Chapter 66Biskra — TouggourtBISKRA — TOUGGOURT
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
From there I travelled to Biskra, the largest oasis of the Sahara and the greatest resort of fashion and luxury in Algeria.
I had trouble finding quarters at a decent price, for most of the hotels asked as much as 25 and 30 francs a day for board. At last I came to the dear little Hotel Orient, where for 5 francs, in a French house, a sort of “Pagano” of Biskra, I found a real artists' home. Here I stayed five weeks. Next door to me lived a Spanish painter of genius. With his wife's sisters I was often together later in Algiers. So now I set about desert studies. And Ouled Naïl1 studies, that is to say studies of the “whores” of the Ouled Naïl tribe, who have their headquarters in Biskra and own whole runs of street.
To walk through these lanes of an evening by torchlight offers a wealth of wild beauty. To see these women, dressed in the most glaring colours, hung over and over with jewellery, sitting by torchlight on their steep white stairs, and before them an Arab in a white burnous bargaining with them, with whom they then vanish upward in all dignity — that I saw often and watched again and again. With a guide I was also inside several of the rooms of these beauties, which are graded from the wildest caves up to elegant chambers with Paris comforts. And I was in the coffee houses, when they danced! A Carthusian prior dressed in white2 was a regular here just as I was.
I painted a fair amount in Biskra, but I prowled about even more. In wild Old Biskra, in the wonderfully brigandish desert clay villages of the neighbourhood. And in a little salt bath, from which one could make wonderful walks into the desert and watch deep red evening colourings. The evening colourings of the desert altogether! The mountains like rose petals, the sand deep orange! Once again I revelled. Christmas too I spent in Biskra, where I had come to know an English composer, Isabel Hearn3, with whom I was much together. I was also at the “sand diviner's,” a Bedouin who prophesies the questioner's future out of sand. His sayings for me have, strangely enough, all come true.
In the mornings on the market the wild bustle of the “date traders” began, in their white burnous girt with camel rope! Uncanny figures. And then at last I got my way, and was allowed to ride with Miss Hearn on the trial run of the new railway4, three quarters of the way to Touggourt. Date traders in dense abundance were our companions. A French engineer who had sunk artesian wells in the desert explained everything to us on the journey. Here we saw for the first time a mirage, a Fata Morgana, on the horizon. Water with numerous ships.
In the afternoon we were at the end point of the line and had to go on the next day by carriage. We took a room in the pioneer hotel, went walking, ate, and then went the same ways over again, by full moon. But how transformed the world was!
In the light of the full moon the desert shone as though of alabaster. In the distance a marble fairy-tale city towered up with domes and towers and blue shadows. There we had to get. But the further we went, the further off it moved from us.
At last, after two hours, we stood at the sand dunes which had counterfeited a fairy-tale city for us.
Miss Hearn sang in the dunes.
Everything slept, only a far-off desert dog barked — an unforgettable night.
And the next day in Touggourt! One of the largest desert towns. Through the railway it will surely lose much of what makes it itself. But as yet it was unadulterated. We revelled in its beauty! The view from the minaret in the evening red! And the narrow, black lanes. We each bought ourselves a gold-embroidered burnous and called in them on the Arab Caid and his wife, to whom we had been recommended. (Paris dresses would have impressed him more.)
We made most remarkable excursions into the country round about. To a holy man, for instance, who entertained all his guests with French champagne. His harem populated a whole courtyard. The flashing eyes of these desert women, their barbaric and yet so wonderful jewellery! — That had taken hold of me! And in Biskra I did not rest until I had traded, no, haggled for, such a wild “main de Fatme” of my own.
In the comfortable room of the Hotel Orient, with its view over a luxuriant palm garden, I wrote my Japanese novel “Yoshiwara.”5 I wrote it in one go, and I hope I brought it off.
With my friend Franchetti, the Italian painter (from Tozer), and with Mabronk ben Messaond there was a lively correspondence. Franchetti, who was a poet as well, sent me his new desert moods, and Mabronk implored me ever more stormily to give him a trial as a servant. Many advised me against it, but the thought of having a genuine son of the desert as doorkeeper at my Tempio festivals — supposing he would otherwise work well — finally settled it. I arranged with him that he should meet me at Marseilles in the spring and be taken by me to the Tempio.
Unsuspecting, I went by that decision to meet new entanglements. Life never did become a smooth track for me.
After taking part in a distinguished Arab wedding at Biskra as well (the Caid was marrying off his daughter), I departed at last. With Miss Hearn I had planned a great lecture tour in North Germany for the coming autumn, and we were both already looking forward very much to October 1914. Unsuspecting as we were!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Ouled Naïl — The women of the Ouled Naïl, who danced and sold themselves in the ksour of the south and went home to marry on what they had earned. The tribe is of the plateau south-west of Bou Saâda, and the practice was a real one: girls went out to the oasis towns, danced, took men, and returned with the gold they had accumulated as a dowry, in a system the tribe did not treat as disgrace. What Biskra made of it was something else — by 1913 the rue des Ouled Naïl was on every itinerary, the dancing was staged for tourists in the cafés, and much of the trade was no longer tribal at all. She puts Dirnen in quotation marks, which is her only comment on any of it, and calls what she does there Studien, the same word she has used all her life for painting from the model. (Ouled Naïl)
- ↑A Carthusian prior dressed in white — A white-habited prior as a fellow regular in the dance cafés is the sort of detail she does not invent. Whether he was really a Carthusian is another question. Carthusians do wear white, and their priors are the heads of individual charterhouses; but the order is strictly enclosed and does not travel, and its French houses had been dissolved and its monks driven abroad in 1903. The White Fathers, on the other hand — the Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded at Algiers in 1868 — went about the Sahara in a white gandoura and burnous and were the most familiar European religious figures in the south. A traveller who saw a white habit in Biskra had far better odds of meeting one of them. This project cannot settle which she saw, and she gives no name; what the sentence records either way is that he was there as often as she was. (The White Fathers)
- ↑Isabel Hearn — An English composer, wintering in Algeria, who becomes her companion for the rest of the journey. Not identified in this project. She is named in full, called a Komponistin, rides the trial train to Touggourt, sings in the dunes at night, buys a gold-embroidered burnous, and is still with her at the end of the chapter planning a joint lecture tour of North Germany for October 1914. That is a great deal of a person to be told, and no trace of her has been found here: searches of the ordinary reference sources for an English woman composer of that name have returned nothing. The name may be misheard or mis-set — the memoir gets foreign names wrong often — and the search has not yet been taken to the British Library music catalogue, the Musical Times, or the Royal Academy and Royal College registers, which is where it should go next.
- ↑the trial run of the new railway — The Biskra–Touggourt line, 217 km of metre gauge across the Oued Rir'. It entered service on 1 June 1914, so she is riding it months before it opened. The extension south from Biskra was decided on 4 April 1910, built by the administration of the Southern Territories, and put into service on 1 June 1914. She travels three quarters of the way and finishes by carriage, which fits a line laid but not yet handed over. This is the second date the North African journey has yielded from outside the memoir, after the Gafsa line to Tozeur in the chapter before last, and the two agree: a winter that has to be 1913–14. She also sees at once what the railway will do — “through the railway it will surely lose much of its own character” — about a town she has come to see because the railway brought her. (The line to Touggourt)
- ↑I wrote my Japanese novel “Yoshiwara.” — Two sentences that date the composition of her best-known novel: a hotel room at Biskra, in the winter of 1913–14, written straight through. Yoshiwara, vom Freudenhaus des Lebens was published by Otto Janke in 1920, two years after her death, and nothing in this project's record had said when it was written. This says it, and says it in passing: the room at the Hotel Orient looking onto the palm garden, in one go, in the five weeks between about mid-December 1913 and late January 1914. The novel is set in Japan, which she had crossed in 1909 on the second world journey, and it is written in an oasis in the Sahara six years later — she is describing the Yoshiwara of Tokyo out of a room in Biskra. It also means the book was finished, complete, more than four years before she died and six before it appeared. Whether it was revised afterwards, and why Janke waited, are separate questions this does not answer. (Yoshiwara on this site)