Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx of the Seashore (1879-80), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Last year, the Times Flow Stemmed blog posted a terrific list of books about the desert to which others added nominations. I’ve made a
project of reading these works, but as I keep learning of other desert books,
my goal recedes like (if I may be so boldly
original) a desert mirage. The latest interloper, a work I’d be thrilled to put
high on my own such list, is French writer Pierre Loti’s plainly entitled The
Desert (Le Désert, 1895), which, with fortuitous timing, came to my
attention mere hours before I headed to the Mojave for a long weekend. Rarely has
a book aligned so magnificently with the setting in which I read it.
The Desert recounts, in diary form, Loti’s month-long
journey from Cairo to Jerusalem through the Sinai and Petraean deserts in the
company of two European companions and twenty or so Bedouin. Translator Jay
Paul Minn notes that Loti took the trip both to indulge his obsession with Islam
and, hoping to find inspiration in Jerusalem, in an effort to reconcile his
atheism with his mother’s Christianity. Rejecting the most commonly traveled
routes, Loti opted for the more forbidding, dangerous passage through the
Petraean, at the time beleaguered by internecine clashes and conflicts between
Arabs and Turks.
The first pages of The Desert gripped me as few books
have. Loti quickly plunges the reader into landscape and lightscape, evoking
the desert’s emptiness and silence with impressionism turned to full burn:
…the desert does not disappoint, even
here at this threshold where it is just beginning to appear. Its immensity
overwhelms everything, enlarges everything, and in its presence the wickedness
of human beings is forgotten.
And how quickly we have been taken
prisoner by it! How suddenly have we been wrapped in silence and solitude!... Nobody
and nothing anymore, as the desolate night descended…And suddenly all around us
there was infinite emptiness, the desert at twilight, swept by a steady cold
wind: the desert of a neutral and dead color, spreading under a darker sky that
seemed to fall and crush it out to the edges of the horizon all around.
Turning to nearly any page of The Desert, one finds
rapturous appreciations of color, light, space, the weirdly sculpted geology created
by harsh, elemental forces, unexpected desert flowers, snakes and gazelles,
lush oases, distant snow-capped peaks, the “permanent and ageless stars.”
Loti’s descriptions come saturated in color; I suspect the book would still be
fascinating were one to conserve only the passages involving pink. There is
something pure about Loti’s encounter, a human presence so aesthetically and
spiritually overwhelmed by mesmerizing light and shadow, by the vast, shifting
sands, that for much of the book one would scarcely know other people were
about. Loti’s attention towards his own unmediated confrontation with the
desert masks the reality of his essentially traveling as a tourist. The Bedouin
supply team so essential to Loti’s undertaking most noticeably appear when,
almost comically, they streak past Loti and his companions each day at lunch in
order to set up the evening camp, shouting greetings that briefly unzip the
silence of the desert until they again ride out of sight.
Loti knows that he’s putting the human presence secondary,
and to be fair, he does offer more than a few nods towards the people he meets.
He details his frustrating negotiations with a functionary at Aqaba and the
boredom of the outpost’s Turkish soldiers, sketches encounters with desert
chieftains, Russian pilgrims and barefoot Bedouin children, and, upon arrival
in Gaza, summarizes its place in history with a succinct power that replaces
associations from today’s headlines with a tragic sense of the city’s rich,
irretrievable past. Most captivating, though, is Loti’s account of the astonishing
monastery of Saint Catherine high on Mount Sinai, where he spent a forced
sojourn (due to snow!). Before reading Loti’s account, I knew nothing of this nearly
inaccessible, ancient edifice, its monks going about their solemn daily tasks as
monks have done there for 1,500 years, its vaults hiding innumerable priceless
relics and manuscripts. Through Loti’s hermetic account, Saint Catherine’s comes
across as remote and unexpected a religious refuge as the mystical mountain
monastery featured as the culmination of Peter Brook’s hypnotic film, Meetings
With Remarkable Men.
The Desert is a sui
generis work of desert writing, its sumptuously romantic reveling in the
desert’s colors, textures, and spiritual inducements (should anyone need to
explain the concept of romanticism, Loti’s book could be an invaluable teaching
tool) drifting occasionally towards the decadent and surreal. One scene
exemplifying this aspect involves the shooting of an owl, which the Europeans, aggrieved
over having dispatched such a magnificent bird simply for sport, decide to bury
in “a little trench in the sand”:
When the owl is in the hole on its
back, with its wings hugging its body like a monk’s cloak, it still stares at
us obstinately, with an astonished expression of reproach that cuts us to the
quick.
On the poor yellow eyes which will
never be seen again, on the so well-groomed and beautiful feathers that will
soon rot, we throw sand. Then we roll a heavy rock over to assure peace for
this tomb…
Give in to Loti’s romanticism, and the staring yellow eyes
become as potent a symbol as Ozymandias, left to gaze eternally out upon the lone
and level sands. But slip out of Loti’s magic spell for an instant, and the
scene could take on an almost laughable quality of kitsch.
Still, I can’t get that owl out of my head. A hundred years
after its decay into nothingness, I envision it as an enduring presence, a
fixed, disembodied stare somewhere out in the desert vastness. It seems to encapsulate
the essence of Loti’s small book, his capturing, in limpid, crystalline prose,
the unforgettable drama of seeing the
desert, of having one’s eyes opened to its immensity, timelessness and power
over one’s perceptions. For those of a romantic temperament (I’m not naming
names), Loti’s book seduces and enthralls, a treasure to be luxuriated in
knowing full well - and holding in abeyance one’s awareness - that it has
little to do with the realities of the desert’s human face, and everything to
do with the impressions that can bewitch one there and induce a profound,
transfixing awe.
Loti’s book thus stands apart from, say, Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian
Sands, a divergent account of travel with Arab tribes that Times Flow
Stemmed pegged as perhaps the greatest of desert books. If one seeks to grasp
the palpable danger and grit of desert travel and the fundamental courage of
the peoples who manage to live there, it’s doubtful one could do better. Thesiger
might have cringed at Loti’s glancing, tourist’s appreciation of the desert
tribes, but I suspect he would have identified with the spell the desert had
cast. For Loti, perhaps better than any writer I have read, including Thesiger,
conveys the experience of being absolutely smitten, humbled and transformed by
the desert.
As I hiked that weekend through the Mojave,[i]
everything seemed filtered through Loti’s gaze: the metamorphosis of light, of pinks
and lavenders, yellows and grays, ochers and violets; an unexpected petroglyph left
by a long vanished people; a chill wind sweeping a canyon as snow clouds closed
upon distant peaks; glowing, faraway ridges and empty, interminable plains slowly
engulfed by darkness. If, in rhapsodizing about the desert, Loti had expected to
convey a profound, contagious appreciation, he’d succeeded spectacularly. An
overwhelming sense of solitude and an “illusion of being united with universal
permanence and time” took hold. Did it matter that some 20 million people lived
within a few hours’ drive? I couldn’t think about that.
[i] A rare moment of advocacy for something other than
books on this blog: Several of the areas I explored fall within the proposed
Sand to Snow National Monument. Write your
representatives to help ensure preservation of this stunningly majestic area
where the Mojave and Sonoran deserts transition to the summits of Southern
California’s highest range. UPDATE February 12, 2016. Sand to Snow (along with two other large areas of Mojave desert) has just been designated as a National Monumnet by President Barack Obama, a tremendous action that will ensure protection of these astonishing desert landscapes.
