by Bryher;
We sailed for Naples and England. My next visit to Egypt was in 1923 and by that time the world had changed. It was not disappointing, it was like an album of old photographs, familiar yes, but with no emotional content. I had squeezed the Orient dry in childhood, there was nothing to add and I have no desire now ever to return. The background will always be a part of me but we alter as we develop and as I grew up I was drawn towards the West. Yet emotion is stronger than reason as I knew when I heard the voice of the muezzin, fifty years later, at Lahore. We need mercy in this ever revolving world and though the woolen thread of the dervish is now lost to me, I still remember the color of its compassion. How can we obliterate what has once been home?
FOUR
The winter of 1905-6 was a disaster. Perhaps it was inevitable after the exultation of Egypt. We set off in early December, this time with a governess, an English girl of about twenty who subsequently became a great friend both of my mother and myself, to travel through Spain to North Africa.
I had prepared for the trip by reading Prescott’s History of Ferdinand and Isabella and Washington Irving’s The Alhambra. (I wonder if people appreciate now how widely some American books circulated among the English at that time.) There was also a Henty about the Carlist wars but it is perhaps significant that it is almost the only story of his that I cannot remember. We had looked forward to the journey but we were unhappy in Spain. It was partly the poverty, people shivered in their grimy clothes and were too numb and unhappy even to beg. Yet there was something more; we felt a hostility that was hard to define and for the first time I was miserable and bored.
Madrid was piercingly cold and we caught influenza. We swallowed huge doses of ammoniated quinine, the favorite remedy of the period, and after the fever subsided spent our mornings at the Prado. I tried to copy the horses of Velásquez and I liked Goya who had drawn the crowds that we still saw in the streets but my impressions were external. I missed the depth of Egypt, the liveliness of Naples. The solitary moment that filled me with awe was when I saw the sword of Cortes in some armory. We went to a game of pelota but it only made me homesick for a windy English field and the footballers racing by us and the ball in our team’s control.
The Escorial was terrifying and I was not even scolded for wanting to run outside into the sun. I remember only the synagogue in Toledo, perhaps because it was the first that I had ever entered. We all have one place that is nearer to our hearts than any other and it is natural that the reverse is true as well. I had just the same sensations when circumstances compelled me to cross Spain in middle age. It was as if I had to suppress all emotion on both occasions until I had left the country.
Once Christmas was over we went south. I remember being shaken awake in the middle of the night because the trains always seemed to leave at four in the morning and crouching over a brazier filled with lumps of charcoal at a hotel at Cordova trying to get warm. Of course I liked the Arab arches in the mosque there that had been converted into a cathedral and the tangerines, glistening as if beneath crystal, under a slowly falling rain. Seville, however, was a nightmare. The Spanish-American War had not been over long, the English usually left their daughters in the nursery so that I was taken for an American child and people leaned over the balconies and spat at me. After I had received a full blow in the face, twice in one afternoon, I howled.
I know that it will horrify all lovers of the Mediterranean but I could have knelt in Gibraltar and kissed the clean streets. I was so glad that I was English because of the warm and reassuring kindness of the faces about me and I was in my element when we drove out to watch the apes. It was not insularity, I had felt perfectly at home in Italy, France and Egypt. No, it was some underlying cruelty of which I was conscious in Spain and that was all the more sinister because I could not explain it, even to myself. I only knew that I was unhappy there and that it was, in all the meanings of the word, an alien place.
We arrived in Algiers early in January. It was snowing. This would have been endurable in England, “What else can one expect of the British climate?” but we should have had the comfort there of thick carpets and a blazing fire. The hotel was almost without heating, the wind blew under windows warped by the summer sun and we shivered. In addition, the city seemed entirely French with only an occasional fez to remind us that we were in Africa. We were not allowed to visit the mosques and after the richness of Egypt the tidy streets and dark clothes were a disappointment to us all.
My father talked easily to Frenchmen. They reminded him, I suppose, of his boyhood. He had spent it at Caen. I listened, as a result, to dozens of discussions as to whether the French or English method of government were better in the East. The English remained aloof and encouraged the inhabitants to retain their native cultures whereas the French mixed with them more freely but distrusted the Orient, they wanted their Arabs to become as Parisien as possible. “We assimilate,” a bearded, sunburnt engineer proudly declared one day after lunch, “you are a nation of sanitary inspectors and police. One day,” he shrugged his shoulders expressively, “you will go. We shall stay.” Now, fifty years afterwards, the French system seems to have lasted a fraction longer in time.
There was no donkey boy to tell me about his village nor any archaeologist to show me some painted hieroglyphics. “We might as well be in Paris,” I grumbled as I walked up and down the avenues in my best coat and hat looking at shop windows. “Wait till you get to Biskra,” they consoled me at the hotel, “that is the gateway to the desert.” Full of anticipation mixed with some misgivings, we set off hopefully one morning and ran at once into an unexpected adventure.
Algeria is swept every winter by tremendous storms. The visitors are always told that these are exceptional and floods are never mentioned. One moment we were looking out of the window at a drab and stony valley, the next instant the train shook as if an avalanche had hit it and a swirling river of shrubs and pebbles sucked at the rails. People rushed into the corridor, were we still moving? Had we stopped?
“C’est dangereux.” The conductor, a portly Frenchman with an immense black beard, stuck his head into our compartment, looked reproachfully at my mother and groaned.
“Does he expect me to scream?” my mother asked icily, continuing to embroider a rose upon a piece of cream-colored silk. I thought that I saw a dead camel but it was only an uprooted bush. My governess got out another rug, it had turned very cold. “Dangereux, dangereux,” we could hear our friend moving up the coach. Yes, it was dangerous, a French engineer agreed, he had left his seat and was talking to my father, the floods naturally might undermine the track. All the same, he leaned out of the window to stare at the turbulence below us, he thought that the rails would hold. There was no need to alarm ourselves. We should reach our destination in due course but evidently, a thorny mass of branches hurtled past us as he spoke, yes, evidently, we should be late.
The Biskra that I remember must have greatly changed since 1893 and André Gide’s famous visit. It was more like a small provincial French town than a gateway to the East. The hotel was low and square with a row of palms standing outside the terrace. There had been no train to Algiers that morning on account of the storm so the rooms that had been intended for us were still occupied. The proprietor rushed us into a bedroom that was full of plaster. “Le vent!” He waved his arms expressively, somebody had opened a door, the draft had blown in a window and had brought down part of the wall. After that, as he expected, we accepted our cramped and improvised quarters without grumbling too much. The provisions failed. We lived principally upon dried dates, a picturesque but monotonous diet. We sat in coats and even gloves trying to keep warm while everything that we touched was covered with half an inch of dust. I had read my books twenty times and my father’s cheerful explanation, “If we had not come here we should not have known what it was like,” irritated us beyond measure. He could amuse himself by talking to another group of engineers marooned, like ourselves, by the weather. We were disillusioned and
angry.
The wind dropped eventually as suddenly as it had begun. A guide in a new, scarlet fez, baggy fawn trousers and a light coat that was almost French in cut, so different from Ali’s soft robes, proposed a visit to Sidi Okba, a neighboring oasis. We longed to go anywhere outside the too familiar hall of the hotel and set out the next morning in a carriage drawn by two horses. We had first to splash our way across a shallow ford outside the town and then to drive for some hours across the dunes.
Sidi Okba was famous for the tomb of a marabout and for its dates. “Oh, she will be crushed!” my governess screamed, it was her first experience of the Orient, as a heavily veiled woman stepped into the middle of a group of donkeys. Each of the animals was trying to rub its triangular pack of fodder off against a wall. I sat with the aloof expression of the experienced traveler to whom such scenes were an everyday occurrence as a haughty figure on a big, white pony trotted past with his burnous drawn, hoodwise, almost across his face. A child, a slice of the fiat, native bread in his hand, looked up from a game and laughed. The irrigation ditches had overflowed and the carriage wheels jolted from one pocket of mud to the next while the smell of stagnant water and rotting palm fronds tempted us in some places to follow the native example and breathe through handkerchiefs.
While we were looking at the outside of the tomb that we were not allowed to approach, the guide drew my father aside. Some village elders had warned him that another storm was about to burst and it would be safer for us to remain in Sidi Okba for the night. We could rent an empty native house. We looked at the mud floors and my father decided that it might not be the question of one night but several and we turned at once to hurry back to Biskra.
We drove about halfway and the weather seemed unchanged so we paused in the shelter of a sandy ridge to eat a hurried meal under the pale sunlight of what could have been an English winter day. There was not a soul in sight when we continued our journey. We rumbled on with much jingling of reins and I was thinking regretfully of my rides across the “real” desert during the previous year when the carriage halted abruptly. “Stop him!” my mother cried as the coachman leaned forward and began to lash the horses unmercifully. There was a strange sucking noise and we began to sink. I still do not know exactly what had really happened. Two hours before, the track had been rough but sandy; now the entire plain was a treacherous swamp. A thin glutinous mud, the color of lava, coiled ominously forward. Deep runnels of water were beginning to appear around us while the carriage wheels were locked and the frightened horses could not extricate their legs. I was lifted out and stood on a hummock a few feet away. The others jumped. I felt a slight but disturbing pull on the soles of my boots and, for once, even my father seemed uncertain what to do.
We stood in the cold wind while the carriage sank further and further into the mud. Fortunately for us, a French officer appeared on horseback, leading a troop of mounted soldiers and two mules, each of which had a strange stiff bundle strapped to its saddle. It was not precisely cheerful to be told that these were the bodies of two French priests who had been swept away by a flood and drowned, some days previously. The officer rode over to us to ask what had happened but as soon as his men halted, their chargers began to sink. He gave a sharp order and they all moved off again while he shouted to us that he would send us help.
We waited on our hummocks, dragging first one foot clear and then the other. The horses were quiet, their haunches were held as if in a vise. The guide’s fawn trousers were a mass of slimy patches although he had rolled them above his thin knees. It cannot have been more than half an hour (although it seemed much longer) till men and ropes arrived from a neighboring village. They heaved, they hauled, up to their waists themselves in mud, the traces broke, they mended them and pulled again until the horses struggled out at last onto firmer ground and a dirty, dripping object like a trampled mud pie emerged slowly from the bog. It was our once-polished carriage. Our guide produced a dagger from under his coat, we did not know whether this was a symbol of his authority or a sign that he expected trouble. We jumped into our seats while they were reharnessing the animals, paid our rescuers and drove off as fast as we could, while they quarreled violently about each man’s share of the francs, a few feet from the quagmire.
Our own troubles had not ended. We still had to cross the ford. The four inches of water from the morning had deepened into a yellow torrent. Yet what were we to do? The bog lay between us and the oasis and we could not camp out in the desert for the night on account of both bandits and the cold.
The driver yelled. We plunged forward. The force of the river flung us sideways, we put our feet up on the seats because water was swirling over the floor. I almost disgraced myself by squealing as we seemed to topple; I thought the landau was going to turn upside down with us inside it, unable to get out. “You shouldn’t have brought the child into this,” my mother protested and for once I almost agreed with her but my Henty training reasserted itself as the carriage staggered forward and we reached the shallows.
Our fellow guests were lined up in the lounge, discussing our probable disappearance by the time that we reached the hotel. Who but the mad English would go out in such weather? There was even an enterprising journalist waiting with his notebook on the steps, I never shared the Victorian horror of reporters and would have liked to talk to him myself but was whisked upstairs immediately lest I chatter. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about our adventures in the local paper the next day and only resented the fellow’s too fertile imagination. Of course we had never screamed “from the bottom of our stomachs,” it had merely been a painful surprise to be almost drowned in a desert.
The line to the coast was still cut in several places on account of the storm, there were no newspapers, a hardship in those pre-radio days and worse still, from my father’s point of view because he was primarily in Algeria for business reasons, there were no letters. We went to Constantine directly the railway opened only to find that we were trapped again. The wind blew round and up the famous cliffs, dark Jewish faces watched us suspiciously from doorways and we caught glimpses of plump women with bare arms, covered with silver bangles, in spite of the cold. By this time my father had either reverted to his Caen boyhood or succumbed to an Oriental fatalism, we were not sure which, but my mother had reached the limit of her endurance. She dressed us both in our best clothes and went to call in person on the stationmaster. He was very kind, he had a fire lit immediately in his office and discussed our predicament with sympathy and understanding. Constantine was one of the coldest places in Algeria, there was naturally nothing for Madame to do but he had had a wire to say that a train could get through to Bone on the following morning and he advised us to return to the coast. It would be warmer and there would be more shops. We returned in triumph to my father and packed.
Bône was a pleasant town of small white villas, each built inside a garden, facing the sea. It was completely French in atmosphere, the hotel was full of people whom I was to recognize in novels when I was a little older, men with newspapers propped up against wine bottles at lunch or women staring for hours into half-empty coffee cups. Conversation centered on the weather or crops. At least we could brush the sand out of our hair and refuse, with ostentation, to eat dates. We had only a very old guidebook and it was not my favorite Baedeker but it mentioned a forest just outside the town that had been full of lions. We drove there one day but it was as quiet and peaceful as any country park. I forgot Bone completely until 1923 when Norman Douglas gave me a memoir of Isabelle Eberhardt to read. She had spent her first months in Africa there with her mother and, as sometimes happens, the place flashed back into my mind with a more than pictorial intensity and I felt myself kneeling again on the shiny, black leather seat of the carriage, staring between the trunks of the trees, in the hope that one lion had survived.
“If we had not come here, we should not have known what it was like,” As so often, my father was correct. It was natural for me, aged eleven, to mis
s the desert rides and all that Egypt had given me but the time was not wasted in spite of my grumbles. I knew the danger of floods, Isabelle Eberhardt was drowned in one, and the somehow thinner atmosphere of the Algerian dunes, when I read Gide and other books about the country in the nineteen twenties. “Never mind, Miggy,” my father said at the end of a particularly dull afternoon, “we are going to Tunis tomorrow and then you will get back to the bazaars.”
I did not think of Tunis, I thought of Carthage and of Henty’s Malchus hiding in the reservoirs. Alas, it was another disappointment. It was partly because we all had influenza again, I seemed to have my nose permanently inside a handkerchief, but it was also because I felt myself “outside.” Nobody talked to me, the Arabic was harsher and I could not understand it; besides I knew immediately that I was just an unwelcome stranger. We walked up and down the street of the scent merchants where they weighed essence of jasmine in tiny amber phials against one or more gold coins. It was interesting to watch once but there were no saddles, the houses, robes and turbans were white, there were none of the delicate colors that had made such lovely patterns along the Cairo streets, the atmosphere was not Oriental, it was French. I heartily agreed with my family when they said that the Midi would have been warmer and the journey less exhausting. I was seasick all the way to Marseilles and thoroughly happy to return to England.
Our disastrous winter had not ended. A few days after our arrival I caught German measles from a maid. It was worse in actuality than it had been in imagination because, apart from a third cold, I did not feel ill and yet I was shut up miserably in my bedroom for several days without the garden, my dog or my books.