The Garden Of Allah

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Garden Of Allah


Domini and Suzanne got to the station of Robertville much too early.
The large hall in which they had to wait was miserably lit, blank and
decidedly cold. The ticket-office was on the left, and the room was
divided into two parts by a broad, low counter, on which the heavy
luggage was placed before being weighed by two unshaven and hulking men
in blue smocks. Three or four Arab touts, in excessively shabby European
clothes and turbans, surrounded Domini with offers of assistance. One,
the dirtiest of the group, with a gaping eye-socket, in which there
was no eye, succeeded by his passionate volubility and impudence in
attaching himself to her in a sort of official capacity. He spoke
fluent, but faulty, French, which attracted Suzanne, and, being
abnormally muscular and active, in an amazingly short time got hold
of all their boxes and bags and ranged them on the counter. He then
indulged in a dramatic performance, which he apparently considered
likely to rouse into life and attention the two unshaven men in smocks,
who were smoking cigarettes, and staring vaguely at the metal sheet on
which the luggage was placed to be weighed. Suzanne remained expectantly
in attendance, and Domini, having nothing to do, and seeing no bench to
rest on, walked slowly up and down the hall near the entrance.

It was now half-past four in the morning, and in the air Domini fancied
that she felt the cold breath of the coming dawn. Beyond the opening of
the station, as she passed and repassed in her slow and aimless walk,
she saw the soaking tarpaulin curtains of the carriage she had just left
glistening in the faint lamp-light. After a few minutes the Arabs she
had noticed on the road entered. Their brown, slipperless feet were
caked with sticky mud, and directly they found themselves under shelter
in a dry place they dropped the robes they had been holding up, and,
bending down, began to flick it off on to the floor with their delicate
fingers. They did this with extraordinary care and precision, rubbed the
soles of their feet repeatedly against the boards, and then put on their
yellow slippers and threw back the hoods which had been drawn over their
heads.

A few French passengers straggled in, yawning and looking irritable.
The touts surrounded them, with noisy offers of assistance. The men in
smocks still continued to smoke and to stare at the metal sheet on the
floor. Although the luggage now extended in quite a long line upon the
counter they paid no attention to it, or to the violent and reiterated
cries of the Arabs who stood behind it, anxious to earn a tip by getting
it weighed and registered quickly. Apparently they were wrapped in
savage dreams. At length a light shone through the small opening of the
ticket-office, the men in smocks stirred and threw down their cigarette
stumps, and the few travellers pressed forward against the counter,
and pointed to their boxes with their sticks and hands. Suzanne Charpot
assumed an expression of attentive suspicion, and Domini ceased
from walking up and down. Several of the recruits came in hastily,
accompanied by two Zouaves. They were wet, and looked dazed and tired
out. Grasping their bags and bundles they went towards the platform. A
train glided slowly in, gleaming faintly with lights. Domini's trunks
were slammed down on the weighing machine, and Suzanne, drawing out her
purse, took her stand before the shining hole of the ticket-office.

In the wet darkness there rose up a sound like a child calling out an
insulting remark. This was followed immediately by the piping of a horn.
With a jerk the train started, passed one by one the station lamps, and,
with a steady jangling and rattling, drew out into the shrouded country.
Domini was in a wretchedly-lit carriage with three Frenchmen, facing
the door which opened on to the platform. The man opposite to her was
enormously fat, with a coal-black beard growing up to his eyes. He wore
black gloves and trousers, a huge black cloth hat, and a thick black
cloak with a black buckle near the throat. His eyes were shut, and his
large, heavy head drooped forward. Domini wondered if he was travelling
to the funeral of some relative. The two other men, one of whom looked
like a commercial traveller, kept shifting their feet upon the hot-water
tins that lay on the floor, clearing their throats and sighing loudly.
One of them coughed, let down the window, spat, drew the window up, sat
sideways, put his legs suddenly up on the seat and groaned. The train
rattled more harshly, and shook from side to side as it got up speed.
Rain streamed down the window-panes, through which it was impossible to
see anything.

Domini still felt alert, but an overpowering sensation of dreariness had
come to her. She did not attribute this sensation to fatigue. She did
not try to analyse it. She only felt as if she had never seen or heard
anything that was not cheerless, as if she had never known anything that
was not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable. What did she remember? A
train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life;
the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf,
their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France,
the stormy voyage, the sordid illness of almost everyone on board, the
approach long after sundown to the small and unknown town, of which it
was impossible to see anything clearly, the marshalling of the recruits
pale with sickness, their pitiful attempt at cheerful singing, angrily
checked by the Zouaves in charge of them, their departure up the hill
carrying their poor belongings, the sleepless night, the sound of the
rain falling, the scents rising from the unseen earth. The tap of the
Italian waiter at the door, the damp drive to the station, the long wait
there, the sneering signal, followed by the piping horn, the jerking and
rattling of the carriage, the dim light within it falling upon the stout
Frenchman in his mourning, the streaming water upon the window-panes.
These few sights, sounds, sensations were like the story of a life to
Domini just then, were more, were like the whole of life; always
dull noise, strange, flitting, pale faces, and an unknown region
that remained perpeturally invisible, and that must surely be ugly or
terrible.

The train stopped frequently at lonely little stations. Domini looked
out, letting down the window for a moment. At each station she saw a
tiny house with a peaked roof, a wooden railing dividing the platform
from the country road, mud, grass bending beneath the weight of
water-drops, and tall, dripping, shaggy eucalyptus trees. Sometimes the
station-master's children peered at the train with curious eyes, and
depressed-looking Arabs, carefully wrapped up, their mouths and chins
covered by folds of linen, got in and out slowly.

Once Domini saw two women, in thin, floating white dresses and spangled
veils, hurrying by like ghosts in the dark. Heavy silver ornaments
jangled on their ankles, above their black slippers splashed with mud.
Their sombre eyes stared out from circles of Kohl, and, with stained,
claret-coloured hands, whose nails were bright red, they clasped their
light and bridal raiment to their prominent breasts. They were escorted
by a gigantic man, almost black, with a zigzag scar across the left
side of his face, who wore a shining brown burnous over a grey woollen
jacket. He pushed the two women into the train as if he were pushing
bales, and got in after them, showing enormous bare legs, with calves
that stuck out like lumps of iron.

The darkness began to fade, and presently, as the grey light grew slowly
stronger, the rain ceased, and it was possible to see through the glass
of the carriage window.

The country began to discover itself, as if timidly, to Domini's eyes.
She had recently noticed that the train was going very slowly, and she
could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp
earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist
ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train
was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned,
without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes
flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather
to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the
soil, over which the dawn, rising from the wet arms of night, shed a
cold and reticent illumination. By a gash in the rounded hills, where
the earth was brownish yellow, a flock of goats with flapping ears
tripped slowly, followed by two Arab boys in rags. One of the boys was
playing upon a pipe coverd with red arabesques. Domini heard two or
three bars of the melody. They were ineffably wild and bird-like,
very clear and sweet. They seemed to her to match exactly the pure and
ascetic light cast by the dawn over these bare, grey hills, and they
stirred her abruptly from the depressed lassitude in which the dreary
chances of recent travel had drowned her. She began, with a certain
faint excitement, to realise that these low, round-backed hills were
Africa, that she was leaving behind the sea, so many of whose waves
swept along European shores, that somewhere, beyond the broken and near
horizon line toward which the train was creeping, lay the great desert,
her destination, with its pale sands and desolate cities, its sunburnt
tribes of workers, its robbers, warriors and priests, its ethereal
mysteries of mirage, its tragic splendours of colour, of tempest and
of heat. A sense of a wider world than the compressed world into which
physical fatigue had decoyed her woke in her brain and heart. The little
Arab, playing carelessly upon his pipe with the red arabesques, was soon
invisible among his goats beside the dry water-course that was probably
the limit of his journeying, but Domini felt that like a musician at the
head of a procession he had played her bravely forward into the dawn and
Africa.

At Ah-Souf Domini changed into another train and had the carriage to
herself. The recruits had reached their destination. Hers was a longer
pilgramage and still towards the sun. She could not afterwards remember
what she thought about during this part of her journey. Subsequent
events so coloured all her memories of Africa that every fold of its
sun-dried soil was endowed in her mind with the significance of a living
thing. Every palm beside a well, every stunted vine and clambering
flower upon an _auberge_ wall, every form of hill and silhouette of
shadow, became in her heart intense with the beauty and the pathos she
used, as a child, to think must lie beyond the sunset.

And so she forgot.

A strange sense of leaving all things behind had stolen over her. She
was really fatigued by travel and by want of sleep, but she did not
know it. Lying back in her seat, with her head against the dirty white
covering of the shaking carriage, she watched the great change that was
coming over the land.

It seemed as if God were putting forth His hand to withdraw gradually
all things of His creation, all the furniture He had put into the great
Palace of the world; as if He meant to leave it empty and utterly naked.

So Domini thought.

First He took the rich and shaggy grass, and all the little flowers
that bloomed modestly in it. Then He drew away the orange groves, the
oleander and the apricot trees, the faithful eucalyptus with its pale
stems and tressy foliage, the sweet waters that fertilised the soil,
making it soft and brown where the plough seamed it into furrows, the
tufted plants and giant reeds that crowd where water is. And still,
as the train ran on, His gifts were fewer. At last even the palms
were gone, and the Barbary fig displayed no longer among the crumbling
boulders its tortured strength, and the pale and fantastic evolutions
of its unnatural foliage. Stones lay everywhere upon the pale yellow or
grey-brown earth. Crystals glittered in the sun like shallow jewels, and
far away, under clouds that were dark and feathery, appeared hard and
relentless mountains, which looked as if they were made of iron carved
into horrible and jagged shapes. Where they fell into ravines they
became black. Their swelling bosses and flanks, sharp sometimes as
the spines of animals, were steel coloured. Their summits were purple,
deepening where the clouds came down to ebony.

Journeying towards these terrible fastnesses were caravans on which
Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest. Many Kabyles, fairer
than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their rock villages.

Over the withered earth they went towards the distant mountains and the
clouds. The sun was hidden. The wind continued to rise. Sand found its
way in through the carriage windows. The mountains, as Domini saw them
more clearly, looked more gloomy, more unearthly. There was something
unnatural in their hard outlines, in the rigid mystery of their
innumerable clefts. That all these people should be journeying towards
them was pathetic, and grieved the imagination.

The wind seemed so cold, now the sun was hidden, that she had drawn both
the windows up and thrown a rug over her. She put her feet up on the
opposite seat, and half closed her eyes. But she still turned them
towards the glass on her left, and watched. It seemed to her
quite impossible that this shaking and slowly moving train had any
destination. The desolation of the country had become so absolute that
she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying
beyond. She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of
sterility. Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the
world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had
never looked and of which He had no knowledge.

Abruptly she felt as if her father had entered into some such region
when he forced his way out of his religion. And in this region he had
died. She had stood on the verge of it by his deathbed. Now she was in
it.

There were no Arabs journeying now. No tents huddled among the low
bushes. The last sign of vegetation was obliterated. The earth rose and
fell in a series of humps and depressions, interspersed with piles of
rock. Every shade of yellow and of brown mingled and flowed away towards
the foot of the mountains. Here and there dry water-courses showed their
teeth. Their crumbling banks were like the rind of an orange. Little
birds, the hue of the earth, with tufted crests, tripped jauntily among
the stones, fluttered for a few yards and alighted, with an air of
strained alertness, as if their minute bodies were full of trembling
wires. They were the only living things Domini could see.

She thought again of her father. In some such region as this his soul
must surely be wandering, far away from God.

She let down the glass.

The wind was really cold and blowing gustily. She drank it in as if
she were tasting a new wine, and she was conscious at once that she
had never before breathed such air. There was a wonderful, a startling
flavour in it, the flavour of gigantic spaces and of rolling leagues of
emptiness. Neither among mountains nor upon the sea had she ever found
an atmosphere so fiercely pure, clean and lively with unutterable
freedom. She leaned out to it, shutting her eyes. And now that she saw
nothing her palate savoured it more intensely. The thought of her father
fled from her. All detailed thoughts, all the minutia of the mind were
swept away. She was bracing herself to an encounter with something
gigantic, something unshackled, the being from whose lips this wonderful
breath flowed.

When two lovers kiss their breath mingles, and, if they really love,
each is conscious that in the breath of the loved one is the loved one's
soul, coming forth from the temple of the body through the temple door.
As Domini leaned out, seeing nothing, she was conscious that in this
breath she drank there was a soul, and it seemed to her that it was the
soul which flames in the centre of things, and beyond. She could not
think any longer of her father as an outcast because he had abandoned a
religion. For all religions were surely here, marching side by side, and
behind them, background to them, there was something far greater than
any religion. Was it snow or fire? Was it the lawlessness of that which
has made laws, or the calm of that which has brought passion into being?
Greater love than is in any creed, or greater freedom than is in any
human liberty? Domini only felt that if she had ever been a slave at
this moment she would have died of joy, realising the boundless freedom
that circles this little earth.

"Thank God for it!" she murmured aloud.

Her own words woke her to a consciousness of ordinary things--or made
her sleep to the eternal.

She closed the window and sat down.

A little later the sun came out again, and the various shades of yellow
and of orange that played over the wrinkled earth deepened and glowed.
Domini had sunk into a lethargy so complete that, though not asleep, she
was scarcely aware of the sun. She was dreaming of liberty.

Presently the train slackened and stopped. She heard a loud chattering
of many voices and looked out. The sun was now shining brilliantly,
and she saw a station crowded with Arabs in white burnouses, who were
vociferously greeting friends in the train, were offering enormous
oranges for sale to the passengers, or were walking up and down gazing
curiously into the carriages, with the unblinking determination and
indifference to a return of scrutiny which she had already noticed and
thought animal. A guard came up, told her the place was El-Akbara, and
that the train would stay there ten minutes to wait for the train from
Beni-Mora. She decided to get out and stretch her cramped limbs. On
the platform she found Suzanne, looking like a person who had just been
slapped. One side of the maid's face was flushed and covered with a
faint tracery of tiny lines. The other was greyish white. Sleep hung
in her eyes, over which the lids drooped as if they were partially
paralysed. Her fingers were yellow from peeling an orange, and her smart
little hat was cocked on one side. There were grains of sand on her
black gown, and when she saw her mistress she at once began to
compress her lips, and to assume the expression of obstinate patience
characteristic of properly-brought-up servants who find themselves
travelling far from home in outlandish places.

"Have you been asleep, Suzanne?"

"No, Mam'zelle."

"You've had an orange?"

"I couldn't get it down, Mam'zelle."

"Would you like to see if you can get a cup of coffee here?"

"No, thank you, Mam'zelle. I couldn't touch this Arab stuff."

"We shall soon be there now."

Suzanne made all her naturally small features look much smaller, glanced
down at her skirt, and suddenly began to shake the grains of sand from
it in an outraged manner, at the same time extending her left foot. Two
or three young Arabs came up and stood, staring, round her. Their eyes
were magnificent, and gravely observant. Suzanne went on shaking and
patting her skirt, and Domini walked away down the platform, wondering
what a French maid's mind was like. Suzanne's certainly had its
limitations. It was evident that she was horrified by the sight of bare
legs. Why?

As Domini walked along the platform among the fruit-sellers, the guides,
the turbaned porters with their badges, the staring children and the
ragged wanderers who thronged about the train, she thought of the desert
to which she was now so near. It lay, she knew, beyond the terrific
wall of rock that faced her. But she could see no opening. The towering
summits of the cliffs, jagged as the teeth of a wolf, broke crudely upon
the serene purity of the sky. Somewhere, concealed in the darkness of
the gorge at their feet, was the mouth from which had poured forth that
wonderful breath, quivering with freedom and with unearthly things. The
sun was already declining, and the light it cast becoming softened and
romantic. Soon there would be evening in the desert. Then there would
be night. And she would be there in the night with all things that the
desert holds.

A train of camels was passing on the white road that descended into the
shadow of the gorge. Some savage-looking men accompanied them, crying
continually, "Oosh! Oosh!" They disappeared, desert-men with their
desert-beasts, bound no doubt on some tremendous journey through the
regions of the sun. Where would they at last unlade the groaning camels?
Domini saw them in the midst of dunes red with the dying fires of the
west. And their shadows lay along the sands like weary things reposing.

She started when a low voice spoke to her in French, and, turning round,
saw a tall Arab boy, magnificently dressed in pale blue cloth trousers,
a Zouave jacket braided with gold, and a fez, standing near her. She was
struck by the colour of his skin, which was faint as the colour of _cafe
au lait_, and by the contrast between his huge bulk and his languid,
almost effeminate, demeanour. As she turned he smiled at her calmly, and
lifted one hand toward the wall of rock.

"Madame has seen the desert?" he asked.

"Never," answered Domini.

"It is the garden of oblivion," he said, still in a low voice, and
speaking with a delicate refinement that was almost mincing. "In the
desert one forgets everything; even the little heart one loves, and the
desire of one's own soul."

"How can that be?" asked Domini.

"Shal-lah. It is the will of God. One remembers nothing any more."

His eyes were fixed upon the gigantic pinnacles of the rocks. There was
something fanatical and highly imaginative in their gaze.

"What is your name?" Domini asked.

"Batouch, Madame. You are going to Beni-Mora?"

"Yes, Batouch."

"I too. To-night, under the mimosa trees, I shall compose a poem. It
will be addressed to Irena, the dancing-girl. She is like the little
moon when it first comes up above the palm trees."

Just then the train from Beni-Mora ran into the station, and Domini
turned to seek her carriage. As she was coming to it she noticed, with
the pang of the selfish traveller who wishes to be undisturbed, that
a tall man, attended by an Arab porter holding a green bag, was at the
door of it and was evidently about to get in. He glanced round as Domini
came up, half drew back rather awkwardly as if to allow her to precede
him, then suddenly sprang in before her. The Arab lifted in the bag,
and the man, endeavouring hastily to thrust some money into his hand,
dropped the coin, which fell down between the step of the carriage
and the platform. The Arab immediately made a greedy dive after it,
interposing his body between Domini and the train; and she was obliged
to stand waiting while he looked for it, grubbing frantically in
the earth with his brown fingers, and uttering muffled exclamations,
apparently of rage. Meanwhile, the tall man had put the green bag up
on the rack, gone quickly to the far side of the carriage, and sat down
looking out of the window.

Domini was struck by the mixture of indecision and blundering haste
which he had shown, and by his impoliteness. Evidently he was not a
gentleman, she thought, or he would surely have obeyed his first impulse
and allowed her to get into the train before him. It seemed, too, as
if he were determined to be discourteous, for he sat with his shoulder
deliberately turned towards the door, and made no attempt to get his
Arab out of the way, although the train was just about to start. Domini
was very tired, and she began to feel angry with him, contemptuous too.
The Arab could not find the money, and the little horn now piped its
warning of departure. It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at
once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara. She tried to pass the
grovelling Arab, but as she did so he suddenly sprang up, jumped on
to the step of the carriage, and, thrusting his body half through the
doorway, began to address a torrent of Arabic to the passenger within.
The horn sounded again, and the carriage jerked backwards preparatory to
starting on its way to Beni-Mora.

Domini caught hold of the short European jacket the Arab was wearing,
and said in French:

"You must let me get in at once. The train is going."

The man, however, intent on replacing the coin he had lost, took no
notice of her, but went on vociferating and gesticulating. The traveller
said something in Arabic. Domini was now very angry. She gripped the
jacket, exerted all her force, and pulled the Arab violently from the
door. He alighted on the platform beside her and nearly fell. Before he
had recovered himself she sprang up into the train, which began to
move at that very moment. As she got in, the man who had caused all the
bother was leaning forward with a bit of silver in his hand, looking as
if he were about to leave his seat. Domini cast a glance of contempt at
him, and he turned quickly to the window again and stared out, at the
same time putting the coin back into his pocket. A dull flush rose on
his cheek, but he attempted no apology, and did not even offer to fasten
the lower handle of the door.