Travels

by Paul Bowles

  The antique shops here in the souks are famous. As one might expect, tourists are considered to be a feebleminded and nearly defenseless species of prey, and there are never enough of them to go around. Along the sides of the galleries stand whole tribes of merchants waiting for them to appear. These men have brothers, fathers, uncles and cousins, each of whom operates his own shop, and the tourist is passed along from one member of the family to the next with no visible regret on anyone’s part. In one shop I heard the bearded proprietor solemnly assuring a credulous American woman that the amber perfume she had just bought was obtained by pressing beads of amber like those in the necklace she was examining. Not that it would have been much more truthful of him had he told her that it was made of ambergris; the amber I have smelled here never saw a whale, and consists almost entirely of benzoin.

  If you stop to look into an antiquary’s window you are lost. Suddenly you are aware that hands are clutching your clothing, pulling you gently toward the door, and honeyed voices are experimenting with greetings in all the more common European languages, one after the other. Unless you offer physical resistance you find yourself being propelled forcibly within. Then as you face your captors over arrays of old silver and silk, they begin to work on you in earnest, using all the classic clichés of Eastern sales-patter. “You have such a fine face that I want my merchandise to go with you.” “We need money today; you are the first customer to come in all day long.” A fat hand taps the ashes from a cigarette. “Unless I do business with you, I won’t sleep tonight. I am an old man. Will you ruin my health?” “Just buy one thing, no matter what. Buy the cheapest thing in the store, if you like, but buy something ... “ If you get out of the place without making a purchase, you are entitled to add ten to your score. A knowledge of Turkish is not necessary here in the bazaars. If you prefer not to speak English or French or German, you find that the Moslems love to be spoken to in Arabic, while the Jews speak a corrupt Andalusian version of Spanish.

  Today I went out of the covered souks by a back street that I had not found before. It led downward toward the Rustempaşa Mosque. The shops gave the street a strange air: they all looked alike from the outside. On closer inspection I saw that they were all selling the same wildly varied assortment of unlikely objects. I wanted to examine the merchandise, and since Abdeslam had been talking about buying some rubber-soled shoes, we chose a place at random and went into it. While he tried on sneakers and sandals I made a partial inventory of the objects in the big, gloomy room. The shelves and counters exhibited footballs, Moslem rosaries, military belts, reed mouthpieces for native oboes, doorhooks, dice of many sizes and colors, narghilehs, watchstraps of false cobraskin, garden shears, slippers of untanned leather hard as stone, brass taps for kitchen sinks, imitation ivory cigarette holders ten inches long, suitcases made of pressed paper, tambourines, saddles, assorted medals for the military and plastic game counters. Hanging from the ceiling were revolver holsters, lutes and zipper fasteners that looked like strips of flypaper. Ladders were stacked upright against the wall, and on the floor were striped canvas deck chairs, huge tin trunks with scenes of Mecca stamped on their sides, and a great pile of wood shavings among whose comfortable hills nestled six very bourgeois cats. Abdeslam bought no shoes, and the proprietor began to stare at me and my notebook with unconcealed suspicion, having decided, perhaps, that I was a member of the secret police looking for stolen goods.

  OCTOBER 19

  MATERIAL BENEFITS may be accrued in this worldwide game of refusing to be oneself. Are these benefits worth the inevitable void produced by such destruction? The question is apposite in every case where the traditional beliefs of a people have been systematically modified by its government. Rationalizing words like “progress,” “modernization,” or “democracy” mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they might otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent Moslems the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea of what people living in the twentieth century should be. The old helplessness in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate belief in man’s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.

  Abdeslam is not a happy person. He sees his world, which he knows is a good world, being assailed from all sides, slowly crumbling before his eyes. He has no means of understanding me should I try to explain to him that in this age what he considers to be religion is called superstition, and that religion today has come to be a desperate attempt to integrate metaphysics with science. Something will have to be found to replace the basic wisdom which has been destroyed, but the discovery will not be soon; neither Abdeslam nor I will ever know of it.

  Yallah

  Introduction to Photographic Book on the Sahara by Peter W. Haeberlin, 1956

  THE WESTERN SAHARA is one of the last great terrae incognitae left on this shrinking planet – a vast, mysterious lunar land which seems almost to possess natural laws of its own. It could scarcely be nearer to Europe without being in Europe, and yet the traveler there could not feel himself farther from the world he knows, even if he were to lose himself in the deepest jungle of the Mato Grosso. Since it is fashionable at the moment to believe that man has more or less completed his conquest of nature, people speak confidently of having “subdued” the Sahara because they have managed to scratch three tiny trails across its surface, and because they have succeeded, temporarily at least, in persuading certain of the inhabitants not to engage in their time-honored pursuit of pillaging the voyager’s camp. But let the rising tide of Moslem desire for independence from European domination move a little farther south from Algeria, a little farther north from the Senegal, and the three narrow ribbons of trail would be useless; the Sahara would then have to be flown across rather than ridden across, the sand-covered trails would no longer be visible even from low-flying planes, and conditions all over the western Sahara would again be what they were in Rio de Oro two decades ago. On paper Rio de Oro belonged to Spain, but in fact it belonged to the men who lived there; the holes shot in the wings of any plane which flew too low to please the natives proved that. It is one thing to “own” land, and another to be able to set foot on it.

  Yallah (the title means ‘Let’s go’ in Arabic): this book of photographs of the Sahara by Peter Haeberlin was initially published in German in 1956 and a year later in English.

  But at the moment of writing there are, between the Nile valley and the Atlantic, three trails along which motor vehicles regularly pass, and they are referred to as the lifelines of the French Empire. The most recently opened and least frequented of these is the ancient Piste Imperiale, which leads from Morocco to Senegal, passing through Mauritania. Next, to the east, there is the Oran-Gao trail which follows the dry Zousfana-Saoura river valleys as far as it can, and then plunges straight across one of the most formidable regions in all the Sahara, the Tanezrouft. And finally, farthest east, there is the original and classic route from Algiers southward, passing through the Territory of the M’Zab and the principal towns of the north Sahara: Ghardaïa, El Goléa and In Salah, through the Hoggar Mountains, and into the Niger Colony to Zinder. Except for the final section of the trail, this is the route taken by the Haardt Audouin Expedition in 1923, which accomplished the first crossing of the Sahara using automotive power. And this is also the itinerary followed by Peter Haeberlin.

  The course of each of these trails was determined many centuries ago by the inhabitants of the desert, with an eye to maximum avoidance of the areg (singular: erg), those mountainous seas of sand which are scattered across the face of the Sahara, covering, perhaps contrary to popular belief, only about ten percent of its surface, but providing the greatest single obstacle to locomotion there. If a trail is far from the erg, even after a strong wind it will still be visible, but if it passes near to such a region
, as is inevitable at certain points, the navigator’s difficulties begin, for it will be covered, often for considerable distances, and he risks going astray and getting bogged down in the deep sand at some spot just far enough removed from the zone of passing vehicles so that his efforts to orientate himself or to make his presence known will be wholly futile. Then the supplementary water rations he has brought along assume an almost derisory character: what are a few extra days in the face of the infinite supply of sun and unbroken silence which the Sahara has at its disposal?

  This book is a record of one man’s journey southward. He went across the desolate stretches of the Algerian tell, entire regions of which are hidden beneath snow in the winter months, to Djelfa, one of the saddest places in the world – this in spite of the fact that the town is in the mountains of the Ouled Naïl and is the center from which the Berber dancing girls bearing that name set out on their travels to gladden the hearts of men, and to which they return, after having earned their dowries in the brothels of North Africa, on their way back to wed the men of their tribe who are waiting for them. South of here are the gaps in the final range of saw-tooth mountains which separate the north from the desert, and the first oasis, Laghouat.

  Since the importance of an oasis is calculated by the number of female, date-bearing palms it possesses, Laghouat may be counted as one of the poorer oases. However, it is the first place where one sees the seguiat, or channels of running water which are so essential to the cultivation of the Saharan oases. For these palm forests which dot the face of the desert are man-made, and require unceasing work if they are to continue their existence. Wherever the subterranean sheets of water (which lie in well-nigh every part of the Sahara) were found to be close enough to the surface, men discovered ways of bringing that water out of the ground and using it to irrigate the immediate vicinity. The original Negrito population doubtless had instituted some sort of irrigation before the Arabs arrived during the centuries following the Hegira, but it was the latter who devised the amazingly complex systems of aqueducts which now operate there. The population of the ksour (the villages within the oases) is still largely Negro, but these are not the same Negroes who were in residence at first. The autochthonous dwellers, hostile to intruders, beat a slow retreat to the region now known as the Tibesti, and the Sudanese imported by the Arab conquerors replaced them as keepers of the oases. Without these black people, who can withstand the fierce climate, it is doubtful that there would be any towns at all in the Sahara. Tending an oasis means continuous effort to expand it; new trees must be set out and transplanted at the edges of the area of cultivation. Only this way can the depredations wrought by the shifting sand be kept pace with; in nearly every oasis there is some region which is slowly but inexorably being buried by creeping dunes.

  South of Laghouat lies the chebka, a highly eroded region, totally devoid of vegetation, whose terrain, strewn with countless small sharp stones, is next to impossible to cross on foot. In the center of this hostile land, at a junction of several dry ravines, is the heptapolis of the M’Zab. It is a curious place, inhabited by a curious people. The Mozabites, often referred to by Europeans as the “puritans of Islam”, belong to the schismatic sect of Abadites, but are designated contemptuously by orthodox Moslems as kharedjiin, “those who have stepped outside” (that is, of the true religion), and this in spite of the fact that they observe a fanatical meticulousness in adhering to the moral precepts of Islam.

  All over North Africa it is the custom for the tolba (men versed in the Koran, but not yet of the status of a fqihh) to sit in the cemeteries on Friday and for a small sum to recite appropriate surat from the holy book to the individual dead, the average person not being sufficiently educated to perform such a rite. The tolba of the M’Zab not only do this, but also frequent the graveyards at night, a custom which has led orthodox Moslems to accuse them of trafficking with black magic. Very likely it is this peculiarity more than anything else, coupled with the fact that they are the shrewdest traders of all the Algerians (“Where there is a Mozabite, the Jew must work with his hands”), which damns them in the eyes of the rest of the native population. They are a tribe of small shopkeepers with their business concentrated in Algiers and the other large cities of the Mediterranean littoral, and their custom is to leave their homes and wives behind in the desert for periods ranging from one to two years, while they make money in the big city. During this time they live penuriously, sleeping under the counters of their shops and eating as little as possible. Back in the M’Zab, their wives are under the surveillance of pitiless matrons whose responsibility it is to see to it that their virtue remains intact during their husbands’ absence. The master’s return is always unexpected, since he never announces his intention beforehand. One day the wife looks up, and there he is, back again for a few weeks to see his orchards, repair his house, renew his acquaintanceship with his sons, and, Allah willing, beget another. Then off he goes again for another indeterminate period, to rejoin his two eldest sons in Oran, or Constantine, or some other place, perhaps taking with him one of his younger sons who is now old enough to work in the shop. It is a serious business, being a Mozabite, and one senses the atmosphere of sobriety the moment one arrives in the place. Children are reprimanded for laughing during their play, and the women, heavily swathed in yards of white cloth so that one invisible eye peers out from within a tunnel of the material, converse in whispers and turn away their faces as one passes.

  Inbreeding has gone on to such an extent since these people first emigrated here from the north that they are almost a race apart; one has the impression that everyone belongs to the same family, so pronounced are the similarities of feature between one man and the next. In general the men are short and slightly squat, with wizened yellowish faces that eternally wear an expression of seriousness, even of dissatisfaction. Doubtless this is the classical countenance of puritans; one could scarcely expect a people who disapprove so highly of pleasure to look otherwise.

  Beyond the M’Zab one moves into Chaamba country. The Chaamba are Semites like the Mozabites, but unlike them they are nomads, and they made life difficult for the French soldiers during the last part of the nineteenth century when France was attempting to link Algeria with her West African colonies; now, like the rest of the Saharans, they are “pacified”, but the legend of their cunning and ferocity still lives on in the market places and cafés of the towns, where tales are told.

  It is in El Goléa that the traveler finds his first opportunity to explore the erg, that vast petrified sea whose unmoving waves are mountains of golden sand, fine as dust El Goléa is more ruin than actuality, more past than present. It is amusing to reflect, as one stands looking up at its decayed fortress, that the name is merely another pronunciation of the word which has finally come to grace Madrid’s famous street, the Calle Alcalá. (In Morocco it is pronounced El Qelâa.)

  Until the advent of European rule (which of course shatters all social, moral, and economic patterns, leaving in their place only inner chaos), the owners of the gardens and administrators of the town were the El Mouadhi, one of the four Chaamba tribes. It was a classical Saharan example: the El Mouadhi preferred living in tents among the dunes to dwelling in town in fixed, unmovable houses. Leaving that indignity to their Negro dependents, who worked the land and tended the palms, they never set foot inside the town until the date-harvest season, and then only for the length of time it took to pack up the dates and carry them back off into the erg. In the Sahara a town does not designate the kind of agglomeration we think of when we use the word. It is a decentralized thing, a whole region, generally coinciding with the extent of the oasis, divided into quite separate villages which may be, as in the case of oases whose form is serpentine because they follow the course of a dry river-bed, even a day’s walk apart. In Salah, for instance, comprises twelve ksour, or villages; it is the political and economic center of a large region called the Tidikelt. How quickly the world changes! In 1891, according to a
bulletin compiled by Commandant Bissuel (Chef de Bataillon au 1er Régiment de Zouaves), one went to In Salah in order to buy ivory, ostrich plumes, panther and lion skins, rhinoceros horns, gold-dust, incense, and slaves. With regard to the last-mentioned commodity, he appends an exhaustive price list as well, which gives a good idea of the relative value of slaves at that time, according to their age and sex. Costs ranged at source (Timbuktu) from fifty francs for a boy between four and ten years’ old, to three hundred fifty francs for a girl not younger than eleven nor older than sixteen. Adults were evaluated at prices between these two extremes. The selling price at In Salah was double or even triple the cost. That was nine years before the beginning of this century.

  Today the traveler passing through In Salah fills his gasoline tank and cools off in the municipal swimming pool. He also spends the night there, because the nearest village is three hundred kilometers in one direction and four hundred twenty in the other; that much importance is still left to the town that once was to the Sahara what Timbuktu was to the Sudan.

  In Salah is an excellent place from which to study at first hand the feggaguir. These underground waterways are triumphs of primitive ingenuity. They consist of miles of gently sloping tunnels, large enough for men to go through if need be; they are fed by wells at their upper terminals, and are constructed in such a manner that each garden is assured of its share (and no more) of a steady flow of water. It is a superior system to that of surface distribution, for evaporation is kept at a minimum, and the inevitable disputes over who has been depriving whom of his rightful supply of water are obviated. In the oases where the canals are open and the flow is controlled by a series of locks which are easily tampered with, lifelong feuds with resultant bloodshed are not uncommon.