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Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African
 Poems for the Millennium
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the
Leslie Scalapino Memorial Fund for Poetry, which was established
by generous contributions to the University of California Press
Foundation by Thomas J. White and the Leslie Scalapino–O
Books Fund.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 poems
for the m i l l e n n i u m

The University of California

Book of North African Literature

Volume Four

Edited with commentaries by

Pierre Joris
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

and
Habib Tengour

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment
for the Arts.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poems for the millennium, volume four : the University of California book of North African
literature / edited with commentaries by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

   p. cm. — (Poems for the millennium ; 4)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-26913-2 (cloth) — isbn 978-0-520-27385-6 (pbk.)
1. North African literature. I. Joris, Pierre. II. Tengour, Habib.
PL8014.N652P64 2012
808.8'9961—dc23 2012024995

Manufactured in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–
1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 To those poets of the Maghreb and the Arab worlds
who stood up against the prohibitions.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Contents

Thanks and Acknowledgments xxxi

Introduction 1

A Book of Multiple Beginnings

Prologue 13

The First Human Beings, Their Sons and Amazon Daughters 16

Hanno the Navigator (Carthage, c. sixth century b.c.e.)

from The Periplos of Hanno 21

Callimachus (Cyrene, 310–c. 240 b.c.e.)

Thirteen Epigrammatic Poems 23

Mago (Carthage, pre-second century b.c.e.)

from De Agricultura 26
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Lucius Apuleius (Madaurus, now M’Daourouch, c. 123–c. 180 c.e.)

from The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses 27

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (Carthage, c. 160–c. 220 c.e.)

from De Pallio (The Cloak) 29
from Scorpiace (The Scorpion) 30

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus (Carthage, early third century–258 c.e.)

from Epistle to Donatus 31

Lucius Lactantius (Cirta? c. 240–Trier? c. 320 c.e.)

from De Ave Phoenice 32

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (Saint Augustine)
(Thagaste, 354–Hippo, 430 c.e.)
from Confessions 33
from De Doctrina Christiana 34
from De fide rerum invisibilium 35
from Psalmus contra partem Donati 35

Blossius Aemilius Dracontius (Carthage, c. 455–c. 505 c.e.)

The Chariot of Venus 36
De Mensibus (Months) 36
The Origin of Roses 37

Luxorius (Carthage, sixth century c.e.)

“They say, that when the fierce bear gives birth” 37
Premature Chariot 38

First Diwan
A Book of In-Betweens: Al-Andalus, Sicily, the Maghreb

Prologue 41

Anonymous Muwashshaha 45

Some Kharjas 46

Ibn Hani al-Andalusi (Seville, c. 934–Barqa, Libya, 973)

Al-Jilnar 49
Extinction Is the Truth . . . 50

Ibn Darradj al-Qastalli (958–1030)

from Ode in Praise of Khairan al-‘Amiri, Emir of Almería 52
from Ode in Praise of al-Mansur al-‘Amiri, Emir of Córdoba 53
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Abu Amir Ibn Shuhayd (Córdoba, 992–1035)

from Qasida (I) 55
Córdoba 56
from Qasida (II) 56
“As he got his fill of delirious wine” 57
Gravestone Qasida 57

Yusuf Ibn Harun al-Ramadi (d. c. 1022)

Hugging Letters and Beauty Spots 58
Silver Breast 58
Gold Nails 59

viii Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 The Swallow 59
O Rose . . . 59

Yosef Ibn Abitur (mid-tenth century–c. 1012)

The “Who?” of Ibn Abitur of Córdoba 60

Hafsa bint Hamdun (Wadi al-Hijara, now Guadalajara, tenth century)

Four Poems 64

Samuel Ha-Levi Ibn Nagrella, called ha-Nagid, “the Prince”

(Merida, 993–Granada, 1055)
Three Love Poems 65
War Poem 66

Ibn Hazm (Córdoba, 994–Niebla, 1064)

My Heart 67
from The Neck-Ring of the Dove
from “Author’s Preface” 68
Of Falling in Love while Asleep 69

Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (Córdoba, 994–1091)

Six Poems 70

Ibn Rashiq al-Qayrawani (also al-Masili)

(Masila, Algeria, c. 1000–Mazara, Sicily, c. 1064)
from Lament over the Fall of the City of Kairouan 71

Ibn Zaydun (Córdoba, 1003–1071)

Fragments from the Qasida in the Rhyme of Nun 74
Written from al-Zahra’ 75

Salomon Ibn Gabirol (Malaga, c. 1020–Valencia, c. 1058)

The 16-Year-Old Poet 77
from The Crown of Kingdom 77
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Al Mu‘tamid Ibn Abbad (Seville, 1040–Aghmat, 1095)

To Abu Bakr Ibn ‘Ammar Going to Silves 80
To Rumaykiyya 81

Ibn Hamdis (Noto, Sicily, 1056–Majorca, 1133)

He Said, Remembering Sicily and His Home, Syracuse 82
Ibn Labbana (Benissa, mid-eleventh century–Majorca, 1113)
Al-Mu‘tamid and His Family Go into Exile 85
Two Muwashshahat 85

Contents ix

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Moses Ibn Ezra (Granada, c. 1058–c. 1135)
Drinking Song 87
Song 88

Al-A’ma al-Tutili (b. Tudela, c. late eleventh century–d. 1126)

Water-Fire Muwashshaha 88

Ibn Khafadja (Alcita, province of Valencia, 1058–1138)

The River 90

Yehuda Halevi, the Cantor of Zion (Toledo, 1075–Cairo, 1141)

from Yehuda Halevi’s Songs to Zion 91
The Garden 92

Ibn Quzman (Córdoba, 1078–1160)

[A muwashshaha] 93
The Crow 94

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164)

“I have a garment” 96

Abu Madyan Shu’ayb (Sidi Boumedienne) (Cantillana, 1126–

Tlemcen, 1198)
You Will Be Served in Your Glass 96

Hafsa bint al-Hajj Arrakuniyya (Granada, 1135–Marrakech, 1190)

Eight Poems 97

Ibn Arabi, al-Sheikh al-Akhbar (Murcia, 1165–Damascus, 1240)

“I believe in the religion of love” 99
“O my two friends” 99
The Wisdom of Reality in the Words of Isaac 100

Abi Sharif al-Rundi (Seville, 1204–Ceuta, 1285)

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Nuniyya 100

Ibn Said al-Maghribi (Alcalá la Real, 1213–Tunis, 1274)

The Battle 102
Black Horse with White Chest 103
The Wind 103

Abu al-Hassan al-Shushtari (Guadix, 1213–Damietta, 1269)

My Art 104
But You Are in the Najd 105
Desire Drives the Camels 105

x Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Abraham Abulafia (Saragossa, 1240–Comino, c. 1291)
How He Went as Messiah in the Name of Angel Raziel
to Confront the Pope 106
from The Book of the Letter 107
from Life of the World to Come: Circles 108

Ibn Zamrak (Granada, 1333–1393)

The Alhambra Inscription 112

T h e O r a l T r ad i t i o n I

Prologue 117

Kabyle Origin Tale: “The World Tree and the Image of

the Universe” 120

from Sirat Banu Hilal (I)

Sultan Hassan el Hilali Bou Ali, the Taciturn 121
Over Whom to Weep 121
Who Is the Best Hilali Horseman? 122
Chiha’s Advice 123
Bouzid on Reconnaissance in the Maghreb 124

Four Tamachek’ Fables

The Greyhound and the Bone 126
The Lion, the Panther, the Tazourit, and the Jackal 126
The Billy Goat and the Wild Boar 127
The Woman and the Lion 128

Kabylian Song on the Expedition of 1856 129

Tuareg Proverbs from the Ahaggar 130

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Second Diwan
Al Adab: The Invention of Prose

Prologue 135

Ibn Sharaf al-Qayrawani (Kairouan, c. 1000–Seville, 1067)

On Some Andalusian Poets 137
On Poetic Criticism 138

Contents xi

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Ibn Rashiq al-Qayrawani (also al-Masili) (Masila, Algeria, c. 1000–
Mazara, Sicily, 1064)
from Al-‘Umda: “On making poetry and
stimulating inspiration” 139

Al-Bakri (Huelva, 1014–Córdoba, 1094)

from Kitab al-Masalik wa-’al-Mamalik (Book of
Routes and Realms) 143

Abu Hamid al-Gharnati (Granada, 1080–Damascus, 1169)

from Tuhfat al-Albab (Gift of the Spirit)
Description of the Lighthouse of Alexandria 147
Chamber Made for Solomon by the Jinns 148

Ibn Baja (Avempace) (Saragossa, 1085–Fez, 1138)

from The Governance of the Solitary, Chapter 13 149

Al-Idrisi (Ceuta, 1099–Sicily, c. 1166)

from Al-Kitab al-Rujari (Roger’s Book) 152

Ibn Tufayl (Cadiz, c. 1105–Marrakech, 1185)

from Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a Philosophical Tale 155

Musa Ibn Maimon, called Maimonides (Córdoba, 1138–Fostat, 1204)

from The Guide for the Perplexed 160

Ibn Jubayr (Valencia, 1145–Egypt, 1217)

from The Travels of Ibn Jubayr: Sicily 163

Ibn Battuta (Tangier, 1304–Marrakech, 1369)

from Rihla: Concerning Travels in the Maghreb 167

Ibn Khaldun (Tunis, 1332–Cairo, 1406)

from The Muqaddimah, an Introduction to History, Book 6
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Section 54: “The craft of poetry and the way of

learning it” 171
Section 55: “Poetry and prose work with words,
and not with ideas” 175

Sheikh Nefzaoui (Nefzaoua, southern Tunisia–c. 1434)

from The Perfumed Garden
The Names Given to Man’s Sexual Organs 176
The Names Given to Woman’s Sexual Organs 177

xii Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi (Leo Africanus)
(Granada, c. 1488–1554)
from Travel Diaries
Why This Part of the World Was Named Africa 179
The Manner and Customs of the Arabs Inhabiting Africa 179
On Fez 180

A B o o k o f My s t i c s

Prologue 185

Abu Madyan Shu’ayb (Sidi Boumedienne) (Cantillana, 1126–

Tlemcen, 1198)
The Qasida in Ra 189
The Qasida in Mim 191

Abdeslam Ibn Mashish Alami (Beni Aross region, near Tangier, 1163–1228)
As-Salat Al-Mashishiyah (The Salutation of Ibn Mashish) 192

Ibn Arabi, al-Sheikh al-Akhbar (Murcia, 1165–Damascus, 1240)

Our Loved Ones 195
I Wish I Knew if They Knew 196
“Gentle now, doves” 196
“Who is here for a braveheart” 198

Abu al-Hassan al-Shushtari (Guadix, 1213–Damietta, 1269)

Layla 199

Othman Ibn Yahya el Sherki (Sidi Bahlul Sherki) (Tétouan region,

seventeenth century)
from Al-Fiyachiya 200

Ahmed Ibn ‘Ajiba (Tétouan region, 1747–1809)

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Qasida 204
Maxims 206

Mystical Poetry from Djurdjura

“Tell Me, You Saints from Everywhere” 207
“Those Who Remember Know It” 207
“What Dwelling Did I Raise in Ayt-Idjer” 207
“Bird, Soar Up into the Sky” 208

Contents xiii

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Two Shawia Amulets
Amulet against Poison and Poisonous Animals 209
Amulet to “Unknot” Headaches and Neuralgias 209

Third Diwan
The Long Sleep and the Slow Awakening

Prologue 213

Sidi Abderrahman el Mejdub (Tit Mlil, early sixteenth century–Merdacha,

Jebel Aouf, 1568)
Some Quatrains 215

Sidi Lakhdar Ben Khlouf (Mostaganem region,

sixteenth–seventeenth century)
from The Honeycomb 218

Abdelaziz al-Maghraoui (Tafilalet, 1533–1593/1605)

from A Masbah az-Zin (O Beautiful Lamp!) 221
from Peace Be upon You O Shining Pearl! 222

Mawlay Zidan Abu Maali (d. Marrakech, 1627)

“I passed . . . ” 223

Al-Maqqari (Tlemcen, c. 1591–Cairo, 1632)

On Those Andalusians Who Traveled to the East 224

Al-Yusi (Middle Atlas, 1631–1691)

from Al-Muharat
[Two seasons] 226
[The city and the country] 226

Ahmed Ben Triki (Ben Zengli) (Tlemcen, c. 1650–c. 1750)

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

from Tal Nahbi (My Pain Endures . . . ) 227

from Sha’lat Niran Fi Kbadi (Burned to the Depths of
My Soul!) 227

Sid al Hadj Aissa (Tlemcen, 1668—Laghouat, 1737)

A Borni Falcon Song 229
A Turkli Falcon Song 230

Al-Hani Ben Guenoun (Mascara, 1761–1864)

from Ya Dhalma (O Unfair Lady!) 230

xiv Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Sidi Mohammed Ben Msaieb (d. Tlemcen, 1768)
from O Pigeon Messenger! 232

Mohammed ben Sliman (d. Fez, 1792)

The Storm 234

Boumediene Ben Sahla (Tlemcen, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century)

from Wahd al-Ghazal Rit al-Youm (I Saw a Gazelle Today . . .) 235

Mostefa Ben Brahim (Safa) (Boudjebha, Sidi Bel Abbès province,

1800–1867)
Saddle Up, O Warrior! 237

Mohammed Belkheir (El Bayadh, south of Oran, 1835–1905)

Melha! 239
Moroccan Exile 240
Exiled at Calvi, Corsica 240

Si Mohand (Icheraiouen, At Yirraten, c. 1840–Lhammam-Michelet, 1906)

Three Poems 241
from Si Mohand’s Journey from Maison-Carrée to Michelet 242

Mohamed Ibn Seghir Benguitoun (Sidi Khaled, c. 1843–1907)

from Hiziya 244

Sheikh Smati (Ouled Djellal, near Biskra, 1862–1917)

Mount Kerdada 247

Mohamed Ben Sghir (Tlemcen, late nineteenth century)

Lafjar (Dawn) 249
Ya’l-Warchan (O Dove) 249

Abdallah Ben Keriou (Laghouat, 1869–1921)

“Oh you who worry about the state of my heart” 250
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Hadda (Dra Valley, southern Morocco, late twentieth century)

The Poem of the Candle 251

A Book of Writing

Prologue 257

Archaic Kufic Script 259

Polychrome Maghrebian Script 260

Maghrebian Script 261

Contents xv

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Maghrebian Cursive Script 262

Andalusian Cursive Script 263

Al-Qandusi
A Bismillah 264
The Word Paradise 265

Maghrebian Script: The Two Letters Lam-Alif 266

Maghrebian Mujawhar Script 266

Fourth Diwan
Resistance and Road to Independence

Prologue 269

Emir Abd El Kader (Mascara, 1808–Damascus, 1883)

My Spouse Worries 271
I Am Love 271
The Secrets of the Lam-Alif 272

Mohammed Ben Brahim Assarraj (Marrakech, 1897–1955)

Poem I 274
Poem II 275

Tahar Haddad (Tunis, 1899–1935)

from Muslim Women in Law and Society 277

Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche (Ighil Ali, 1906–Paris, 1962)

Adoration of the Palm Trees 280

Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi (Tozeur, 1909–Tunis, 1934)

Life’s Will 282
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Mouloud Feraoun (Tizi Hibel, 1913–Algiers, 1962)

from Journal, 1955–1962 284

Emmanuel Roblès (Oran, 1914–Boulogne-Billancourt, 1995)

from Mirror Suite 287

Edmond Amram El-Maleh (Safi, 1917–Rabat, 2010)

from Taksiat 289

Mouloud Mammeri (Taourirt Mimoune, Kabylia, 1917–Aïn Defla, 1989)

from L’Ahellil du Gourara: Timimoun 293

xvi Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Mostefa Lacheraf (Sidi Aïssa, 1917–Algiers, 2007)
from Country of Long Pain 295

Mohammed Dib (Tlemcen, 1920–La Celle-Saint-Cloud, 2003)

from Ombre Gardienne 297
Guardian Shadow 1 297
Guardian Shadow 2 298
Guardian Shadow 3 298
Dawn Breaks 298
The Crazed Hour 299
Nursery Rhyme 299
A Voice 300

Bachir Hadj Ali (Algiers, 1920–1991)

Dreams in Disarray 302
Oath 303

Jean Pélégri (Rovigo, 1920–Paris, 2003)

Open the Pebble 304

Nourredine Aba (Aïn Oulmene, 1921–Paris, 1996)

from Lost Song of a Rediscovered Country 307

Mohammed Al-Habib El-Forkani (Tahannaout, 1922–Rabat, 2008)

“In a miserable world” 309
“My yesterday pursues me” 310

Frantz Fanon (Fort-de-France, 1925–Bethesda, Maryland, 1961)

from On National Culture 311

Jean Sénac (Béni Saf, 1926–Algiers, 1973)

Dawn Song of My People 315
News in Brief 316
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

The July Massacres 317

Malek Haddad (Constantine, 1927–Algiers, 1978)

The Long March 319

Kateb Yacine (Guelma, 1929–Grenoble, 1989)

Nedjma, or The Poem or the Knife 321
from Nedjma 323

Ismaël Aït Djaafar (Algiers, 1929–1995)

from Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah 327

Contents xvii

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Anna Gréki (Batna, 1931–Algiers, 1966)
The Future Is for Tomorrow 329
Even in Winter 330

Henri Kréa (Algiers, 1933–Paris, 2000)

from Le Séisme au bord de la rivière 333
Clandestine Travelers 335

T h e O r a l T r ad i t i o n II

More Kabylian Origin Stories 339

The Origin of Shooting Stars 339
The First Eclipse 339
The Origin of Menstruation 340

The Magic Grain: A Tale 341

Kabyle Proverbs 345

Songs 347
Children’s Rain Song 347
“O night lights of Jew Town” 347

from The Adventures of the Jew 348

1. The Bride Who Was Too Large 348
2. The Tail of the Comet 349

More Riddles and Proverbs 350

Satirical Nomad Poem 351

Saharan Gharbi / Western-Style Anonymous Nomad Songs 351

from Sirhat Banu Hilal (II) 353

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Sada Betrays Her Father for Love of Meri 353

Fifth Diwan
“Make It New”: The Invention of Independence I

Prologue 361

Libya 365
Muhammad al-Faituri (b. al-Janira, Sudan, 1930)
The Story 366

xviii Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Incident 366
The Question and the Answer 367

Ibrahim al-Koni (b. Fezzan region, 1948)

from Anubis
Dusk 367

Ashur Etwebi (b. Tripoli, 1952)

from Of Solitude and a Few Other Matters 373

Faraj Bou al-Isha (b. 1956)

Where Does This Pain Come From? 377
Here I Am 377
Wait 377
Sleep 377

Fatima Mahmoud (b. Tripoli, mid-twentieth century)

What Was Not Conceivable 378

Laila Neihoum (b. Benghazi, 1961)

Melting Sun 383

Khaled Mattawa (b. Benghazi, 1964)

from East of Carthage: An Idyll 384

Tunisia 388
Claude Benady (Tunis, 1922–Boulogne, Hauts-de-Seine, 2000)
Thirst for a Country . . . 390
Struggle 391

Al-Munsif al-Wahaybi (b. Kairouan, 1929)

The Desert 393
In the Arab House 393
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Ceremony 394

Midani Ben Salah (Nefta, 1929–2006)

In the Train with Them 395

Noureddine Sammoud (b. Kelibia, 1932)

The Eyes of My Love 397
Salah Garmadi (Tunis, 1933–1982)
Our Ancestors the Beduins 399
Counsel for My Family after My Death 400

Contents xix

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Shams Nadir (Mohamed Aziza) (b. Tunis, 1940)
from The Athanor 401
Echoes from Isla-Negra 404

Abderrazak Sahli (Hammamet, 1941–2009)

Clerare Drac 405

Moncef Ghachem (b. Mahdia, 1946)

Mewall 405

Fadhila Chabbi (b. Tozeur, 1946)

The Blind Goddess 408
Engraving Twenty-Nine 409

Abdelwahab Meddeb (b. Tunis, 1946)

from Talismano 409
from Fantasia 411

Muhammad al-Ghuzzi (b. Kairouan, 1949)

Female 413
Quatrains for Joy 414

Moncef Ouahibi (b. Kairouan, 1949)

from Under Sargon Boulus’s Umbrella 416

Khaled Najjar (b. Tunis, 1949)

Stone Castle 419
Boxes 420
Poem 1 420
Poem 2 421
Poem 3 421
Poem 4 421
Poem 5 421
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Tahar Bekri (b. Gabès, 1951)

from War to War 422
from I Call You Tunisia 423

Amina Said (b. Tunis, 1953)

“Child of the sun and the earth” 425
“I am a child and free” 426

Moncef Mezghanni (b. Sfax, 1954)

A Duck’s Speech 427
The Land of Narrow Dreams 428

xx Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Adam Fet’hi (b. 1957)
The Blind Glassblower 430
Cavafy’s Whip 431

Dorra Chammam (b. Tunis, 1965)

from Reefs and Other Consequences 433

Amel Moussa (b. Tripoli, 1971)

A Formal Poem 436
Love Me 437

Samia Ouederni (b. 1980)

For Tunisia 438

Mauritania 439
Oumar Moussa Ba (Senegalese village bordering Mauritania, 1921–1998)
Well-Known Oxen 440
The Banu Eyo-Eyo 441
Plea 441
Peul Poem 441
Song of the Washerwoman 442

Tene Youssouf Gueye (Kaédi, 1928–1988)

The Meaning of the Circus 443

Assane Youssouf Diallo (b. 1938)

from Leyd’am 444

Djibril Zakaria Sall (b. Rosso, 1939)

To Nelson Mandela 447

Ousmane-Moussa Diagana (Kaédi, 1951–Nouakchott, 2001)

from Cherguiya 450
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Mbarka Mint al-Barra’ (b. al-Madhardhara, 1957)

Poetry and I 450

Aïcha Mint Chighaly (b. Kaédi, 1962)

Praise on the Site of Aftout 451
Nostalgic Song about Life 452

Western Sahara 453

Bahia Mahmud Awah (b. Auserd, 1960)
The Books 455
I Have Faith in Time 456

Contents xxi

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 A Poem Is You 456
Orphan at a Starbucks 457

Zahra el Hasnaui Ahmed (b. El Aaiún, 1963)

Voices 457
“They Say That the Night” 458
Gazes 459

Mohammed Ebnu (b. Amgala, 1968)

Exile 460
Children of Sun and Wind 460
Message in a Bottle 461

Chejdan Mahmud Yazid (b. Tindouf, 1972)

Sirocco 462
The Expectorated Scream 463
Enough! 464

Limam Boicha (b. Atar, 1973)

The Roads of the South 464
Boughs of Thirst 465
Existence 466

A Book of Exiles

Prologue 469

Diaspora 
Mario Scalési (Tunis, 1892–Palermo, 1922)
Symbolism 471
New Year’s Gift 471
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Sunrise 472
Words of a Dying Soldier 472
Envoy 473

Jacques Berque (Frenda, 1910–Saint-Julien-en-Born, 1995)

from “Truth and Poetry”: On the Seksawa Tribe 473

Jacques Derrida (Algiers, 1930–Paris, 2004)

from The Monolingualism of the Other, or
The Prosthesis of Origin 478

xxii Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Hélène Cixous (b. Oran, 1937)
Letter-Beings and Time 484

Hubert Haddad (b. Tunis, 1947)

A Quarter to Midnight 488

Diaspora 
Paul Bowles (New York, 1910–Tangier, 1999)
from Africa Minor 493

Juan Goytisolo (b. Barcelona, 1931)

Dar Debbagh 496

Cécile Oumhani (b. Namur, 1952)

Young Woman at the Terrace 501

T h e O r a l T r ad i t i o n III

Prologue 505

Aissa al Jarmuni al Harkati (Sidi R’ghis, now Oum El Bouaghi,

1885–Aïn Beïda, Oum El Bouaghi province, 1946)
Poem about His Country, the “Watan” 506
Quatrain about the Jews at a Wedding Party in
the “Harat Lihud” Quarter in Constantine 506
Quatrain about the Sufi Sheikh Sidi Muhammad ben Said’s
Young Wife Who Had Died the Night Before 506
Two Quatrains about Human Existence 507
Two Quatrains on the Shawia People Sung at
the Olympia in Paris (1936) 507
Poem about Education 507
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Two Lyrics from al Harkati’s Recorded Songs 508

Oh Horse Breeder! 508
The Slender One 508

Qasi Udifella (1898–1950)

Four Poems 509

Mririda N’aït Attik (Megdaz, c. 1900–c. 1930)

The Bad Lover 513
What Do You Want? 514
The Brooch 514

Contents xxiii

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 The Song of the Azria 515

Slimane Azem (Kabylia, 1918–Moissac, France, 1983)

Taskurth (The Partridge) 517

Cheikha Rimitti (Tessala, 1923–Paris, 2006)

He Crushes Me 518
The Girls of Bel Abbès 519
The Worst of All Shelters 520

Kheira (b. Tunisia, c. 1934)

You Who Rebel against Fate, Rise and Face What
God Has Ordained 521

Mohammed Mrabet (b. Tangier, 1936)

Si Mokhtar 523

Hawad (b. north of Agadez, 1950)

from Hijacked Horizon 529

Lounis Aït Menguellet (b. Ighil Bouammas, 1950)

Love, Love, Love 535

Mohammed El Agidi (Morocco, twentieth century)

“Tell me Sunken Well” 537

Matoub Lounes (Taourirt Moussa, 1956–Tizi Ouzzou, 1998)

Kenza 539
My Soul 540

Fifth Diwan
“Make It New”: The Invention of Independence II
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Algeria 545
Mohammed Dib (Tlemcen, 1920–La Celle-Saint-Cloud, 2003)
from Formulaires 547

Jean Sénac (Béni Saf, 1926–Algiers, 1973)

Man Open 549
Heliopolis 550
Song of the Mortise 552
I Like What’s Difficult, Said You 553
The Last Song 553

xxiv Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Kateb Yacine (Guelma, 1929–Grenoble, 1989)
from Le Polygone Étoilé 554

Nadia Guendouz (Algiers, 1932–1992)

Green Fruit 558
On Rue de la Lyre 559
1st May 1963 561

Assia Djebar (b. Cherchell, 1936)

Poem for a Happy Algeria 563
from Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade 564

Malek Alloula (b. Oran, 1937)

from The Colonial Harem 569

Mourad Bourboune (b. Jijel, 1938)

from The Muezzin 574

Nabile Farès (b. Collo, 1940)

Over There, Afar, Lights 577

Rachid Boudjedra (b. Aïn Beïda, Oum El Bouaghi province, 1941)

from Rain (Diary of an Insomniac) 580

Abdelhamid Laghouati (b. Berrouaghia, 1943)

“To embrace” 583
Indictment 584

Youcef Sebti (Boudious, 1943–Algiers, 1993)

The Future 587
Hell and Madness 588

Ismael Abdoun (b. Béchar, 1945)

“Faun-eye’d iceberg burn” 589
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Rabah Belamri (Bougaa, 1946–Paris, 1995)

“Have we ever known” 590
Inversed Jabbok 591

Habib Tengour (b. Mostaganem, 1947)

from Gravity of the Angel 593

Hamida Chellali (b. Algiers, 1948)

“In the days” 597
from The Old Ones 598

Contents xxv

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Hamid Skif (Oran, 1951–Hamburg, 2011)
Pedagogical Couscous Song 602
Poem for My Prick 602
Here I Am 603

Hamid Tibouchi (b. Tibane, 1951)

from The Young Traveler and the Old-Fashioned Ghost 604

Mohamed Sehaba (b. Tafraoui, 1952)

Far from Our Erg 610
The Bird No Longer Sings 610
I Miss Something . . . 611

Abdelmadjid Kaouah (b. Aïn-Taya, near Algiers, 1954)

Neck 613
Modern Bar 613
Majestic 613

Tahar Djaout (Azeffoun, 1954–Algiers, 1993)

March 15, 1962 615

Amin Khan (b. Algiers, 1956)

Vision of the Return of Khadija to Opium 617

Mourad Djebel (b. Annaba, 1967)

Summer 620

Mustapha Benfodil (b. Relizane, 1968)

from I Conned Myself on a Levantine Day 621

Al-Mahdi Acherchour (b. Sidi-Aïch, 1973)

In the Emptiness 623
Return to the Missed Turn 624
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Samira Negrouche (b. Algiers, 1980)

Coffee without Sugar 626

Morocco 629
Driss Chraïbi (El Jadida, 1926–Drôme, France, 2007)
from Seen, Read, Heard 630

Mohammed Sebbagh (b. Tétouan, 1929)

from Seashell-Tree 634
from Candles on the Road 635

xxvi Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 A Brief Moment 636
The Missing Reader 637
Maternal Instinct 637
In Shackles 637
If I Had a Friend 638
Two Poems 639

Mohamed Serghini (b. Fez, 1930)

Poem I 640
Poem III 641
from Assembly of Dreams 641

Abdelkrim Tabbal (b. Chefchaouen, 1931)

To the Horse 643
Happiness 644
The Speech 645
Absent Time 646

Zaghloul Morsy (b. Marrakech, 1933)

from From a Reticent Sun 647

Mohamed Choukri (Aït Chiker, 1935–2003)

from The Prophet’s Slippers 648

Ahmad al-Majjaty (Casablanca, 1936–1995)

Arrival 652
Disappointment 652
The Stumbling of the Wind 653

Abdelkebir Khatibi (El Jadida, 1938–Rabat, 2009)

from Class Struggle in the Taoist Manner 654
from Love in Two Languages 656
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (Tafraout, 1941–Rabat, 1995)

Horoscope 659
Indictment 660
from I, Bitter 661

Ali Sadki Azayku (Taroudant, 1942–2004)

Neighbor to Life 665
The Shadows 666
Mother Tongue 667

Contents xxvii

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Abdellatif Laâbi (b. Fez, 1942)
The Portrait of the Father 668
The Anonymous Poet 669
Letter to Florence Aubenas 670

Mostafa Nissabouri (b. Casablanca, 1943)

from Approach to the Desert Space 673

Abdelmajid Benjelloun (b. Fez, 1944)

The Flute of Origins, or The Taciturn Dance 679
Eternity Comes Down on the Side of Love 680
A Woman to Love as One Would Love to Revive after Death 681

Tahar Ben Jelloun (b. Fez, 1944)

from Harrouda 682

Mohamed Sibari (b. Ksar el Kebir, 1945)

from Very Far Away . . . 685
Confession 686
Lady Night 687

Malika El Assimi (b. Marrakech, 1946)

Things Having Names 689
Smoke 690
Mariam 691
The Snout 691

Mohammed Bennis (b. Fez, 1948)

from The Book of Love 692
For You 692
Letter to Ibn Hazm 693
Seven Birds 696
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Ahmed Lemsyeh (b. Sidi Ismail, 1950)

Fragments of the Soul’s Shadow 698
I Miss My Self 699

Rachida Madani (b. Tangier, 1951)

from Walk through the Debris . . . 700

Mohammed al-Ashaari (b. Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, 1951)

from A Vast Space . . . Where There’s No One 704

xxviii Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Medhi Akhrif (b. Assilah, 1952)
from The Tomb of Helen 707
Half a Line 710

Abdallah Zrika (b. Casablanca, 1953)

from Drops from Black Candles 711
from Some Prose: My Sister’s Scream in Black and White 713

Mubarak Wassat (b. Mzinda, Safi region, 1955)

Balcony 715
Innocence 716
The Time of the Assassins 716

Hassan Najmi (b. Ben Ahmed, 1959)

The Window 717
Couplets 718
The Blueness of Evening 718
The Train Yard 719

Waafa Lamrani (b. Ksar el Kebir, 1960)

Alphabet Fire 720
A Shade of Probability 720
The Eighth Day 721

Ahmed Barakat (Casablanca, 1960–1994)

Afterwards 724
Black Pain 724
The Torn Flag 725

Touria Majdouline (b. Settat, 1960)

A Minute’s Speech 727
Out of Context 728
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Ahmed Assid (b. Taourmit, Taroudant province, 1961)

Prayer 729
A Chamber the Color of Disgust 730
Suns 731

Mohamed El Amraoui (b. Fez, 1964)

En Quelque 732
Jerusalem 733

Mohammed Hmoudane (b. Maaziz, 1968)

from Incandescence 735

Contents xxix

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Ouidad Benmoussa (b. Ksar el Kebir, 1969)
Restaurant Tuyets 738
This Planet . . . Our Bed 738
Road of Clouds 739

Omar Berrada (b. Casablanca, 1978)

Subtle Bonds of the Encounter 739

Credits 745

Index of Authors 757

Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

xxx Contents

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Thanks and
Acknowledgments

As is the custom, we will thank those individuals who have helped us with
the labor of this book and are closest to us toward the end of this note. But
to start with, we want to acknowledge the push of what we would like to
call the extreme contemporariness of history, as the edge of cultural and
political events—in this case those of the so-called Arab Spring—coincided
with and energized the final year of the redaction of this assemblage. In no
small way are those events a vindication of a project that has been in the
works for more than a decade now—with at least one of its aims being an
assertion of the cultural importance of the Arabo-Berber heritage for the
world. So our admiration and thanks go to all those in Tunisia and Libya,
but also in Egypt and beyond, who have decided to take to the streets and
reawaken the open-minded and pluralistic spirit that once animated the
world of al-Andalus and the Maghreb. Upmost in our minds as we worked
on this project were those Maghrebian poets, writers, and artists who suf-
fered torture, imprisonment, and, all too often, death at the hands of repres-
sive state systems, both colonial and postcolonial. We remember and thank
all of them. May the names of two assassinated Algerian poets who were our
personal friends—Youcef Sebti and Tahar Djaout—stand in for all of those
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

courageous fighters for freedom and justice too numerous to name.

It is impossible to list in extenso all the Maghrebian, European, and
American poets, writers, and scholars who contributed advice and counsel
during the long decade it took to bring the idea of this book to fruition. But
among those who functioned as continuous advisers, we give special thanks
to the poets Mohammed Bennis, Abdellatif Laâbi, Khaled Mattawa, and
Abdelwahab Meddeb. Marilyn Hacker and Madeleine Campbell have been
wise advisers and excellent translators. Joseph Mulligan has done amazing
gathering and translating from the Spanish for the Western Sahara sec-
tion, and beyond. In Paris, Éditions de la Différence has graciously given us

xxxi

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 permission to use the work of many of its Maghrebian authors—shukran!
More than thanks—as without his unstinting help and hard work as both
gatherer and translator (especially of the melhun materials) this would be
a different and much diminished book—are due to the Algerian poet and
scholar Abdelfetah Chenni, who by right could be named the third coeditor.
We also want to express our thanks and gratitude to poet, translator and
scholar Peter Cockelbergh, who assisted throughout the process of this book
with advice and translation help, and whose proofreading skills came to our
rescue in that final proverbial nick of time. On this side of the ocean, we
are deeply grateful to the other cofounder of the Poems for the Millennium
series, Jerome Rothenberg, whose continuous support and advice have been
invaluable, and to Charles Bernstein, whose enthusiasm for and defense of
this project have been beyond the call of duty.
Institutional help has also played its role in advancing the cause of the
book, and we thank the Ministère de la Culture of Luxembourg, which
enabled several research trips to Algeria and Morocco. More locally we
are grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for its support and
to the Leslie Scalapino Memorial Fund for Poetry, which was established
by generous contributions to the University of California Press Foundation
by Thomas J. White and the Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund. Our team at
University of California Press, led by Rachel Berchten, has been unstint-
ing in its efforts to ensure a healthy natural birth to this oversize brainchild
of ours. Of course the two editors could not have completed this task if
Nicole Peyrafitte, son Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, and daughter Hind Tengour
didn’t have their backs during the often difficult—though always exhilarat-
ing—nomadic wanderings that the gathering and shaping of this volume
demanded.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

xxxii Thanks and Acknowledgments

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Introduction

This book has been incubating in our minds for a quarter century now, and
we have been gathering material for even longer—with the aim of assem-
bling and contextualizing a wide range of writing from North Africa previ-
ously unavailable in the English-speaking world. The result is, we believe,
a rich if obviously not full dossier of primary materials of interest not only
to scholars of world literature, specialists in the fields of Arab and Berber
studies, but also to a general audience and to contemporary readers and
practitioners of poetry who, to deturn a Frank O’Hara line, want “to see
what the poets in North Africa are doing these days.” It is a project meant as
a contribution to the ongoing reassessment of both the literary and cultural
studies fields in our global, postcolonial age. Its documentary and trans-
genre orientation means that it not only features major authors and literary
touchstones but also provides a first look at a wide range of popular cultural
genres, from ancient riddles, pictographs, and magic formulas to contem-
porary popular tales and songs, and is also in part a work of ethnopoet-
ics. Drawing on primary resources that remain little known and difficult
of access, and informed by the latest scholarship, this gathering of texts
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

illuminates the distinctively internationalist spirit typified by North African

culture through its many permutations.
A combination of traditional and experimental literary texts and ethno­
poetic material, this fourth volume in the ongoing Poems for the Millennium
series of anthologies is a natural progression from its predecessors. Jerome
Rothenberg and Pierre Joris edited the first two volumes, which present
worldwide experimental poetries of the twentieth century. Volume 3, as
a historical “prequel,” covers the new and experimental poetries of nine-
teenth-century Romanticism worldwide. This volume—which we have at
times half-jokingly thought of as a “sidequel,” for its southerly departure
from Europe and North America, the series’s main focus—is conceptually

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 linked to volume 3 in its attempt to present the historical processes that led
to the most innovative contemporary work. And the first two, core volumes
in fact include—although in a minimal manner, of necessity—a few of the
Maghrebian authors who are revolutionizing writing in their countries
today. Those books also show the importance of oral literature in contem-
porary experimentation, a theme deepened and broadened in the volume at
hand.
Throughout the years of work on this book, our shorthand working title
was “Diwan Ifrikiya,” which has the advantage of being brief and concise,
though the disadvantage of being slightly obscure compared to the longer,
less elegant, but more explicit appellation Book of North African Literature.
“Diwan Ifrikiya”—as we refer to it throughout this introduction—combines
the well-known Arabic word for “a gathering, a collection or anthology” of
poems, diwan, with one of the earliest names of (at least part of) the region
that this book covers. Ifrikiya is an Arabization of the Latin word Africa—
which the Romans took from the Egyptians, who spoke of “the land of the
Ifri,” referring to the original inhabitants of North Africa. The Romans
called these people Berbers, but they call themselves the Amazigh, and even
today tribal names—such as Beni Ifren—in their language, Tamazight,
include words derived from ifri.
“Diwan Ifrikiya” is thus an anthology of the various and varied written
and oral literatures of North Africa, the region known as the Maghreb, tra-
ditionally described as situated between the Siwa Oasis to the east (in fact,
inside the borders of Egypt) and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, spanning
the modern nation-states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—as well
as the desert space of the Sahara. Given the nomadic habits of the Tuareg
tribes, the larger Maghreb can include parts of Mali, Niger, and Chad, plus
Mauritania, to the great desert’s southwest, famous for its manuscript col-
lections. (The spread of the various Amazigh peoples is also describable in
terms of their basic food, namely the breadth and limits of the use of rolled
barley and wheat flour, or couscous.) We have also included the extremely
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

rich and influential Arab-Berber and Jewish literary culture of al-Andalus,

which flourished in Spain between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. This
culture was intimately linked to North Africa throughout its existence and
even after its final disappearance following the Reconquista, given that a
great part of Spain’s Muslim and Jewish population fled toward the south
then, seeking refuge in North Africa.
The time span of “Diwan Ifrikiya” reaches from the earliest inscrip-
tions—prehistoric rock drawings in the Tassili and Hoggar regions in the
southern Sahara; the first Berber pictograms—to the work of the current
generation of postindependence and diasporic writers. Such a chronology
takes in diverse cultures, including Amazigh, Phoenician, Jewish, Roman,

2 Introduction

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 Vandal, Arab, Ottoman, and French constituents. It also covers a range of
literary genres: although concentrating on oral and written poetry and nar-
ratives, especially those which invent new or renew preexisting literary tra-
ditions, our gathering also draws on historical and geographical treatises,
philosophical and esoteric traditions and genres, song lyrics, current prose
experiments in the novel and short story, and so forth.
From a wider or outside perspective, the overall chronological arrange-
ment makes perceptible the crucial importance of this region in the devel-
opment of Western culture, adding hitherto little-known or unknown his-
torical data while showing how the Maghreb’s present-day postcolonial
achievements are major contributions to global world culture. In ancient
times, the Maghreb was seen as the Roman Empire’s breadbasket—we hope
this book shows that at the intellectual and artistic levels this has remained
so ever since. To be candid: North Africa is a region whose cultural achieve-
ments—including their impact on and importance for Western culture—
have been not only passively neglected but often actively “disappeared” or
written out of the record. This is true for the majority of this area’s autoch-
thonous writers and thinkers, even those few whose achievements have been
recognized north of the Mediterranean—often because they became dias-
pora figures working in Europe. A few examples may suffice: Augustine is
certainly considered a major church father, but his North African roots, if
not totally obscured, are given little credit. Apuleius, the author of one of
the first prose narratives that prefigure our novel, is known as a Latin or late
Roman writer, not a Maghrebian. It is also interesting to note in this con-
text that the last poet whose mother tongue was Latin was a Carthaginian,
and that by an odd circumstance the first nonoral poet in our chronology,
Callimachus—whose forebears immigrated to Cyrenaica (Libya), possibly
from the Greek island of Thera, where the first ruler of the Battiad Dynasty
came from—wrote in Greek.
We know that during the heyday of Arab-Islamic culture, and more spe-
cifically between 1100 and 1300 c.e., scribes and thinkers first safeguarded,
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

then translated and transmitted to the Europeans, much of the Greek phi-
losophy and science that we pride ourselves on as the roots of Western
civilization. Many lived and worked in al-Andalus, that thriving center of
culture on European shores—a place where a millennium ago Arabs, Jews,
and Christians learned to live together in productive peace. Yet the core
figures of this period of Arab culture, such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta,
and Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi—whom we know as Leo
Africanus—if not unknown, are seriously marginalized in the West. Lip
service may be paid to, say, Ibn Khaldun, as the father of sociology, or a
French author of Lebanese origin may write a successful novel based on the
figure of Leo Africanus, but the actual texts of these writers, thinkers, and

Introduction 3

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 mapmakers are rarely available to the Anglophone world—or are available
only to specialists or, again, without much context with which to read and
appreciate them.
Even if Arab culture went into a long sleep and the high-cultural pro-
ductions of the Maghreb often became mere imitations of the classical
Mashreqi (Near Eastern) models—and thus less creatively innovative—dur-
ing the centuries between the fall of al-Andalus to the Spanish Christians
and the conquest of North Africa by the colonial powers, there was much
cultural activity then. This is especially true for the autochthonous Berber
cultures which, despite having been Arabized (at least to the degree of
accepting Islam, in many instances in a modified, maraboutic form), kept
alive vital modes of popular oral literature, for example Berber tales and sto-
ries, plus elaborations and updated versions of the Arab-Berber epic of the
Banu Hillal confederation. European anthropologists gathered much of this
ethnopoetic material in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it
has since faded from view, we surmise both from a lack of interest shown by
the old colonizers and from a justifiable and understandable unease among
Maghrebians toward this material so often labeled “primitive” or “prelit-
erary” by those who recorded it. Besides which, the current Maghrebian
societies are too busy trying to invent their own contemporaneity and to
modernize themselves to have much time or desire to invest their limited
resources in reassessing their remote pasts. If this anthology helps to dispel
some of this unease or even incites other researchers and writers to look
deeper into these hidden and buried histories, it will have accomplished one
of its main goals.
The longtime neglect of such a major cultural area is part of a wider, now
well-documented, Eurocentrism; permit us to cite an example germane to
the project at hand. In the early days of Modernism, Ezra Pound spent time
and energy establishing the roots of European lyric poetry, which he located
in the French/Occitan troubadour tradition, a lineage that has become
canonical over the past century. Open your American Heritage Dictionary,
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

and you’ll see that it gives the Latin tropare as the root of troubadour—an
etymology that on closer inspection, however, turns out to be reconstructed,
presumed, and unattested (i.e., marked with an asterisk). In fact, the field of
romance philology has done everything in its power to negate any traces of
a non-European origin of—or even strong foreign influence on—European
lyric poetry. And yet it has been known since at least 1928, via the work of
the Spanish linguist Julián Ribera, that the obvious root of troubadour is the
Arabic tarab, “to sing,” specifically to sing a musical poetry that produces
an exalted state. (One could also link this ecstatic sense of tarab to Federico
García Lorca’s duende.) Pound, like nearly all other European and American
writers and researchers, was looking for European origins—though in his

4 Introduction

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 1913 essay on the troubadours he had a vague inkling that something else
was going on, as far as the tunes of the troubadours’ canzos are concerned:
“They are perhaps a little Oriental in feeling, and it is likely that the spirit of
Sufism is not wholly absent from their content.” It is that kind of belittling
and, in the final analysis, deeply denigrating attitude that “Diwan Ifrikiya”
addresses and, we hope, redresses somewhat.
This anthology is organized into five approximately chronological diwans,
inside which the authors appear in chronological order. Reading through
them, one can get a sense of temporal progression and thus of the changes
brought by history. The First Diwan, subtitled “A Book of In-Betweens:
Al-Andalus, Sicily, the Maghreb,” starts with an early, anonymous muwash-
shaha—that lyrical poetic form invented in al-Andalus which moved Arabic
poetry away from the imitation of classical qasida models going back to
pre-Islamic forms. After a wide presentation of Arab and Jewish poets who
made al-Andalus so incredible and possibly unique, the diwan ends with Ibn
Zamrak’s wonderful description of the Alhambra.
The next diwan, “Al Adab: The Invention of Prose,” presents a range of
materials—from literary criticism through Ibn Khaldun’s writings (the ur-
texts of what will become sociology) to historical, literary, and cultural doc-
uments—that will give the reader a sense of the breadth and width of this
pulsating and formative civilization. The Third Diwan, “The Long Sleep
and the Slow Awakening,” moves us from the end of the fifteenth century
(and thus the end of al-Andalus, which can be dated to the final victory of
the Spanish Reconquista, in 1492) to the end of the nineteenth, a period
during which Arab culture—both in its cradle, the Middle East, and in its
Western extension, the Maghreb (in fact, in Arabic Maghreb means “West,”
in both a geographical and a deeper cultural, even mystical, sense)—fell
prey to what is usually called decadence, at the political, social, and cultural
levels. For the Maghreb, however, even these centuries held creative excite-
ment: it was then that one of the great poetic forms of North Africa, the mel-
hun, came into its own by revitalizing its classical roots through both formal
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

and linguistic innovations, including the use of the Maghrebian vernacular.

The innovations and final grandeur of these poems, song lyrics really, are
difficult to bring across in translation; suffice it to say that the poems have
stood the test of time and still represent the core repertoire of the great mel-
hun singers.
The Fourth Diwan, “Resistance and Road to Independence,” covers about
one hundred years: from the mid-nineteenth (the aftermath of the French
colonization of Algeria) to the mid-twentieth century, that moment when
the people of the Maghreb begin to demand—and fight for—sovereignty.
The shock of colonization may at first have numbed these populations, but
in the twentieth century they produced a literature of resistance while on

Introduction 5

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 what we have called the long road to independence. A specifically national or
nationalist thought also emerged then, as a range of differences—between,
before all, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—rose to the surface and began
to be theorized. Emblematic of this period are the diwan’s two framing fig-
ures: Emir Abd El Kader, born in Mascara in 1808, the great nomad war-
rior who gathered the tribes to fight the French, was a superb writer and
poet, a Sufi mystic, and a follower of Ibn Arabi’s thought, who died in exile
in Damascus; and Henri Kréa, the French-Algerian poet who fought for
Algeria’s independence and died in Paris in 2000. An amazing span—with
other amazing figures, such as Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi, Frantz Fanon, and
Kateb Yacine, whose work includes some of the first great classics of modern
Maghrebian literature.
A double diwan concludes the book: although it covers only the past sixty
or so years, its size demanded the split into two sections. We have divided it
according to geography, grouping the two northeastern Maghreb countries
(Libya and Tunisia) with the two relatively small countries in the south-
west of our area, namely, Mauritania and Western Sahara, while keeping
Algeria and Morocco for part 2. The writers in this diwan are those who
came of age at the moment of independence and the two to three generations
since then. This diwan’s size and literary achievement show that the great
richness that characterized early Maghrebian culture, even if buried for a
time by the “decadence” of one of its foundational cultures and then by the
strictures of European colonial impositions, has burst to the fore again—
with a vengeance. This richness brings to mind the days of multicultural
al-Andalus, even if today we would call it multinational or hybrid or cross-
border. For instance, the youngest poet in the last—the Morocco—section
of the book, Omar Berrada, sets his work presented here in the company of
the three international figures whom he honors: the late-nineteenth-century
French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry, the twentieth-century North American
performance poet bpNichol, and the great Sufi poet and mystic Ibn Arabi
(1165–1240), whom we will meet on several occasions throughout “Diwan
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Ifrikiya.”
The diwans are interrupted, leavened, given breathing room—however
you experience it—by a series of smaller sections, four “Books” and three
“Oral Traditions,” whose roles are multiple: filling in detail, giving context,
or foregrounding specific areas. Thus “A Book of Multiple Beginnings” pre-
cedes the First Diwan, taking the reader from an early Berber inscription
(see p. 10) to a prehistoric rock painting in the southern Sahara’s Tassili and
Hoggar region (see p. 12) through the first centuries of recorded literary out-
put. The Phoenician, Greek, and Roman writings from this period include
some of the world-class achievements of Maghrebian culture.
Creation myths and tales of origin logically open this section. This puts

6 Introduction

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 the autochthonous Berber peoples rightfully at the start of the Maghrebian
adventure while also foregrounding a tradition—the oral tradition—that
has consistently produced major literary achievements over several millen-
nia. This tradition is so ample and important that we had to create three
independent sections (“Oral Traditions 1–3”) dispersed throughout the
anthology to try to do justice to its richness—which persists today, as the
third of the sections, presenting contemporary oral work, shows. The distri-
bution of these sections also reflects the fact that many of this anthology’s
contemporary writers source and resource themselves in that oral tradition’s
imaginary—one could go so far as to consider it the Maghrebian collective
unconscious.
The other books concentrate on the poetry of the Sufi mystics (“A Book
of Mystics”), on the very specific poetics of Arabic calligraphy (“A Book
of Writing”)—a core sense-making, meditative, and aesthetic dimen-
sion of Arab culture—and, finally, on a few diasporic writers (“A Book of
Exiles”), both those who have left North Africa for whatever reason but
feel themselves Maghrebian despite their exilic position and those who have
come and stayed, deciding to become Maghrebian or return to lost roots.
Ironically, this smallest of subsections could be the largest: the diasporic or
exilic dimension is one of the main characteristics of Maghrebian literature,
given that the majority of its authors live and write on two or more shores.
Although it may seem counterintuitive for “A Book of Exiles” to include
such writers as Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, who are seen as essen-
tially French (even if some of their work points to—and their late work
indeed insists more and more on—the importance of their Maghrebian
roots), their contributions here deal exactly with exile from the Maghreb and
the related question of choice of language (see, for example, Derrida’s essay
The Monolingualism of the Other, which is a response to and an elabora-
tion of the Moroccan poet and thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi’s writings on this
problem). Their work also helps to contextualize the problems of the sur-
rounding obviously Maghrebian contemporary writers, who faced both the
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

necessity of actual exile and the difficult decision of which language to write
in. Although their mother tongue was usually one of several Berber languages
or a darija (dialectal) variation of Arabic, more often than not they forwent
these in favor of either the old colonial language, namely, French, or classical
Arabic (which some Berbers, including even the great Algerian writer Kateb
Yacine, consider as much of a colonial/imperial imposition as French).
Writing in French invariably connects the author with the old colonial
metropole—no matter if he or she lives in the Maghreb or in self-imposed
or forced exile elsewhere—as that’s where the major publishing houses are
(only recently have independent houses emerged in the Maghreb). Writing
in Arabic means dealing with small local publishers and getting caught up in

Introduction 7

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 all the political and censorship problems this has meant for most of the time
since independence, or trying to publish in Lebanon or Egypt, the major
Mashreqi publishing centers. The latter is also fraught with problems, as
Maghrebian and Mashreqian cultures do not necessarily coexist easily. But
no matter if they publish in Paris or Beirut, these writers have little chance
of being translated into and published in English. The little interest and
financial support our cultural institutions and publishers have been able to
garner for translations from French and Arabic have been squarely devoted
to Parisian, Beiruti, and Cairene authors. Even greater are the difficulties of
those Maghrebian authors who chose to write in Berber—though Morocco
and Algeria have each recently declared it an official national language—or
use the ancient tifinagh alphabet, as does the Tuareg poet Hawad, who now
lives in southern France. It is therefore also an aim of this gathering to pro-
vide a space for the mixing and mingling (at least in English) of writers who
in their own countries and in other (usually country- or language-specific)
anthologies have to exist in a kind of de facto cultural apartheid.
Many if not most of the texts are appearing for the first time in English
translation, while others are retranslations into contemporary American
English of older Englished versions. The genres and the original lan-
guages—Tamazight (Berber), Greek, Latin, Arabic, and French—are mani-
fold. Obviously a work of this order cannot be the work of one or even two
persons. If we are the “author-editors” and, for some part, the translators
of this anthology, we are fully aware of our limits: although between us we
do have English, Latin, French, and Arabic, we do not know all the ages,
all the languages, all the cultures that have contributed to this gathering.
Our role has been threefold: (1) as the principal gatherers and arrangers of
materials worked on by many other scholars, writers, and translators, (2) as
the creators of the specific shape this book has taken (although here we owe
a debt to Jerome Rothenberg, the collaborator with one of us on the first two
volumes in the Poems for the Millennium series), and (3) as the purveyors of
a range of translations done singly or in collaboration whenever no transla-
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

tions could be found, as well as of most of the contextual materials, such as

prologues and commentaries, given to make more tangible and understand-
able the textual productions—poems, narratives, mystical visions, travel
writings—of an area of the world not necessarily familiar to the general
reader. To keep the volume from being overlong and to maintain focus on
the texts themselves, we have not provided an individual commentary for
every author although in many cases further information is included in
the prologues. We do know the Maghreb well: Habib Tengour is Algerian,
was born and raised in Algeria, taught at the University of Constantine for
many years, and, though now based in Paris, returns to his home country

8 Introduction

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 and other Maghrebian countries a number of times a year. Pierre Joris also
taught for three years in the 1970s at the University of Constantine (where he
and Tengour met) and has since returned regularly to this book’s three core
countries: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
It is our contention that “Diwan Ifrikiya” is especially important today,
at a moment in history when the West’s, especially the United States’, con-
vulsive engagement with Arab culture is in such a disastrous deadlock.
Paradoxically, the United States is publishing more books on Arab coun-
tries, regimes, economics, and politics than ever before, though nearly all of
them concentrate on the negative and paranoia-creating aspects of “Islamic
terrorism” and do their best to claim noncivilization status for the region
they cover (by suggesting, for instance, that it suffers from a combination
of “primitive,” bloodthirsty religion and misuse of modern Euro-American
technologies) or are written from similarly dismissive perspectives. Such
works do not permit the reader to understand what deeply animates these
populations, in truth so near to us yet always pushed back and occulted.
A book concerned with Maghrebian cultural achievements, in fields such
as literature and philosophy, allows us to share in this universe, which is
part of ours, no matter how deeply repressed. Knowledge of the Maghreb
is, we believe, essential in a world where a nomadic mind-set is crucial for
understanding (or inventing) the new century—especially if we do not want
to repeat some of the deadliest errors of the last.
It is a marvelous coincidence that although we first thought of this book a
quarter century ago, we actually gathered and wrote it exactly when Tunisia
and Libya saw the start of a revolution, called the Arab Spring, that is still
going and may be the shape-shifter that will determine the outcome of this
century. We hope that through its polyvalent view of the region’s cultural
achievements, our book will help to further a deeper understanding of this
strategic part of the world.
Pierre Joris
Habib Tengour
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

New York / Paris

Spring 2011

Introduction 9

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 In Thugga, a Berber-Roman city of northern Tunisia, a Punic sanctuary erected and dedicated to the
memory of the Numidian king Massinissa (d. 148 c .e.), this bilingual inscription in Punic and Lybic-
Berber was found on a rectangular stone in the southeast sector of the forum. Discovered in 1904
and dated to the tenth year of the reign of Massinissa’s successor, Micipsa—that is, to 139 b .c .e.—
the stone is now at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 A B o o k o f M u l t i p l e
B e g i n n i n g s
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Prehistoric rock painting, southern Sahara Tassili region. From Henri Llote, Vers d’autres Tassilis
(Paris: Arthaud, 1976).

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 P ROLOGUE

(1) Human traces in North Africa go back to more than 40,000 years b.c.e.
But our knowledge of them is limited to a specific area: the region of Gafsa
in west-central Tunisia, with ramifications toward the high plains between
Constantine and Sétif in Algeria, and areas of the Sahara and ancient
Cyrenaica—modern Libya. In this region snail farms and a stone and bone
industry were found, indicating that from about 8000 until 4000 b.c.e., the
human inhabitants seem to have been rather sedentary: they lived on snails,
plants, and wild fruit while also hunting mammals and birds. They had
clearly discovered the concept and practice of art, as shown by the Capsian
tools, worked ostrich eggs, and burned and incised stones found in the quar-
ries of el-Mekta, Tunisia, and preserved in the Gafsa Museum. The Capsian
cultures (named for the town of Gafsa, which in Roman times was known
as Capsa) probably came into being later than those of the Sahara and the
Sudan, which had evolved a Neolithic culture including ceramics by the end
of the seventh millennium b.c.e.
At the core of the Capsian Neolithic a range of differentiations appears,
with each region showing its own characteristics. The definitive desertifi-
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

cation of the Sahara marked this long Neolithic (lasting from circa 6000
to circa 3000), creating in its wake a separation between two worlds, one
of which would be forced to turn toward the sea. We know little about
the evolution of North Africa in the second millennium b.c.e. Numerous
megalithic monuments, difficult to date with any accuracy, are disseminated
throughout the region around Constantine. They do, however, suggest
Mediterranean influences. The introduction of the horse—which will make
the reputation of the Numidians in their confrontation with the Romans—
also dates from this period.
It is via the Mediterranean that North Africa entered history with a capi-

13

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 tal H: the world of writing, of traditions diffused over many centuries, and
of archeology, which reveals the ancient presence of the Phoenicians and
the Greeks, from the most eastern parts of what is today Libya to the Pillars
of Hercules. When Elissa (a.k.a. Dido), sister to the king of Tyre, founded
Carthage in 814 b.c.e., the region was peopled by Berbers. The ancient
Greeks called the territory between the Egyptian border and the Pillars of
Hercules, including the Saharan zones, Libya, picking up on the Egyptian
name “land of the Libu.” Homer has Menelaus travel through Libya on his
way home, and according to the poet it was a land of great riches, where
lambs have horns as soon as they are born, ewes lamb three times a year,
and no shepherd ever goes short of milk, meat, or cheese. He called the
inhabitants of this paradisiacal land the Lotophagi, the Lotus-eaters. But
it is Herodotus who has left us the most accurate description of the ancient
Libyan populations: he is the first to clearly establish a distinction between
the nomadic and the sedentary populations. Some of the names he cites have
survived, such as those of the Atlantes (together with the famous legend
of Atlantis), the Auses (Oasians), and, most important, the Maxyes. After
the Roman conquest, Libyan will no longer be the name of all the Berber
peoples, but only one of them.
With the Roman invasion of Africa, “Libya” is divided into four regions:
Libo-Phoenicia, Numidia, Mauritania, and Getulia, the Saharan backcoun-
try. Knowledge of the Berber peoples gets more precise during the period of
Roman colonization, when Roman historians record several traditions con-
cerning the autochthonous populations. The name Mazyes (per Kektaios)
or Maxyes (per Herodotus) is Latinized as Mazaces or Mazax and applied
to Caesarean Mauritania, though by the third century b.c.e. several peo-
ples carried this label. The variations on the name probably derive from an
original Berber denomination, as up to today the Berbers call themselves
Imazighen or Amazigh, meaning “free man.” The question of whether they
are an autochthonous population or arrived in that part of the world as a
result of migrations is still sometimes hotly debated.
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

In De Bello Jugurthino (The Jugurthine War), the Roman historian Sallust

relates the settlement of North Africa according to Punic books attributed
to the Numidian king Hiempsal II. To sum up Sallust, this supposedly hap-
pened in three stages. Libyans and Getulians formed the original settlement.
Persians and Medes from Hercules’s army in Spain invaded, finally amal-
gamating via intermarriage. The mix of Persians and Getulians produced
the Numidians, while that of Medes and Libyans resulted in the Moors.
Finally came the Phoenicians, who colonized the shores and founded a num-
ber of cities.
The Berbers emerged from “obscurity” only in the third century b.c.e.,

14 A Book of Multiple Beginnings

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 when the Numidian and Moorish kingdoms got involved in the wars between
Rome and Carthage along the whole perimeter of the eastern Mediterranean.
Previously Carthage had played an essential role in the region’s development
by spreading its customs and adapting them to local circumstances. Punic,
for example, was used by literate Berbers and survived the demise of the
city of Carthage, flourishing side by side with the Berber languages for a
long time. It is interesting to note that despite the existence of an alphabet
of their own, literate Berbers have mostly used the language of the other
(Punic, Greek, and Latin, then Arabic and later French) in their writings.
After Carthage created several commercial centers along the coast of Africa,
its rivalry with the Greeks transformed the habitat, the culture, and the reli-
gious life of this region, primarily from the fourth century b.c.e. on. Roman
domination, which eventually stretched across all of North Africa, com-
bined with the Carthaginian civilization’s influence (more or less profound
depending on Carthage’s relation to each city) and the different levels of
development of the various Berber populations to create the originality and
the diversity of the North African space. And this was the result despite the
unity that could not but emerge from the centralizing power of Rome—felt
in, for instance, the Hellenistic and Roman culture dispensed in schools, be
they in Carthage, Cirta, Caesaria, or smaller cities such as Madaurus, where
Apuleius was born.
The economic weight of the African provinces also gave them a certain
cultural leverage. The Berbers were talented practitioners of Latin letters:
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a.k.a. The Golden Ass, remains important
to this day, standing as one of the great early prose works foreshadowing
the development of such literary forms as the novel. But it is before all in
the domain of religious thought, with the spreading of Christianity, that
North Africa and specifically Numidia was to make a capital contribution.
Tertullian (155–222 c.e.) was the first major Christian author and the first
Maghrebi writer of religious matter in Latin. He opened the way to a wide
literary tradition then developed by Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), Arnobius
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(d. 330), Lactantius (250–325), Optatus of Milevis (d. 387), and Dracontius
(c. 455–c. 505), whom some claim as possibly the last poet whose mother
tongue was Latin. And then there is of course Augustine, probably the
most illustrious representative of this early North African tradition. Born
in Thagaste (today Souk Ahras) and later made bishop of Hippo (today
Annaba), Augustine marked the consciousness of not only the scholars with
whom he was in contact both in Africa and throughout the Roman Empire
but also those of the following centuries, first with the specific positions
he took on a whole range of theological problems in his voluminous writ-
ings and maybe even more lastingly with his literary-philosophical magnum

Prologue 15

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 opus, the Confessions. When Augustine died in 430, the Vandals were at the
doors of Hippo, and North Africa was about to begin another of its many
transformations.
(2) Even though the earliest literary material traces found in North Africa
are inscriptions, texts, and poems written in Greek, Punic, and Latin, we
contend that the Berbers, the earliest inhabitants of the area, had rich oral
traditions that predated these by millennia. Their tradition of tales, songs,
and other genres—explored in more detail in the three Oral Tradition sec-
tions—not only has lasted until today but is now experiencing what can
only be described as a renaissance, with present-day Morocco and Algeria
finally inscribing Amazigh as an official language in their constitutions, thus
taking the first step toward doing away with the neglect, opprobrium, and
repression that were the lot of the native North African languages during the
centuries of colonial domination—be it Latin-, Arabic-, or French-speaking.
We therefore open the first chapter—called “A Book of Multiple Begin-
nings”—to make clear the multiplicity of the area’s cultural origins ab initio
(with a Berber tale that gives an Amazigh version of how the world and all
that’s in it came to be created). That such tales were gathered in the opening
decades of the twentieth century by Leo Frobenius, whose work—take, for
example, his concept of Paideuma, culture as a gestalt and a living organ-
ism—would be so important to the rich experimental poetic tradition of that
century all the way from Ezra Pound to Jerome Rothenberg’s later ethnopo-
etics movement, seems to us a meaningful link between the most distant
past and our own and may be described by the phrase—in the poet and
cultural passeur Michel Deguy’s words—“extreme contemporaneity.”

T h e F i r s t H u m a n B e i ng s,
Th ei r S o n s a n d A m azon D a ug hte rs
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

In the beginning there were only one man and one woman, and they lived
not on the earth but beneath it. They were the first people in the world, and
neither knew that the other was of another sex. One day they both came to
the well to drink. The man said: “Let me drink.” The woman said: “No, I’ll
drink first. I was here first.” The man tried to push the woman aside. She
struck him. They fought. The man smote the woman so that she dropped to
the ground. Her clothing fell to one side. Her thighs were naked.
The man saw the woman lying strange and naked before him. He saw
that she had a taschunt. He felt that he had a thabuscht. He looked at the

16 A Book of Multiple Beginnings

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
 taschunt and asked: “What is that for?” The woman said: “That is good.”
The man lay upon the woman. He lay with the woman for eight days.
After nine months the woman bore four daughters. Again, after nine
months, she bore four sons. And again four daughters and again four sons.
So at last the man and the woman had fifty daughters and fifty sons. The
father and the mother did not know what to do with so many children. So
they sent them away.
The fifty maidens went off together toward the north. The fifty young
men went off together toward the east. After the maidens had been on their
way northward under the earth for a year, they saw a light above them.
There was a hole in the earth. The maidens saw the sky above them and
cried: “Why stay under the earth when we can climb to the surface, where
we can see the sky?” The maidens climbed up through the hole and onto the
earth.
The fifty youths likewise continued in their own direction under the earth
for a year until they too came to a place where there was a hole in the crust
and they could see the sky above them. The youths looked at the sky and
cried: “Why remain under the earth when there is a place from which one
can see the sky?” So they climbed through their hole to the surface.
Thereafter the fifty maidens went their way over the earth’s surface and
the youths went their way, and none knew aught of the others.
At that time all trees and plants and stones could speak. The fifty maidens
saw the plants and asked them: “Who made you?” And the plants replied:
“The earth.” The maidens asked the earth: “Who made you?” And the earth
replied: “I was already here.” During the night the maidens saw the moon
and the stars, and they cried: “Who made you that you stand so high over us
and over the trees? Is it you who give us light? Who are you, great and little
stars? Who created you? Or are you, perhaps, the ones who have made every-
thing else?” All the maidens called and shouted. But the moon and the stars
were so high that they could not answer. The youths had wandered into the
same region and could hear the fifty maidens shouting. They said to one
Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

another: “Surely here are other people like ourselves. Let us go and see who
they are.” And they set off in the direction from which the shouts had come.
But just before they reached the place, they came to the bank of a great
stream. The stream lay between the fifty maidens and the fifty youths. The
youths had, however, never seen a river before, so they shouted. The maid-
ens heard the shouting in the distance and came toward it.
The maidens reached the other bank of the river, saw the fifty youths, and
cried: “Who are you? What are you shouting? Are you human beings too?”
The fifty youths shouted back: “We too are human beings. We have come
out of the earth. But what are you yelling about?”

The First Human Beings 17

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four : The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris, and
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 October 17th.—I am off to Tashkend to-day, with Maria
Michaelovna and my maid Mina. All the cars of our train are occupied
by the members of the medical expedition sent to Tashkend to fight
against the plague. It consists of forty doctors and ten sisters of
mercy. The rain is coming down in torrents, but when I felt happy I
was not in the least aware that the sun was not shining, and I am so
happy now to rejoin Sergy! Our train is an express and rushes past
nearly all the stations. We hadn’t time for dinner and snatched a
sandwich at a railway buffet, that had probably been waiting more
than a week for travellers to arrive.
October 21st.—We are at Petrovsk at ten o’clock in the morning. I
saw the Tzarevitch, a great ship ready for sea, with steam up,
making ready to cast off and be gone; the gang way was just about
to be withdrawn when we got on board.
I am again on the hateful element. The sea is covered with foam,
the wind blows impetuously, rising in enormous billows. We have to
struggle both with the hurricane and the swift current which does
not permit us to approach the coasts of Derbent where we had to
put in. I suffer a great deal from sea-sickness, although I have made
three voyages round the world. All the passengers look green and
miserable.
October 22nd.—At eleven o’clock we arrived at Baku, where a very
disagreeable surprise awaited us. We have to leave the boat and go
over to the Prince Bariatinsky, a poor little thing, little more than a
yacht. The Tzarevitch is retained for the Prince of Oldenbourg.
We made ourselves as comfortable as we could in our stuffy little
cabin. Towards evening we entered a dense fog, and could not see
four paces ahead. The captain does not leave the poop, and every
five minutes the fog-horn throws piercing shrieks into the black
night.
October 23rd.—At daybreak the fog cleared away. The sea is quite
smooth. We are going full speed, making fifteen knots an hour.
 At ten o’clock we entered the port of Krasnovodsk. My car was
attached to the express of the Prince of Oldenbourg, who arrived in
the afternoon on the Tzarevitch. Before starting the Prince sent his
aide-de-camp to ask if I could receive him. I replied that I felt very
tired for the moment but hoped that I should be able to see His
Highness during our long railway journey.
October 25th.—I found a telegram from Sergy waiting for me at
Kermineh, telling me by what train he would meet me at the station
of Kata-Kourgan. I am happy, happy, happy!
We had a long time to wait at Kermineh because the Emir had
come to see the Prince of Oldenbourg, and our train was not due to
start for two mortal hours. I must just have patience and wait, but
as patience is an unknown word in my vocabulary, I grumbled
awfully at the delay. This time I travelled incognito and was left in
peace; my blinds were scrupulously drawn down. Trying to shorten
the hours that separated me from my husband, I went to bed
directly after dinner. Oh, I wish it was to-morrow!
October 26th.—It was only in the middle of the night that we
arrived at Kata-Kourgan, where Sergy’s waggon was joined to our
train. I can’t find words to express my joy!
It was about eleven o’clock when we stopped at the station of
Samarkand. Everywhere was the smell of pungent disinfectant. We
are going to remain two days here. Sergy put up at the house of
General Fedoroff, Governor of Samarkand. The town is ten miles
from the station, but I prefer to remain in my car, standing alone in
a side-track of the line. The road leading to the station was
illuminated at night with different coloured lanterns hanging from
the trees.
October 27th.—The chief of the station, who took care of my
sleep, and was afraid that I should be aroused by the shrieks of the
manœuvring engines, gave order to the engine-drivers to moderate
their transports when blowing their whistles.
 The Medical Expedition has arrived this morning. Four lady-
physicians, accompanied by twelve sisters of mercy, called upon me
in the afternoon. They told me that a part of the expedition had
been sent to Anzob, a pestilence-stricken village, and got there with
great difficulty. There was no carriage-road and they had to make
their way by precipitous paths in the mountains.
My husband proposed to the Medical Expedition to organise an
ocular ambulatory inspection during their stay at Samarkand which
was especially necessary in this country, where eye-diseases
predominate, thanks to the rare and superficial connection of the
natives with water. Their famous religious ablutions consist in the
submersion of their hands in a vase filled with water of doubtful
cleanliness, in which they wash away their sins; and after that they
dash the water over their faces, and it happens sometimes that a
whole crowd of natives have already performed their ablutions in
that basin of water! One can easily imagine the hygiene of this
ceremony.
October 28th.—This morning a group of Asiatic princes were
presented to my husband in his railway-car; amongst them there
was the pretender to the throne of Afghanistan Isaac-Khan—leading
his little son by the hand. Before that Prince several pretenders to
the throne of Afghanistan had chosen Samarkand for their
residence, amongst them the famous Abdurakham, who, after
having been raised to the throne, had shown his gratitude to the
friendliness of the Russians, by playing false. Under pain of death,
the entrance of Russian subjects into his territory was forbidden.
Isaac-Khan is poor as a rat; he is living on a petty allowance of the
Russian government, and though he has very little hope of
succeeding to the throne of Afghanistan, he brings up his son as if
the throne would belong to him one day or other. When the boy is
asked who he is, he answers with an air of great importance: “I am
Grand Sirdar” (General-in-Chief), but for the moment his army
consists only of half a dozen ragged servants. I took an instinctive
dislike to his father, and saw “Borgia” written all over him. In fact I
believe the prince a man capable of anything, and though honied
words come readily to his lips, his eyes flash an evil look, and hardly
ever meet those of the person with whom he talks. There was
something in his appearance which distinctly alarmed me. He would
have made a perfect villain in a melodrama, with a beard growing
almost reaching his eyes. It was not a face that one would care to
meet when alone in the dark. Amongst the exotic princes I saw the
suzerain of a small principality, who after having become a Russian
subject, received as recompense the grade of major. He wears a
“khalat” with Russian epaulettes, girded with a green sash, a sign
that he is a descendant of the Prophet. When the presentations
ended, my husband distributed medals and “khalats” to the native
notables who came up to him preparing their most engaging smiles.
After having received their gift, they retired backwards murmuring
profuse thanks and touching their forehead, mouth and heart,
contriving to stimulate on their faces sentiments of profound
gratitude, though nourishing a profound hatred towards the
Russians. From these treacherous people one can expect anything; it
is an eternal armed-peace with them.
October 30th.—At ten o’clock precisely we arrived at Tashkend-
station. My unexpected arrival was welcomed with joy and cordiality.
I distributed my nods and smiles on each hand; the back of my neck
was sore with bowing.
Energetic measures are being taken to check the progress of the
epidemic. The plague is daily decreasing, and the Emperor charged
the Prince of Oldenbourg to thank my husband for the energetic
measures he had taken to battle with it.
The first leaves begin to fall and the park looks very dismal. The
weather is horrible, the sky leaden-grey. I hear the monotonous wail
of the wind and the rain beating against the window-panes.
This time my stay at Tashkend was but a very short one. At the
end of a fortnight I was on my way back to St. Petersburg.
November 12th.—When I arrived at Samarkand, a telegram from
the Emir was brought to me. The Asiatic Sovereign asked to be
warned in advance, so that I could be received with fitting ceremony
at Kermineh where he wanted to meet me, but I refused and
begged him by wire not to trouble himself, because we passed
Kermineh by night.
November 14th.—The Amou-Daria is very low at this season. The
big river in several places forms wide sandbanks, and this time I was
not a bit afraid to cross the bridge.
November 16th.—We arrived this morning at Krasnovodsk, where I
took my passage on the Korniloff. The weather is bright and clear;
the sea is shining in the sun, promising us a favourable crossing.
November 17th.—The wind has changed during the night, bringing
bad weather. After dinner the captain came to ask how I was and
told me that the lights of Petrovsk had been sighted, and that
another half-hour will find us on shore. We had four hours to wait
before the train started.
November 21st.—I arrived safe and sound at St. Petersburg,
having had quite enough of railway and sea.
Our capital was very animated this season: soirées, dinners,
concerts, the whirl went on, but I shut myself within four walls and
scarcely saw anyone, I can’t enjoy anything when Sergy is not there.
I am reckoned as being eccentric in leading the life of a nun in her
cell—a very spacious one, it is true—but I have a sublime
indifference to public opinion, having my own way of looking at
things, and am not, as a rule, meddling with other people’s business;
why do they meddle with mine? I am free of my own actions, and
can do as I like, I suppose! Goethe says: “The happiest of mortals is
he who finds his happiness in his own home.” I can, therefore, be
placed among the happy ones.
It is music which is my passion. In my spare moments I had some
lessons on the guitar, but I soon put an end to them, the cords of
the instrument hurting my fingers. Then I bought a cithern, the
cords of which hurt me still more, and resolved to give myself up, as
before, to the concertina.
 At last I decided to come out of my shell and went sometimes to
theatres and concerts. Volodia Rougitzki, a gifted boy-pianist of
thirteen, enchanted me by his performance of the works of Chopin,
Liszt and Rubinstein. I wonder if this “Wunderkind” will ever become
a “Wundermann!”
Antonine Kontski came to St. Petersburg to give a concert. He had
a tremendous success; the audience was enthusiastic and the
applause was deafening. I enjoyed his concert a great deal and
applauded so much that I split my gloves. For the last encore the
audience demanded “Le Réveil du Lion,” one of Kontski’s
masterpieces. Then the old mæstro returned and bowed to the
wildly excited people and said: “My Lion is weary, he is going to bed,
but next week I’ll bring out my wild animal, if you still desire to hear
his roaring.”
My husband is promoted to the rank of General-in-Chief. He was
Brigadier-General when I married him, and it is now the third and
last rank that I enjoy with him.
In the middle of December Sergy sent me a telegram to say that
he had taken a six months’ leave. We decided to spend Christmas in
Mertchik, the beautiful estate belonging to my husband’s elder
brother, situated in the government of Kharkoff. I started for
Mertchik to meet Sergy in the highest of spirits. A week later, we
were both back to St. Petersburg.
When Spring came on, I began to learn to ride the bicycle. After
some inevitable tumbles, I soon surmounted the difficulties of this
sport.
May 17th.—The day of our departure for Tashkend has come. This
time we decided to steam down the Volga from Nijni-Novgorod to
Astrakhan. When we arrived at Nijni-Novgorod we went straight to
the boat. Numerous porters with heavy loads on their backs invaded
the deck; they are able to bear extraordinary burdens. We saw a
man carrying a piano, coming up a narrow plank on to our steamer,
just as easily as a world-famed athlete would have performed it.
 Our boat has weighed anchor. The weather is beautiful. After
dinner we lay stretched on our rocking-chairs on deck, inhaling with
delight the fresh evening breeze; sea-gulls followed us. An obliging
sailor, a good-looking sun-tanned young fellow, brought me big
lumps of black bread to feed them. We ply between two low and flat
banks, only reeds round about and fishing men’s huts here and
there. I must say, though it is not very patriotic of me, that the Volga
is not to be compared to the romantic Rhine, which, in its turn, is
not to be compared to the lovely shores of the Amour, one of the
most beautiful rivers in the world. During our numerous voyages we
had seen the Mississippi, the Yan-tze-Kiang, the river of Saint
Lawrence and many other big rivers, and I find that the Amour
surpasses them all by the beauty of its banks.
May 18th.—This morning we arrived at Kazan. Large barges come
up to unload our cargo of coal. We remained here till six o’clock and
Sergy went to see the Governor of the city, having to discuss
different questions concerning the Mussulmans, who compose the
ninth part of the population of Russia. The principal centre of their
domicile is the Caucasus, Crimea, Turkestan and the Government of
Kazan. At first sight it seems that the Mussulmans of Turkestan and
those of Kazan differ widely in conditions and characteristics. They
have different histories, and last but not least, quite different modes
of life, but in reality it is not so, the dream of the splendour and
glory of their Prophet unites them all. That refers not only to the
Mussulmans inhabiting Russia, but just as much to the millions of
believers peopling India, Turkey and other Mussulman countries. The
task of administering equal justice to Moslems and Christians is a
difficult one. The Mussulmans are all clever diplomatists from their
youth. Talleyrand said that the tongue was given to the man to hide
his thoughts, and the Mussulmans, who have understood it long
before him, profit largely by this principle. I was present at an
interesting interview which took place between my husband and
some Buriate syndics during our travel through the Transbaikalia
provinces; they were Buddhists all of them. The interview took place
soon after the nomad Buriates were placed on a level with the
Russian population, perhaps not quite to the satisfaction of the
Buriates. When Sergy asked them if they were satisfied with the
change of their social position, the syndics replied frankly that they
were but tolerably pleased. With these people one could come to an
understanding somehow, but it is quite different with the
Mussulmans. This is a discourse that my husband held with a group
of Moslem syndics who were presented to him in one of his voyages
in the provinces of Turkestan, all standing with sweeping salaams
from floor to forehead, their turbaned heads bent low. Sergy’s words
were translated into their native tongue by an interpreter: “Do you
remember the everlasting wars you had in the time when you were
under the dominion of your khans, when nobody knew that, leading
a peaceful and easy-going life to-day, your blood would not be shed
to-morrow? Do you not feel happier now, when the labourer can
gather in his harvest quietly, and the merchant sell his wares in
safety?” And all the syndics, smoothing their long white beards,
replied in chorus: “Hosch, Taksir!” (It is true, master) “Do you
remember that not long ago spears were driven into you and that
you were condemned to death without any judgment? Are you
punished now without any plausible cause?” “Hosch, Taksir!”
asserted the syndics bowing very low. “Did your administrators ever
build schools, hospitals, nicely-paved roadways? Did they give you
an impartial court of justice, and incorruptible functionaries?” At
these last words a swift change swept over their faces, with a
malicious smile they exchanged a look, and their countenances again
remained expressionless, as if carved in wood, and the same
stereotype answer was heard: “Hosch, Taksir!” And only accidentally,
you could learn from the junior natives, that their elders
remembered with veneration the time when they were not sure of
the following day and when they were pierced through with spears.
They weren’t in want of any innovation either, provided that their
“Crescent” should be glorified everywhere. In such conditions, when
the population does not come to meet the enterprises of the
administration, all the measures concerning the Mussulmans,
scattered about Russia, must be taken by the administrators. It is
precisely on this subject that my husband had conferred with the
Governor of Kazan, whilst I pined alone in my stuffy cabin.
As soon as Sergy returned on board, we continued our way. The
smell of naphtha pursues us. The surface of the water is covered
with large spots of naphtha all the colours of the rainbow. It is pretty
to look at, but this substance is injurious to the fish; the best species
of which have disappeared from the Volga.
The night is splendid, the sky is all studded with stars, and I have
no wish to go to bed.
May 20th.—The weather has changed, and the Volga is stirred into
little rippling waves by the passing of the wind.
We are at Samarkand in the afternoon. A large company of young
ladies, pupils of the Institute of Orenbourg and scholars of the corps
of cadets, came on board our steamer; they are bound for Turkestan
to spend their summer holidays. An elderly grandmother of one of
the cadets had charge of the young people. The officers and
functionaries serving in Tashkend have the right to send their
children to be educated in Orenbourg on the government’s account.
From Samara to Saratov the Volga is more like a lake than a river.
We pass under an immense iron bridge, the building of which cost
seven million roubles. I remained all the time on deck, admiring the
beautiful banks along which rise forest-clothed hills.
Towards four o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at Saratov. A
company of Cossacks took passage on our boat. The men came
from Orenbourg and are going to serve their time in Turkestan for
three years. After dinner the Cossacks sang in chorus and danced
wild jigs on the deck, whilst, on the other hand, a man with a green
turban, which indicated that he was a Mecca pilgrim, went through
the necessary forms of prayer on the rug at his feet, with his face to
the East, first standing, then kneeling, then prostrating himself.
May 21st.—The banks of the Volga are low and sandy in these
parts; the sky has become grey, the water has taken a dull colour,
and the rain is beginning to fall heavily.
 In the afternoon we arrived at Astrakhan and were immediately
surrounded by a noisy crowd of Kalmucks, Tartars and Persians. We
had a jolly dinner on deck. My husband’s aide-de-camps and
attachés were so amusing and merry. They ordered champagne and
drank my health. Mr. Baumgarten, one of the attachés, the soul of
the company, when raising his glass to me, made a most charming
speech; he said that my presence embellished their journey and that
they regretted awfully that our arrival at Tashkend would put an end
to the pleasure of having a good deal of my company, for we only
met at meals.
Dinner over, we had music in the saloon. After my solo on the
concertina, Mr. Baumgarten, who had been inspired by my
performance, and was by nature somewhat of a poet, improvised a
piece of poetry of the most tender nature, with the following
dedication: “To Mrs. Barbara Doukhovskoy, in remembrance of a
never-to-be-forgotten night on the Volga.” It is spoken there of love,
moon and the rest. The poetry ended with the words, “Oh,
enchanting night on the Volga, can I ever forget thee?” How sweetly
poetical! Who could have believed fat Mr. Baumgarten to be so
gifted!
May 22nd.—The Volga is so broad that the shores disappear; only
a narrow yellow line of bank is to be seen. At dawn we changed our
steamer for a larger one—the Equator. We had to part from the
Volga here; our boat stole out towards the open sea.
The neighbourhood of Astrakhan plays a great part in the life of
the Transcaspian provinces; all sorts of wares and products are
imported there in great quantity. This time our steamer is loaded
with barrels of beer.
The wind raises great waves, which sweep our deck. We shall
have a good tossing about on the treacherous Caspian Sea, no
doubt.
May 23rd.—I have slept very badly the whole night, because of
the intense heat and the horrid rolling of the ship; every hour I
heard the change of watch ringing. At last I saw the morning twilight
entering by the porthole. A brown-coloured lamb, brought by our
sailors from Persia, squeezed himself through the half-open door of
my cabin; he was on friendly terms with my little pug-nosed Chinese
dog, Mokho, and both animals began to chase each other, making an
awful noise.
May 24th.—Horrible night! A heavy gale blowing all the time. The
sailors couldn’t hear the words of command; we rolled unmercifully.
We arrived in the morning at Krasnovodsk and walked to the train
which was waiting for us near the pier. During the short walk I had
to fight against the wind, which did its utmost to carry off my hat,
and blew my umbrella into a sail.
Before starting we were shown the railway-carriage which had just
been presented to the Emir by our Emperor; it impressed me by its
splendour. This carriage, painted blue and ornamented with golden
stars, will be very useful to the Emir when the Orenbourg railway-
line is terminated, for he goes for a cure to the Caucasus every year.
May 25th.—What a heat! The roof of my car is covered with a
thick layer of earth to protect it from the rays of the burning sun, but
it is of no use, we are roasted alive all the same.
This morning we nearly ran over a camel. The encounter with
these quadrupeds is very disagreeable, for it is only by repeated loud
whistles that our engine-driver can make them leave the rails; they
kept running before the train all the time.
May 26th.—It is Sunday to-day. When we approached the station
of Merv, church-bells began to toll. It was a church-car which was
waiting to be hooked on to our train, and thus we had Mass whilst
crossing the vast desert.
May 27th.—At seven o’clock in the morning we are at Kermineh,
where the Emir had come to welcome us. Opposite the platform was
erected a large tent in which a copious lunch was prepared; but I did
not leave my car, feigning a bad headache. A band of native
musicians came to divert me with their weird music, which made me
grind my teeth. A beautiful bouquet was brought to me from the
Emir, together with a rich casket containing a pair of ear-rings with
diamonds as large as hazel nuts.
The Emir invited my husband and his suite to dine at his summer
residence, eight miles from the station. In their absence the soldiers
of the Bokharian watch-guard were lying stretched out full length in
the shade, under the trees, indulging in a dolce far niente.
My husband returned late in the night and we continued on our
way. To Sergy the palace of the Emir proved a disappointment. It is
an ugly building of no particular kind of architecture; the apartments
are decorated with pictures, statues and ornaments of every sort,
stuck up anyhow and everywhere. The Emir regaled my husband
with a Lucullus repast, with champagne in profusion, but the Emir
drank only lemonade, fermented drinks being forbidden by the
Koran.
May 28th.—At last we are nearing Tashkend. Towards noon our
train stopped at the railway-station, full of people. After having gone
through the proceedings of hasty greetings with all present, we went
to our carriage. On our passage native musicians blew with all their
might into pipes of enormous length, raising them to the skies. They
performed such beastly sounds that I feared our horses would take
fright and bolt.
A few days after our arrival, three foreign tourists paid an
unexpected visit to Tashkend: Sven-Hedin, the renowned Swedish
Pamir and Thibet explorer, who had written a book about these
countries; MacSwinee, an English colonel going out to India to
command a Bengal regiment; and Mr. Herbert Powell, an English
traveller going to try the shortest way leading from London to India,
the future railway-line. For the present the English make this
journey, via Brindisi and the Suez Canal, in three weeks’ time, but as
soon as the Russian and British railroad join, the trip will take but
eight days. Only five hundred miles are wanting for the line to be
completed, but political combinations are hindering the work. Mr.
Powell had passed one month in Moscow to study the Russian
language, so difficult for strangers. Nevertheless, many English
officers serving in India speak our language, and it is a great pity
that the same cannot be said of the Russian officers who serve in
Turkestan. Notwithstanding their long sojourn in that country, they
do not speak the native language. It is quite recently that a school
was organised where the Hindustani language is taught. We had
also a visit from a French Academician, Mr. St. Yves, a member of
the French Academy, who was going to Thibet to explore the lake
Koukou-Nor, and of an English engineer, Mr. Wilson, who had come
to Tashkend to study the system of local irrigation. The greater part
of the soil of Turkestan, as that of India, would have presented long
ere this a veritable earthly paradise if it were not for the want of
water. The Government and the inhabitants are doing everything in
their power to overcome this difficulty. They profit by the proximity
of every river, and if there is no river, they dig artesian wells.
The English, in general, are very much interested in everything
concerning Turkestan. I read an article about my husband which
came out in the Daily Chronicle. I quote the following from the
London newspaper:—“Every English officer, who understands the
problem of Oriental politics, must know of what great importance is
the centralisation of Russian powers in Asia. For the moment sixty
thousand men are united under the command of General
Doukhovskoy, one of the most able officers of the Russian army.” We
gave a great dinner to the foreign travellers. After the end of the
repast, we went into the park, illuminated with coloured lanterns to
let them see the dances of the “batchas” (native boys arrayed in
woman’s dress). The women in the Orient are not allowed to
participate at public performances, and their parts are always taken
by men. The courts of the suzerains of Central Asia and India boast
of their troops of “batchas,” effeminate boys with long plaited hair,
arrayed in sumptuous silk robes. In Tashkend the “batchas” are quite
different. It was grown-up youths who were brought up to us,
wearing white calico shirts and heavy boots which had not seen any
polish for a long time. A band of native musicians, sitting on their
heels on a carpet spread upon the grass, began to beat the cords of
a kind of cithern, and the would-be “batchas” started turning
around, whilst the musicians accelerated their time. The
performance could scarcely be called a dance; it was rather a swift
walk within a circle. Suddenly wild shrieks were heard, and the
“batchas” began turning round like a spinning-top, whilst the
musicians accelerated their time, and the “batchas” made rather
clumsy jumps.
Our menagerie is enlarged. A native inhabitant of Tashkend
presented me with a wild horse caught in the mountains, striped like
a zebra, with long donkey ears. The animal was placed in the same
enclosure with the reindeers, and a she-donkey was given to him as
a spouse, which helped to tame the wild horse. Donkeys are very
cheap in Turkestan. One can get a splendid specimen for the sum of
twelve roubles, and a working ass for five roubles.
A few miles from Tashkend there is a Leper Settlement. When my
husband visited it, he saw only ten lepers. He made inquiries, and
was told that all the rest were begging in the streets of Tashkend.
Sergy ordered them to be packed off immediately to their own
dwelling. A collection, for the benefit of these poor wretches, is now
in the press. I take part in it, and publish our crossing of the Pacific
Ocean from San Francisco to Yokohama.
 CHAPTER CXXII
A SHORT PEEP AT ST. PETERSBURG AND BACK
TO TASHKEND

August 10th.—To-day I started for St. Petersburg, where I am

going to spend two months. There were many people to see me off.
The Grand Duke was at the station. He handed me a big bouquet
and a beautiful rose-coloured satin box of bonbons. I received so
many bouquets that my husband’s aide-de-camps had not arms
enough to hold them. One of the lady members of our collective
book for the benefit of the lepers, presented me with an enormous
bouquet, bound with a white ribbon with a swallow perched on a
telegraphic wire painted on it, and underneath “Revenez” was
imprinted in golden letters, with the signature of all the writers
concerned in the book. Before the train started the Grand Duke told
me he was very pleased that I entered my car holding his bouquet,
without any rivals to it.
August 12th.—I saw a mirage to-day: a lake with some trees
around appeared on the horizon. In the desert in fine weather,
mirages are often to be seen, but they always appear in the form of
water.
August 13th.—I arrived this morning at Krasnovodsk where I had
to wait for the steamboat until to-morrow. My car was rolled on to
the pier and two sentinels were placed at its door. There is stillness
all around, I only heard the wash of the waves on the shore, some
steps distant. It made me feel drowsy, and I soon fell asleep, lulled
by the whispering ripple of the sea.
August 14th.—I woke at dawn. The morning dew spread around in
a white mist. Somewhere in the distance a cock crowed and another
answered the challenge. At seven o’clock I took passage on the
steamer Tzarevitch. The weather is splendid, the sea like a mirror. A
slight breeze enters my cabin, flapping the muslin curtains. After
dinner I went upon deck. On the sky bright stars were shining, and
the fresh breeze swept my face.
August 15th.—The weather has changed for the worse; heavy
black clouds hang over the billowy sea. The wind is getting stronger;
we are awfully tossed about. I have really no chance on the sea; as
soon as I step on board, Neptune never fails to be very
disagreeable.
We arrived at Petrovsk far behind time. My car was attached to
our train as far as St. Petersburg.
I only spent three weeks on the banks of the Neva. I was
miserable without Sergy, and my solitude becoming unbearable, I
returned with my mother to Tashkend.
We have borne the voyage capitally and had a good crossing this
time. The weather was fine, the sun shone brightly on a very calm
sea; we had no rolling at all. We accomplished also our journey by
rail without any accident.
My sudden and unexpected appearance at Tashkend created quite
a commotion in the town. My mother was very much impressed by
all our surroundings. To amuse her we arranged, every night, card-
parties. There appeared to be a great number of whist-players in
Tashkend; partners were never wanting. Mother’s partners presented
her with a green cloth with all their autographs embroidered on it.
They tried to entice me into their play, but I was no card-player, and
at my first essay, my face openly expressed: “I am bored to death.” I
thrust furtive glances at the clock all the time, watching for the
hands to show the hour of my deliverance. I did not repeat my
experiment.
Tashkend is thrown into wild agitation by the arrival of General
Toutolmine, the aide of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevitch. This
General had been in the same military school with my husband; he
was accompanied by several smart officers in the guards, Prince
Jaime de Bourbon, the son of Don Carlos, among them. The Prince
is a legitimist claimant of the Spanish throne, serving in the Russian
army in the regiment of the Hussars. He is a dashing, showy, cavalry
officer, of the type that finds favour with women; like Cæsar he
came, saw, and conquered. The Prince is accustomed to win all
hearts and does not believe it possible for any creature of the fair
sex to do so much as look at him without falling in love with him. I
found him very entertaining, but did not lose my heart. He sat
beside me at dinner and was very bright and witty. He told me that a
gipsy had foretold him three things: a great gain, a wound and a
crown. The first of the predictions came true, he has won at a
lottery the sum of 2000 roubles; will the other two prophecies come
true? “Qui vivra verra!” After dinner I mounted my bicycle,
accompanied by Prince Jaime and his comrades. We made a long
run, I rode fast, going at a pace almost equal to that of an express
train; my cavaliers were completely exhausted, trying to keep up
with me.
The Emir has sent a delegation to my husband with numerous rich
presents. The delegates wore beautiful khalats and white turbans
made of very thin stuff, twisted round their shaved heads. These
turbans cost scores of pounds; it was India which supplied them, but
now they are fabricated in Moscow much cheaper. After the deputies
had been presented to Sergy, they were ushered into my sitting-
room. The most talkative of the party was Astanakul-Divan-Begui,
the first minister of the Emir; his companions sat down on the edge
of their chairs, smoothing their knees with their hands, scarcely
lifting their eyes from the carpet, and would only say “yes” and “no.”
After a copious “dastarkhan,” (lunch) served in the winter-garden,
the deputies presented us with numerous gifts sent by their
Sovereign, which lay piled about the long terrace. Six Bokharian
attendants stood like ancient slaves before this amassed wealth:
superb carpets, muskets, pistols, daggers set with precious stones,
gilt caskets with splendid jewellery, a dream from the “Thousand and
One Arabian Nights.”
 We gave a grand dinner for two hundred persons in honour of the
delegates. An invisible band placed in the park played during the
repast. Champagne flowed in abundance and numerous toasts were
drunk, accompanied by a flourish of trumpets. I sat between two
laconic deputies, who answered with low sounding monosyllables to
all the questions I put to them with seraphic patience. I felt glad
when dinner was over.
That same night I took part in a concert got up by the
Benevolence Society in our house. The hall was brilliantly lighted;
every seat was taken. The Bokharian deputies were present at the
concert and I wore in their honour the heavy golden necklace
presented to me by the Emir. It is fortunate that I had to play
instead of singing, because for the great weight of the necklace I
could not have drawn one single note out of my throat. I was seized
with an access of shyness, before mounting the platform, and had to
swallow soothing drops to quiet my nerves; nevertheless I thought I
should die of fright when I appeared before the audience and was
conscious of an inclination to run away, but giving a swift glance to
the public confronting me, I soon recovered my self-possession
entirely, and performed my solo on the concertina with great
success, gathering frenzied bravos, and I had to play no fewer than
five encores. All the same I had too good sense not to understand
that my success was due especially to the position I held, much
more than to my talent; it was only green paper laurels that I got,
and I should have liked to win real ones and play in other
surroundings, with veritable artists and amongst a less partial
audience. The concert brought a large profit, more than one
hundred pounds. All the ladies who took part in it received a
bouquet bound with white ribbons bearing the Red Cross.
On the next day the delegates were present at a children’s feast
arranged on the square opposite our house. The entertainment was
given especially to attract the little natives; we wanted to tame these
little savages and show them that the Russians were not so terrible
as they are made to believe. The whole population, except a small
part of civilised natives bring up their children inculcating in them
the fear of the Russians. The entertainment began about three
o’clock and went on till quite late in the evening. There were about
two thousand children. It amused me to watch their enjoyment and
see the expression of mistrust, stamped on their small faces, change
suddenly into one of keen delight when sweets and toys were being
distributed to them. It is to be hoped that the little Sartes returned
to their homes carrying sentiments of friendship to the Russians in
their small hearts.
The opening of the Agricultural Exhibition took place whilst the
deputies were at Tashkend. All the productions of Turkestan were
gathered there: fruit, flowers, seeds, preserved vegetables,
bonbons, domestic animals, etc. A great number of venomous
insects, which abound in the Famished Steppe, were also exhibited;
scorpions, phalanxes, and spiders of every kind. A mollusk, which is
to be found in all the bathing establishments of Tashkend, is
particularly disgusting; that little monster is scarcely perceptible in
the water, being half transparent, like jelly. Ugh, the horror!
Summer passed quickly. Autumn came on. The dead leaves fell
silently and covered the alleys of our park with a yellow carpet. In
November, snow fell in abundance and the trees bent under the
heavy flakes. The trains are obliged to stop for several days, the line
being encumbered with snow.
On Christmas night a group of maskers, wrapped up in red
dominoes, with little round bells hanging all around, appeared
unexpectedly, followed by a band of music. After having performed a
kind of ballet, they took off their dominoes and we saw before us a
fantastical crowd of people in fancy dress. There were clowns
daubed with chalk among them, and pirates, monks, pierrots,
Columbines, etc. One of the aide-de-camps proved a tremendous
success; he represented a gigantic doll dressed all in red, and
walking on stilts right up to the ceiling. In one of the corners of the
big hall suddenly a small booth appeared, in which an old wizard
began selling curious advertisements. He offered, for instance, ten
thousand roubles for a faithful woman. (And for the fidelity of a man
it is ten millions that he ought to offer, shouldn’t he?) The people
who approached this booth were caught by the hook of this old
man, who sprinkled them all over with scent out of an invisible
sprinkler. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly. The
floor was strewn with confetti. I did not at all like to have bits of
paper poured down my back. The ball-room presented a very gay
appearance with its merry couples swinging to-and-fro to the music
of one of Tashkend’s best bands. I had not danced for years, not
since I was married, and enjoyed it greatly, I must confess. We did
not stop dancing till late. When the last people went away it was
broad daylight.
The winter this year was a particularly severe one. The
thermometer has gone down very low. Our apartments though
supposed to be thoroughly heated, are very chilly. The wind whistles
down the chimney its monotonous song, and I am so dull, so dull!
Oh, how I long to leave Tashkend for good and all!
My wish was realised sooner than I expected. In the middle of
January my husband was called away to St. Petersburg on business.
It seemed too good to be true! St. Petersburg was to me the summit
of earthly bliss. I longed for the life, the beauty, the movement of
the Great City.
January 6th.—We started to-day for St. Petersburg. Our train
advances very slowly because of the snow which covers the line. We
have recourse to means used in America: a sort of brush is fastened
to our engine to clear the way and sweep away the snow.
January 9th.—The weather is horrible. A snow-storm arose. The
wind whistles and howls in the plain; flakes of snow adhere to the
glass and it is impossible to see anything outside.
January 10th.—The cold keeps increasing. It is difficult to believe
that it was a hot inferno I had to endure in these places not very
long ago.
January 11th.—The cold keeps increasing; though well wrapped up
with furs, I sat shivering in the train. The pale rays of the sun appear
from time to time, piercing the sky clouds, and the road covered
with a heavy carpet of snow shines like diamonds.
Early in the morning we arrived at Kizil-Arvat, having to stop here
for twenty-four hours: the train could not move for the heaps of
snow on the line and soldiers were sent out to clear the way for us.
The principal offices of the railroad are stationed here. There is a
working-men’s club with a bar, but without alcoholic drinks, a library
and a large hall where concerts and theatricals are held. It would
have been desirable to increase the number of such clubs, for it is
not only by tedious, boring preaching that the workmen are kept
away from drunkenness, and if you made them happy and
comfortable they would not want to go off in the evening to public
ale-houses.
January 12th.—We continued our journey at daybreak. When I
awoke I found the snow had completely disappeared. Towards noon
we arrived at Krasnovodsk and took our passage on the Tropic.
We are once more convinced that the geographers are often
mistaken. The Caspian Sea, which never freezes according to them,
appears to be frozen for forty miles out. It is not an agreeable
prospect to have to cut through the ice, but we have a
compensation—we shall not be tossed about.
January 13th.—At dawn we weighed anchor. It gives one the
shivers to hear the ice grating against the thin body of our ship. As
the Caspian never freezes the ships are not equipped for polar-
crossing, and the Tropic does not resemble in the least the ice
breaker, which was of such use to us during our crossing from
Vladivostock to Nagasaki in the winter.
January 14th.—During the whole night we found ourselves in the
position of Nansen. It is only towards morning that the sea was free
from the ice. The barometer mounts visibly; the proximity of the
Caucasus is perceptible.
Towards night we arrived at Baku, where we have a special train
placed at our disposal. The railway between Baku and Petrovsk is
not open officially, and we had to advance at a snail’s pace. I
thought we should never get to Petrovsk if we crawled like that.
January 15th.—We have passed the night in the open field
because the trains do not run yet in the dark. Early in the morning
we began to advance at the rate of four miles an hour; in risky
places the guards walked on in front to examine the line.
January 16th.—We arrived at Petrovsk in the afternoon. We are in
Europe here, and although we have got a three days’ railway
journey before us, St. Petersburg seems quite near.
 CHAPTER CXXIII
PARIS WORLD’S FAIR

My husband’s health had failed a good deal of late, and the

doctors have ordered him an absolute change and rest. Sergy was
overworked and a good holiday will set him right. He wants to take a
long leave and go abroad for some time. Kissingen was
recommended by the doctors, but we meant to have a jolly good
time and went first to Paris to visit the World’s Fair. Mr. Shaniavski
was nominated as representative of the Turkestan section and was
sent before us to Paris. He met us at the Gare du Nord,
accompanied by four Bokharians and a Turkoman, sent to the
Exhibition to look after the rich objects exposed by the Emir, and to
serve also as a vivid decoration in the Asiatic section, where the
place of honour was assigned to Turkestan. These decorative
personages, when passing through St. Petersburg, attracted much
curiosity by their magnificent costumes, it is not astonishing
therefore that they produced a great sensation in Paris. When our
train came to stop at the platform, we saw a crowd of eager
spectators waiting to see the arrival of the exotic personages whom
the Orientals had come to meet, expecting to see no less a person
than a Rajah. People stood on chairs to get a peep at us, and great
was their disappointment, when simple mortals clad in European
dress, stepped out of the train.
We took a carriage and went to Passy, a western suburb of Paris,
where a villa, overgrown with lilacs, bearing the name of Villa des
Lilas, was secured for us by Mr. Shaniavski, in the quietest part of
Paris, in the neighbourhood of the Exhibition.
Mr. Shaniavski had put up with his Bokharians in a house in the
Passage des Eaux, described by Zola in his novel Une page d’Amour.
The small Asiatic colony consists of a Bokharian colonel, a captain, a
merchant who speaks a few words of French and serves as
interpreter, and four servants. The Bokharians, arrayed in rich
“khalats,” walk about the streets quite indifferent to the stare of
wondering Parisians. When they go out shopping, they are taken for
princes, and are made to pay princely prices. One day, when visiting
the Grands Magasins du Louvre, they were received at the entrance
door by the directeur, surrounded by his assistants, who proposed to
the princes to show them through the house, expecting to fleece the
Bokharians, who asked the prices of everything they saw without
any views as to purchasing them. After having visited in detail the
section of jewellery, tapestry and other fancy goods, they made the
insignificant purchase of half a dozen crockery plates, after which
the splendid directeur, and his satellites, disappeared as by magic,
forsaking the stingy Bokharians.
Though the Exhibition has been opened a whole month, the
section of Central Asia is not quite ready yet; it is only the section of
Turkestan which came to an end, thanks to the energy of our
delegate. Next to it are the sections of the Caucasus and Siberia. A
crowd of Russian workmen, wearing red shirts, put the finishing
stroke to them.
The best place at the Exhibition is assigned to Central Asia, called
“Russie des Indes,” quite near the Trocadero. This section, which is a
duplicate in miniature of the Kremlin, in Moscow, is surrounded by a
high crenelated wall with a row of turrets ornamented with the
Russian Double Eagle. When you enter it, the Russian architecture
gives place to an Arabian style. An immense panorama represents a
large square in Samarkand, with a lively crowd of natives; only when
seen quite close, one perceives that it is but a picture, not a reality.
Our section is striking by its vivid and bright colouring. A fountain
plays in the middle of an immense hall, decorated with beautiful
Asiatic carpets and armour, and filled with all kinds of products of
our possessions in Central Asia. The best appreciators of a
remarkable collection of plants and seeds, appeared to be a legion of
mice; these gnawing little animals arranged for themselves, in broad
daylight, Lucullus-like repasts, without being disturbed in the least
by the crowd of visitors. The grains disappeared visibly, and poison
was put in every attractive place, but the cunning mice, preferring
the tasty grains, carried their victory on to the battle-field.
Next to our Asiatic section stands the pavilion of Polar Russia. The
morose Siberian nature is such a contrast with our bright Turkestan.
The panels on the walls represent a seal-chase; all sorts of stuffed
polar animals fill the big halls, as well as an ethnographic collection
of manikins, which represents in a very life-like manner, different
types of the inhabitants of Siberia. The model of a sledge, harnessed
with a team of dogs, reminded me vividly of our drive on the frozen
Amour during carnival-week at Khabarovsk. On long tables, in the
middle of the hall, lay all sorts of furs: beautiful sables, blue fox,
beaver, etc. It is curious that according to official information, only 7-
8 beavers are killed yearly in Kamtchatka. How can we explain then
that hundreds of real beaver skins are sold in Russia. (It is the fur-
traders only who can unriddle the thing).
The Caucasus section is just opposite. In a large separate building
a panorama represents the new Siberian railway-line. The Sleeping-
car Company has exposed the model of a Transcaspian train,
composed of an engine and three cars belonging to the International
Company, in which one experiences the illusion of a journey through
Siberia. The guard whistles, the train seems to move, but in reality it
is only the panorama on the walls which is put into motion by a
special mechanism. The travellers perceive through the windows the
whole way leading from Moscow right to the terminus station—
Pekin. When you pass through all the cars, to the other end of the
hall, you are in the Chinese section, where the front gate represents
a part of the walls of the city of Pekin.
The next day after our arrival at Paris, the section of Central Asia
was inaugurated. To get there we had to elbow our way through a
throng. A Te Deum was sung by the singers of the Russian Church,
whilst all the Kremlin bells were ringing a full peal at which my
Russian heart bounded with joy. That day we spent six hours at the
Exhibition, and did not sit down for one minute. I was awfully
hungry, having eaten only one croissant since morning, and Sergy
carried me off to the Trocadero to have dinner in one of the best
restaurants. The hall was full of guests. Two very disreputable-
looking creatures sat at the table next our own; they were painted
with cheap cosmetics, and the heat took off their paint, which came
out in the wrong places, and very soon the powder on their faces
was becoming paste, and the red on their cheeks and the black of
their eyebrows began to run down in streaks, metamorphosing them
into tattooed papouses, which didn’t hinder them in the least from
casting coquettish glances around. They tried to make eyes at my
cavaliers, but it was all in vain; their charms left them quite
unmoved. We were too tired to walk home and got into a cab whose
driver, with folded arms and bowed head, was nodding on his seat,
his nose buried in an open newspaper. Both coachman and horse
were dozing the whole way, and it is only a miracle that we got to
our villa without running into other carriages.
Next day President Loubet visited our section, where he was
presented with a map of France worked “in relievo,” in a frame of
jasper; the seas were made of marble, the rivers of silver and the
towns of precious stones, got from the Ural mountains. The huge
emerald representing the city of Marseilles cost eight thousand
roubles. President Loubet is a very different sort of person from
what I had expected the ruler of France to be; he is an insignificant-
looking little old man, saluting cordially from right to left. A Russian
lady, who heard us speaking our mother-tongue, mingled into our
conversation. Before leaving our section she favoured me with a
condescending nod and a limp hand-shake, but when she heard our
interpreter addressing me by my rank, she rushed back and
squeezed my fingers effusively. Nasty woman!
We visited that day the Algerian village in the Trocadero Gardens.
Superb natives, arrayed in rich costumes, sat on the threshold of
their open booths, shrieking out the virtues of their wares. Close to
the village stands the Dahomey pavilion, with its straw-thatched
roof. Black natives stood on watch, perched on the top of a high
tower. In the Singhalese village I patted the small brown babies,
calling to mind my sojourn in Colombo. We entered a barrack close
by, from which resounded the frantic strains of weird native music.
Inside, women clad in Oriental costumes, gleaming with golden
coins on their waists and wrists, performed the Danse du Ventre to
the accompaniment of clapping hands. One of the beautiful
“odalisques” stepped down from the estrade and passed round with
a plate into which people dropped money. One glance was enough
to show that this would-be Daughter of the Desert was a typical
“Parisienne” from the “quartier des Batignolles.”
The pavilions of the different States are picturesquely scattered
along the banks of the Seine. All these magnificent buildings, made
of plaster, will be in three months’ time reduced to the level of the
“Champ de Mars.” One can’t believe that these enormous palaces
are only temporary visitors, like the people, and will be destroyed in
a few months, after the closing of the Exhibition. It is only the
“Palais des Beaux Arts,” built of brick and mortar, which will not be
thrown down. A most beautiful and interesting collection of old
masters is exhibited in this building. We became so fascinated with
some of these wonders, that we could hardly get away from the
place. It amused me to see how insufficiently cloaked statues upset
the decorum of a pair of prim old maids in large turned-down hats
surrounded by green gauze veils, unlovely and unloved creatures,
belonging to that sort of Puritans who do not admit kisses because
no one ever kissed them. This part of the Exhibition is situated near
the principal entry on the side of the Place de la Concorde, with the
famous “Parisienne” made of stone and perched very high on the
top of a triumphal arch. It is queer to see the reproduction of a
fashionable lady dressed up-to-date, posted in such a dangerous and
uncomfortable place; we are accustomed to see symbolic figures in
that risky position, defying in posture to the laws of equilibrium.
There was a great crowd walking about the Exhibition, a constant
going to-and-fro of people who had come from all quarters of the
globe. The human whirlpool made me quite giddy. Several bands
play in different parts of the grounds near the “Pont Alexandre III.,”
which illustrates in stone and bronze the famous Russian Czar. We
listened to the music of an American orchestra led by Sousa, the
king of marches, in like manner as Strauss and Waldteufel had been
the kings of the waltz in times of yore.
Our walks through the Exhibition lightened visibly our pockets.
The prices of all the objects exposed for sale are exorbitant, money
melted like snow and we came home utterly penniless.
There are different means of locomotion through the great extent
of the Exhibition, beginning by the Tonqinoise “puss-puss,” to the
last technical invention—the “trottoir roulant,” moving sidewalks,
three rows of which run along without stopping. The first row moves
very slowly, and it is easy to jump on it; the second row moves
faster, and the third one races with the swiftness of an express train.
Great agility is needed to pass from one trottoir to the other, and it
happens sometimes that the backs of clumsy pedestrians rest on
one trottoir, whilst his legs are being dragged on the neighbouring
one.
In the Rue de Paris, near the Eiffel Tower, different attractions are
to be found: bearded women, mermaids, and other marvels of past,
present, and future life. In a miorama we crossed from Marseilles to
Constantinople without leaving Paris. Another panorama gives the
illusion of a sea-voyage round the world. In the Palais des Optiques
we went down under the sea, and were introduced to horrid
monsters. We came upon a gigantic telescope showing the moon at
the distance of sixty kilometres. A huge wheel 177 metres high, with
thirty-two waggons, wheels round intrepid passengers. The Palais de
la Femme contains amazing toilettes of past and ultra modern times.
I fell in love with a costume of the last note of modernity, which
Sergy wanted to purchase, but I was reasonable enough to refuse
the present, for the price was unheard of. The Panorama du Mont
Blanc shows a group of excursionists climbing up the Alps, which
reminded me of our ascent on the Mont Blanc.
To come into the Vieux Paris representing the Paris of past
centuries, we had to cross a drawbridge and enter through a tower-
gate guarded by sentinels of the middle ages, holding long lances,
into the Rue des Remparts, a corner of a street in the fourteenth
century, with dwellings filled with mediæval attributes. On the front
of the houses, instead of numbers, the pictures of different birds are
reproduced. In the narrow, tortuous streets we found ourselves
surrounded by people dressed according to the fashion of ancient
times; knights in armour and ladies of the middle-ages walked to-
and-fro. My imagination travelled, transporting me to the days of
long ago, and I felt as if the clock had been put back several
centuries. When we passed the Tour du Châtelet, the fourteenth
century had vanished by magic into the time of the Tudors, making a
jump through the space of over two hundred years. Chants
resounded from the church of St. Julien, which belonged formerly to
the “Minstrels Brotherhood.” On the Square we saw the gibbet
watched over by mousquetaires armed with muskets and wearing
three-cornered hats. In the Rue des Vieilles Écoles, the house
inhabited by Molière is exactly reproduced. Ladies in paniers and
powdered perukes promenaded, escorted by their cavaliers dressed
as marquesses. Different processions circulated. Here is a band of
clerks directing their steps towards the Court of Justice, with
inkstands adjusted to their girdles, carrying in their hands burning
torches. In the Criminal Hall, instead of law suits, Mysteries are
represented.
Not far from the Vieux Paris is the Andalousie du temps des
Maures. The entry represents the exact copy of the Alcazar in
Seville; on the Plaza de Toros, instead of horrid bull-fights, pretty
Andalusian gitanas (Spanish gypsies) with a rose placed above the
left ear in their jet-black hair, dance seguedillas and habaneras. It
was fire which ran in their veins. I was very much astonished to see
our Turkoman promenading amongst the audience. We were told
that the impressario had invited him to come every night gratis to
his establishment, as a living decoration. I cannot conceive what can
be in common between an inhabitant from Central Asia and Spanish
life.
Opposite Andalousia an Alpine village has spread itself
ungeographically, with its cattle, shepherds, watchmaker-shops and
wooden toy-makers. Amidst natural glaciers and water-falls, an
animated crowd dressed in the costumes of all the Swiss cantons,
walk about. We saw the house where Bonaparte passed the night on
his march with his army of 30,000 men across the St. Gothard pass,
with all the furniture just as it was then. There was the armchair by
the hearth in which the great man sat, gazing into the glowing coals.
What pictures did he see in the flames? Did his thoughts wander
back to Josephine, or to new laurels and glory?
The Exhibition opened at ten. We went there as soon as the gates
were thrown open and left it only when we found ourselves almost
too tired to stand. We met there many friends from Russia, Mr.
Radde amongst them, director of the Museum in Tiflis, an eminent
biologist versed in all the antiquities and questions of the past. He is
awfully abstruse-minded, and always looking as if he just descended
from the clouds. One day, when Mr. Radde called upon us at the Villa
des Lilas, he made the acquaintance of our landlord, who had
nothing of the Adonis about him, with his round moon face, and a
tiny baby nose disappearing between his fat cheeks. In a fit of
absent-mindedness he began to pity the cherub-faced gentleman for
having such a terrible inflammation, and on both sides of the face all
the more. Our landlord thanked him for his compassion, but said
that happily, he never suffered from toothache, and was not afflicted
therefore, with inflammation of any kind. I had to make a desperate
effort to be serious when witnessing this comic scene.
We knew our Paris well, and had a jolly good time at night,
enjoying theatres and café-chantants. I did feel gay going to
naughty places in the quartier Montmartre without caring whether it
was proper or not. At the Chat Noir the programme was very varied,
exhibiting celebrities dressed in a costume remarkable for its lack of
stuff, and famed for the height to which they could raise one leg and
knock their own noses with it while standing upon the other. We
visited the Cabaret du Ciel and the Cabaret de l’Enfer, two rather
disreputable establishments with quaint representations of bliss in
heaven and tortures in hell. In the first cabaret the customers are
received by a bevy of white-winged, long-haired masculine beings,