# The Fire of Desert Folk/Chapter 3

THE PRIMITIVE RACES OF THE NORTH
WE left the Balear without a tinge of regret and were soon in our hotel, elaborating a plan for visiting the different parts of the city.
We soon discovered that, aside from this revelation of the marked difference in the psychology of the Spanish and French colonizations, Oran possesses nothing uniquely distinctive or particularly interesting. First of all, there are no real Arabs in the town, as I cantiot accept as such the black gentlemen wearing French shoes from Raoul and fantastically large trousers with vests and coats to match, even though they do sport bournouses and extraordinarily high, large hats of multicolored straw. Moreover, they get drunk in the bars and small cafes on aniseed brandy.
The miserable Arab quarter of the town, the so-called "village nègre," with its small, low and terribly dirty, evil-smelling houses and its miniature maidcet-place, where heaps of things that seem to have no possible value or use anywhere in the world are exhibited for sale alongside the fruit and vegetables, has not the faintest resemblance to Moorish towns, even the smallest ones. It gives one the feeling that the French purposely left ​this pseudo-Arab quarter to prove that sympathy is possible between themselves and Islam.
These so-called Arabs of the Oran streets are either the local nabobs or neighboring landowners, possessing larger or smaller holdings. Both are totally under the influence of the French civilization, and for the excellent red wine of the region, the Royal Kebir, they are willing to disregard even the laws of the Koran.
In the Arab quarter lives an agglomeration of individuals from many different tribes and of shelterless beggars, pariahs and human flotsam, scavenging birds living from day to day, sometimes dangerous species of these, though such are rare under the energetic and successful hunting of their kind by the police.
When my wife and I sought for a place where we could hear native music and songs and see the native dances, we found a most unprepossessing den, where a whole sanitary corps should have first been set at work to blaze the way for us. It was a high price for my wife to pay, but she had come to Africa with the very definite purpose of studying the native tribal music and of searching it out in all its forms. We were met by two big, strong and over-familiar men, who piloted us to a small room with only one narrow window and ushered us to seats on a big chest, covered with a cushion that had long ago earned its right to retire from further service. Then the dancing-women entered, in multi-colored dresses and with innumerable jewels and trinkets about their necks and in their ears and hair. Observing these gaudy decorations, I recognized them as coming from the neighborhood of the Gare de l'Est, where numerous factories ​turning out this sort of jewelry and bizarre ornaments aie to be found. The women wore no veils and had their eyes heavily underlined with black and their eyebrows brought together in one continuous dark line.
Their painted cheeks and lips and the circles, zigzags, arrows and squares tattooed all over their faces, made such a vivid picture that I started to photograph them, but was rewarded only by the precipitate flight of all save a single young and supple woman with a sharp, rapacious expression. When I sought the reason for this miniature hegira, one of the men explained that the ordinary Moslem believes that to have one's picture taken brings misfortune and sickness and that consequently only the young dancer and they, the men, could be snapped,
"Are you, then, not followers of the Prophet?" He shrugged his shoulders and answered:
"Yes, though not of Mahomet but of Ben Sliman. We belong to the Mlaina tribe."
I did not then understand the full significance of his explanation and only later learned the interesting and curious facts needed to elucidate it. In the south of Oran province and in other parts of the French possessions in North Africa there exist several tribes who are despised by the real Moslems but who, at the same time, inspire in their more orthodox brothers a mystic awe. It seems not yet to have been thoroughly established just what the extraction of these tribes really is, whether they migrated from Asia or are indigenous to Africa. They were formally followers of Islam, but their prophet is Omar ben Sliman, who is said to have been a renegade ​Jew that revised the text of the Koran, debauched the ritual and customs of Islam and left to the tribes who recognized him as their prophet a body of magic practices, which are carried out as well by the women—dancers, singers and witches—as by certain of the men, who exercise their art as sorcerers or makers of talismans. It is even said that the Mlaina are really a Gipsy tribe.
Such was the enigmatical company that Zofiette and I met in the village nègre, when we as yet knew nothing about the mysterious Mlaina and consequently asked no further questions, only photographing the trio and directing them to proceed with the dance for which they had been promised their twenty francs. One of the men took from his belt a flute and began to play a weird, plaintive tune replete with long-drawn monotonous notes, while the other beat the measure by clapping his hands and the woman sang some verses of a far-from-inspiring song, executing after each some movements of their native dance, among them the now-classical "shimmy," which had its origin in the Gipsy corenta. The whole performance was tedious, ugly and uninteresting, so that we were soon glad to get away from the malodorous temple of the Oran Terpsichore.
After this disillusionment we searched no further in Oran for glimpses of the Arab life, unless we count as such the very different visit to the large mosque of Jama el-Pasha, which was erected in the eighteenth century with the money received as ransom for the Christian slaves in commemoration of the expulsion of the Spaniards from Oran. There in the shaded court of the ​mosque, where a fountain gurgled low into a marble basin filled with goldfish, an old muezzin with a face that showed much suffering related in excellent French this story of its origin. Near the fountain lay a beggar in rags, with his swollen face covered by sores and with scores of flies swarming over him. Heedless of these and of all life's other minor worries, he slept peacefully in the shadow of the palms, lulled by the rhythm of the mountain stream that found its way beneath the walls and streets of the city to this quiet fountain.
We remained in Oran for some days and visited all the different parts of the city, the usual French town with its inevitable Boulevard National, its Place d'Armes, Place Kléber and Place de la République. To see these it is not worth while to go to Oran, to suffer from seasickness and to be melted and fried by the African summer sun. However, the Promenade de Letang is very picturesque with its terraces and its Chateau Neuf, whose old walls enclose what are now military buildings but which served in earlier days as the palace of the relentless Spanish governor or of the pirate beys of Oran. In Letang Park we saw beautiful specimens of magnolias and fig trees, the latter with twisting branches that resembled some writhing, fighting reptile monsters, and, beyond these, pines, plane-trees, palms and innumerable beds of brilliant and rare flowers. From the sloping terraces of the Park one can look out across the twenty miles of sea that stretches eastward from Cape Falcon promontory.
But from an opening in the north wall of the fortress of Santa Cruz there is an even more beautiful and more ​extensive view of the sea, which is also most impressive by reason of the character of the approach to it. This window in the rock can only be reached through a long, dark gallery, at the end of which the visitor is suddenly met by an almost blinding light that flows in, a silent, azure stream, through the large opening in the wall. Sky and sea—two blue worlds of calm and restive power—lavishly send here into the interior of the old Spanish castle their reflected streams of the sun's nectar, soft, appeasing and full of happy serenity, floating in with it the life-giving ozone, the aroma of resin from the pines without and the mingled odors of the sea.
Later we made a motor trip from Murjajo Mountain along a highway cut in the rocks well above the sea, which was blue as a sapphire one moment and green as the purest emerald another. Following this shore road we passed through numerous summer resorts of the inhabitants of Oran and small fishing hamlets, where they bring in large flounders and enormous langoustes, the well-known clawless lobster of the Mediterranean.
But along this road to Cape Falcon and in other localities near Oran one can find something more curious and scientific than the fish and the hotels and restaurants incident to sea resorts, for here among the rocks are extensive caverns wherein hanging stalactites have joined with their opposing stalagmites to form the colonnades of mysterious temples of unknown or forgotten gods—more likely forgotten ones, as man already lived in these regions while the gods still walked with men upon this sinful earth. In these ledges one can find innumerable caves and grottoes, forming whole cavern cities, ​fragments of sketches carved on the rocks by the hand of prehistoric man, the remains of hunting spoils, the stone implements he used and the traces of the household fires he burned. Here beneath the Murjajo generation after generation of various races and tribes must have succeeded one another. To the rocky sides of this range there must have clung diverse peoples and civilizations, whose individual cults and tribes fought for the possession of these sun-bathed slopes, where there is always such treasure of warmth, of light, of tempering and balmy winds from the sea and of an almost incomprehensible spirit of joy that never leaves the newcomer from the moment he touches the shore of this great peaceful harbor of Oran.
What tribes, what races had their origin here in those early periods of human history, or migrated here from other territories, perhaps years of marches from these shores? From what nations sprang those unknown hunters, now returned to dust, who in these caverns of Algeria left great heaps of bones of elephants, of immense buffaloes, lions, rhinoceroses and hippopotami; beside them the shells of mussels and other edible mollusks; and, among all these, stone hatchets, arrow-heads and spear-points? To what races belonged those artists who graved their pictures with flints on the cavern walls and on the cliffs of rivers that have now been dried for centuries? Who coursed these unlimited stretches where the Sahara today spreads a pall over an empire but where once the sea bathed the rocks of Erg and the Anti Atlas? What human agglomerations existed there when the continent of Africa had quite another form and while ​mysterious Atlantis and Lemuria were still above the waves, those continents of which mention is made in the very oldest historic records, among them the earliest Chinese chronicles?
These questions thrust themselves up before me at the very beginning of my journey across North Africa. We know that the Arabs came from the east, were a warlike people that subdued the population of North Africa, which was then divided into hostile tribes, and penetrated to the shores of the Atlantic near Rabat in Morocco. History plainly gives us these facts; yet that was all but as of yesterday, after the death of Mahomet in the seventh century of our era. We know also that all the other tribes which were then indigenous to this vast stretch of territory between Egypt and the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean are called Berbers or Kabyles; but that is not a satisfactory explanation. I traversed these expanses from west to east and from north to south and, during my journey, saw so many different types, judged from any standard, that I cannot accept such an artificial grouping together of these Berbers, even when one takes into consideration the crossing of races, anthropomorphic changes and other factors in assimilation.
Contemporary scientific sources do not afford decisive and conclusive evidence as to the first inhabitants of this country within the period of man's present speculation. They assume that a race, seeking to avoid the desert and separated by it from Central Africa, advanced ​farther and farther toward the north until it reached the territories of contemporary Algeria, Tripolitania, Tunisia and Morocco. They assume also with Tissot that two human streams met here, this one working outward from the borders of the Sahara and the other migrating from the north across the Spanish and Italian straits. The union of these two streams gave birth to the Berber race, which has the anthropological characteristics of the darker types of Europeans and of the brown race of the Sahara region, quite different and distinct from the African black peoples. The white races from ancient Spain, or Iberia, formed a part of this amalgamation. One can trace this origin of the Berbers on Egyptian monuments of the nineteenth dynasty, where they were referred to as "Libou." From this was derived the name of Libya, which phonetically resembles the names of the oldest Berber families, such as Liwata and Lwata. Among the Libu the Egyptians differentiated one tribe, distinguishing it as "Tahennou," which translates "people with a light skin."
Subsequent anthropology and history had to deal with the streams of newcomers arriving in Africa from everywhere—Chaldeans, Phoenicians and colonists from Rome; then a new wave of white men in the Vandals, Greeks and Normans; following these, the Arabian and Turkish flood. Under these influxes the question complicates itself and is finally drowned in a stream of names without meaning—Moors, Numidians, Lotophagi, Gaetuli, Gindans and Garamantes. Meanwhile the tribe of Nefzua has preserved in its ancient chronicles records of its relations with Egypt, just as Egyptian documents also refer to this relationship. Already in the fourteenth ​century B.C. these tribes, Libu and Tahennu, had a distinct civilization and industry, were ruled by hereditary kings and made political agreements with other tribes and peoples, especially with the islanders of the Mediterranean.
The excavation of ancient tombs and dolmens has yielded no definite answer to this very interesting question concerning the primitive peoples of North Africa, no more than have the designs and drawings discovered on the rocks, which are almost everywhere alike and which must be interpreted or even accepted with the greatest caution, inasmuch as Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs, one of the authorities on the subject, when investigating in the Sahara, found in a group of primitive rock-drawings the picture of a steamer which had been scratched there by the unsacred hand of a more unsacred tourist of our own generation.
The riddle remains a riddle, however much scholars tnay try to explain it. Some months after my visit to Oran, while I was on my way from Constantine to Tunis, I talked with a Marabout with whom I had tea and questioned him concerning the custom of the Berbers in staining their hands with henna.
"It is a tradition among us and is carried out in memory of former inhabitants of North Africa, who had a red skin and were both powerful and wise," he answered after some hesitation.
"What were these earlier inhabitants called?"
"We do not know," was his disappointing reply.
The unanswered riddle again ! But when I communicated this statement of the Marabout to an accidental acquaintance during a dinner in Tunis, a certain Mr. Charles Grewster, he nodded his head and observed:
​"I do not know exactly what to say to that. I can only point out to you that this 'henna' appears to have some strange connection with the name 'Tahennu' which the Egyptians gave to a people living to the west of the Pharaoh's realm."
I often pondered on this striking similarity between the words and feel that the explanation of the Marabout may throw some light on the significance of tire Egyptian name. As a matter of fact, "light" often indicated something "sunny" or "divine," hence "men with God's skin." According to their accepted tradition the skin of the gods was red. Did there exist along the Atlantic shore of Africa a red race? Not only did it exist, but it exists still in the Basques living in the western Pyrenees and along the shore of the Bay of Biscay. In an article which I read not long ago concerning the lost Atlantis, the author makes the confident statement that the inhabitants of that continent belonged to the red race.
Although I know nothing of Mr. Grewster's qualifications or training, it seems to me that his speculative, loose hypothesis has as much to commend it as that presupposing the migration of a brown race from the edge of the Sahara and of another brown race from Iberia and the shores of the Baltic across the straits or overland bridges that formerly united Italy and Spain with the African continent.
And all this speculation as to the origin of the primitive population of North Africa sprang from a visit to ​a most unprepossessing Oran den, where a painted and tattooed daughter of the mysterious Mlaina tribe performed a native dance.
This riddle, however, gave me no peace and I searched everywhere for something that could help to explain it. Now, when I look back upon the past, and I study my notes of travel and the works of specialists in this subject, I am struck by the more distinctive characteristics of the magic art current among these North African tribes. I refer especially to magic strength, which, according to their general belief, is derived from blood, from all sorts of human and animal refuse, from corpses and from parts of the body; as well as to superstitions which run parallel with this belief in magic, such, for instance, as the possession of the ability to remain invisible and unheard, the union of the souls, hearts and thoughts of two men, the influence of colors on the spiritual side of man's nature, et cetera. Whence come these magical practices? No nation has independently developed them. In those where they have become current they have been borrowed from Gipsies, Andalusians, Moors, Chaldeans and Egyptians, all of whom had relations with North Africa and, therefore, with these Berbers, who, having accepted Islam, carried with them their practices to Mecca during their sacred pilgrimages. Thence they spread to Asia Minor and western Asia, then further on to India and even to China, if we recall that Arabian followers of the Prophet built a mosque in Canton a long time before the discovery of the Chinese shores by the Portuguese. But all this is only supposition, a feeble effort to find some plausible answer to the anthropological riddle of North Africa.
* ↑ See the works of Duveyrier, Bourgignat, Letourneux, Faidherbe, St. Gsell, Tisset, Moulieras, Ripley, Ridgeway, Reinach, Bertholon, Deniker and others.
* ↑ Mr. Grewster told me that the botanical name of the plant from which this juice is extracted is Lawsonia inermis; which corresponds with the observations of the French writers, A. Certeux and E. H. Carney and of the German authority, Sprengel.