there is nothing more curious in the material change which is passing so rapidly over the modern world than what i may call the romance of communication.
with the romance of discovery every one is thoroughly acquainted. the modern world is saturated with that form of romance; it has permeated all our literature and is still the theme of most of our books of travel. but like all things which have attained a literary position, the romance of discovery already belongs to the past. not that nothing remains to be discovered: on the contrary, the modern world has hardly yet begun to appreciate how it may penetrate from detail to detail and find perpetually something new in that which it thinks it knows, but the great broad unknown spaces, the horizons quite new to europeans which break upon them for the first time, are now no longer left to the explorer. with the romance of communication, luckily for us, there is another, a newer and, in a certain sense, a much wider field. many who have travelled largely have felt this, but it has not yet, i think, been expressed.
[pg 160]
what i mean by the romance of communication is this: that the establishment of regular lines for ocean traffic, the building of railways and, above all, of good roads, have made it possible for a multitude of men to see those contrasts which travel can afford, and this development of modern travel has just begun to afford our generation, and will afford with much greater generosity the generation to come, an opportunity for feeling physically the complexity and variety and wonder of the world. this is a good thing.
not so long ago it was a difficult matter for a man to go from some northern part of europe, such as england, to so isolated a community as that which inhabits the island of majorca. now it is easy for a man and costs him but a few pounds to go from england to barcelona, and from barcelona he can sail with a rapid and regular service to the port of palma. when he reaches that port he cannot but feel the romance, finding this little isolated state wealthy and contented in the midst of the sea. corsica, of which men know so little, is similarly at hand to-day, and so are the valleys of the pyrenees, especially of the spanish valleys upon which as yet there is hardly any northern literature or experience. in a year or two we shall have the railway through the cerdagne, and another line will take one up the valley of the ariège into the middle part of northern spain.
but of all these benefits to the mind which the[pg 161] modern charge is procuring, i know of none more remarkable than the entry into the desert.
that portion of northern africa which the french have reclaimed for europe, and which was throughout the existence of the roman empire an integral part of european civilisation, consists of the great tableland buttressed to the north and the south by mountain ranges, and crossed in its middle part by parallel outcrops of high rock. this plateau stretches for somewhat more than a thousand miles all along the southern shore of the western mediterranean. if the reader will take a map he will see jutting out from the general contour of africa, an oblong as it were, the eastern end of which is tunis, the western end morocco. all that oblong is the tableland of which i speak. the coast is warm, fertile, densely cultivated and populous; full of ports and cities and the coming and going of ships. the highlands behind and to the south of the coast line are more arid, very cold in winter, baking in summer, and always dry and rugged to our northern eyes. but they are habitable, the population is spreading upon them, and they contain the past relics of the old roman civilisation which prove what man can do with them when their water supply is stored and their soil is cultivated.
now this habitable land suddenly ceases, and falls into the desert of sahara. the demarkation is abrupt and is everywhere noticeable to the eye. it is indeed more noticeable in the eastern than in the[pg 162] western part. the limit between what miss bell has called, in a fine book of hers, "the desert and the sown," is more than a day's march in width upon the moroccan frontier; indeed it is several days' march, and one is not over-sure when one has left the habitable soil and when one has reached the inhospitable sand at the eastern end. the limits are not only marked sharply by a differentiation in the climate and the vegetation, but also by an abrupt escarpment. the atlas (as the plateau of northern africa is generally called) falls in huge, precipitous red cliffs right down upon the sahara. it so happens that these cliffs, just at the point where they are most abrupt and most rugged, and most romantic, are cleft by a profound gorge through which the wady biskra runs very clear and cold, filled with the melting of the snow upon the high mountain of aures to the north of it. this gap in the cliffs the romans knew well. they had a military station here to guard them against the ravages of the nomad tribes who afterwards, in the form of the arabian invasion, overran their african province and turned it from an european and a christian to an asiatic and mohammedan thing. the romans called that gorge "the kick of hercules," as though the god had here by a stroke of his foot broken away from the cultivated north toward the desert. through this gap ran their military road, and here, as a formation of the gorge demanded, they carried that road over the river, the[pg 163] wady biskra, upon the bridge the stones of which still remain, though renovated and supported by modern work, to recall the greatness of the empire.
the arabs, in their turn, have called this astonishing breach "foum es sahara"—the mouth of the sahara; and, as is always the case where they found a roman bridge, they have added the name el kantara, the bridge. for it is remarkable that the arabs were unable to continue roman work, especially in masonry, save where they had a large roman population to help them after their conquest, and the bridges which the romans had built were regarded by them with a sort of superstitious reverence.
now this mouth of the sahara, this gap in the glaring wall of the desert, has, by a coincidence which has its obvious geographical cause, and which is to be discovered in many another pass throughout europe and northern africa, served for modern methods of communication the purpose which it served for the ancients. it is the nearest approach which the desert makes to the sea-coast; it is the approach involving the least engineering effort, the most obvious and the most natural entry from the northern cultivated land on to the waterless sandy waste. therefore, modern civilisation has used it, and you get here more than anywhere else that romance of sudden contrast with which, as i have said, modern methods of travel have gifted the modern world. the french first built down this[pg 164] track a military road, as hard, excellent and well graded as any that you will find in europe. it not only goes through the gorge, but right on into the sand of the desert, bounded upon either side by masonry, and it has reached, or very soon will reach, biskra without a break.
some time after this road had been planned, a railway was constructed along the same track, with certain divergences where the gradient of the highway was too steep for the rails and where therefore long curves were necessary. whether a man goes by the road or the rail, this is what he sees—and he had best see it in early spring, or what is with us in england late winter. as the road and the rail wind downwards from the little plateaux, by great steps as it were from one level to another, the traveller has about him such scenery as has accompanied him for the last hundred miles: fields of cotton, the trees proper to a temperate climate, and rugged, rocky ridges cropping up from the cultivated soil. there is nothing around him to remind him of what is called "the east," except the camel preceding its master up or down the great highway and the distinctive dress of the natives; for the climate, the crops, and the temperature, the quality of the sunlight, he might be on one of the plains of western america, which indeed this part of africa most nearly resembles.
he comes to a clean little inn entirely french in architecture, surrounded by a cool and quiet garden,[pg 165] and with the river running behind it. he walks on a few hundred yards through the gorge, and quite suddenly at the turning of a corner the desert and all its horizon breaks upon his eyes. he sees a waste of hot, red, unusable sand, a brilliant oasis of palm trees, and even the sun, small and glaring above that plain, seems something different from the familiar light which he had received but an hour before.
it is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable revelation which modern travel affords. and if i had to advise any one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel, at least in the way of landscape, i would advise him to visit this astounding place. it has already found its way into many english books, but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how exceedingly easy is its access. for travellers even to so near a place like to put on an air of mystery. there is no one with a fortnight to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes travel difficult). any one who will take that journey would have a memory to last him all his life.
there are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is the spoiling of them. i have never been able to agree. places are not spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by the[pg 166] character of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place of the east and the west, i think, save with a desire to wonder and to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. such men may come in any numbers and the place will be the better for them. at any rate, i repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand, for as yet hundreds of englishmen with far more than that leisure and infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its opportunities; and your quickest way is by marseilles and bona, and on your way i beseech you to stop and see timgad, which is a dead roman city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the edge of the desert.
