大象传媒

'By now you will have returned from your adventure into the comparatively unknown,' wrote my wife Minna on 25 April, 'and, being me, am naturally wondering whether it was the success it ought to have been. I do not expect to have my curiosity satisfied for at least ten days... but am I anxious.'

Success? If a transformation of all my previous ideas about North Africa could be termed a success, then success it was. For more than sixteen months I had lived in a city dominated by the French civil and military powers, French-speaking and mainly white. I had travelled hundreds of miles to the south, to the edge of the Sahara where the people were predominantly Arabic speaking and where French rule, though comprehensive, was less apparent. I met a new kind of Arab. My distaste for the venal, cringing, impoverished native population of Algiers dissolved when encountering the people of the South, when I passed beyond the physical barrier of the Atlas Mountains to each 'the other side of the moon.'

Boarding the train in Algiers with my three Army companions I found most of my fellow- travellers were French. When we travelled from Biskra to Touggourt we were the only Europeans.

I had sent Minna a day by day - almost hour by hour - account of my experiences but within a week of my return to Algiers the separate encounters, landscapes, street-scenes and sounds had merged into a total psychic experience which would remain as separate from my daily life as is a dream from wakefulness.

'I wonder if my account of this bizarre journey will convey the faintest impression of what I have seen,' I wrote to Minna, 'Never have I felt so far away from every familiar thing. There can be few points of contact with these people whose every thought is in a different key to ours. A musical simile: most westerners find Arab music alien and discordant. Yet the notes are the same as ours. There the resemblance ends. The fundamental principles of life in Temelhat are identical with those in Tooting - love and lust, fear and hope, anger and affection, meanness and generosity.

But there, too, the resemblance ends. The development and fruition of these fundamental impulses bear no relation to the sequence we expect from our own experience. This 'difference' I am convinced is due almost entirely to the spiritual outlook of the Muslim, to the fact that for the majority their faith is a living thing, the foundation upon which their whole manner of life is built. Destroy that faith and you would destroy the race.

'Here there is no sharp division between the sacerdotal and the secular. Law, faith, hygiene, morals are all bound together in the pages of the Koran and the Muslim hierarchy seems essentially a religious one. Lawsuits between Arabs are settled in an adjunct to the mosque by the Cadi who is an ecclesiastic, not a layman. The French have been in North Africa for more than a hundred years, and except for the slightest blending at the edges the simile of oil and water is apt. The ordinary French settler does not understand the Arab and does not wish to do so. He is contemptuous of him as an idler. What the Arab thinks of the Frenchman I dare not say.'

On my last day in Touggourt I had a heartening experience. There was a tiny shop - more properly a hole in a wall owned by one Merahat Sassi Ben Messaoud. There were leather bags, Arab knives, Ouled Nail jewellery, bracelets, anklets, slippers and a pair of ancient Arab flint-lock rifles with long, thin, chased barrels and elaborately inlaid stocks.

I rummaged around the knives and sorted out one of a type I had seen worn in Temelhat. 'You like ver' old books?' said the owner and I nodded. He dived into a cupboard and brought out a little volume no larger than an average English prayer-book. This was not bound, but wrapped about with a piece of leather.

'The Koran,' said Merahat Sassi, 'Ver' ancient. But cover gone and it has become damaged. Ver' fine work - many pictures.' I examined it. Damaged it certainly was - it seemed that it had fallen into water and the ink had run together on many of these handwritten pages. But much was intact and spaced throughout - dividing the sections I supposed - were exquisite little half-page and full-page designs reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

He wanted six hundred francs for this and my other purchases. After much bargaining I could not reduce the figure below five hundred. I shrugged and told him that this was the last day of my leave. I was returning to Algiers. Much as I should have liked to buy I had not enough money. He smiled and spread his hands: 'It signifies nothing. I have confidence. Send me the money by post when you get to Algiers.' Thus I became the owner of an Arab knife of wicked appearance, two near-silver bracelets for Minna and a handwritten Koran. I must have an honest face... or was it my British uniform?

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