Chapter III

The old life of the desert is passing away; the fact is written on the landscape, on the faces of the people and in their hearts. It was as full of miseries as of grandeurs; and its disappearance is for good. What was admirable in it was the endurance of the human heart in the sterile places, and the mysterious flowering from it, amid this desolation, of a great faith. The death of a religion, no more than the decay of other institutions, should perplex or disturb; all these alike are the work of the soul, and when the soul leaves them they perish; and as in the revolutions the daily life of men goes on, so in the religious changes of organization and dogma the spiritual life of the soul continues. The soul can no more be without religion than the body without life. The sense of the mystery of its own being abides in the soul, in however half-conscious or imperfect forms, implanted in its vital and animating principle, and shares with shaping power in its thoughts, emotions, and will, and exhales the atmosphere in which it realizes its spiritual life; it is here that religion, in the external sense of worship and dogma, has its source. The desert soul may cast the old life like a garment—faith and all; but under these old skies and in these supreme horizons it cannot change its nature, which is, in a sense, the human form of the desert. The flower of faith will grow here, and blossom in the wild, in the future as in the past, for the desert is a spiritual place; and in this austere and infinite air faith will continue to be a religion of the desert truly, with the least of the corporeal in its manifestation and idea, with the least of the defined in creed and localized in place; for the spiritual, the universal, the vague are the intuitions and language of the desert; there religion is less a thought than a feeling, less a prayer than a mood.

I closed my meditations in such thoughts as these, instinctively seeking, amid so much that was mortal, the undying, in the decadent the permanent, in the transitory the eternal.

IV

The stars were coming out in the sky; the coolness of the night was already in the air. The old Arab had long ago departed; the kif-smoking youth were gone. I was alone under the vine trellis, with the dark lines of the palm grove before me in the falling night. The proprietor, a mild-faced and gentle-mannered old Arab, came, as I rose to go, with a few pleasant words, and gave me a small branch of orange-flowers and a spray of the white flower of the palm. “_C’est le mâle_,” he said with a smile. And as I rode home over the silent desert, and, crossing the bed of the oued, looked back on the mountain wall and swept with my gaze the great, dark waste under the stars, I found myself repeating his words—“_C’est le mâle_.”

DJERBA

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VII

DJERBA