If we had the misfortune to be born half a century or more ago, the maps of Africa of the period, with their vast interior emptiness, suggested to our youthful imagination that this unpleasant region extended over the greater part of the continent, the elephant taking the place of the lion in the more southern portions.

“So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.”

The last generation has seen these mediæval ideas considerably modified. Travel and war have been the means of filling much of the blank space; the arts of peace have followed in their wake; African railways would occupy quite a respectable page in a world-wide Bradshaw; and the Stock Exchange in a searching for economy of syllables has irreverently shortened the poetical Tanganyika to the practical Tank. The great flat plain is last to go;—the millions of acres of rather light soil which the French have been so unaccountably anxious to daub with their colour on the map. We have given up the lions; we know that such carnivorous beasts can only live in a fairly fertile country which supplies sufficient food to their prey. But we have clung to the plain and the sand. Nevertheless it seems that they must go too. We read that you may travel for days in the Sahara on rocky hills and not find enough sand to dry your signature. So perish the beliefs of youth.

Yet to any picture of Algeria the Sahara supplies a romantic background. The sight of a caravan arriving from some distant oasis still has power to stir the imagination. Even in face of our information as to the Sahara’s only partial sterility, we cherish some shreds of wonder at the men who can wring a livelihood and find the means of travel under such inhospitable conditions.

The Sahara has been defined as the region which receives only as an exception any rainfall, whether of Mediterranean origin, or from the tropical regions of West Africa. It is only relatively a desert in the strict sense of the word; no part of it is absolutely without rain, and even in the districts which are reputed the most dry the traveller may meet with violent storms. The generally arid nature of the soil is due to the fact that water circulates not on the surface, but underground. Where it comes to light either by natural or artificial means, a focus of intense cultivation, an oasis, is produced.

The Algerian Sahara is only a portion of the great desert of Northern Africa. Yet it is ten times the size of Algeria itself. It consists roughly of two great depressions separated by an isthmus of calcareous hills. Each of these basins contains a great expanse of dunes, and the two chief groups of oases occur in their lower levels. A generation ago it was commonly believed that the Sahara was the bed of a sea which had disappeared at no very distant date; and projects were formed of admitting the Mediterranean by means of a canal. But more precise knowledge has shown that its sterility is due to other causes; that like the rest of the continent it has its ancient conformation of mountain and plain; that it has distinctive flora and fauna long established; and that the portion which lies below the level of the Mediterranean is of very small extent.

Between eighty and ninety per cent of the surface is of rock, slightly undulating and broken occasionally by perpendicular ravines and large crevasses. Here, as a rule, no water can be found, and the only vegetation is an occasional thorny shrub. With the regions of the sand dunes it is different. Their sterility is by no means absolute. They have a vigorous vegetation of their own, which will support camels, and even sheep at a favourable season. They absorb eagerly the rainfall which runs off the rocky plateaux, and acting as a sponge retain it for a long period. Their comparative barrenness is due only to the dryness of the climate; wherever they can be irrigated they become fertile.

Of the underground rivers the best known is the Oued Rir, which is met with about fifty miles to the south of Biskra, and extends as far as Temacin, fourteen miles south-west of Touggourt. Its course is marked by a number of oases, some of which have been created, and others much improved by the Artesian wells of the French engineers. The first experiment of this sort was tried as early as 1856 at the oasis of Tamerna. After twenty-two days of work, in the presence of a crowd of incredulous and scarcely friendly natives the bore produced a veritable river of a thousand gallons a minute.

“In the desert a fountain is springing.”

At this welcome spectacle, the ingrained distrust of and smothered hostility towards the stranger and his methods vanished; all gave way to a transport of joy and enthusiasm. The work thus begun has been continued with great success, chiefly by French companies; new wells have been sunk and old wells repaired; and it is estimated that the value of the oases of the Rir has increased fivefold, and their population more than doubled.

Similar results have been attained elsewhere. But while they increase the productiveness of the oases, and at the same time improve the routes and the condition of the nomads, they do not warrant any hopes of extensive cultivation in the Sahara. The conditions of life continue difficult. The oases are very unhealthy; their sedentary inhabitants are the prey of malignant fevers and chronic diseases. The summer climate is appalling; a variation between freezing-point and 120° Fahrenheit in the twenty-four hours is not unknown. Those of the inhabitants, Arabs or Berbers, who have an admixture of the blood of the Soudanese negroes, are best fitted to support such trying conditions. As a place of residence for Europeans the Sahara cannot be recommended with any confidence.

Of the sedentary peoples of the Sahara the most interesting are the Mozabites; of the nomads the Touaregs, who range over the vast region to the extreme south. Both are considered to be of Berber origin. The Mozabites have already been mentioned as traders in Algiers. Their country, the Mzab, is situate in one of the most sterile parts of the Sahara, on the rocky promontory which separates the eastern and western depressions. It lies about 400 miles due south of Algiers. Here with amazing toil they have created a fertile region. They have dug wells and found water, and have built dams to intercept and retain the occasional rainfall. The contrast of their fertile gardens with the bare and fantastic rocks which surround them, a land of exaggerated sterility where Nature herself seems dead, is described by travellers as very striking. The industry and commercial aptitude of the Mozabites is very remarkable. They excel as money-lenders and in small banking business. It is said that among them a Jew must work with his hands.

During the last few years, without attracting much attention from the outer world, France has quietly conquered the Sahara, or at all events brought its nomad tribes under effective control. The Touaregs, neither very numerous nor very well armed, have succumbed to persistent pressure and a few trifling defeats. Some are settling on the fringe of the oases; others drifting into the service of the State. The systematic brigands of centuries will pass, it has been said, in a few years from the Stone Age to the age of aviation. They recognize, not without humour, that their rôle of levying contributions has fallen into other hands. A captain of spahis in garrison at Timbuctoo, was ordered to pursue a caravan which had made off in the night without paying the market dues. “We also,” said the Touaregs, “when we stop a caravan, do so to collect _le droit de passage_.”

The conquest of the desert, long delayed, has only been achieved by the regular employment of the camel. For nearly a century, since Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, the French had made spasmodic efforts to utilize this animal, but with little success. The camel corps were regarded with ridicule and contempt, and the peculiarities of the beast were little understood. A common belief in fabulous stories of its powers of speed and endurance, its capacity for doing without food and water, occasioned much suffering and immense loss. In fact it requires, year in year out, as much sustenance as other herbivorous beasts of its bulk; where it differs from others is in its power to support extreme irregularity in its meals. This quality, and especially its ability to take in at one drink enough water for several days, render it of unequalled value for desert journeyings. The camel can work for six months in the year on the meagre diet which the sparse vegetation of the Sahara affords; it is necessary for his existence that he should spend the remaining six in complete rest at pasture, where he feeds voraciously from morning to night without losing a minute. “But it must not be believed,” says M. Gautier, “that the camel on active service does not eat; he feeds when he has the opportunity, and the opportunities must not be rare. For a caravan of camels traversing the desert, the stomach of the beasts is the sovereign lord of marches and halts, the director of the daily programme; day and night, the fatigue and hunger and sleep of the men do not enter into the account; everything is subordinated to the single necessity of nourishment for the herd. Whenever a little edible vegetation is met with, at whatever point of the itinerary, a halt is made for several hours or several days; in the intervals, even as happens sometimes, of two or three hundred kilometres or of five or six days, progress, slow and regular, is made without truce, almost without sleep, beneath sun and stars alike. One can only stop at a pasturage; a voyage in the Sahara is a hunt for a blade of grass.”

God, says the proverb, having made the desert, repaired the mischief by creating the camel. Considered absolutely it is an inferior beast of burden to the horse and mule, considered relatively to the conditions of the Sahara it is invaluable. But it must be treated according to its necessities. In the mines of Algeria, for props in the galleries, pine is preferred to oak; oak breaks suddenly when the limit of its strength is reached, pine on the contrary cracks and creaks,—it gives warning. The camel is as the oak, he gives no warning. Exhausted, he stops abruptly like a motor-car which has run short of petrol; he crouches and dies, with plenty of dignity and with an air of thinking of something else. So have ended countless camels in the service of France. But since 1902 camel corps have been raised on a scientific basis; the animal used being almost invariably the _méhari_, a species of dromedary. A body of natives of the tribe of the Chaamba has been organized, each of whom in return for a definite sum of money supplies two or three camels, which are his own property, to exchange, to sell, to traffic with as he pleases. He is, in fact, a contractor. For a further sum he provides his own food, clothing and equipment. This system seems to be a reversion to an ancient custom, which the very word “soldier” recalls.

The effect has been magical. Almost without a blow the Touareg has recognized his master. The Chaamba patrol the desert and enforce French conceptions of law and order. Communications have been opened in all directions; the tremendous journey between Algeria and the West African possessions of France is now frequently made without danger and without exciting remark. The _méharistes_ have solved the problem so long insoluble.

But a greater project is agitating the minds of the forward Colonial party, the linking of the French possessions by a Trans-Saharian railway. The scheme is not a new one. It was much discussed thirty years ago. The French Government appointed a scientific commission to study the matter, and the French public, ever ready to support a vast engineering scheme, was eager to subscribe the necessary capital. The murder by Touaregs of the Flatters mission administered a cold douche, and for the time being the subject dropped. It has been revived of late by M. Leroy Beaulieu and other writers. Two lines are projected, one to Lake Tchad, the other to Timbuctoo. The distance to be covered is enormous, in each case about 2700 miles, of which 2000 is desert. The engineering difficulties are not great, but the commercial prospects of such a line seem very poor. A train or two a year would deal with all the existing traffic, and there appears little scope for development. It is suggested that the Upper Niger may become another Nile, but even then its trade would seek an outlet rather to the Atlantic than to the Mediterranean and across the Great Sahara. The post route to South America might be shortened a little, but at what cost and inconvenience! The best hope for the would-be railway builders lies in the discovery of minerals. A mining industry would develop the Sahara as it has developed the bare uplands of the Transvaal and the icy wastes of Klondyke. But of this there is no present indication.

Meantime, in the extreme west, on the borders of Morocco, the railway has been extended as far as Colomb-Béchar, a distance of 728 kilometres to the south-west of Oran. This is a strategic line. It is in the direction of Morocco that the eyes of the army of Africa are now turned. French writers are never tired of repeating that Barbary is one, and should be undivided, that the masters of Tunis and Algeria must be lords of Morocco too. The safety of Algeria itself is said to depend on the French control of Morocco. Such is ever the language of him who would go forward. We have said it ourselves often enough, and to fix the limits of empire is sometimes more difficult than to advance them.

It may be worth while to note what is the present military force of France in North Africa. According to the project for the Budget of 1911, the force in Algeria consists of 2134 officers and 52,927 men; in Tunisia of 698 officers and 17,007 men. The cavalry numbers in all 440 officers and 9074 men. The number of native troops is singularly small, about 15,000 infantry and 1800 spahis. Judging by our experience in India it would be possible to make a far larger use of native military talent, to the great advantage of the population, and to the consolidation of the French hold on the country. The native troops employed in the late Morocco campaign, especially the Tunisians, bore themselves with the greatest credit.

In the Sahara special companies have been recently raised. They contain a certain admixture of French troops:—24 officers and 123 men to 817 men. It would seem a special field for the raising of a force of natural cavalry and camel-men.

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_X—TIMGAD_

The Roman frontier—Lambessa—The Empire ruined by bad finance—African
Emperors—The plan of Timgad—Buildings, inscriptions, and mosaics—
Prosperity of Roman Africa—Local patriotism—The Roman tradition.

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“As in those realms where Cæsars once bore sway,
Defaced by time and tottering to decay,
There in the ruin heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
GOLDSMITH.

East and west of Batna lay the Roman frontier line during the first two centuries of the Empire. It was marked by a series of cities, partly military, partly commercial; extensive ruins bespeak their ancient importance. As elsewhere in Europe and North Africa the fall of the Empire seldom meant the abandonment of the city sites; they continued to be occupied by successive generations of men, even though, like Rome herself, for a period they sank to insignificance. And their ruined buildings, public and private, offered a convenient quarry to the builders of subsequent ages. It results that we are scarcely able to find an ancient city in which the original plan of house and street has not been seriously interfered with. While, as in many English towns, the main lines of the streets often follow the Roman thoroughfares, we have seldom the opportunity of studying the scheme as a whole, although all through Southern and Western Europe innumerable individual features exist more or less well preserved.

We owe the existence of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the accident of their overwhelming by ashes and lava from Vesuvius. The former has been laid bare; the excavation of the latter, a much more serious matter, awaits the day when the disposers of wealth, public or private, shall see fit to undertake a work, which promises the greatest results. It happens by a piece of exceptional good fortune that here, on the southern edge of Barbary, Pompeii has a serious rival. The Roman city of Thamagudi, now called Timgad, has since its destruction at the time of the Arab invasion of A.D. 692 never been the habitation of man. To this cause alone may its present condition be attributed. It has passed twelve centuries in a great silence. Its ruined temples and baths have been the haunt of the panther and the jackal. No neighbouring town despoiled its stones, or ground its marbles to make mortar. Its columns lay prone, its temples and houses were for the most part levelled with the ground; yet a massive arch or two told through the centuries to the watcher from afar that here once stood a Roman city.

The night of centuries is past; the long silence is broken; the jackals have fled to their mountains; and a Latin race is tenderly safeguarding its heritage. Once again a road leads to the portals of the ancient city, and with infinite skill and care the debris has been cleared away. Columns have been re-erected, masonry replaced in its original position and fragments of inscriptions pieced together; a very triumph of that vast capacity for taking pains which is such an important element of French genius. One charm of the place to the visitor is that it is not exploited as a tourist resort. A little museum has been set up to hold the treasures found among the ruins, a modest hotel has been built, and the neighbouring Arabs have been encouraged to hold a weekly market outside the walls; but there is no turnstile to be passed, you are not delivered over to a guide, no tout is permitted to worry you, and you are free to pass to and fro, to go in and out as you list as long as you don’t steal or deface anything. So for a contemplative mind every possible attraction is conserved.

The Roman conquest and civilization—or rather assimilation—of North Africa were slow, tentative and reluctant. Scipio Æmilianus burnt Carthage in 146 B.C.; it was more than a hundred years later that Julius Cæsar handed over Cirta to the soldiers of Sittius. Under Augustus a camp was established at Theveste (Tebessa), and the Third Legion, Augusta, was stationed there with the object of protecting the territory of Cirta, and the proconsular province which is now Tunisia. Under the shelter of this post, during the first century of our era, the great corn lands enclosed by the Aurès mountains were gradually brought under Roman control. The building of Thamagudi in the reign of Trajan, in the year A.D. 100, is evidence of the importance to which this region had by that time risen. This process continued during the next two centuries. No doubt as the population of Italy declined, and her fertility decreased, Rome came to rely more and more on the corn of Africa, and more land was continually brought under cultivation. This is the significance of such a city as Timgad, lying over 3000 feet above the sea on a slope of the Aurès mountains.