The Garden Of Allah

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Garden Of Allah


"What a boor!" Domini thought as she bent out of the window to do it.

When she turned from the door, after securing the handle, she found the
carriage full of a pale twilight. The train was stealing into the gorge,
following the caravan of camels which she had seen disappearing. She
paid no more attention to her companion, and her feeling of acute
irritation against him died away for the moment. The towering cliffs
cast mighty shadows, the darkness deepened, the train, quickening its
speed, seemed straining forward into the arms of night. There was a
chill in the air. Domini drank it into her lungs again, and again
was startled, stirred, by the life and the mentality of it. She was
conscious of receiving it with passion, as if, indeed, she held her lips
to a mouth and drank some being's very nature into hers. She forgot her
recent vexation and the man who had caused it. She forgot everything in
mere sensation. She had no time to ask, "Whither am I going?" She felt
like one borne upon a wave, seaward, to the wonder, to the danger,
perhaps, of a murmuring unknown. The rocks leaned forward; their teeth
were fastened in the sky; they enclosed the train, banishing the sun and
the world from all the lives within it. She caught a fleeting glimpse of
rushing waters far beneath her; of crumbling banks, covered with debris
like the banks of a disused quarry; of shattered boulders, grouped in a
wild disorder, as if they had been vomited forth from some underworld
or cast headlong from the sky; of the flying shapes of fruit trees,
mulberries and apricot trees, oleanders and palms; of dull yellow walls
guarding pools the colour of absinthe, imperturbable and still. A strong
impression of increasing cold and darkness grew in her, and the noises
of the train became hollow, and seemed to be expanding, as if they were
striving to press through the impending rocks and find an outlet
into space; failing, they rose angrily, violently, in Domini's ears,
protesting, wrangling, shouting, declaiming. The darkness became like
the darkness of a nightmare. All the trees vanished, as if they fled in
fear. The rocks closed in as if to crush the train. There was a moment
in which Domini shut her eyes, like one expectant of a tremendous blow
that cannot be avoided.

She opened them to a flood of gold, out of which the face of a man
looked, like a face looking out of the heart of the sun.



CHAPTER III

It flashed upon her with the desert, with the burning heaps of carnation
and orange-coloured rocks, with the first sand wilderness, the first
brown villages glowing in the late radiance of the afternoon like carven
things of bronze, the first oasis of palms, deep green as a wave of the
sea and moving like a wave, the first wonder of Sahara warmth and Sahara
distance. She passed through the golden door into the blue country, and
saw this face, and, for a moment, moved by the exalted sensation of a
magical change in all her world, she looked at it simply as a new sight
presented, with the sun, the mighty rocks, the hard, blind villages, and
the dense trees, to her eyes, and connected it with nothing. It was part
of this strange and glorious desert region to her. That was all, for a
moment.

In the play of untempered golden light the face seemed pale. It was
narrow, rather long, with marked and prominent features, a nose with a
high bridge, a mouth with straight, red lips, and a powerful chin. The
eyes were hazel, almost yellow, with curious markings of a darker shade
in the yellow, dark centres that looked black, and dark outer circles.
The eyelashes were very long, the eyebrows thick and strongly curved.
The forehead was high, and swelled out slightly above the temples. There
was no hair on the face, which was closely shaved. Near the mouth were
two faint lines that made Domini think of physical suffering, and also
of mediaeval knights. Despite the glory of the sunshine there seemed to
be a shadow falling across the face.

This was all that Domini noticed before the spell of change and the
abrupt glory was broken, and she knew that she was staring into the face
of the man who had behaved so rudely at the station of El-Akbara. The
knowledge gave her a definite shock, and she thought that her expression
must have changed abruptly, for a dull flush rose on the stranger's thin
cheeks and mounted to his rugged forehead. He glanced out of the window
and moved his hands uneasily. Domini noticed that they scarcely tallied
with his face. Though scrupulously clean, they looked like the hands of
a labourer, hard, broad, and brown. Even his wrists, and a small section
of his left forearm, which showed as he lifted his left hand from one
knee to the other, were heavily tinted by the sun. The spaces between
the fingers were wide, as they usually are in hands accustomed to
grasping implements, but the fingers themselves were rather delicate and
artistic.

Domini observed this swiftly. Then she saw that her neighbour was
unpleasantly conscious of her observation. This vexed her vaguely,
perhaps because even so trifling a circumstance was like a thin link
between them. She snapped it by ceasing to look at or think of him. The
window was down. A delicate and warm breeze drifted in, coming from
the thickets of the palms. In flashing out of the darkness of the gorge
Domini had had the sensation of passing into a new world and a new
atmosphere. The sensation stayed with her now that she was no longer
dreaming or giving the reins to her imagination, but was calmly herself.
Against the terrible rampart of rock the winds beat across the land of
the Tell. But they die there frustrated. And the rains journey thither
and fail, sinking into the absinthe-coloured pools of the gorge. And the
snows and even the clouds stop, exhausted in their pilgrimage. The gorge
is not their goal, but it is their grave, and the desert never sees
their burial. So Domini's first sense of casting away the known
remained, and even grew, but now strongly and quietly. It was well
founded, she thought. For she looked out of the carriage window towards
the barrier she was leaving, and saw that on this side, guarding the
desert from the world that is not desert, it was pink in the evening
light, deepening here and there to rose colour, whereas on the far side
it had a rainy hue as of rocks in England. And there was a lustre of
gold in the hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as
the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of
the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The
wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with
precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence
of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled
itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost savage, the colour of summer
that never ceases, of heat that seldom dies, in a land where there is no
autumn and seldom a flitting cold.

Down on the road near the village there were people; old men playing
the "lady's game" with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from
flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and
beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground
with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and
green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose
in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And
as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic
solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the
palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky
courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of
homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the
golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls
in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers
to their velvet-footed beasts.

The caravan which Domini had seen descending into the gorge reappeared,
moving deliberately along the desert road towards the south. A
watch-tower peeped above the palms. Doves were circling round it. Many
of them were white. They flew like ivory things above this tower of
glowing bronze, which slept at the foot of the pink rocks. On the left
rose a mass of blood-red earth and stone. Slanting rays of the sun
struck it, and it glowed mysteriously like a mighty jewel.

As Domini leaned out of the window, and the salt crystals sparkled to
her eyes, and the palms swayed languidly above the waters, and the rose
and mauve of the hills, the red and orange of the earth, streamed by
in the flames of the sun before the passing train like a barbaric
procession, to the sound of the hidden drums, the cry of the hidden
priest, and all the whispering melodies of these strange and unknown
lives, tears started into her eyes. The entrance into this land of flame
and colour, through its narrow and terrific portal, stirred her almost
beyond her present strength. The glory of this world mounted to her
heart, oppressing it. The embrace of Nature was so violent that it
crushed her. She felt like a little fly that had sought to wing its
way to the sun and, at a million miles' distance from it, was being
shrivelled by its heat. When all the voices of the village fainted
away she was glad, although she strained her ears to hear their fading
echoes. Suddenly she knew that she was very tired, so tired that
emotions acted upon her as physical exertion acts upon an exhausted man.
She sat down and shut her eyes. For a long time she stayed with her eyes
shut, but she knew that on the windows strange lights were glittering,
that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of
the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the
sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired.
Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the
celestial mountains in the visions of the saints. Perhaps the long chain
of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been
powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves of unearthly violets, and
the desert was not cloudy in the distance towards the Zibans with the
magical blue she thought she saw there, a blue neither of sky nor sea,
but like the hue at the edge of a flame in the heart of a wood fire. She
often wondered, but she never knew.

The sound of a movement made her look up. Her companion was changing his
place and going to the other side of the compartment. He walked softly,
no doubt with the desire not to disturb Domini. His back was towards her
for an instant, and she noticed that he was a powerful man, though
very thin, and that his gait was heavy. It made her think again of his
labourer's hands, and she began to wonder idly what was his rank and
what he did. He sat down in the far corner on the same side as herself
and stared out of his window, crossing his legs. He wore large boots
with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for
walking in. His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor.
The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to
the figure than English clothes generally are. He had on a black silk
necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle. By the
way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too,
was seeing the desert for the first time. There was something almost
passionately attentive in his attitude, something of strained eagerness
in that part of his face which she could see from where she was
sitting. His cheek was not pale, as she had thought at first, but brown,
obviously burnt by the sun of Africa. But she felt that underneath the
sunburn there was pallor. She fancied he might be a painter, and was
noting all the extraordinary colour effects with the definiteness of a
man who meant, perhaps, to reproduce them on canvas.

The light, which had now the peculiar, almost supernatural softness
and limpidity of light falling at evening from a declining sun in a hot
country, came full upon him, and brightened his hair. Domini saw that it
was brown with some chestnut in it, thick, and cut extremely short, as
if his head had recently been shaved. She felt convinced that he was not
French. He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of
Russia. He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observation.
It suggested great force not merely of body, but also of mind, an almost
abnormal concentration upon the thing observed. This was a man who
could surely shut out the whole world to look at a grain of sand, if he
thought it beautiful or interesting.

They were near Beni-Mora now. Its palms appeared far off, and in the
midst of them a snow-white tower. The Sahara lay beyond and around it,
rolling away from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if
they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. A long spur of
rose-coloured mountains stretched away towards the south. The sun was
very near his setting. Small, red clouds floated in the western quarter
of the sky, and the far desert was becoming mysteriously dim and blue,
like a remote sea. Here and there thin wreaths of smoke ascended from
it, and lights glittered in it, like earth-bound stars.

Domini had never before understood how strangely, how strenuously,
colour can at moments appeal to the imagination. In this pageant of the
East she saw arise the naked soul of Africa; no faded, gentle thing,
fearful of being seen, fearful of being known and understood; but a
phenomenon vital, bold and gorgeous, like the sound of a trumpet pealing
a great _reveille_. As she looked on this flaming land laid fearlessly
bare before her, disdaining the clothing of grass, plant and flower, of
stream and tree, displaying itself with an almost brazen _insouciance_,
confident in its spacious power, and in its golden pride, her heart
leaped up as if in answer to a deliberate appeal. The fatigue in her
died. She responded to this _reveille_ like a young warrior who, so
soon as he is wakened, stretches out his hand for his sword. The sunset
flamed on her clear, white cheeks, giving them its hue of life. And
her nature flamed to meet it. In the huge spaces of the Sahara her soul
seemed to hear the footsteps of Freedom treading towards the south.
And all her dull perplexities, all her bitterness of _ennui_, all her
questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind
into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking
herself, "What am I?" She had felt infinitely small confronted with the
pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she
did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something
large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within
her to greet all this nobility, all this mighty frankness and fierce,
undressed sincerity of nature. This desert and this sun would be her
comrades, and she was not afraid of them.

Without being aware of it she breathed out a great sigh, feeling the
necessity of liberating her joy of spirit, of letting the body, however
inadequately and absurdly, make some demonstration in response to the
secret stirring of the soul. The man in the far corner of the carriage
turned and looked at her. When she heard this movement Domini remembered
her irritation against him at El-Akbara. In this splendid moment the
feeling seemed to her so paltry and contemptible that she had a lively
impulse to make amends for the angry look she had cast at him. Possibly,
had she been quite normal, she would have checked such an impulse. The
voice of conventionality would have made itself heard. But Domini could
act vigorously, and quite carelessly, when she was moved. And she was
deeply moved now, and longed to lavish the humanity, the sympathy and
ardour that were quick in her. In answer to the stranger's movement she
turned towards him, opening her lips to speak to him. Afterwards she
never knew what she meant to say, whether, if she had spoken, the words
would have been French or English. For she did not speak.

The man's face was illuminated by the setting sun as he sat half round
on his seat, leaning with his right hand palm downwards on the cushions.
The light glittered on his short hair. He had pushed back his soft hat,
and exposed his high, rugged forehead to the air, and his brown left
hand gripped the top of the carriage door. The large, knotted veins
on it, the stretched sinews, were very perceptible. The hand looked
violent. Domini's eyes fell on it as she turned. The impulse to speak
began to fail, and when she glanced up at the man's face she no longer
felt it at all. For, despite the glory of the sunset on him, there
seemed to be a cold shadow in his eyes. The faint lines near his
mouth looked deeper than before, and now suggested most powerfully the
dreariness, the harshness of long-continued suffering. The mouth itself
was compressed and grim, and the man's whole expression was fierce and
startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure
inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask
confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For
a minute the man's eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them
unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which.
Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to
her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the
Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this
stranger stood by him. The thing was as vital, and fled as swiftly as a
hallucination in a madman's brain.

Domini looked down. All the triumph died out in her, all the exquisite
consciousness of the freedom, the colour, the bigness of life. For there
was a black spot on the sun--humanity, God's mistake in the great plan
of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely
conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the
cold of the sunless places in the golden dominion of the sun.

The man had dropped his eyes too. His hand fell from the door to his
knee. He did not move till the train ran into Beni-Mora, and the eager
faces of countless Arabs stared in upon them from the scorched field of
manoeuvres where Spahis were exercising in the gathering twilight.



CHAPTER IV

Having given her luggage ticket to a porter, Domini passed out of the
station followed by Suzanne, who looked and walked like an exhausted
marionette. Batouch, who had emerged from a third-class compartment
before the train stopped, followed them closely, and as they reached the
jostling crowd of Arabs which swarmed on the roadway he joined them with
the air of a proprietor.

"Which is Madame's hotel?"

Domini looked round.

"Ah, Batouch!"

Suzanne jumped as if her string had been sharply pulled, and cast a
glance of dreary suspicion upon the poet. She looked at his legs, then
upwards.

He wore white socks which almost met his pantaloons. Scarcely more than
an inch of pale brown skin was visible. The gold buttons of his jacket
glittered brightly. His blue robe floated majestically from his broad
shoulders, and the large tassel of his fez fell coquettishly towards
his left ear, above which was set a pale blue flower with a woolly green
leaf.

Suzanne was slightly reassured by the flower and the bright buttons.
She felt that they needed a protector in this mob of shouting brown and
black men, who clamoured about them like savages, exposing bare legs and
arms, even bare chests, in a most barbarous manner.

"We are going to the Hotel du Desert," Domini continued. "Is it far?"

"Only a few minutes, Madame."

"I shall like to walk there."

Suzanne collapsed. Her bones became as wax with apprehension. She saw
herself toiling over leagues of sand towards some nameless hovel.

"Suzanne, you can get into the omnibus and take the handbags."

At the sweet word omnibus a ray of hope stole into the maid's heart, and
when a nicely-dressed man, in a long blue coat and indubitable trousers,
assisted her politely into a vehicle which was unmistakable she almost
wept for joy.

Meanwhile Domini, escorted serenely by the poet, walked towards the long
gardens of Beni-Mora. She passed over a wooden bridge. White dust was
flying from the road, along which many of the Arab aristocracy were
indolently strolling, carrying lightly in their hands small red roses or
sprigs of pink geranium. In their white robes they looked, she thought,
like monks, though the cigarettes many of them were smoking fought
against the illusion. Some of them were dressed like Batouch in
pale-coloured cloth. They held each other's hands loosely as they
sauntered along, chattering in soft contralto voices. Two or three were
attended by servants, who walked a pace or two behind them on the left.
These were members of great families, rulers of tribes, men who had
influence over the Sahara people. One, a shortish man with a coal-black
beard, moved so majestically that he seemed almost a giant. His face was
very pale. On one of his small, almost white, hands glittered a diamond
ring. A boy with a long, hooked nose strolled gravely near him, wearing
brown kid gloves and a turban spangled with gold.

"That is the Kaid of Tonga, Madame," whispered Batouch, looking at the
pale man reverently. "He is here _en permission_."

"How white he is."

"They tried to poison him. Ever since he is ill inside. That is his
brother. The brown gloves are very chic."

A light carriage rolled rapidly by them in a white mist of dust. It was
drawn by a pair of white mules, who whisked their long tails as they
trotted briskly, urged on by a cracking whip. A big boy with heavy brown
eyes was the coachman. By his side sat a very tall young negro with a
humorous pointed nose, dressed in primrose yellow. He grinned at Batouch
out of the mist, which accentuated the coal-black hue of his whimsical,
happy face.

"That is the Agha's son with Mabrouk."

They turned aside from the road and came into a long tunnel formed by
mimosa trees that met above a broad path. To right and left were other
little paths branching among the trunks of fruit trees and the narrow
twigs of many bushes that grew luxuriantly. Between sandy brown banks,
carefully flattened and beaten hard by the spades of Arab gardeners,
glided streams of opaque water that were guided from the desert by a
system of dams. The Kaid's mill watched over them and the great wall
of the fort. In the tunnel the light was very delicate and tinged with
green. The noise of the water flowing was just audible. A few Arabs were
sitting on benches in dreamy attitudes, with their heelless slippers
hanging from the toes of their bare feet. Beyond the entrance of the
tunnel Domini could see two horsemen galloping at a tremendous pace into
the desert. Their red cloaks streamed out over the sloping quarters of
their horses, which devoured the earth as if in a frenzy of emulation.
They disappeared into the last glories of the sun, which still lingered
on the plain and blazed among the summits of the red mountains.

All the contrasts of this land were exquisite to Domini and, in some
mysterious way, suggested eternal things; whispering through colour,
gleam, and shadow, through the pattern of leaf and rock, through the
air, now fresh, now tenderly warm and perfumed, through the silence that
hung like a filmy cloud in the golden heaven.

She and Batouch entered the tunnel, passing at once into definite
evening. The quiet of these gardens was delicious, and was only
interrupted now and then by the sound of wheels upon the road as a
carriage rolled by to some house which was hidden in the distance of the
oasis. The seated Arabs scarcely disturbed it by their murmured talk.
Many of them indeed said nothing, but rested like lotus-eaters in
graceful attitudes, with hanging hands, and eyes, soft as the eyes of
gazelles, that regarded the shadowy paths and creeping waters with a
grave serenity born of the inmost spirit of idleness.

But Batouch loved to talk, and soon began a languid monologue.

He told Domini that he had been in Paris, where he had been the guest of
a French poet who adored the East; that he himself was "instructed," and
not like other Arabs; that he smoked the hashish and could sing the love
songs of the Sahara; that he had travelled far in the desert, to Souf
and to Ouargla beyond the ramparts of the Dunes; that he composed
verses in the night when the uninstructed, the brawlers, the drinkers of
absinthe and the domino players were sleeping or wasting their time
in the darkness over the pastimes of the lewd, when the sybarites
were sweating under the smoky arches of the Moorish baths, and the
_marechale_ of the dancing-girls sat in her flat-roofed house guarding
the jewels and the amulets of her gay confederation. These verses were
written both in Arabic and in French, and the poet of Paris and his
friends had found them beautiful as the dawn, and as the palm trees of
Ourlana by the Artesian wells. All the girls of the Ouled Nails were
celebrated in these poems--Aishoush and Irena, Fatma and Baali. In them
also were enshrined legends of the venerable marabouts who slept in the
Paradise of Allah, and tales of the great warriors who had fought above
the rocky precipices of Constantine and far off among the sands of
the South. They told the stories of the Koulouglis, whose mothers were
Moorish slaves, and romances in which figured the dark-skinned Beni
M'Zab and the freed negroes who had fled away from the lands in the very
heart of the sun.