Part 8

I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain that what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was changeless must be dead. And I had noted how men who had travelled widely were more simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known the sea; but if they had chiefly known the desert, more subtle and often emptied of the Faith at last: the Faith dried up out of them as the dews are dried up out of the sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen mornings. But these men, speaking in Christendom, had affected me little; here, so near the waste places where men cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt afraid.

We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences were shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what he and his call wisdom, but I, despair. We discussed together in these brief moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power much greater than his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though his words were careful and heavy.... He told me that the day was better than the night. The daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when it was gone you could see the dreadful hollow.

MYSELF: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked which was the more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”

“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs) “mists and kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the desert the stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless distances I remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with conviction) how great nations, as they advance with unbroken records and heap up experience, and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly the enlarging actions of men, see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.

We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the edge of a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to return. We both turned back to look at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and the dead town: the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad, made small by the distance and all in one group together. I looked at him as he stood there and the fantastic thought half took me that he had known the city while it was yet loud with men. When he had left me the oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural reason began to fade. I saw him go into a secchia; I saw him again upon the further side swinging powerfully down the slope. He crossed another fold of land, he showed upon the crest beyond, and after that I did not see him again.

[Sidenote: The Walk to the Desert]

Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds, but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living things moved under the forest trees.

So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line quite hard and level marked the extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the country which is the prison-wall of our race.

[Sidenote: The Sight of the Desert]

The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the division and the boundary, was abrupt.

A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but very habitable and sown with large cities, living and dead. There are behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone, unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand that blows and shifts under the wind.

[Sidenote: The View of the Desert]

On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer I began to pick my way carefully downward.

[Sidenote: The Oasis]

I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found first the railway, and then the strong high road which the astonishing French have driven right out here into nothingness.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Arab Riding]

I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the hills, for it is their native place....

[Sidenote: The Ksar]

Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring _ksours_ which they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the sun.... This is how it will end.”

[Illustration]

When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river, the road and the railway all make their way together, one above the other, from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian house after so many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine, and asked the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying to get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Return]

“Very soon,” I said to myself, “I shall come back to the coast-harbours, and I shall see again all the business of the shipping and the waves; and I shall see, rounding the pier-heads, those happy boats which seem to be part of the mist and of the very early morning.” So it was; for I came at the close of a bright day through the hills of the Tell to the sea: here was the Mediterranean, and here were all the sails. I saw again the little harbour by which I had entered Africa, and I was glad to find such a choice of ships at the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go to all parts of the world. So I chose one that was a Spaniard, bound for Palma in Majorca and I drove a bargain by which I was to go for next to nothing, provided I stayed on deck, and ate none of their food.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Last Bargain]

When I had driven this bargain, I bought wine, bread and meat ashore, and came back and took a place right up in the bows from which to watch the sea. It was the afternoon when we cast off and left the harbour, and before it was quite dark we had lost the land. I lay there for many hours in the bows, and thought about my home. And as I went across the sea I recalled those roofs built for true winters, and those great fireplaces of my own land. I also thought of the thick, damp woods which begin by Tay and go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or south of these are never seen; I remembered Europe well. There were women there (to whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear and simple, and whose foreheads low; I remembered that all their gestures were easy. I remembered that in the harbours men would meet me kindly; I was to meet my own people again, and their ritual would not seem to be ritual because it would be my own, and the air would be full of bells. The ship also, going eagerly onwards dead north under the stars; she carried me towards my native things, herself reaching her own country, for nothing alien to Europe could make or preserve the science that had constructed such engines and such a hull.

[Sidenote: The Memory of Europe And her Toast]

“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look back, as upon an adventure, towards my journey in this African land. I shall be free of travel. I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns. I shall see railways (of which I am very fond), and I shall hear and see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought about all these things as the ship drove on.

Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny. I had just come back from the land which Europe had reconquered, and which, please God, she shall continually hold, and I said to myself, “Remain for ever.”

“We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from you, _Salvâ Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world.”

It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “_Esto perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my rambling book that title.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: It Dawns]

In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet I saw no land. I saw before me a boundary of waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a man feels on some lake inland, knowing well that there is governed country upon every side.

This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to the shore which Christendom has never lost.

But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for the Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other iron boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier against which his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him to recall most vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of the wild.

[Sidenote: The End]

There, where the fresh torrent that has nourished the grove is already sinking, stagnant and brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all alone and cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but the line of the sand.

[Illustration]

FINIS

Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO., LIMITED Tavistock Street, London

Transcriber’s Notes

1. Standardized hyphenated words when the same word appeared in the text as both hyphenated and non-hyphenated.

2. Silently corrected palpable typographical errors; retained non-standard spellings and dialect.

3. Italic text in the original is delimited by underscores.

4. Bold text in the original is delimited by equals signs.