Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist Read Free Book Online Page A

the 1980s,
A Summer in the Sahara
was published in new academic editions which also account for variations in the text. In them you find other explanations for the silence in Laghouat.

42
    In the spring of 1830, Paris was already seething with the rebellion which was to find its outlet in the July revolution. De Polignac’s militantly reactionary government was about to fall. As a final way of diverting dissatisfaction, it was decided to attack Algiers, on the pretext of an alleged insult to the French Consul.
    In their proclamations to the people, the French said they had come to liberate the Arabs from Turkish oppression and make them ‘lords in their own mansions’. But the supposed liberators committed the most hideous atrocities and retained power wherever they could seize it.
    France under the July monarchy decided to keep just Algiers and its immediate surroundings; but the military was not to be deterred. Villages were burnt down in their hundreds, and thousands of refugees died of starvation. By the time the February revolution introduced the second empire, Algerian resistance had been broken all along the coast.
    The mountains and the deserts remained. No political decision could stop the conquest that continued with military logic. On December 3, 1852, it was Laghouat’s turn. The French seized the town after a two-day siege. Forty-five years later, the commanding officer described in his memoirs what happened next:
    The town had to endure all the horrors of war, experience all the atrocities that can be committed by soldiers when they are left for a moment to themselves, still feverish from the dreadful fighting, raging over the dangers they have undergone and the losses they havesuffered, excited by their hard-won victory. Terrible scenes were enacted.
    Fromentin arrived in the early summer of 1853, scarcely six months after the massacre. ‘I feel neither joy nor happiness here,’ he writes. ‘Difficult to explain why …’
43
    Every morning, I go up onto the roof and sit there for a while, looking out over the brown slopes surrounding the town. They are covered with fresh green bushes and trees, although everywhere the actual ground is dry and infertile. The moisture has retreated from the sun and the winds, further down into the ground. That is where the roots seek it out.
    Yesterday I drove through flowering nerium, a bush named after the Greek word for water,
nero
. It has a brilliant ability to find water at great depths and human water-diviners have always followed its roots.
    The contrast between surface and depths, between what the eye sees up here and the real circumstances down there, are the fundamental experience of the desert.
    From my viewpoint on the roof, I can follow the route of the victorious French into town. Fromentin did the same when the stench of corpses was still in the air. A French lieutenant who was present told him:
    We literally waded in blood, and for two days it was impossible to get anywhere for the heaps of corpses.Not only hundreds of men, shot or with bayonet wounds all over them, but also – why not say it as it is? – the bodies of huge numbers of women, children, horses, donkeys, camels, yes, even dogs … A terrible book could be written about the episodes I heard tell of the following morning alone, of what had been enacted during the two or three hours the reprisals lasted …
    Fromentin didn’t write that book. He deleted the lieutenant’s story from his manuscript and contented himself with a summary: ‘They waded in blood; there were corpses by the hundred.’
    In Fromentin’s writing, too, there is a contrast between surface and depth, between what the eye sees up there and the actual circumstances further down. In one place in the manuscript he asks: ‘A third of the population killed – with what right, because of what crime or what threat and with what doubtful results?’
    But he at once stops himself: ‘I have no right either to describe or to