Part 11
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.”
[Illustration: SIDI OKBA: A STREET]
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.
[Illustration: THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE SAHARA]
“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.
[Illustration: AN ARTESIAN WELL]
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.
[Illustration: A NATIVE WELL]
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.