II
SNOW in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like a broken hillside—it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room, bare, narrow, but clean, which reminded me curiously of such accommodation as one used to find in western Kansas towns thirty years ago, fit for the seasoned traveller, but without superfluities,—frontier-like, a border lodging; and the impression was deepened and vivified when I descended the rude and confused stairway and found the private-family dining-room, with the only fire—olive-knots burning reluctantly on a small hearth. A French officer, hanging over it, made room for me, and in a moment two other officers appeared, heavily clothed with leather and capes, prepared, as I gathered, for a long ride in the country. It might have been a hunting scene in Colorado, in the early morning, except for the military color, the foreign physiognomy and the French coffee we were drinking; it had the traits of rude vigor, hardihood and weather that belong to an outdoor life.
It seemed more natural to go out into the snow than not, and so I found an Arab and went. Our path led us a short way through streets of Sunday quiet, and soon broke by a city gate into irregular country, picturesque from the beginning with ruined masses of old ramparts. The road was bordered with trees and hedges, a lovely road even in the snow, and soon it was apparent that we were passing through the midst of an old and extensive cemetery with cypresses, cactus, fig-trees, here and there an immense carob-tree, and olives and locusts, diversifying the uneven lines of the slopes; and everywhere, as far as one looked, neglected graves, shrines in ruins, koubbas—small, square, dome-covered memorials of the saints—dilapidated and with broken arches, the débris of centuries of devotion and mortality. It was quite in keeping; for I was myself on pilgrimage, where for seven centuries the faithful Moslem of the land had preceded me, to the holy tomb of Sidi bou-Médyen, the patron saint of the little city. As he ended his earthly travels on one of these neighboring slopes—and he had wandered through the Arab world—he exclaimed: “How good it were to sleep in this blessed soil the eternal slumber!” and so they buried him there. It was a place of immemorial consecration; in early times of the faith a body of pious Moslems had been cloistered near by, and already in that age in these fields the “men of God” had their resting-places about which the Moslems liked to be buried, as old Christians used to wish to lie in holy ground about the church. It was even then a place of pilgrimage, and a village grew up about it, and ruins of minarets and mosques still lie there; and later, about Sidi bou-Médyen’s shrine, another village was built among the encumbering graves, for he was a famous saint and many pilgrims came there, and now the inhabitants say pleasantly: “We have the dead in our houses.” The landscape is thus a place of tombs; but it is enchanting, and one sees at a little distance terraced mountain edges, thick gardens of olive, the pomegranates, the ancient fig-trees, masses of foliage and vines, abounding fertility and freshness, green and flowering with spring; and sown all along the tree-sheltered road the low and humble ruins of mortality.
I entered the village—the road ran a mile or more through such a scene—and climbed the steep way to the wooden door through which one comes into the precincts of the saint’s tomb with its attendant mosque and school. I did not anticipate a mausoleum; I was familiar with such shrines and knew what I should see; but the square koubbas, with their white domes, which one sees e
