Chapter VI: A City of Shadows

(_Fachi Oasis_)

In a land of overpowering solitude Fachi stands alone: a forlorn group of dwellings in a mighty wilderness of colourless sands. All around is absolute desert, vast and silent, and depressingly poverty-stricken. Not until far beyond its immediate ranges are outland borders situated, that finally interrupt the sway of the desert seas. To the east, 100 miles away, lies the Kowar Depression, and, farther on, Tibesti; to the west, 200 miles away, the mountainland of Aïr: to the south, some 300 miles, the desert merges into the bush of the French Sudan; while in the north it extends to the Fezzan.

The environment of Fachi might well terrify the stoutest. Moreover, the vast desert that surrounds it is an open highway for raiders, and others, who seek to pass across it, on secretive journeys, from one distant region to another.

Lost in a land of this kind, where few but raiders pass, without neighbours, without anyone to call to for help, one wonders, to begin with, how Fachi can exist. It shelters no more than a mere handful of sedentary natives, about 150 to 200 human souls in all, yet this strangest of primitive dens stands unbroken, alone, as it has stood since its beginning, as a citadel of the desert.

Raiders who come and go are free to pass before Fachi at will, for, once clear of the desert’s borders, there is no living soul to stay them. And the natives of the town will tell you, with comprehensible pride, but with a hard light in their eyes, that evil-visaged men have sat down and looked upon Fachi from a distance, coveting its capture—in the end to rise and go their way, foiled by the fear of death in the traps of a wizards’ den.

In the modern history of Fachi, caravans visiting the oasis have been attacked outside its walls, where bleached human skulls still deck the sands; but only once has the town itself been threatened with destruction. That occurred fifteen years ago, when the raiders, said to number 1,500, forced a temporary entrance and fought through the western side of the town: the houses of which part still lie in ruins eloquent of the destruction of the fateful day.

It is obvious that to stand thus alone and live, self-reliant and self-dependent, Fachi must be strong—_strong with an uncanny genius_. And that that is so is soon revealed.

Its outer fortifications are the walls that enclose it—a double line of ramparts, with a broad moatlike ditch between. To-day the outer barrier is incomplete, for it is battered and broken in places that have not been repaired, but the inner and principal wall is all that a powerful defence should be: high and grim and unscalable.

My feelings, when I first entered Fachi through its frowning walls, were of bewilderment and astonishment.

Through an open doorway, unpretentious from the outside, one passed down a few crumbling steps, and stood on the threshold of the town. Sense of protection from the outside world, with its blighting sun and sand-filled wind, was present at once, while an eerie gloominess already threatened; for the level of the town was almost cellar-depth below the land outside. Flung back against the thick exterior wall, rested the first grim evidence of defence: a heavy, palm-plank door riveted, primitively, and chained together, while a great beam and a stone set into the floor of the court within showed how it was closed and buttressed when need arose (I was soon to learn that every street, every dwelling entrance, every room within these dens, had doors of the same character of formidable strength). Over this portcullis type of entrance, which gave the only way of entry to the town, the white jaw-bones and skull of a camel are built into the wall, on the inside, for all the world like the crest of a gang of pirates.

But the strangest novelty, in those first moments, lay in the discovery that, on all sides, the walls were constructed with _salt_, blackened with dust and age, yet, surely, _salt_, set as hard as the finest concrete and rasping as broken glass. It was not long before it dawned on me that the whole of the remarkable town was built of the same material.

The court, or area, inside the entrance, is small. But, passing on through a dark, shadowy, covered porchway, I soon learned that everywhere space was given away with niggardly economy.

Leaving the entrance, one enters a maze of alleys which represent the streets of the town: alleys that twist and turn in an amazing fashion, so that it is difficult to get an unobstructed view of more than a mere twenty or thirty feet of fairway. They are the narrowest slits of lanes, man-wide in places, but twice that width on an average; closely confined by black dwelling-high walls. Such sections of them as are fortunate enough to have a narrow overhead outlet to the sky are filled with shadows. Where roofed over they are dark and grim; mouse-ridden nooks, where man might lurk at any hour of the day who wished to cut an enemy’s throat.

Bare, earthy settees are recessed in places in these alleys where a foot or two of extra space permits an addition without entirely blocking up the pathway. There a single person may repose in the cool of evening; or sit cross-legged with another, exchanging idle gossip, or hatching cunning schemes.

Twisting and turning, portalled at points of advantage with a confusion of plank doors, these alleys lead an interminable distance. I find myself in the position of believing I am lost in a large city, and will never get back unguided to the point of setting out. I have been a score of times in Fachi. On the last visit, as on the first, I found myself at dubious turnings, enquiring of furtive den-dwellers, “Which way leads to the blue sky outside?” Can one credit this of a place no greater in area than a country village? It seems hardly possible; yet it is so, and it is chiefly the closely knit network of lane-slits that leads to this erroneous impression of great size.

Nearly empty of people, the lanes are full of shadows and a sense of a thousand mysteries. Everywhere there are _shadows_: and on the day that I first entered Fachi I found myself repeating, under my breath: “It is a lost city, and its name should be, _The City of Shadows_.

Shadows, always shadows, meet one at every turn in ever-changing phase. Weird, attractive shapes when cast from parts where unskilled, unplotted building has found a happy architectural result, or frowning nooks where lurk the sentiments of witchery or ghosts of the wicked dead.

A few natives pass. They brush against me because of the narrowness of the lane. Close to them I see that their clothes are dirt soiled, their features hard and villainous. They hurry on and vanish out of the street with a single step aside. They have turned a corner or entered a dwelling.

All the dwellings are entered directly from the alleys. The burrowing for shelter is increased in the dwellings; their floors are farther under the ground than the dusty lanes. (They have nothing to fear from rain and consequent flooding; for it does not rain.) A low, earthy parapet guards a few steps underground, and a tiny door, of hatchway size, through which only a stooping figure can pass. When there are no occupants at home, even during the day, these palm-plank, rudely anchored doors are closed and barred with the forbidding strength already described; as if neighbour trusted not neighbour.

But the issue that is vital to Fachi’s scheme of defence is in the fact that, from within, at a moment’s notice, _the whole town can be barred and buttressed and placed under lock and key_.

Packed like the skep of a hive, with intent to utilise space, Fachi is a regular honeycomb of crowded dens. They are salt-built, like the rest of the town, and as dark and shadowy and mysterious as the alleys outside. Each cell in the honeycomb has its narrow slit of a door, with a spy-hole, no larger than a halfpenny, drilled through the wall near the side of the jamb, so that folks may be peered at when approaching, or when arrived and knocking for admission.

Even by day nearly all the dwellings are locked and barred. When, perchance, a door stands ajar a feeble ray of light steals into a bare-walled, smoke-blackened den that has no more furnishing than a heap of dates on a mat and a skin of water hanging from the low ceiling. Once admittance has been gained from outside, it is seen that the interior of every home is comprised of den leading to den, each with its thick plank door and its air of suspicion and secrecy. Before entering a single dwelling I had already realised that every yard of the lanes within Fachi could be defended almost single-handed, and that, should defenders happen to be driven back or killed at any one point, a fresh rally could be made with success at every gateway in their course. In the barred doors within the dens themselves I again thought of the cunning strategy from the point of view of hand-to-hand defensive fighting.

Seeking through a honeycomb of dens with curiosity thoroughly aroused, I eventually came out into daylight in a tiny courtyard in the centre. Thence an outside stairway mounted to the roofs. Climbing it, I viewed a panorama of the flat, parapeted housetops of Fachi. Beside me were attic store-rooms, locked and barred like so many of the chambers, and a confusion of jagged parapets, well-nigh impassable to anyone who might try to scale them. Weedy dates, old bones, broken earth-jars, all the odd refuse of primitive homes, lay scattered on these roofs; and I realised that the rubbish-heaps of Fachi’s den-dwelling people lay over the roofs of their burrows, and not in the alleys or in the dwellings. It was a condition of things that revealed the animal sense of people accustomed to stick closely to their warrens. These roofs, _outside_, were the nearest spaces to the open air; moreover the unsightly squalor seldom waxed fetid there owing to the baking sun and extreme dryness of the atmosphere: a state of affairs that did not exist when old bones, or aught else outcast, lay fly-festering in the shade below.

I came out from investigating a honeycomb of dwellings with a back that ached with stooping through hatchway doors.

I moved on. There was one more sight to see.

I had by this time, by promise of food, persuaded an ill-clad, hungry-looking individual to act as guide; one of the most villainous, indolent-looking men I have ever seen. I asked him to lead me to the fortress of the town, which I had seen from the outside, standing behind the double ramparts of the exterior, near to the remarkable “Seven Palms of Fachi,” which stand in a stately group close to the north front.

I am led through a maze of alleys. A heavy door, barring our path, is reached and unlatched, and a final lane lies before me. My guide vouchsafes the information that the fort is at the other end.

In a few moments we reach the rear courtyard of the fort, the largest open space in Fachi. It is uninteresting, for it is empty for the time being, and its high, unscalable walls seem stiffly posed like a petrified place awaiting the assembly of war-girded hordes.

We pass on inside—and I stand amazed. Before me is _the den of the Forty Thieves_, or a scene equivalent; but real, and not imaginary. The fort, with high, naked walls towering around it, looks like a gigantic square-cut pit, with the bottom packed, almost to overflowing, with giant earthen jars. It is those jars that make the most amazing sight of all. Gleaming whitely, they fill the entire fort, except where the roofed-in, low, gloomy corridors jut out from the base of the main wall, giving access to the pit and to the four corner towers.

The fort might be compared to a vast, unused cupboard full of gigantic empty jam-pots—but jam-pots far above the most exaggerated dreams of the hungriest schoolboy. I started to count them, but gave it up. They looked, in their unevenly lined hundreds, as numerous and as disorderly as a flock of sheep.

Some were measured. The largest are 7 feet in diameter by 8 feet 4 inches high; the smallest 5 feet in diameter by 4 feet high. Though the sizes vary, they are all of one shape: giant jars tapering to a wide-mouthed neck at the top. They are constructed out of white chalky clay, knit with fibrous hairs of vegetation. Steps are moulded in the sides of all the larger jars, so that anyone may mount to gain entry at the top.

We had entered the final stronghold of Fachi; the last place of refuge in a city conceived, from end to end, with one great purpose—_its strength of defence_. And whoever may have been the wizard—for it is no haphazard work—he had the genius of a great man-at-arms. These giant urns, ready to be filled with dates and grain in time of siege, the deep well of water that is hidden in the centre of them, are eloquent of their purpose; like all else in the war-prepared fastness.

Reluctantly I left this strange open-air hall to climb to one of the watch-towers. The way was perpendicular; up notched palm-poles, and niches cut in the hard salt walls; then, through loopholes, into each of the three turret rooms that made up its height. On reaching any lofty outlook with country around it one usually looks outward on the vast panorama of landscape that presents itself. My first impulse here, on stepping out on the tower roof, was different. I turned at once in toward the town to peer down into the haunting pit I had just left, where glistened whitely in the sun, the urns of “The Forty Thieves,” like a picture of another age.

And from that strange scene I slowly lifted my eyes in vain endeavour to learn where one single street in Fachi began and ended. Then I was lost in unstinted wonder at it all.

Native history—imparted to me by the _Malam_, or learned man, of Fachi—has it that in bygone times the people of the town had no cunning in war, and were terribly harassed by raids. Arab caravans, with rich merchandise from Algeria and Tripoli to Bornu and Wadai, in those days passed through Fachi, and the uncertain safety of the place was not to their liking or benefit. Wherefore, the story goes, there came a time when Arabs arrived on the heels of an attack, when the town had been hard hit, and much reduced in strength. It happened that a great Arab from Tripoli was this caravan’s leader. He called the people of Fachi about him and said, in effect, according to the story, “Why is this? Enemy destroy you. You fear! You fly like the jackal into the desert to die!

“Bah! You have not sense! But Allah has sent us to your aid. We will show you how to build so that henceforth you shall fear no one.”

Whereupon they set about building a completely new city, not imperfectly, but under the strict supervision of the great Arab. It is said that if any part was imperfect it was ordered to be taken down and rebuilt.

So that, in the _Malam’s_ words:

“Fachi is built as it stands to-day, because a great Arab came from the north and taught our people sense.”

He could not name the great benefactor, nor could I find anyone who knew. But that he came from Tripoli all affirmed.

It is not impossible that he was one of the renowned Oulad Sliman tribe—Tripolitans who, in the past, migrated to settle near Mao, on the north of Lake Chad, to escape Turkish oppression.

I turned from contemplation of the town to look over the landscape. From the top of the tower it was not so barren as from below, for the green groves of date-palms were prominently in view. The oasis holds little more of value than a narrow belt of palms, the pits of salt, and a good supply of subterranean water. For the rest, nothing but sand; the whole environment so unprepossessing that one cannot escape its terrible poverty.

And inside the town a population that has barely food to keep body and soul together.

I caught myself thinking:

“What queer, ungodly places some people live in!”

I had just muttered:

“I suppose it is their native soil. They have lived here all their lives, like animals born in a cage, and they know no other world.”

Then I caught sight of my guide, whom I had forgotten, glued against the wall, peering, ever so cautiously, out of one of the tower loopholes, aiming with his fingers, as if he held a rifle. From head to foot, he looked a perfect brigand.

I followed the cue. Who knew the occupation of these people from one year’s end to the other? The brief halt of passing caravan told one nothing of that. Did raids go forth from those grim walls when hunger pressed, and all was quiet about them? It was more than likely. Certainly they possessed an unfettered freedom that gave outlet to that wildness of the wilderness that was in them, which ran, unknown to living soul outside their own little world, untamed and unchecked, through the shadowy alleys and dark dens within the walls, and, mayhap, found a fiercer outlet in evil-doing abroad.

The hard-featured natives of the town are Beri-Beri. They are strangely animal-like, in general, perhaps because of their terrible environment, and their life is an underworld of vice.

I ceased pondering, and called the guide from his look-out.

I asked him one question before we began the descent from the tower:

“How many men have you killed?”

He smiled at once, as if I had hit on a subject he knew something of, and that was much more pleasant than guiding a stranger through his town. Then he extended his left hand, and, with the other, slowly bent over each finger until they were all counted out. Whereupon he answered:

“Five men I have killed.”

At the outset I called Fachi _A City of Shadows_, impelled by the original beauty and magic of its wealth of shadowy scenes. That title has grown fourfold. Beside aught that there is of beauty, and threatening it, there are never-ending shadows in its openness to danger from outside, sharp shadows in its periods of hunger, and uncanny shadows in the threat of evil that lies behind barred doors and in the visages of cold-eyed men.

CHAPTER VII

SALT OF THE EARTH