the leather and silver workers, and of the butcher, the baker and the seller of blankets and foodstuffs is, as yet, unspoiled and uncontaminated with anything more worldly than oil-lamps. The conducted tourist has not yet reached Bou-Saada, and consequently the native life of the place is all the more real.

Here is an account of a café acquaintance made at Bou-Saada. Zorah-ben-Mohammed was a pretty girl, according to the standards of her people, with a laugh like an houri. She confessed to eighteen years, and it is probable that she owned no more. The rice powder and the maquillage were thick on her cheek, whilst the rest of her face was frankly ochre. For all that she was a pretty girl and came perilously near convincing us of it, though hers was a beauty far removed from our own preconceived standards.

Great black eyes and a massive coiffe of raven-black hair topped off her charms. Below she was clad in a corsage of gold-embroidered velvet and an ample silk pantalon that might indeed have been a skirt, so large and thick were its folds. Bijoux she had galore. They may have been of gold and silver and precious stones, or they may not; but they were precious to her and added not a little to her graces. Bracelets bound her wrists and her ankles, and her finger-tips were dyed red with henna.

Zora or Zorah Fatma, or in Arab, Fetouma, are the girlish names which most please their bearer, and our friend Zorah was a queen in her class. Zorah served the coffee in the little Moorish café in Bou-Saada’s market-place, into which we had tumbled to escape a sudden sandstorm blown in from the desert. Her powers of conversation were not great; she did not know many French words and we still fewer Arab ones, so our respective vocabularies were soon exhausted. We admired her and made remarks upon her,—which was what she wanted, and, though the charge for the coffee was only two sous a cup, she was artful enough to worm a pourboire of fifty centimes apiece out of us for the privilege of being served by her.

As we left, Zorah, with her professional little laugh on her lips, cried out, “redoua, redoua!” (to-morrow, to-morrow!) “Well—perhaps!” we answered. “Peut-être que oui! Peut-être que non!”

A visit to the marabout at El Hamel, fifteen kilometres from Bou-Saada, is one of the things to do. We descended upon him in his hermit shrine, and found him seated on a great carpet of brilliant colouring and reclining on an enormous cushion of embroidered silk,—not the kind the Tunisian workers try to sell steamship-cruising tourists during their day on shore, but the real gold-embroidered, silky stuff, such, as dressed the characters of the Arabian nights.

Hung about the marabout’s neck was his chaplet of little ebony beads, and behind his head hung an embroidered silken square, its gold olive branches and fruit glittering with sun’s rays like an aureole.

Grouped about the marabout in a squatting semicircle and listening to his holy words were a half-dozen or more faithful Mussulmans. One of them was very old, with a visage ridged like a melon rind, and a fringe of beard that once was probably black, but was now a scant gray collaret. His face was the colour of brown earth, but he was manifestly a pure blooded Arab; there was not even the telltale pearly-blue tint in the eyes which always marks the half-bred Berber-Arab type. Another, rolled snug in an old burnous, was by his side, his eyes quite closed and his head and body rocking as though he was asleep. He probably was. A third was younger, of perhaps three and thirty, but he was quite as devout as his elders, though he was more wide-awake, and looked curiously and interestedly upon us as we stood in the doorway of the little white temple of a sanctuary awaiting the time when the marabout should be free of his religious duties.

Our visit was appreciated. We had brought the holy man a few simple gifts of chocolate, matches, and a couple of candles, and donated twenty copper sous to his future support. After the adieux of convention were exchanged, we jogged our little donkeys back to the town by a short cut through the bed of the Oued Bou-Saada.

CHAPTER XVII

KABYLIE AND THE KABYLES

The mountain villages of Kabylie are not mere nests of huddled shacks, nor groups of tents, nor “lean-tos,” nor mud huts. They are of well-built houses, with sloping or flat stone roofs, and look like the little hamlets of the Pyrenees or the Cevennes in France, where the rude winters have taught men to build after a certain fashion in order to live comfortably. The Kabyles early learned the same way of doing things; for, in spite of the fact that the brilliant African sun sometimes burns, even in midwinter, with a fervour unknown elsewhere, the mountain-tops are snow-covered for three or four months of the year; and the roads over which the daily antediluvian mail-coach and diligence pass—with occasionally an intrepid automobilist—are often impassable for a week.

The railway does not penetrate this mountain fastness beyond Tizi-Ouzou, and though it skirts the sunny southern side of the woods, the snows of winter blocked it last year for forty-eight hours. And this in Africa! If the exterior of the Kabyle mountain villages do resemble those of other lands, their interiors have a style of furnishing and decoration all their own. Purely Kabyle, it is wonderfully decorative, simple, and effective. It is the artist’s ideal interior, as the illustration herewith shows. The decorative scheme is its all in all. There is little furniture, almost no bibelots, if one omits goat-skin rugs, blankets, and the homely pottery and copper domestic utensils.

From Fort National the route leads down to meet the trunk line at Beni-Mançour, and en route takes on even a wilder aspect than that by which one ascended from the seaboard plain around Algiers. The journey can be made readily in a day by hired carriage, or, better yet, in a few hours by automobile.

From either side extend mountain valleys and ravines, each of them giving place to a road of sorts, practicable to the mountain mule, but to nothing else, save a human being on foot. If one would do some real exploring, let him spend ten days in Kabylie. He will think he is in the “Forbidden Land” of Tibet so far as intercourse with the outside world is concerned.

Footprints of the naked feet of men and women, and of the cloven hoofs of animals, will be the only signs of life visible for hours at a time. Yet in spite of the fact that the land is so wild and dreary, it is the most thickly populated region of Northern Africa. The braying of donkeys, the voices of women, the cries of children, and the gutturals of the men give, if not a melody, at least a quaint and charming sound as one draws up on some hilltop Kabyle village. A flock of sheep bars the way, but an old woman with a stick pounds them hither and thither with head-cracking blows, and at last you arrive before the open door of a native café and bargain with a soft-faced brown Kabyle youth for a bourriquet to take you twenty kilometres farther on, where you may find a lodging for the night.

You must bargain, wherever you are, and for whatever you want, in Africa; even with the Kabyle. Once your bargain made,—three francs for a little donkey for a day, or five, including his owner for a guide,—you need have no fear. The Kabyle will hold to it like grim death. The Kabyle is a savage if you like, but his virtues are many.

The Kabyle villages abound in dogs. They may not be vicious dogs, but you don’t know whether they are or not, and accordingly are wary. The Kabyle dogs have all shades of pitch and gamut in their voices. There are tenors, baritones, and even sopranos, and an occasional bass. If a solitary example is met with on a by-road he is readily made to retreat with a shower of stones; but as he is liable to catch up with you later, accompanied by reinforcements, as you draw up on the village, you must ever be on the qui vive. No one ever heard of anybody but a sheep-stealer having been bitten by a Kabyle dog (which, by the way, looks like any other mongrel cur): but discretion here, as in many other tight corners, is the chief part of valour. “De l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace!” is a stimulating French slogan, but one is in doubt about putting it into practice with a grinning, long-fanged mongrel before him on a lone mountain road.

The Kabyles are one division of that great race of Berbers, the most ancient dwellers on African soil. They have kept the type comparatively pure by inhabiting this restricted area closely bordering upon the Atlas Mountains a dozen or twenty leagues from the sea. “They are,” says M. Jules Duval, “the principal types of the Berber race, and those who have best conserved their ancestral characteristics, and are perhaps the Numidians of old.” That is a pedigree worth owning up to. Brave and industrious, the Kabyles can fight as well as bargain, and they value patriotism and ancestral tradition above everything else.

Of all the Mussulman races, the Kabyles treat their women with the greatest deference, and even allow them to frequent public fêtes, faces uncovered, and to dance with the men, yatagan or gun in hand.

The Kabyle is successful in whatever occupation he follows, more so than any of his Mussulman brothers. As herders, farmers, armourers, blacksmiths, and masons,—at everything in fact that requires an aptitude and deftness of hand,—they excel.

When in straits the Kabyle will sell all his worldly goods, save his gun, without the slightest trace of emotion. Perhaps this is because his gun is the only thing on which he pays taxes and accordingly he knows its value.

It is said of the Kabyles that they eat their daughters. “Le père mange sa fille.” This comes from the custom which some of the Kabyle tribes have of bartering off the hand of their daughter to the most willing suitor at a price ranging from two hundred to a thousand francs. There’s nothing very wrong about this, seemingly, not according to African standards.

The Kabyle and his relatives in their little square house live the life of a truly happy family. He and his relatives and his live stock—except his camels, the odour from which is a little too strong for even Kabyle nostrils—all living together under the same roof. There is no more squalor about it, however, than one may see in the human and pig-inhabited huts of Connemara.

The Kabyle comes of a comparatively wealthy class, but his house furnishings are very meagre. Besides the animals before mentioned, he possesses only his batterie de cuisine, some great oil jars and earthenware pots for the storing away of olives, butter and honey. He also has a storehouse for grain, where he keeps his wheat or maize flour, which he or the members of his family have themselves ground between the traditional upper and nether millstones, which in this case are portable ones.

Such is a brief inventory of the dwellings and the round of life of the Kabyles of the mountain villages, founded by their ancestors hundreds and perhaps thousands of years ago. Some of their race have got the wandering foot, and live in the pastoral black and brown striped tent like the real nomads; but these are comparatively few in number. The real, Simon-pure Kabyle is a house-dweller.

The Kabyle mountain settlements are often mere hamlets called dehera, and in these the village schoolmaster, besides having his own duties, also performs the functions of priest of the temple. He is literally the imam of the mosque, and carries out according to his faith the monotonous repetition of the words of the Koran when not otherwise engaged. Every Kabyle village has its temples of knowledge and of religion, just as sure as it has a headsman or Sheik. The mosque is naturally the most notable edifice of the settlement; but is seldom splendid or pretentious, and often it serves as a hostelry as well as a place of worship. But only for the faithful—not for dogs of infidels.

Though the Kabyles in general are not tent-dwellers, but live in houses of stone or brick construction, these edifices exhibit no particular architectural characteristics; but are as much like the dwellings of the Pueblos as they are like those of the Thibetans. To all intents and purposes the towns and settlements and, in a measure, all Kabyle houses, are fortresses. This is an effect which is heightened by the almost universal employment of substitutes for the crenelated battlement and meurtrières or loopholes, cut in the walls in place of windows, so distinctive of European feudal architecture.

Just by way of contrast to the virtues of the Kabyles, it is bound to be recorded that they are the dirtiest lot that one finds in Africa; and inasmuch as this is contrary to the tenets of the Mussulman religion it is the more to be remarked. Up to within a few years, according to the head of a French mission which surveyed the Kabyle country, there was but one public bath establishment to be found in all their native towns and villages. The result is that hereditary affections are transmitted from generation to generation, and were it not for the efficacy of the open-air cure the Kabyles would be a considerably less long-lived race than they are.

The Kabyles live well at all events, and their couscous is renowned throughout all Algeria. Their preserved figs and ripe and unripe olives are of the first quality and bring the highest prices in the markets of Algiers, Bougie or Beni-Mançour. The Kabyle is no longer a savage, though he does stick closely to many traditions, and eats his couscous out of a great dish of beechwood fashioned by hand from a cross-section cut from a tree-trunk. The mere fact that he eats it from a plate at all, instead of from a pot, indicates, however, an approaching degree of civilization.

The Kabyle is primarily a tiller of the soil and a herder of goats and sheep. And when education was thrust upon him, or rather upon his children, by a progressive French government, he resented it. He had cut out an illiterate career for his progeny; he didn’t care if they weren’t educated, nor did they.

He explained it all to the writer in a Moorish café one afternoon, in a patois something like the following,—it’s a queer thing, Arab-French, but it’s as good as that of most foreigners nevertheless.

“Si li Beylick fasir, fic toutes lis enfants dis mitres d’icole, qu’ist-ce qui travaljar la tirre ... qu’ist-ce qui gardi lis chèvres, lis motons, lis vaches?” Who indeed will guard his goats and sheep if the children all go to school! The old man probably will have to work himself.

The new generation is changing, but the old-school Kabyle is as conservative as a “down-east farmer,” a “Yorkshireman,” or a “bon Provençeau.”

The Kabyles are the Piedmontese or Auvergnats of Algeria. An indigenous race which has resisted better than any other the march of progress. They have, too, certain other foreign characteristics. One wonders how they got them. They practise the vendetta, like the Corsican; they have the landesgemeinde, as in certain of the Swiss cantons; and they have cock-fights like the Spaniards. They are a very curious race of people, but they are becoming enlightened, and rank among the most loyal towards the new French government of all the tribes of Algeria.

The Kabyle has fought for France, and fought well. The first zouaves were Kabyles,—the name comes from Zouaoua, a Kabyle tribe. General Clauzel enrolled a company of them in 1831, and taught them what, he was pleased at the time to think, was civilized warfare. Doubtless it was, as civilized as any warfare, which is not saying much for it. This new type of soldier, the zouave, has endured to this day in France and elsewhere, and a very practical, businesslike soldier he has proved.

The Kabyle women jingle with bijoux and scintillate with yards of ribbons and flying draperies, and a strong scented perfume emanates from them with an odour of sanctity, almost, so strange and exotic is it. They know the difficult art of elegance—these mountain women of Kabylie—better than their more fashionable sisters. Not all the science of the couturière or the modiste can give a tithe of the grace borne naturally by these half-savage Kabyle beauties. The Jewesses of Algiers and Tunis have a certain, if crude, voluptuous elegance, which is an adulteration of civilization and savagery; but the Kabyle woman, beneath her draperies and her bijoux, expresses something quite different. Cleopatra might well have been one of them. Their natural graces and their bijoux are the details which set off their charms so splendidly. The cross-breeding of the Berber with the Arab has no doubt debased the race somewhat. This is mostly among the men and the women who dwell in the towns.

Apparently these Kabyle women are not coquettes, though they smile, always, with their pearly teeth, rouge-red lips, and flashing eyes, bespeaking the sensuality of a land and its customs entirely foreign to European civilization. Of beauty they have little according to other standards, although their features are not crude or unlovely. Rather is theirs the beauty of a high-bred animal, or the sculptured bronze ideal replica of a race. They are types of a species and are delightful to look upon, alike in face and figure.

The Kabyle jewelry is something to be coveted by every woman. It can be bought—even in the bazaars and souks of Algiers and Tunis—at its weight for old silver. But the buying of it is an art, and one must beware of not getting dross or something made in Birmingham or Solingen. The genuine old stone or

coral-set enamelled Kabyle bracelets and necklaces are becoming rarer, and the imitation ones more and more common. Still, in any aspect, the designs are beautiful, and far and away ahead of the aberrations of mind which produce the art-nouveau jewelery of Bond Street or of the Rue de la Paix. Sometimes instead of silver a substitute of dull, unburnished white metal,—pewter most probably,—is used in the settings of these bizarre ornaments, and even then the effect is charming.

The Kabyles have ever been fond of coral, which, from the earliest times, they gathered from the sea, cutting and polishing the fragments as if they were precious stones. Coral is fast disappearing from the African coast, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, wherever the Italians have exploited the commerce, and the rosy, translucent branches of old are now more often replaced with the inferior dead coral of a yellowish white or even reddish brown colour. Unless indeed celluloid imitations are not used instead.

Sea shells, too, enter into the make-up of the adornments of the Kabyle woman.

The metal work, be it gold, silver, or pewter and antimony, is invariably hand-forged, with the loving marks of the hammer still visible. This rough crudity is its charm, for the intrinsic value as a rule is not great. It looks high at fifty francs (a collaret of three or four bands strung together on a silver wire, with a clasp the size of a half-dollar), but when, by the classic process of Arab or Berber bargaining, you get the same thing for ten francs, it is really très bon marché.

Grande and Petite Kabylie, the Kabylie du Djurjura and the Kabylie des Babors, is not thickly strewn with Frenchified towns and cities. On the coast there are Dellys, an incipient seaport. Bougie, the ancient Saldae, where a colony of veterans was established by the great Augustus, but now a growing seaport with half of its fifteen thousand population French. Djidjelli, a hundred kilometres east of Bougie by a wonderful coast road, was the ancient colony of Igilgili of Augustus. Collo is an Italianized fishing village; Beni-Mançour, a flourishing small town to-day, but formerly a simple bordj or halting-place on the main caravan route from east to west; and Setif, the chef lieu, contains a mixed population of 15,000, of which a quarter part are Europeans and 1,600 Jews.

These commercial centres, and a half a dozen smaller places, are the only points where the traveller by road or rail will find any approach to European comforts in all Kabylie, excepting at Tizi-Ouzou and Fort National on the branch road from Beni-Mançour to Bougie.

Tizi-Ouzou is the centre of a Kabyle population which figures out a hundred and ten souls to the square kilometre. Its name signifies “Col des Genets,” and it occupies the site of an old bordj or rest-house of former days.

Four hours of diligence—which costs four francs—carries one from Tizi-Ouzou to Fort National, at any time of the year between April and December; at other times the pass of Tirourda may be snow-covered, and you may become stalled for hours or even days. Fort National, in the heart of Grande Kabylie, is a grim, modern fortress, perched on the highest peak of the Algerian mountain range paralleling the coast. It is only interesting from a grim picturesque point of view. The citadel crowns a height a thousand metres above sea-level, and from its terrace unfolds a remarkable panorama of mountain-tops and valleys: “Incipient mountain chains stretching out in all directions like the arms of an octopus,” a Frenchman described these topographical features, and if you know what an octopus looks like you will be struck by the simile. Fort National is the best centre from which to make excursions into Kabylie, but you must come here in the spring or autumn for the purpose, not in winter or summer.

Bougie is off the beaten track. To get there one must break his journey going from Algiers to Biskra, Constantine or Tunis at Beni-Mançour. Bougie is a coast town, and one of the terminals of the steamship lines from Marseilles. Because tourists go and come via Algiers, or via Algiers and Tunis or vice versa, Bougie is not known of all travellers in North Africa. This is where they make a mistake. Bougie is the most splendidly situated of all the African Mediterranean ports. Its points of view and panoramas are ready-made for the artists to jot them down in crude paint on dull canvas—if they can. The most one can do is to try. And Bougie, its glistening white-walled houses, its shore-line, its sky-line, and its background of cliff are motifs which will fascinate all who view it, whether for the first or last time.

All the same Bougie has little enough of interest for the conventional tourist. The native quarter is not remarkable, the mosque is a modern affair, though on good old lines, and the native market, if curious, does not equal those of Blida, Boufarik, or Constantine.

It is the site of Bougie, and its environs, that make its charms. If its hotels were not poor patterns of those of the pompous prefectures in France it would really be a delightful seaside resort.

There are some Roman ruins of the days of Augustus still remaining, some fragmentary fortifications, and some great cistern vaults. Bougie’s past was historic, for it was one day the capital of an independent state. The Spaniards came and destroyed its independence through the wiles of Pedro Navarro, who built Algiers’ Peñon. Charles V sojourned here for a time, basking under African skies, in 1541. That is all of Bougie’s romance.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONSTANTINE AND THE GORGE DU RUMMEL

The original settlement was very ancient long before the Romans of the time of Scipio, who gave it its present name. Romans, Arabs, Vandals, and Turks all held it in turn until General Valée came in 1836 and drove the latter out by strategy. Not by siege, as the painter has tried to make us believe.

The great rock of Constantine is only attached to the surrounding country by a slim neck of land. Below lies the Rummel, still cutting its bed deeper and deeper each year, until now a very cañon is gouged out of the city’s rock foundation. The only communication between the city and the surrounding plateau is by the Bridge of El Kantara, spectacularly picturesque, though not artistically beautiful, the successor of an old Roman bridge on the same site.

Any who have marvelled at the Bridge of Ronda in Spain, and at the natural rock-bound fortress to which it leads, will observe its similarity to Constantine. Its rocky walls are impregnable, though not untakable. Nothing but a continuous dynamite performance could blow up Constantine; to accomplish it would be to blow up a mountain. Nevertheless, the French captured the Mohammedan fortress at the time of the occupation—albeit at a great expenditure of time and loss of men.

Centuries earlier than this, in Roman days, Sallust, governor of the province under Cæsar, was a property owner here, and fortified the city that it might best protect his interests. With what success is seen by the fact that, though the fortress was besieged and taken eighty times, its garrison was always starved out; it was never blown up or battered down.

The first glimpse of Constantine is confusing. It is difficult to separate its component parts; its historic picturesqueness from its matter-of-fact hurly-burly of commercial affairs. The houses seen from the railway appear commonplace and uninteresting, only saved from sheer ugliness by their remarkable situation. The great gorge of the Rummel flows beneath the ugly iron bridge,—the successor of that more splendid work of the Romans,—and ugly trams, omnibuses, and carts rumble along where one pictures troops of camels and parti-coloured Arabs. Arabs there are at Constantine, of all shades, and Turks and Jews, of all sects, and when one is actually settled down in his hotel and starts out on a wandering, with the intention of focussing all these things into some definite impression, they begin to grow upon him, and Constantine begins to take rank with the liveliest of his imaginings and memories. Constantine is a wonder, there is no doubt about that; but one must become acquainted with it intimately in order to love it. Constantine’s streets are running rivers of as mixed a crew of humanity as one may see out of Cairo, Constantinople, or Port Saïd. Tunis is its nearest approach in the Moghreb.

The main artery of the Arab town is the Rue Perrégaux. Here are the Moorish cafés, the mosques, the shops of the sweetmeat sellers, the vegetable dealers, the embroiderers, and the jewellers. The Cirta of Jugurtha has become the Constantine of to-day, but its mediævalism still lives in spite of the contrast of a gaudy opera house, a bank, and an “hôtel-de-ville.” The native quarter keeps well to itself, however; and modern improvements do not

encroach upon its picturesque primitiveness as they do at Algiers.

Beside its site and its bridge, Constantine’s monuments are not many or great. The chief one is the Mosque of Salah Bey, with its marble decorations chiselled out by the hand of the slave of an olden time. The cathedral of to-day is built up out of a transformed mosque, but shows, undefiled, its ancient Mauresque arcades and faïences. On the broidered mihrab, with inscriptions from the Koran woven in the woof, some well-meaning Christian has added a bleeding heart. Is this treating the original Mussulman owner right? It seems enough to make a Christian church out of a Mohammedan mosque, without trying to incorporate two opposing religious symbols in a mural decoration.

The ancient palace of the Bey,—the last Bey of Constantine, Hadj-Ahmed,—though comparatively modern, is a very interesting building. This terrible Turk, the Bey, was a very terrible potentate indeed. He massacred and pillaged his own subjects. He would nail the hands and feet of a fancied offender to a tree, leaving him to die, and would sew up the mouths and manacle the hands of those who spoke ill of him. He held a big club always uplifted, and many other murderous implements besides were ever in the air ready to fall. This palace of the Bey’s was in course of construction at the time the Turkish domination fell. It had been built of porphyry and marble columns, and fine old tiles and sculptured balustrades, brought by rich merchants as presents to the Bey, under pain of imprisonment should they default. It is a miniature Alhambra of courts within courts, and is really extraordinarily beautiful. It covers an area of over five thousand square metres. Under the guidance of a zouave with baggy red trousers and a fez dangling on the back of his head, we walked and circumnavigated all of the paved and orange-planted quadrangles, and quite believed we were living in the days gone by, in spite of the fact that tram-cars were passing by the door, and inconsiderate, un-churchly chimes were ringing out ribald airs from the neighbouring cathedral tower.

On the whole the old Beylical palace of Constantine is far more elaborate and interesting than the Dar-el-Bey at Tunis—or the Bardo, usually reckoned the chief tourist sights of their class. It all depends on the mood, of course, but then we had the mood.

Some of the frescoes of this palace of Turkish dominion are most curious. One of them, painted in the most crude and infantile manner, is inexplicable except for the following legend.

A “dog of a Christian slave”—as his Turkish master called him—was set at the task. He knew nothing of art, but that did not matter to the domineering Turk, who said that “all Frenchmen were born artists.” The frieze was completed, as it may be seen to-day, and the artist (?) stood before his workmanship in fear and trembling, dreading his master’s wrath. The wrath was not forthcoming. His Beyship liked the frieze of birds as big as houses, of ships and frogs all of a size, of cows the size of mosques, and all the other fantasies of an untrained hand and brain. “I told you,” said the Bey, “all these dogs of Frenchmen know how to paint;” and with that he set him free. All potentates have their vagaries. Hadj-Ahmed’s were no greater and no worse than the present German Emperor’s, which have permitted, if not commanded, political portraits to be sculptured on the portals of a Christian church.

Constantine is unique. It is a city as live and bustling as any of its size on earth. It is undergoing a great development. Everybody is prosperous and contented. And, above all, it is historic, and its native quarter unspoiled in spite of the city’s great attempts to become a commercial metropolis.

Constantine is the gateway to a vast and wealthy grain-growing region, and it sits high and proud on the great central plateau of Algeria between the desert and the sea. Practically it is the sole gateway or means of communication through which passes a great proportion of all the life and movement of the great province of which it is the capital. Contrastingly Constantine’s magnificently theatrical site gives entirely another view-point for the stranger within its gates. The great gorge of the Rummel cuts the city entirely off from the surrounding plateau by a thousand foot chasm, where the gathered waters of the plain roll and thunder with such regularity and force that the steep sides are cut sheer as if by the quarryman’s drill. Constantine’s Arab town, too, is entirely a unique thing. It is complete, unspoiled, and genuine. It sits off at one side of the European town, sloping down towards the steep brink of the gorge, and is entirely uncontaminated with the contemporary life of the French. Its colouring is marvellous; and the comings and goings, and the daily affairs, of its Arab merchants and traders lend a charm

of antiquity which not even the realization of the fact that we are living in the twentieth century can wholly spoil. The Kabyle with his skins of oil, the Berber with his wool and leathers, and the town-bred Arab—half Turk, half Jew—occupying himself with all sorts of trading, give a local colour rich and unmixed, such as one finds nowhere else in the East,—either at Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, or Constantinople. What is lacking is mere size and grandeur,—the rest is all there. And the Moorish cafés and the sweetmeat and pastry sellers’ shops of Constantine’s Arab town, visited on the eve of Ramadan, give such a variety of surprises that no one who has once seen them can ever forget them.

To return to the great scenic charm of Constantine; it must be seen and familiarized. As a mere gorge it is no more wonderful than dozens of others,—in the Rockies in America; in the Tarn, or the Gorges du Loup, in the Maures. What the Gorge du Rummel stands for is that it is, and has been for ages, the chief defence of the great city of Constantine, and for that reason it appeals more strongly than any other of its kind.

Before entering the narrow chasm which renders the position of Constantine, “la ville aérienne,” well-nigh impregnable, the Rummel, or Rivière des Sables, has joined forces with the Boumezou, the river which fertilizes.

The change is sudden from the sunny valley to the dark Passage des Roches. The torrent, suddenly narrowed, passes close to a hot spring spurting forth from a cleft in the rock, then flowing through the arch of the Devil’s Bridge and tumbling in cascades through the winding chasm or ravine.

From the edge of the abyss one cannot see the stream which is hidden by the curves of the ravine; the projecting strata of rock furrowed at frequent intervals by vertical water-worn clefts even prevent one from seeing the bottom.

Just below the rock bridge of El Kantara (that of to-day being a reconstruction of the Roman work), the Rummel disappears beneath a vault of rock. The ravine here is only a narrow trench, torn and pierced by underground passages, from the bottom of which rises the sound of rushing waters. Three hundred metres beyond, the torrent emerges from these dark galleries and on both sides the cliffs rise vertically. A single isolated arch, naturally ogival and singularly regular in form, still uniting the two walls of rock.

Here the irregularities and rents in the earth’s surface are the most imposing; the walls of variously coloured rock here and there overhang and rise to a height of over 200 metres, giving a perilous foothold to the buildings of the town above. At this apex of the island city above is the Kef Cnecora or Rocher du Lac, from which an old-time pacha threw down his recalcitrant wives sewn up in sacks, quite after the conventional manner of the day, one thinks. Yes, but here they had an awful drop, and fell not always on the soft watery bed of the river, but on the pointed, jagged rocks of the rapids. Theirs must have been an awful death!

Years ago access to the ravine was entirely impracticable; but since an intrepid engineer with a ninety-nine year concession has built rock ladders and bridges along its whole length—and charges two francs to cross them—the experience of making this semisubterranean tour of Constantine is within reach of everybody.

One day at Constantine a discordant rumbling of voices in the street below attracted us to the windows of our hotel. A strange, conglomerate procession of Mussulman faithful was marching by. Hundreds of brown Arab folk, Kabyles, Moors, and nomads from the south, were marching hand in hand, each with a flower behind his right ear, and all shouting at the top of their voices. A funeral procession had passed but a few moments before, and we thought it a part of the same ceremony, though indeed, as we learned later, it was something quite different.

The few straggling hundreds of the head of the procession soon grew into thousands, all chanting verses of the Koran. Following close came the gaily coloured green, white, and red flag of the Prophet.

We followed in the wake of the procession and at the end of the town came to the Mussulman cemetery. There is no remarkable sadness or sentiment about the Arab cemetery at Constantine, at least not such as one associates with a Christian burial-place. It sits on the sunny slope of a hill, with a silhouette of mountains for a background, and a foreground strewn, helter-skelter, with little tombs and koubas in crazy building-block fashion. There is no symmetry about anything, and tiny headstones crop up here and there through a tangle of weeds and wild flowers. Frequently there is a more imposing slab, and occasionally a tomb or kouba tinted blue or pink, with perhaps its dome gilded. The whole impression, however, is of an indiscriminate mixture of things that just “happened in place,” and were not set out on any preconceived plan.

One imposing domed kouba has a bit of shade from an overgrowing tree and is surrounded by a little level grass-plot which gives it a certain distinction of dignity such as a religious shrine should have.

Beyond the cemetery was a great open plot upon which was to be held the Mussulman fête, which was the real objective of the fast-growing procession, and which by this time had gathered into its fold all of Constantine’s available Mussulman population,—some twenty-five thousand souls who habitually say their prayers to Allah.

Here at the fête the thousands of Arabs, their yellow, red, or green burnouses flowing in the breeze like flags and pennants, grouped themselves first of all around the khaouadji, or open-air cafés, the drinking of coffee being the preliminary to every social function with the Arab.

At the further end of the open ground were set up the tents of the great chiefs,—the Caïds and Cadis of the surrounding tribes, and along one side were grouped cook-shops and fruit-sellers. There were no “hurdy-gurdies,” “Aunt Sallies,” or “shooting galleries.” The Arab takes his pleasures and makes his rejoicings less violently, preferring to squat on his heels, or lie on a straw mat, and drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, or munch a handful of dates or a honey-cake boiled in oil.

One general cook-shop occupied a prominent place. Here were great copper cauldrons where the couscous was being prepared. This indigenous Algerian dish is about the only one containing meat which the temperate Arab eats. Even then he eats mostly of the semoule and bread and gravy, leaving the fragments of mutton or lamb, or chicken (if by chance one wandered aimlessly into the pot) to be boiled down again for another brew.

The Arab eats his couscous out of a great wooden platter, and disdains knife or fork or spoon. A dozen Arabs sit around this shallow bowl of wood and dip their fingers into it, each in his proper turn. It is a sort of game of grab. One may get a choice morsel, or he may not. If not as cleanly a method of eating as that of the Chinaman’s chopsticks, at any rate one’s appetite is sooner satisfied. The Arab has the true spirit of camaraderie in his eating and drinking. The most cultivated and fastidious will mingle with the hoi-polloi, and eat from the same dish and drink from the same merdjil as the most miserable one among the crowd.

The fête, for such it was, seemed to have little religious significance, beyond the marching in procession and chanting, and the fact that it was being held in proximity to holy ground. After the feast there was something like a demonstration, when two score or more Arabs did a sort of a fanatical dance or swirl, which reminded one of the combination of an Indian war-dance and the gyrations of the dervishes of Cairo. Shrill cries and dislocating leaps and bounds brought some of the participants, in time, to a state of inanimation and convulsions; but still the others kept on. One by one a dancer would drop out, this evidently being the way the game was played. When we finally came away, half of them were still bounding about in a frenzy of delirium.

We learned later they were a sect of Islam, called the Aïssaouas, whose principal tenet of faith is the mortification of the flesh. There are various ways of doing this: the hair shirt, flagellation, and crawling about on the hands and knees; but the way of the Aïssaouas is certainly the most violent. Some of them even go so far as to pierce the cheeks and nose with great pins and needles; but if one can swirl and gyrate himself into an epileptic state, his chances of grace and entrance into that Paradise of Houris promised by Mahomet are just as good.

The fête finally came to an end sometime during the night. Then the cook-shops and khaouadjis piled up their belongings in a donkey cart, or on camel-back, and the Arabs folded their tents and silently stole away after the manner set forth in the fable.

The marabout in whose honour all this came about was then left in peace to sleep his long sleep undisturbed until the same orgie should be repeated the following year.

The environs of Constantine are marvellously beautiful. Northward towards Philippeville by road or rail one rises to the Col des Oliviers by zigzags and sharp turns, to descend eventually—a matter of a couple of thousand feet or more—to the brilliant blue Mediterranean. Nearer at hand, rising high above Constantine itself, are the hills of Mansourah and Sidi-M’cid, and to the west the fertile valley of the Hamma.

Philippeville is interesting only because of its site, which lies on the beautiful Gulf of Stora, an ancient port of the Romans. The monuments of Philippeville are nearly nil. There are some few fragments of the arcades of an old amphitheatre, and the modern mosque, though in no way an ambitious monument, is picturesquely perched above the town. The great square, or place, opposite the port is a modern improvement which is commendable enough, but not in the least in keeping with Africa. It is more like a cheap imitation of Monte Carlo’s terrace.

The Italian influence is strong in all these parts. The village of Stora, about four kilometres from Philippeville, is practically peopled by Italians. And one hears as much Italian as he does French in the streets of Philippeville. The little house-corner shrines to be found all over the older part of the town are also frankly reminiscent of Italy.

In the bay, too, the little lateen-rigged, clipper-prowed fishing-boats are Italian in design, and are manned by Italians. Right here one recalls that the “sunny Italian” in a foreign land is almost invariably a “digger of dirt,” a worker on a railway or canal cutting, or a fisherman.

Philippeville has a decided colour of its own, but it is not Arab, and the French is so blended with the Italian that its colouring is decidedly mixed.

CHAPTER XIX

BETWEEN THE DESERT AND THE SOWN

This great plateau of the Tell, the granary of Africa and one of the finest wheat-growing belts of the old world, knows well the rigours of winter; but the summer is long and hot, and crops push out from the ground with an abundance known nowhere else in these parts.

The mountains of “Grande Kabylie” bound it on the west and north, and the Aures on the east and south. Beyond is the desert and its oases. The contrast of topography and climate between the desert and the “sown” is remarkable. All changes in the twinkling of an eye as one passes through the rocky gorge of El Kantara,—one of those mythological marvels accomplished by the hand or heel of Hercules. At any rate, the cleft in the rock wall is there, and in a hundred yards one leaves the winds and chilly atmosphere of a late autumn or early winter’s day behind, and plunges into the still, burning atmosphere of the desert, with palm-tree oases scattered here and there. The same phenomenon may be observed elsewhere, but not in so forcible a fashion. At Batna in winter you may see an occasional bear-skin coat, with the “fur side out,” and at Biskra, sixty odd miles away, you will find a temperature of say 30 degrees centigrade—86 degrees Fahrenheit.

En route from Constantine by railway no towns or cities of note are passed until the great military post of Batna is reached. Here one may break his journey and get an aspect of the mingling life of the desert and the town Arab, which is astonishing in its complexity. The town Arab lives much as we do ourselves,—at least some of his species do,—wears, sometimes, a Norfolk jacket and shoes, which he calls “forme Américaine,” and travels first-class on the railway when he takes his promenades abroad. The other still clings to his burnous and takes off his shoes at every opportunity, travelling by camel caravan, as did his ancestors of a thousand years ago.

Batna itself possesses no monuments of note. It is, however, the starting-point for Lambessa and Timgad, the finest ancient Roman ruined cities left standing above ground to-day,—not excepting Pompeii. A résumé of the delights of these fascinating Roman relics is given in another chapter of this book.

Batna possesses a remarkably well-kept commercial hotel, the “Hôtel des Étrangers et Continentals.” It is not a tourist hotel, which is all the better for it. Moreover it has electric lights in the bedrooms, and a very distinctive and excellent menu on the table. What more could one want—in what people are wont to think of as savage Africa?

We took a likely looking Arab for a guide at Batna, though indeed there was nothing special in the immediate neighbourhood for him to guide us to. He wore a “Touring Club de France” badge in his turban, and read religiously each month the T. C. F. “Revue,” and accordingly he appropriated every stranger as his right, whether one would or no. He was useful, however, in keeping off other importunate Arabs in the great market as we strolled between the stalls.

Batna’s negro village is curiously interesting, though squalid and in ill repute among the authorities.

“Ici le village nègre;” says your Arab guide after you have trudged a couple of kilometres over a real desert trail. There are only a few of these “black blocks” in North Africa, the negroes usually mingling with the Arabs.

At night, in Batna’s village nègre, one might think he was in some head-centre of voodooism, so quaint and discordant are the sights and sounds. Negroes are much the same the world over, whenever they herd together, whether they come from the Soudan, Guinea, or Alabama.

Here in Algeria the negro café is a coffee-shop only a shade more murky than the other coffee-shops. And the faces of those squatting round about, though they glisten in the smoky atmosphere,—ineffectually penetrated by a dim light radiating from a swinging lamp in the centre,—are more dusky.

A tumultuous, raucous chant breaks out above a murmur now and then, though most of the time the sound is a mysterious crooning wail, the genuine negro wail, which is not at all like the banshee’s, but quite as penetrating.

It might be a prison cell or the hold of a slave-ship, this negro café, for all one can distinguish of its appointments. There is nothing luxurious here; it is not classy or exclusive in the least. A sou a cup is the price the negro pays for his coffee. And since he hasn’t the Arabs’ prejudices against strong drink, he can get beet-root and turnip-top cognac and chemically made absinthe at cut-rate prices, which appeal largely to his pocket, if not his taste.

This symphony in dusk, and in thin, shrill so-called music, is impressive. There are negro musicians, negro dancing-women, and a negro proprietor. It’s the real, unadulterated “coontown” drama, where the players are the real thing, and not the coffee-coloured “In-Dahomey” kind.

One touch of white only was to be seen in Batna’s negro café. This was an Arab of the Hauts-Plateaux, with a long, aquiline profile and a flowing burnous and haïk, most probably the lover of one of the trio of dancing-women. His emotions were passive. He might have been at home under his own vine and fig-tree. Still he was out of place, and looked it. The most he would do was to give a sickly smile at some rude pleasantry of his black companions,—and we did that ourselves.

What of this negro company were not drinking thick, muddy coffee or “caravan” tea were smoking kif. The odour of opium, mint, and kerosene was abominable. A negro of the Soudan might stand it, but not a white man; at least none whiter than the lone Arab. So we passed on our way, the dancing-women shrieking, the shrill trumpet or chalumeau squealing, the tambourine jangling, and the oil-lamp smoking. It was not heavenly.

Batna has a very excellent French school for Arab children, and it is there that the young idea learns how to “parler Français.” The French schools are doing good work, no doubt, but they are spoiling the simplicity of the native.

At Batna we saw a school “prize-giving,” which was conducted as follows:

“Premier prix d’application,” called out a black-coated preceptor, “Abdurhaman-ben-Mohammed, Arachin-el-Oumach.” “Boum! Boum!” shouted the rest of the class.

Second prize, third prize, and so on; and all the little rag-tag brown and black population came up in a long file,—they all got prizes apparently,—and the whole thing wound up, as all French functions do, even if they are in the heart of Africa, with the singing of the “Marseillaise.”

The next objective point, going south from Batna, is El Kantara and its gorge.

If ever Longfellow’s poetic lines were applicable, they are here.