TRIPOLI

VIII

TRIPOLI

I

ABSALOM ENGLAND, a tall grizzled Arab and sea-pilot, saluted me on the deck. The combination of names, race, and occupation might have seemed peculiar to me once, but I was proof against any African vagary. He was a land-pilot now, and took charge of me and mine. I did not lose my liberty, but I had unknowingly parted with all responsibility for myself; thereafter, except in consular guard or barred in my hotel, I was under his incessant watch and ward. I even began to have some value in my own eyes, seeing at what a price I was rated, and could easily have fancied myself a disguised soldan with an inseparable follower. He treated me as something between a son and a sheik. But at the moment, to my unforeseeing eyes, he was only a dark, respectful Arab, with a weather-worn and open-air look, black with many summers, a strong type of a fine race, and with a terrible cough that shook him.

We passed the Turkish officials and sank like a bubble in the variety and vivacity of the land, always so noticeable when one comes from the sea. It was pleasant to be in a city once more; there was noise and movement and things to look at; and almost at once the gray mass of a magnificent ruined arch, half buried in the street, lifted its dark and heavy stones, bossed with obliterated faces and grimy sculpture, among the paltry buildings; a grocery shop with its bright fruits and lettered boxes seemed to have nested like a swallow in its lower stories. It looked like a worn, old ocean rock in that incongruous tide of people and trade—once the proud arch of Marcus Aurelius. A few moments brought us to what elsewhere would have been an obscure hotel but was here the chief hostelry—a house with an interior court as usual, a few chambers opening on dilapidated galleries in a double tier, and rude stairs leading up. Seyd, a Fezzan negro boy, showed me to a tumbled room. It was an unpromising outlook even for a brief sojourn. I went at once to the French consul. The other powers have consuls, except that America at that time had none; but owing to the old position of France as the protector of all Catholics, her representative is pre-eminent in the eyes of the Mohammedans—he is “the consul.” The Consulate was a very fine old Arab house; a magnificent dragoman with negro guards received me in the great silent court and led me up the broad stone stairway to the large and beautiful rooms where I was to feel myself so pleasantly at home. Then Absalom and I fared forth.

I found myself in a true African street with a new trait. It is astonishing what originality crops out in the bare and simple things of this land; one thinks he has seen all, and by some slight shift of the lights something new emerges and is magically touched—the real and common made mysterious, the daily and usual made visionary, the familiar unfamiliar once more. It was a narrow street, vaulted from side to side, and its fresh atmosphere was bathed in that cool obscurity which in this land of fierce and burning rays is like balm to the eyes; and, besides, this street was painted blue, which was to add a caress to the softness of the light. This was the slight and magical touch. A stream of passers went down and up the centre of the blueness; the little shops on either side strung along their bright and curious merchandise of the museum and the fair; and the shadowy, azure-toned perspectives framed each figure as it came near, with flowing robe or dark haik and burdens borne on head and shoulder. The place had an atmosphere all its own, that stays in the memory like perfume. I loved to loiter there afterward, but then we had a goal; and we came at last by flights of steps to the market on the great space near the sea. I had seen the people by the beach from the steamer and wondered at their number; and that was why I had come.

It was by far the greatest market I ever saw. It was truly metropolitan. I went among the plotted squares of merchandise and rows of goods spread out in great heaps and little piles, and along by the small tents islanding their foreign treasures. To tell and name it all would be to inventory a civilization: cloths and finery and trinkets; grains in sacks, amid which I wandered nibbling hard kernels of strange savors, trying unknown nuts and dried fruits; utensils, strange-cornered knives with curves of murder, straight, broad blades; slippers and caps; what seemed to me droves of cows—it was so long since I had seen cows—camels and donkeys; vegetables—bulbs, pods, and heads; things to eat, bobbing in pots and kettles; leathers, hides, straws. It was an improvised exposition—everything that the desert hand produces or manufactures of the pastoral kind or that the desert heart has learned to desire of migratory commerce brought from far away. The grass market especially attracted me with its heaped-up bales of alfa, where camels were unloading the unwieldy and enormous burdens balanced across their backs; and so did the Soudanese corner, with odd straw-work, deep-colored gourds, and skin bottles.

But the stage was the least part of the scene; in this play the crowd was the thing. There were familiar traits, but in its wholeness it was a new crowd. I scanned them as an explorer looks at an unknown tribe from the hills. There was nothing here of Tunisian softness, mild affability and elegance, not the simple and peaceful countenances seen in the Zibans, nor the amiable cheer and brusque energy of the Kabyles, nor the blond beauty of the Chaouias, nor even the forbidding face of the Moor; here was a different temper—the spirit of the horde, the fierté of the desert, the rudeness of nature, borne with an independence of mien, a freedom of gait, unblenching eyes; true desert dwellers. I think I never felt the full meaning and flavor of the word, autochthonous, before. They were the soil made man. There was also, beyond the tough fibre and wild grace of the free life, another impression, which owed perhaps as much to the feeling of the stranger there as to anything explicit in the crowd—a sense of something fierce and hard, an instinct of hostility, of disdain, the egotism of an alien faith master on its own fanatic soil.

This crowd, which fascinated me by its vitality and temper of life, was clad in every variety of burnoose and haik and head-gear; here and there was a crude outbreak of color, as if some one had spilt, and soiled, aniline dyes at random, but the general effect was sober—brown earth colors, mixed blacks and grays, dingy whites, a work-a-day world. There were many negroes. I had already added much to my knowledge of negro types, but here I annexed, as it were, new kingdoms of physiognomy. These men were strange as the tropics: some amazingly long-waisted, some Herculean in measure or extraordinarily lean and bulbous in the shoulders—new species of human heads. Arabs and Berbers, mingled with the mixed blood of half a continent, made the bulk; and here and there stood some richer personages, heavily robed, superbly turbaned, merchants from Ghadamès and from further off, where the desert routes spread fanwise from the Soudan to Timbuctoo, opening on the whole breadth of equatorial Africa, Lake Tchad, and the Niger. For Tripoli has been for long centuries a sea-metropolis—it is now the last sea-metropolis—of the native desert world; hither still comes the raw wealth of Africa, with all the old train and concomitants of caravan, traders, and robber instincts; and here are most variously and numerously gathered the representatives of the untamed tribes. It is the last Mediterranean home of the predatory, migratory, old free desert life. This market, I knew, was the direct descendant of one of the world’s oldest trading-posts, for the early Phoenician merchants established a commercial station here, as they coasted along exploring the unknown world; it was on this beach they landed, no doubt; that was long ago. This market was the child of that old trading-post. It was a wonderful scene there, under the crumbling walls in the blazing sun by the quiet sea.

Late in the afternoon I drove out into the oasis, which is a suburb on the southeast of the city. We were soon in the midst of it and passing along by the familiar scene of palm groves, with fruit trees and vegetables and silent roads. It was a more open country than usual, and there was an abundance of gardens with houses in them; it had more the character of suburban villa life, a place of retirement from the city, than any oasis I had seen. The soil had much red in it, and this gave a strong ground-color over which the greens rose darkly on the blue. The tall wells—the guerbas—were a common feature in the gardens, for the oasis is watered in the old way by means of a pulley arrangement between two high standards over which runs a rope worked by a mule or camel or other beast of all work, which tramped to and fro beneath as the goatskin bucket rose and fell. I visited some of these gardens, picked oranges, and wandered about and talked with the laborers. We came out on the desert sharp as the line of a sea beach, cut by the palms; there was a fort or two on the edge, and the hard, barren waste swept away with the finality of an ocean toward the far distant mountain range southward. Two Turkish officers rode up from the route; they were fine figures, splendidly horsed, and looked very real. On the way back we saw many Turkish soldiers, sturdy, capable men, badly clothed but military in every way. I was more interested in the groups and solitary figures returning from the market to their homes, the Bedouins with sticks in their hands or over their shoulders. How they walked! What an erectness in their heads! What an élan in their stride forward! Strangely enough, they reminded me of the virgins of the Erechtheum, the caryatides. I have never elsewhere seen such a pose. How like in color to earth, too, with their browns and grays on the strong tones of the roads they walked along! It was the clearness before twilight, and all the lines of the landscape were lowered and strong in the level rays; the palmy roads, the soldiers, the Bedouins made a picture fuller of life than one usually sees in an oasis. One felt the neighborhood of the city.

When I went out at night the streets were dark; lamps here and there gave a feeble light, stores were open, there were groups about. The cafés I dropped into were not full, unless small, and were all very quiet. There were long bubble pipes to be had, and silent Arabs smoking them; but I contented myself with coffee. It was not interesting, and I went to the Italian-Greek theatre. This was a small hall, but of considerable size, and full of Sicilians and Greeks. They were a hardy looking company, not to say rough. On the stage a girl was being tied to a tree by some Turks; it was a pantomime, and the plot went on and the daring rescue was effected to the satisfaction of the audience. While the stage was being prepared anew, there was the sound of a row at the door. Instantly on either side of me there was a movement and thrust of those hard faces and strong shoulders, like the lift of a dark wave at sea; it reminded me of a mass-play at football, in the old game, only it was bigger, darker, tense; it was fighting blood, always keyed for sudden alarm and instantly ready en masse. The little crowd, serried head over head, paused a moment, as an Arab came forward and made a short speech, explaining the trouble. The men fell back to their seats. The play was going on now—it was a variety performance—with two girls singing songs, and the rescued maiden of the pantomime came down to collect pennies. It was curious to see the changing expression on the faces of those men and boys. They had been hard faces, with Sicilian sombreness in repose, rugged with life, with something dark and gloomy in them; now they broke into smiles, their eyes shone and laughed, as she passed among them, they were glad to have her speak to them—it was sunshine breaking out over a rough and stormy sea. There was a dance now; and so the scenes went on till I came away and Absalom piloted me through the dark and deserted ways to the hotel. It was closed of course, but I was not prepared for what followed. There was a great undoing of bars and turning of locks, and I stepped in over the body of a sleeping negro and waited till his companion did up the fastenings. They seemed to me sufficient for a fortress; and, not content with that, these two negroes slept all night on the floor next the door. It was like a mediæval guard room.

II

We were finishing our late nooning at the café which pleased me best near the little park with the old Roman statues by the sea, where the handful of resident Europeans liked to take the air at evening. I was engaged in my favorite occupation of regarding the street. The little room was crowded with natives seated close, quietly gaming or doing nothing; Turkish officers rolled by in carriages; there was continuous passing; a half-dozen gamins played in the street, the most eager-faced, the most lithe-motioned of boys, the most snapping-eyed Jewish bootblacks, quite beyond the nimble Biskris of Algiers reputed to be the kings of the profession in the Mediterranean; on the other side of the street a flower seller was, as always, binding up violets interminably in his lean hands. It was a pleasant scene; but I lazily consented when Absalom suggested that we drive out to the Jewish village. We crossed the street to the cab-stand. I am not good at bargaining, and I am impatient at the farce or tragedy, as the case may be, of a guide beating down a cabman; but my feelings toward Absalom were different. I frankly admired him as he stood in his plain dignity, perfectly motionless, with a long-stemmed rose at his lips, a beautiful half-blown dark bloom with the curves of a shell in its frail, firm petals; and when the figure had dropped deftly and almost noiselessly from fifteen francs to six, “it is just,” said Absalom, and seated me in the carriage with the double harness.

We passed into the pleasant vistas of the oasis, rolling over the red roads with the tumbled earth walls and by the deep-retired houses and the orange gardens, and the air was full of the fresh balm of spring. It was a smiling, green, and blossoming world, and it was good to be alive. I knew it was just such a world that such villages are in, and this one was native to the oasis and partook of its qualities; but it seemed to take only the rudest and roughest of them and to carry them down. It was a disheartening sight. I had never seen so wretched a Jewish village. The houses, the people were of the poorest; and not in an ordinary way. The village was a fantasy of poverty, a diablerie. The faces and forms, attitudes, occupations of the people, their mere aggregation, depressed me in a sinister way. Some of them were sharpening sickles on old bones; and others, women with earrings, were working at some primitive industry with their toes, using them as if they were fingers. The little place was thronged and busy as an ant-hill; but the signs of wretched life were everywhere, and most in the bodies of these poor creatures. I was glad to be again in the garden and grove of the roadside, and amid the wholesomeness of nature, as we drove off to the centre of the oasis.

There we found a great house, that seemed to be of some public nature, built on the top of a high, bare hill. It belonged to a pashaw, and its roof commanded the whole view of the oasis and its surroundings. It was somewhat like a rambling summer hotel in aspect. We were admitted as if there were nothing uncommon in our visit, and I mounted to the roof and saw the wide prospect—the white city and blue sea behind, the ring of the palmerai about, the gray desert beyond—and on coming down was taken to a large and rather empty room with a balcony. There Absalom told me that the pashaw, who seemed to be the city governor, would be pleased if I would lend him my carriage, as he had an unexpected call to go to town. Shortly after the pashaw came in. It was evident that Absalom regarded him as a very great man. He shook hands with me, and was gravely courteous; but he understood very little French, and real conversation was out of the question. He ordered coffee, gave me cigarettes, and took me out on the balcony, pointing out the desert mountain range, Djebel-Ghariane, of which there was a fine view, and other features. We drank our coffee, and after perhaps twenty minutes of polite entertainment he took my card, shook hands in a friendly spirit, and bade me good-by with an au revoir. I sat alone looking out from the balcony toward those distant mountains over the great desert, smoking the cigarettes he had left me, and thinking of that vast hinterland of fanatic Islam before my eyes, so jealously guarded from exploration, where the fires of hatred against the Christian nations are systematically fed, while a victorious proselytism is sweeping through the central negro tribes, reclaiming them from fetich worship to “the only God.” The carriage was not gone long. We drove back at once, and I found the flower seller by the cab-stand still twining those endless bunches of violets, and jonquils and narcissi, in the sinking sun.

That evening we spent at the Turkish theatre. It was better furnished than the Sicilian. Palms decorated one side of the stage, and large flags draped the back. The centre was occupied by a group of three women of whom the one in the middle was plainly the prima donna. She was a striking figure, tall, and, in her dress, attitude, and expression, of the music-hall Cleopatra type. A high, gilt crown rested on her abundant black hair; her eyebrows were straight, the eyes liquid, roving, and full of fire, the mouth and other features large, the throat beautiful and firm; a white veil descended from the crown on either side, ornaments were on her arms and feet, she wore a flashing girdle, but the effect of her person was not dissipated in jewels or color; her figure remained statuesque, linear, and so much so that there seemed to me something almost hieratic in her pose, as she stood there, with the crown and the veil, motionless, the whole semi-barbaric form finely relieved on the broad stripe of the beautiful flag behind. This was when she was in repose; when she sang or danced the effect was quite different. I was not her only admirer. There were a hundred or more men in the hall—no Europeans. They were smoking, talking, moving about in their seats freely, with an indolent café manner, and the performance went on with long waits. The lady of the stage was a favorite; men threw cigarettes to her and engaged her in conversation from the floor, and she would fling back a sentence to them. There was one admirer beyond all the rest. He sat in the centre near the stage, a splendidly appointed youth from Alexandria, garbed in the richest red, with a princely elegance and mien, a gallant; cigarettes were not for him—he stood up and threw kisses with both hands vociferously and numerously; he left no doubt as to his sentiments. Once or twice he attempted to rush the stage, but was restrained. He would go out, and come back loaded with flowers for ammunition. He had a negro rival off to the left, also finely apparelled, but no match in that regard for the Alexandrian red, though he held his own in the attention of both the audience and the queen of the stage. Meanwhile the numbers of the performance lazily succeeded one another; there was music on the zithern and mandolin, the tambour was heard—songs, dances, other girls. It was all perfectly blameless; and, indeed, in my judgment, the Arabs have a stronger sense of public decorum than the northern barbarians at their play. I saw the entertainment out and went to my castle.

III

A drive in the oasis was always worth having; the sky was the purest blue, it was brisk desert air in the nostrils, and notwithstanding my misadventure with the Jewish village I yielded to Absalom’s programme and went to see how the negroes fared at their own rendezvous. It was a lesson to me not to prejudge even a trifling adventure in a new land. The sight was piquant. The village was a little collection of conical roofed huts with brush fences round each one; a few palms feathered the sky over it, and groves of them made the horizon lines, except where the sparkling sea stretched off beneath the bluff. The place was alive with women and children in striped burnooses and nondescript folds, whose rough edges and nutty colors seemed to belong to the complexions and stiff hair, of all varieties of turn, that one saw on every side. They were very poor people, of course, but their miserable state did not make so harsh an impression as in the case of the Jewish village; there was a happy light in their faces and a fitness in the environment of hut and brush under the palms in the sun which made the scene a part of nature. It was a bit of equatorial Africa transplanted and set down here—a Soudanese village in its native aspect, even to that touch of grimace, as of human nature laughing at itself, which negroes have in their wild state. I had a flash of such an experience at Gabès; in the oasis, just below the beautiful sweep of the cascades, there suddenly sprang up before me in the bush a young negress, as wonderfully clad as unclad. It was as if a picture in my geography had come to life. I might have been in a jungle on the banks of the Niger. It was the same here; the degrees of latitude seemed to have got mixed; the scene belonged much further south under a tropic sky, and I lingered about it with interest and curiosity.

Then I turned to the market close by—not a great market like that of the city but the oasis market. It did not cover a large space, but was prettily situated, and banked at one side by a fine palm grove, which gave it character and country peace. There were two or three hundred people there, scattered among the usual squares of goods and vegetables, variegated with straw work, skin bottles, and Soudanese helmets; but there was an uncommon number of animals—camels and cows, sheep and goats. There was slaughtering going on near the palm grove. It seemed that the purchaser picked out the particular sheep he preferred, and it was made mutton before his eyes. It reminded me of Greek Easter days. The scene, however, was by no means sanguinary; it was a country fair amid the quiet palms asleep in the blue—the life of the people in their own land in their ancestral ways.

IV

The consul had made me his friend by incessant kindness. He had at the start insisted on my taking my first meal in Tripoli with him, and since then I had lived almost as much at his table as at the hotel, which was a blessing, not to say a charity. He was a scholarly gentleman, long resident in the Levant, and familiar with the Moslem world, though his appointment to Tripoli was of recent date. It was to this last fact, perhaps, that I owed the rarest of my privileges, an invitation to visit the mosques in his company. Tripoli is a stronghold of fanaticism, and the mosques are jealously closed to the infidel; permission to visit them is seldom given, and if formally granted is generally made nugatory in some underhand way; for a person in my unofficial station such a visit would be unexampled. The consul, however, had never himself seen them, and he suggested that this would be an opportunity for me. His application was at once honored, and the next morning the chief of police called and we set out at once, preceded by the consular cavass or dragoman, himself no mean figure corporeally, brilliant in his Algerian uniform and bearing before him the formidable and highly ornamented staff of his office.

We went first to the Gurgy Mosque, which is considered the finest of all. I wondered if the key would be lost, which is the usual subterfuge; but the guardian was quickly found, and turned the lock. My account of the mosques must be meagre; the occasion allowed of only a coup d’œil, it was impossible to take notes on the spot, and one could examine in detail only near objects in passing. I can give only an impression, not a description. All mosques are much alike in plan and arrangement. There is a plain, open hall with the great vacant floorspace for prayer, the ornamented mihrab or niche in the wall, showing the direction of Mecca toward which all turn, with brazen candlesticks or hanging silver lamps, and by its side and at a little distance the high pulpit with a steep stairway for the preacher or leader; there may be also a closed box on the floor, or sometimes elevated, for the Sultan or his representative, and a latticed space for women. These are permanent features. The mosques differ much, however, in size, ornamentation, and aspect, and in the entourage of the main room, its approaches, courts, and dependencies. The interior of the Gurgy Mosque was square, finely decorated, beautifully wrought. Intersecting arches, resting on rows of columns, divided it into several naves with many domes. The walls were tiled, and an unusual look of elaborate finish was given to the general effect by the fact that all the surfaces were entirely covered, nothing being left bare; to the color tones of the tiles were added on all sides the lights of the highly wrought stucco incrustation, cool marbles, and the dark, rich contrasts of beautifully carved wood. The capitals of the columns, done in stucco, were each different. Texts of the Koran, illuminated in a fine script on a broad band at the base of the domes, gave another element to the decoration. It was a beautiful mosque, and I remember it as one of the few I have seen which were perfectly finished; there was nothing ruinous or aged or bare about it, and it was completed—a lovely interior in which the simple elements of beauty employed in this art were admirably blended. We especially admired the carved woodwork here. Our stay, however, was but of a few moments’ duration, and we saw only this interior.

We passed on to the Mosque of Dragut, the pirate, the same who built the mound of Christian skulls at Djerba by the seashore. It was quite different, a plain old mosque with old columns, and seemed to belong to old times. In a low chamber to one side was Dragut’s tomb. It was covered with green cloth, and at the four corners colored banners hung over it; other tombs stood about it in the chapel, princes of Islam, and the usual maps of Mecca and the tomb of the Prophet were on the walls, and some cherished objects of historic or personal reverence were here and there; all about were the great candles and the turban-topped small columns of the dead. It was a place of profound peace. This impression was deepened still more as we passed out into the adjoining courts with their low, crypt-like columns, whitewashed, heavy, and sombre. Here the commissary, or chief, who had us in charge, an amiable-faced Turk with a gray, grizzled beard, pointed out the tomb of the English captain, as it is known, a renegade lieutenant of Dragut, who sleeps in a beautiful niche nigh his old commander. Further on beneath an immense, broad old fig-tree in the court were other tombs, with the turbaned end-slabs of different styles and heights—a little company shut in this quiet close of death. A great silence and peacefulness reigned there, alike about the ancient fig-tree without and in the bannered chamber within. I could not help thinking what a place of repose the great pirate had found out for himself and his companions in his death. I went out touched more than commonly with that sense of deep calm which a mosque always, half-mysteriously, awakes in me.

Of the third mosque, which I did not identify, but suppose to have been that of Mahmat, we had barely a passing glimpse, looking down from a gallery upon a large carpeted floor—there were many carpets—but it seemed to offer nothing of special interest. The fourth, however, El-Nakr, the Mosque of the Camel, was after my own heart. It is the most ancient, as indeed one would expect from the name, that of Dragut being next in age, and has the special sanctity that attaches to a traditional religious spot. I suppose it was here that the faith began on the soil. We entered first into one of those low-columned, crypt-like courts; two tall palms were growing in it, with a little patch of bright-green barley beneath. The artistic effect of this simple scene of nature, framed in the seclusion of the gray old walls, with its bit of sky above, the sunshine and the unbroken peace, as it fell on my eyes, was indescribable; of a thousand scenes it imprinted itself on my memory as a thing seen once and seen forever—one of those pictures that are only painted by the soul for itself. We passed within. It was an old plain mosque, with low columns and an ancient look, all without elegance or ornament. It was in the same spirit as that of Dragut, but with still more of austerity and impressiveness. This was the stern old faith, which could dispense with all but God. It touched the Puritan sentiment in me to the quick. This was Islam in its spirituality. Here there was the solitary desert soul in its true devotion, that sought only room for God—the same room as on the desert sands or on mountain tops. There was nothing else in the mosque—only the barley under the palms by the crypt-like cloister, the low-columned austerity within. I felt the harmony of the two—they were different chords, but one music of the desert silence.

It was only when we came out from this sanctuary that I noticed any resentment among the people. As we walked down by the row of men standing about the entrance, scowling faces and fire-flashing eyes were bent on us on all sides, but there was no other demonstration, and we passed through the crowd in that silent glare of hate. It is a curious sensation to feel oneself an object of hatred to a crowd, and this was my first experience of it, though, of course, one notices the hostile look of individuals in Mohammedan countries. It was disagreeable; and I half blamed myself for having violated a prejudice which was perfectly natural for these men. We were out of the press in a few moments, and soon reached the last mosque that it was thought worth while to visit, that of Ahmed Pashaw. It was large, of the same decorated type as the first. There were the same old marble columns, the beautifully ornamented mihrab, the pulpit, the Sultan’s box, a brown latticed gallery; bright mats lay on the floor, the blue and green tiles shone cool on the walls, moulded stucco and carved wood filled the spaces, there being one unusually fine ceiling in carved wood; and there were Koranic texts. The crescent was abundantly used in the decoration. It was all very beautiful and characteristic, full of restful tones, of harmony and repose. As we passed toward an inner door leading to the cemetery of the mosque, we noticed inscriptions to the dead on the wall, and one was pointed out of a pious man who went straight to Paradise. Outside beyond the tall minaret were the tombs of the faithful who were buried here, with the turban-topped slabs as usual. The guardian, who seemed a very old man, with true Arab gentleness urged me repeatedly and cordially to climb the minaret, but I refrained, disliking to detain my companions. We passed out from this beautiful inner close into the street, and turned to the Consulate where we talked over our morning’s walk.

It was no small part of my pleasure in Tripoli that I owed to my friend’s hospitality, which gave me the graces and comfort of civilization in so rude a place as the ordinary traveller necessarily finds such a country. The boys of the oasis, in other parts of Africa, had given me the wine of the date-palm fresh from the tree; here I drank it a little fermented, an exotic drink piquing the curiosity, and was the more glad to renew my memory of a long-forgotten rosso spumante and to make altogether new acquaintance with pleasant wines of Touraine. What conversations we had over these and on the quiet terrace by the garden, ranging through French African territory and the Levant, touching on Persian poets; and my host showed me many beautiful things. It is in this atmosphere of scholarly talk and friendly kindness that I remember the morning walk among the mosques of Tripoli.

V

The British consul, who had also shown me attention, arranged for me to visit the Turkish school of arts and crafts. Hassan Bey, who seemed to be an aid of the Vali, waited on us one morning at the Consulate, and we set out to walk to the school. Hassan Bey was an exile from Daghestan, of a fine military figure, middle-aged, thick-set, with a pleasant countenance; his gray whiskers became his energetic face; he had a look of power and the grave authority of character. He wore a sword; his sleeves and gold braid gave distinction to his person; and he carried lightly, like a cane, the short, twisted whip of stiff bull’s hide that one occasionally sees on these coasts. I have seldom seen so manly a figure, rugged and strong, and stamped by nature for rule; and his politeness was complete and charming, with an accent of strength and breeding that put it out of the category of mere grace of manners. He interested me profoundly by his personality, an entirely new type in my experience, and as the walk was somewhat long I had an opportunity to observe him.

The director of the school received us cordially, gave us coffee and cigarettes, and showed us through the buildings which were rather extensive. The school is endowed with some lands, and its income is supplemented by voluntary funds and a subsidy from the government. It receives upward of one hundred and fifty pupils, from the age of twelve years, and completely supports them during the course, which is seven years in length. Some literary instruction is given, such as geography and secondary branches; but the main end of the school is technical training in the arts and crafts. There was a carpet and silk-weaving department, a tailor-shop, a shoe-shop, carpentry, a foundry and blacksmithing, a refectory and store-rooms. The shops were rather empty, and the students whom I saw were few and of all ages; the rest may have been at their books. The foundry and the carpenter-shop were the busiest and most occupied; there were many heavy pieces of machinery of modern make, and the department seemed properly provided for and in competent management; work was going on in both these rooms, which I watched with great interest. I was told that the furniture of the Ottoman Bank was made here, and apparently orders of various kinds, as, for example, for wheels, were regularly received.

The foundation clearly enough was only a beginning, and the provision inadequate to the scale; but it was a serious and admirable attempt to plant the mechanical arts in the country in their modern form and development, and to foster industry in the simple crafts. The idea was there and in operation, however the means to realize it might seem small in my American eyes, used to great industrial riches in such things; and I was much impressed, not only by the facts but by the spirit of the thing and those who had it in charge. The products seemed excellent, so far as I could judge of the various things shown me. I followed the example of the consul in buying a small bolt of strong silk in a beautiful design of brilliant-colored stripes, and I should have been glad to have taken more in other varieties. I was rather surprised when at the end Hassan Bey suggested my going into the girls’ carpet school. We entered, paused a moment at the school-room door that some notice might be given, and on going into the room I saw that all the girls, who were young, were standing with their faces turned to the wall. We remained only long enough to see the nature of the work and its arrangement, and for a word with the teacher; but the scene, with the young girlish profiles along the sides, was picturesque. There is one other carpet school for girls in another city. We spent perhaps two hours in this inspection and walked leisurely back to town, where I parted with Hassan Bey with sincere admiration.

In the afternoon I went with Absalom to visit a school I had heard of in the Jewish quarter, a pious foundation, the bequest of a wealthy Jew, for the education of poor boys. There were about five hundred of them there, bright-eyed, intelligent, intent, as Jewish boys in their condition usually are. The buildings were excellent, properly furnished, with the substantial and prosperous look of a well-administered educational enterprise. I visited several rooms, saw the boys at their desks and classes, heard some exercises, and talked with the professor in charge. I noticed a tennis-court on the ground. Altogether, I was more than favorably impressed by what I saw, and the mere presence here of a well-organized charity school on such a scale was an encouraging sign. It was surprising to me to find this establishment and the technical school at Tripoli, where I had certainly not anticipated seeing anything of the sort, nor was this my only surprise. I had thought of Tripoli as a semi-barbarous country almost detached from civilization, a focus for Moslem fanaticism, a place for Turkish exiles, a last foothold of the slave-trader, and such it truly was; but it did not present the aspect of neglect and decay that I had imagined as concomitant with this. The old gates of the city had recently been removed; outside the walls there was a good deal of new building going on, which was a sign of safer and more settled life as well as of a kind of prosperity; the roads were excellent, and in a Turkish dependency that is noticeable; in some places new pavements had been laid. In other words, there was evidence of enterprise and public works, of modern life and vitality; and this impression was much strengthened by my experience of the two schools. It is true that I never lost the sense of that strangely conglomerate crowd that passed through the streets, that mixed and fanatic people. I indulged no illusions with respect to the populace en masse. The state of things, however, seemed to me by no means so bad, with these stirrings of civilization, of betterment, of a modern spirit in the city, and I was frankly surprised by it.

My surprise melted away some months later when, on opening my morning paper in America to read of the Turkish revolution, I saw that the Vali of Tripoli was among the first of the exiles to sail for Constantinople; and I observed that, later, he had an active part in the government of the Young Turks. He and Hassan Bey had been doing in Tripoli what they had been exiled for wishing to do on the Bosphorus. Then I understood.

VI

It was night. Absalom and I were in the Arab quarter, on our way to see some Soudanese dancing. There were few passers in the deep-shadowed, silent, blind streets that grew darker and seemed more mysterious as we penetrated deeper into the district. We had gone a considerable distance. From time to time a man would meet us, and then another. We seemed to be going from precinct to precinct under some sort of escort. I noticed that Absalom had many hesitations; once or twice he refused to go further, and there was something resembling an altercation; then he stopped decisively, and would not budge until some one whom he desired should come in person. We stood, a group of four or five, waiting in the obscure passageway for some ten minutes. At last the man came, a tall Arab, with a look of rude strength and superiority. He was the chief, and we walked on with him in that dark network of corners and alleys. I was beginning to think it a long distance, when we turned under a heavy gateway into a dark, open court, as large as a small city square, with houses round it like tenements. A kerosene lamp in a glass cage flared dimly on one side, and there were a few figures round the court; but the scene soon took on a livelier aspect.

The chief began collecting his men in the centre, and numbers of people emerged from the houses and sat on the edges near the walls of the houses. They were a rough-looking crowd, evidently very poor and badly clothed, and there were many that made a wild appearance squatting there in the darkness. Two policemen, attracted by the commotion, came in, and a street lamp was transferred into the court. There was now quite a gathering in the centre, where a fire had been built by which three men were seated; some sort of incense was thrown into it, and a light smoke with a pungent odor began to be lightly diffused through the court. There must have been as many as seventy in the crowd round the fire, and at least a couple of hundred spectators crouched about the sides; it was more of an exhibition than I had expected, and from the corner where I sat with Absalom and two or three attendants the scene began to be weird. Then the drum beat in the middle; the men, all of whom had clappers, lifted them in the air, falling into line, and immediately one of those wild, savage chants shrilled forth, rising and rising to an acute cry and falling monotonously down, increasing in volume and mingling with the noise of the sharp clappers and the drum—an infernal din. The chant of the Aïssaouas, that I had heard in the desert, was “mellow music matched with this.” And, from the first moment it never stopped; it was ear-piercing as it reverberated in the closed court, and at first it was confusing.

The dance began with a procession in double file round the fire, with the three men seated by the smoky flame. It was a slow walk timed to the rhythm of the voices and the clappers, gradually increasing in speed and becoming a jump, with violent gesticulation, twisting, and long reaching of the arms and legs, while the human cry grew shriller and more vibrant and rapid in the emotional crisis of the excitement. Round and round they went, and from time to time the line would break into parts as the men turned to the centre just before me. There were three persons who seemed to be leaders: one, whom I named the Hadji because he answered to my idea of that word, another dervish-like, and a black man. The dervish interested me most. He was the head of his group, and as he came between me and the fire, standing well forward from his band and well in toward the fire, he would whirl, and then reverse, whirling in the opposite direction; and—he and the procession moving forward all the time—he would fall limply forward toward his men almost to the ground, recover, and fling himself backward, rising high with his clappers spread far over his head. It was a diabolical posture; and, as he stood so, his leaping followers bowed down to him, kneeling almost to the ground but not touching it, and flinging themselves erect far back with arms spread. I wondered how they kept their balance in that dancing prostration. Then the group would pass on, and the next come into play—the Hadji, the black man—with the same ceremony, but without the whirling. Round and round they went interminably; the chant rose and fell, the march slackened and quickened, and every few moments there was this spasmodic rite of the salutation and prostration at the height of the dance.

The ring of spectators, crouched and huddled round the court, sat in the imperturbable silence and apathy of such audiences. The edges of the scene were an obscure mass of serried, half-seen forms under the house walls, filling the space rather closely; the smoke of the incense, with which the fire was fed, hung in the air, and Absalom said it was good for my eyes; the only light was the blaze of the flame upon the dark, moving forms in the middle, and the two street lamps over them, and the night-sky above. It was an unearthly scene, with those strange figures and heavy shadows; and the fearful din made it demonic. I do not know what the dance was, its name or origin; but it seemed to me to be devil worship, a relic of the old African forest, a rite of the primitive paganism and savage cults of the early world. The three dark men by the fire with the drum, the grotesque, fantastic ritual of the bowing and kneeling procession, the atmosphere of physical hysteria and muscular intoxication, the monotonous, shrill cry in which the emotional excitement mounted—here were traits of the prehistoric horde, of a savagery still alive and vibrant in these dancing figures. It was as if I were assisting at a worship of the Evil One in a remote and barbarous past.

After a while I began to take notice of particular individuals in the dancing mass. I was specially attracted by three who seemed uncommonly strong and tireless and made a group by themselves. They were poorly but distinctively clad. One was in black, with loose arm-sleeves showing his bare skin to the breast; one was in white, with an over-haik of black divided down the back, which streamed out; the third, who was very tall and lank, one of the tallest figures there, was in blue, faded and worn; and, as they danced, of course the folds of these garments spread out on the air, showing their bare legs in free motion. Their heads were closely covered with white, except the mouth and eyes—not merely covered, but wrapped. I turned to Absalom, and said, “Touaregs.” He looked at them, as I picked them out for him, and said, “Sì, signor,” for he always spoke to me in Italian. I had wished much to see some Touaregs, and, though I had seen men with covered faces, I had never been quite sure. They are the finest race of the desert, first in all manly savage traits, bandits of the sands, complete and natural robbers, fierce fanatics, death-dealers—the most feared of all the tribes. They cover their faces thus to protect them from the sand, for they are pure desert men. I smiled to think that at my first meeting with the terrible Touaregs I found three of them dancing for my amusement; but I looked at them with the keenest interest. They were certainly superb in muscular strength. At the end of an hour they showed no weariness; and there was a vigor in their motions, an elasticity and endurance that easily distinguished them from the others. I watched them long. They were perfectly tireless, and the dance called for constant violent muscular effort. I shall never forget that group, whose garb itself, thin and open, had a riding look, and especially the man in the blue garment, with long, gaunt arms and legs, who fell forward and rebounded with a spring of iron.

There were some changes in the method and order of the motions, but the dances for the most part were merely new arrangements of the same jumping and kneeling performance. I sat in the awful din of it for two hours, interested in many things, and rather pleased, I confess, at being alone in such a company. One gets nearer to them so in feeling; with a companion of the same race, even though unknown, one stays with his race. I left the dance still in the full tide of vehemence and glory of uproar, overhung by the light pungent smoke and dissonance, with the obscurely crouching throng in the low shadows, and as we lost the sound of it in the deep silence of the dark lanes, where we met no one, I think the night of an Arab city never seemed so still. A man with a lantern went ahead to light the way which was black with darkness; Absalom and the headman went with me, and a negro followed behind. They attended me to the door of the hotel, and it was a striking night scene as I stood in the hallway, the negro guards roused from their straw mats looking on, and shook hands with the strong-faced, rough-garbed headman who had had me in his protection that night.

VII

I went out for a last drive with the British consul toward the oasis of Gergarish, which lies westward of the city, a new direction for me. He was familiar with the Mediterranean; and, the talk falling on the classical background of North Africa, I told him of my search for the lotus at Djerba. He avowed his belief that much of the Greek mythic past had its local habitation on these coasts, and gave me a striking and quite unexpected instance. I had supposed that Lethe was an underground stream and approached only by the ghosts of the dead. He assured me that it was situated not very far from Benghazi, where he had been consul, and made an excellent table water. It is a large fountain or underground lake in a cave; he had been on it in a boat with a friend, and it was said that fumes from the water would oppress the passenger with drowsiness. I heard this with great interest, and like to remember that I can obtain a cup of Lethe, should I desire it, this side the infernal world. My friend added his belief that partial oblivion can be found comparatively widely diffused in North Africa, not being dependent on either Lethe or the lotus. This tradition of drowsiness which attaches to these coasts in old days is to be attributed to the quality of the air, which is soporific. Continued residence causes a loss of memory, not that one forgets his early days, home, and children, like the lotus-eaters, but one grows uncertain about recent events and the mind becomes hazy as to whether one has or has not done this or that; to such a degree is this true that my friend advised a return to the north at least once in two years to allow the memory to recover its normal force. With such talk, which was quite seriously said, though it has its humorous side, and which faithfully reflects the African atmosphere, we whiled away the time, conversing, too, of the American excavations at Benghazi and the bells of Derna that rang the Italian priest to his death—for the Arabs dislike bells—and the thousand and one topics on which a traveller is always prepared to receive information. I had been so long alone that those talks at Tripoli were almost as much of a rarity as the scenes; they are an essential part of my memory of the voyage.

Our destination was not the oasis, but some caverns on a height above it. The day was brilliant and a noble desert view stretched round us from the eminence. The blue sea sparkled not far away, an horizon-stripe up and down the coast as far as one could see; the splendid dark green mass of the oasis lay just below us in the valley, and between us and it the desert plain undulated with the long slopes of a rolling prairie, spotted with cattle and a few Arab groups; inland the sands swept on to the line of mountains low on the far horizon. The mass of rock above us was picturesque and solitary. The gem of the view, however, was Tripoli eastward. It was the first time I had truly seen the city from outside—just such a Moslem city as one dreams of, a white city, small and beautiful, snowy pure in the liquid air. I was surprised at its beauty. We explored the cave. It was of a sort of stratified pumice stone and partly filled up with sand. It had been at some time a troglodyte dwelling, and chambers had been hollowed in it. There are many troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, still living in this primitive manner in rock-hewn chambers in North Africa. There are villages of them in the mountains back of Biskra, and especially in the southeastern corner of Tunisia opposite Djerba, and they are found in the low range of the Djebel-Ghariane that I was looking on in the distance. This cavern that we were exploring was one of their prehistoric haunts, a natural fortress and place of refuge for a small group of families in the wild waste.

The drive back was uncommonly beautiful, very African in color, and increasing in atmospheric charm as we neared the city in the clarity of the sunset light. The coast view was especially lovely. The blue sea made the offing, along which a line of scattered palms, continuous but thin enough to give its full value to each dark green tuft in the blue air, and to many a single columnar stem beneath, ran like a screen, not too far from the roadway; and the strong foreground was that red-brown earth with the sunset light beginning on it. The beautiful white city lay ahead of us. The quality of the atmosphere was remarkable. The trees were very light, and seemed to float in the sky, like goldfish in a globe; and as the sunset grew, the diffused rose through the palms on the other side seemed almost a new sky. It was my last evening in Tripoli.

VIII

I had loitered for the last time in the street of the blueness and lingered in the souks of the Djerba merchants and especially in the little shop of a mild-mannered Soudanese dealer where I gathered up the curious objects that had been slowly collecting there for me to serve as mementos—things of gourd and hide, of skin and straw, a few ostrich plumes. I had photographed the baker’s shop, and stopped at the intersection of the four corners to look once more at the ever-passing figures of the inscrutable and conglomerate crowd, the float of the desert life. I had called on my friend and kind adviser at the French Consulate, and my British host, to both of whom I owed so much of the pleasure and variety of my traveller’s sojourn. In one respect it was unique in my wanderings. I had never seen so many strata of culture, so many diverse kinds and stages of human life, in one place. I had had a last talk with Seyd, the boy from Fezzan, and with the negro guards of the gate and the boys at the door who were eager rivals for my morning favors. Now it was over, and I stood on the deck with Absalom. I was sorry to part with him. What a faithful watch he had kept! No matter at what hour I stepped out into the street, he was there, seated by the wall; wherever I left my consular friends, in some mysterious way he was instantly there in the street at my side. He had tempted me to a longer stay with lures of hunting in the desert where he calmly explained he would watch with a gun while I slept, and then I would watch, though there would be two others with us, but it would be better if one or the other of us were always awake, for one did not know what might be in the desert; and he had planned a voyage to Lebda, the city of Septimius Severus—it might be a rough voyage in a boat none too good, but was not he a pilot? He had brought me one day all his pilot papers; there were hundreds of them, each with the name of the craft and the signature of the captain whose ways he had safely guided on this dangerous coast in the years gone by. But my voyage in North Africa was finished; it was done; the much that I had left unseen, and I realized how much that was—for wherever one goes, new horizons are always rising with their magical drawing of the unknown—all that was for “another time.” So, knowing the end had come, he took both my hands in both his for our warm addio, bent his head, and went slowly down the ship’s side.

I watched the scene as we drew away. The central mass of the fort stood in shadow, and the sunset light streamed over the eastern side of the city, the beach and bluffs; slender minarets islanded the sky; the blue crescent of the bay lay broad beneath; the oasis rose over the banked earth, and stretched inland, and the high horizon line was plumed with tall single palms tufting the long sky. I watched it long, till the beautiful city in the fair evening light lessened and narrowed to a gleam, and at the end it was like the white crest of a wave that sank and was seen no more.

IX

I went on deck. It was a May night with a fresh, cold wind. There was a bright star over the crescent moon which hung well down the west, and all the heavens were bright, but not too bright. I leaned on the rounds of a rope ladder of the rigging by the ship’s side aft, and was alone; it was cold, and the passengers were few. I noticed on the horizon a dark shadow half-risen from the waters and mounting toward the moon; it rose rapidly, and grew black as it neared the light above. It was like a high arch, or cascade of gloom, broadening its skirts as it fell on the horizon. The moon was its apex, and seemed about to enter it. The scene was fantastic in the extreme, unearthly, a scene of Poe’s imagination; the moon hung as if at the entrance of an unknown region into which it was about to descend. But there was no further change. The moon crested the arch; the single star burned brilliantly directly above and between the horns of the crescent and at some distance aloft. I watched the strange spectacle; the moon and the broad-skirted curtain of black gloom, pouring from it on the waters just in the line of its bright track over the sea, sank slowly down together. The moon reddened as it neared the horizon line, and when the crescent at last rested on the sea, and the shadow had been wholly absorbed in the moon’s track, there was another Poesque effect; the horned moon was like a ship of flame—not a ship on fire, but a ship of flame—sailing on the horizon. That picture, though it could have been but for a few moments, seemed to last long, and sank dying in a red glow slowly. I remember recalling the lines:

What followed was so singular that it may be best to record it in nearly the exact words of my rough notes, made early the next morning off Malta:

“The strange thing was that the star, still somewhat high in the west, growing brighter, took the track of the moon. I mean the moon’s path of light on the water became the star’s path, as plain but whiter; one passed and the other was there imperceptibly; one became the other. It reminded me of one faith changing into another, from a higher heavenly source. I stayed because the star was so beautiful—the most beautiful star I ever saw, except perhaps the star off Cyprus. It grew larger and more radiant, with many, many points, and became a bunch, as it were, of jackstraw rays, one crossing another, all straight; and then, as I looked, a strange thing happened.

“I saw what might have been spirits in the star, as in a picture. The star lost shape, and became only the setting of these forms of light, perfect human figures. At first there were two, one older and one younger, like an angel with Tobias or Virgin with the young St. John; then there were many others, not at the same time, but successively. Some were constantly repeated; the Byzantine throned figure hieratic, the highwinged angel tall, the young angel seated and writing, the standing figure, prophetic, blessing, with high hands. There were scenes as well as figures: desert scenes as of Arabs—effects of the white and dark, like turbaned and robed figures together; the Magian scene; mixed moving groups, sometimes turned away from me. The figures often moved with regard to each other, and trembled on my own eye singly. When the star approached the horizon, there were figures that seemed to walk toward me on the sea, all white and radiant—single figures always. There were in all three sorts: Byzantine, with the crown or canopy above, and the throne; Italian groups and lines; and Moslem. There was nothing distinctively Greek except seated figures.

“This continued till the star set, perhaps an hour. I would look off from the star to the other stars and to the sea; but as soon as my eyes went back to the star, there were the changing figures still to be seen. One did not see the star, but the figures; not framed in a star or in a round orb, but on a shapeless background; one saw only figures of light as if ‘the heavens were opened.’ And when the star set and was gone, another planet above, also very bright, as I looked, opened in the same way, with similar figures. There I saw a form with Michel-Angelo-like limbs, seated on the orb with loose posture, like the spirit of the star, and then a tall, throned figure with the crown over it. I did not at any time see any features—only forms, very distinct in limbs and modelling of figure, but too distant for features. It was an hour or more, and I still saw them in the new star when I turned away to go below. My eyes were tired. I was not at all excited—quite steady, and observing and experimenting; for I had never known anything similar to this. The visions were constant, without any interval, though changing. It was like looking into a room through a window, or out of a room upon a landscape.

“It was wonderfully spiritual and beautiful. The figures were all noble and beautiful, especially in line, and occupied with something, like living forms. They were white, but not with white clothing, except the Moslem figures, sometimes; but white as of some substance of light—the faces sometimes dark, and there were shadows marking relations of the figures, but not shadows thrown by the figures. I made no effort to shape them; they came; they were of themselves.

“I thought this was what Blake saw; what the shepherds saw; what all orientals saw when the heavens were ‘opened’—what Jacob saw, perhaps. What struck me was that the star was no longer a star, but shapeless, and only a means of seeing. It was a most remarkable experience.”

Africa was always a land of magic; and it seemed to me that night as if the spirit of the land were bidding me, who had so loved it, farewell.