Some one has not inaptly compared the Barbary States—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—to an overseas cap perched jauntily on the bald head of Africa. This picturesque simile has, moreover, some scientific justification, for geological authorities have frequently advanced the interesting theory that when the world was young this region, which has a compacted and clearly defined physical system of its own, was not a part of Africa at all, but, cut off from that continent by an ocean which covered what we now know as the Sahara, formed a great peninsula attached to Europe by the isthmus which at one time unquestionably spanned the present Straits of Gibraltar. Not being a geologist, I am incompetent to pass an opinion on this theory, but its plausibility must be apparent to any one familiar with the topography of North Africa.

Barbary—I am here employing the term to designate the region lying between the Mediterranean and the main range of the Atlas—may be divided into two zones, wholly dissimilar from each other in character. Skirting the coast is a broad band of mountainous but, on the whole, fertile country, sprinkled with populous cities, watered by numerous streams, rich in forests and valleys, known as the Tell—the Arabic for “hill.” Behind the Tell, stretching southward to the barrier formed by the Great Atlas, is a region of lofty table-lands, or steppes, having an average elevation of three thousand feet, bleak and desolate in appearance, with a climate very different from the sunny warmth of the littoral, but providing fine grazing lands for cattle and bountiful crops of esparto grass and grain. Beyond the Atlas there occurs a still more sudden and startling change, as, descending its steep southern slopes, we come out upon the Sahara.

In many respects the country lying to the north of the Atlas belongs, as Mr. L. March Phillips has pointed out,⁠[4] more to the European than to the African system. It is distinctly European in aspect, in its variety of hills and valleys and rivers; it is European in its fertility, in its olive-groves and vineyards, its waving fields of grain, its forests of oak and pine; and it is European in climate, in the temperateness of its heat, which is no greater than that of southern Italy, and in the comparative abundance of its rainfall. The mighty barrier of the Great Atlas cuts it off completely from the Sahara, on which it seems to turn its back, while it faces the Mediterranean and the company of northern nations to which it feels related. Only when you have crossed the Atlas, when the verdure-clothed mountains and pleasant valleys give way to naked plains of sand, the pine-forests to occasional palm-groves, the houses of brick and stone to mud hovels and goat’s-hair tents, the settled agricultural population to nomadic sheep and camel-raisers, the light skins of the Berbers to the black ones of the negroes and the brown ones of the Arabs, do you fully realize that you are in Africa. And when, conversely, you turn your back upon the desert and emerge from the narrow defile of El Kantara upon the Algerian table-lands, you have the feeling that you are back in Europe again.

On leaving Biskra we headed straight north across the desert for El Kantara, forty miles away. Here the lofty wall of the Aurés is riven by a deep and narrow gorge, just wide enough to let the road, the railway, and the little rushing river through. It is called by the Arabs Foum-es-Sahara, the Mouth of the Sahara; but to us, coming up from the south, it was the gateway to the Tell. At the southern entrance to the gorge is the little oasis of El Kantara, which derives its name from a Roman bridge, much restored by the third Napoleon, for this was the site of Calcius Herculis, a fortress-town on Rome’s African frontier. Nestling amid the palm-groves of the oasis, or perched on the crags which mark the entrance to the pass, are three small villages, the Red, the Black, and the White, so named by the imaginative Arabs from the color of the bricks with which they are built, or, to be more exact, from the respective shades which they assume at sunrise and sunset.

When Nature planned the Foum-es-Sahara she was in a dramatic mood; a more fitting, a more impressive, or a more romantic gateway to the desert could scarcely be imagined. The gorge itself is so narrow that there is barely room for the road and the railway above and for the river beneath. Its perpendicular walls of red and yellow rock have been carved by wind-blown sand into the most curious and fantastic shapes—spires, pinnacles, gargoyles, flying-buttresses—one great monolith which rises abruptly from the flank of the Aurés bearing a striking resemblance to a medieval castle, with towers, battlements, and keep. But the most impressive view of the Foum-es-Sahara is to be had at nightfall, when that face of the Aurés which rises precipitously from the desert is transformed by the westering sun into a rampart of ruddy coral in the center of which yawns a mysterious purple aperture—the mouth of the pass itself. A caravan entering it seems to be swallowed up by the earth.

We lunched at Batna, a thoroughly Europeanized little town of low buildings and wide streets, which holds little of either interest or amusement. Commanding the pass at El Kantara, through which from time immemorial the desert tribes have invaded the settled regions of the Tell, it is a place of great strategic importance and has a large garrison, housed in casernes which are the most conspicuous buildings in the town. Batna is of interest to the tourist only because it is there that he turns sharply to the eastward on the ancient military road which leads to Lambessa, Timgad, Tebessa, and the other garrison towns which marked the line of Rome’s southern frontier.

Set on the slopes of the Aurés, three thousand feet above the sea, Timgad may be reached by motor-car from Batna, some thirty miles away, within the hour, the road passing within sight of the ruins of Lambessa. In Roman times Lambessa was an important military outpost, the headquarters of the Third Augustan Legion; but, with the exception of the Prætorium, a massive foursquare building which rises in lonely dignity from amid the crumbled masonry and toppled columns of what was once the Forum, its ruins are scarcely worth the prolonged attention of any one who is not an archæologist, particularly as such picturesqueness as they possess is marred by the proximity of a huge military prison.

A few miles more, across a bleak and treeless plain waist-high in ripening grain, and Timgad comes in view. A whole hillside is thickly strewn with the white bones of the city, which was built in the reign of Trajan, during the first quarter of the second century by the soldiers of the Third Legion, then stationed at Tebessa. From the inscriptions found in the Forum, Colonia Marciana Trajana Thamugas, as it was called, appears to have been founded thirty-six years after Rome burned to the strains of Nero’s fiddle and to have been completed in seventeen years. With the lesson of the great fire fresh in their minds, and with a determination to avoid such disastrous conflagrations, its architects built with almost unnecessary solidity, and, as a further precaution, saw to it that all the more important buildings should have a clear space all around them. Never very large, the town was yet of great importance strategically, having been garrisoned by the Thirtieth Ulpian Legion, composed of veterans who had served in Trajan’s campaigns against the Parthians.

Though Timgad has frequently been compared to Pompeii, which had been destroyed two decades before the other was begun, the two had as little in common as Palm Beach and Omaha. One was a lath and plaster city of pleasure; the other was a substantially built frontier town devoted to military purposes and to trade. While, like all Romans, the sturdy colonists who formed the population of Thamugas demanded a certain measure of magnificence, they could not be expected to rival the rich and luxury-loving Pompeians. Consequently, the statues which have been unearthed are not of the highest order, and the little museum contains few of the exquisite bronzes, pieces of jewelry, and frescos such as have been found in the ruins on the slopes of Vesuvius, but the excavators have laid bare some of the finest mosaics in existence, many of them in a perfect state of preservation.

For the first two hundred years or so of its existence Thamugas appears to have enjoyed a peaceful and highly prosperous existence, being one of the chief strongholds of Christianity in North Africa, but this happy state of affairs was rudely interrupted in the fourth century by the Donatists, fanatical schismatics who by their persecutions of the orthodox precipitated a religious struggle which wrecked Rome’s African empire. Occupied in the following century by the Vandals, its importance rapidly declined, and when, in 535, the Byzantine general, Solomon, drew rein before its gates, he found it in ruins, the Berbers from the neighboring mountains having destroyed it in order that it might not be used as a base of military operations against them. Though rebuilt and repopulated, it did not much longer endure, passing from history in the seventh century, when, during the great Arab invasion, it was stormed, sacked, and burned. For twelve hundred years it lay neglected and almost forgotten, but in 1880 its systematic exploration and excavation was undertaken by the Service des Monuments Historiques of the Algerian government, though even to-day, after nearly fifty years of laborious effort, nearly two thirds of the city remain unearthed.

The attraction of Timgad lies less in its turbulent history, however, than in the beauty of its ruins, considerable portions of which, thanks to the French excavators, now lie open like a book, from which even the casual visitor may obtain a graphic idea of what life was like in a frontier town of Roman Africa. Like all Roman camps, Thamugas was divided into four parts by two main streets—the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus—which intersected at right angles, their pavements still showing the ruts of chariot wheels. At the junction of these thoroughfares was situated what would to-day be termed a municipal center, consisting of the Forum, the Theater, and other public buildings, which, judging from their remains, must have formed a group at once beautiful and imposing.

The Forum, a spacious and stately building with the same dimensions as those of the Pantheon at Rome, was originally surrounded by a double row of marble columns, forty-five feet in height, some of which are still standing. Here was the principal rendezvous of the people of Thamugas, for the Forum was a place for the transaction of mercantile, political, and judicial business as well as a public promenade; a combination, as it were, of a stock-exchange, a city hall, a law-court, a convention building, and a public plaza. On one side the merchants and bankers discussed commerce and finance; on the other the judges dispensed justice; at the far end was a rostrum from which officials, politicians, and others who possessed “the gift of gab” read official communications, delivered funeral elegies, or thundered political orations.

That even the Africa of those far-off days had its Andrew Carnegies is shown by an inscription which was found in fragments during the excavation of a building, the nature of which was uncertain, not far from the Forum. When the fragments had been pieced together the inscription read: “Out of the funds bequeathed by Marcus Julius Flavus Rogatianus, of senatorial memory, by his will to the colony of Thamugas his mother city, the erection of a library has been completed at a cost of four hundred thousand sesterces, under the direction of the city authorities.” It has been estimated by some one of a mathematical turn of mind that the shelves of the library which this Roman philanthropist gave to his home town contained upward of twenty-three thousand volumes—not books in our sense of the word, of course, but papyrus rolls inclosed in metal cylinders, which looked not unlike the music-rolls for a player-piano.

Thamugas had all the usual features of a Roman city and some which other Roman cities had not. They must have been a scrupulously clean people, the Thamugundi, for the remains of thirteen great public bath-houses have already been uncovered, together with the complicated underground arrangements for distributing heat to the various rooms, while even the dwellings of persons of comparatively modest means were provided with bathing facilities of astonishing luxury and completeness. The auditorium of the Theater held nearly four thousand persons, which suggests that Thamugas must have been a good “show town,” for the only playhouse in America with such a seating capacity is the New York Hippodrome. And it is an interesting commentary on modern progress that this frontier town of nineteen hundred years ago was far better provided with sanitary arrangements than are most of the cities of present-day Italy; in fact, the “comfort-stations” behind the Forum might serve as models for municipal planning commissions.

Beyond the Forum, astride the Decumanus Maximus, is the splendid Arch of Trajan, the outstanding feature of the whole city and the finest structure of its kind in Africa. In a state of almost perfect preservation, it rears itself in solitary grandeur above the stones of the ruined city. The arch is of pure white sandstone, its three openings flanked by fluted columns of colored marble. Set on a little eminence, as is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it can be seen from every quarter of the city—a thing of surpassing majesty and beauty against that hot blue sky.

But the thing that appealed to me most in Timgad was an inscription cut deep into a stone set between two columns of the Forum:

The dour-minded have seized upon this pleasing little inscription to point a moral, to illustrate the laxity, the unworthy ideals which prevailed among the Romans during the empire’s decadence and decline. But to me it bespeaks a joyousness, a candid love of harmless pleasures which in this strenuous age, when mere wealth is the chief goal, is most refreshing.

To most visitors, I suppose, Timgad is merely a picturesque and interesting ruin, but to my way of thinking it appeals less to the eye than to the imagination. It is a token of the dim and distant past. It brings to us across a chasm of close on two thousand years a message from a civilization not materially different from our own. It serves to remind us that the power and wealth and progress of which we are so prone to boast were to be found here on the edge of the desert when white man’s America was yet unborn; that the mighty nation which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific had a parallel in another nation which stretched from the Sahara to Scotland. Yet Thamugas, be it remembered, was never a Roman city of the first rank. Its architectural splendors notwithstanding, it was but a border town. It stood on the very frontier of an empire whose greatness is vividly illustrated by the fact that Septimius Severus, during whose reign Thamugas attained its greatest prosperity, was born in Africa and died at York.

Every traveler in India seeks so to time his visit to Agra that he may view the Taj Mahal by moonlight. The same should be done in the case of Timgad, and the visitor who does so will be richly repaid for his trouble—provided, of course, he has any imagination in his soul. Nor will he suffer any discomfort by doing so, for hard by the entrance to the ruins is a modest but well-kept hotel where he can obtain a clean and comfortable bed; or, if he prefers, he can dine there leisurely, spend the evening amid the ruins, and then motor back to Batna, which is but an hour away.

By day Timgad is only an interesting skeleton, but its bones become reclothed with flesh under the magic of the moon. Along the Decumanus marble columns rise again in stately rows; the flagstones of the Cardo resound once more to the clatter of hoofs and the rumble of chariot-wheels; the Forum becomes peopled with the white-clad forms of merchants and orators and statesmen; fires glow on the altars of Jupiter Capitolinus; from atrium and loggia float the sound of music and women’s laughter; along the narrow byways flit barbarians from the outer desert in paint and feathers; through the central opening of the great arch, dimly outlined against the stars, tramps in measured cadence a column of ghostly soldiery in the bronze helmets and leathern jerkins of the Thirtieth Legion ... Thamugas lives once more!

There is nothing very remarkable about the first part of the journey from Batna to Constantine, though the white road which smoked with dust beneath the tires of our Cadillac was, I recalled, the same highway which, twenty centuries before, the Roman legions trod. About half-way to Constantine, however, near two salt lakes which were alive with flamingos and other wild fowl, the road passes within sight of a large and curious sepulchral monument called the Medrassen, which resembles the so-called Tomb of the Christian Woman at Kolea, near Algiers, though it is somewhat smaller and considerably older. The Medrassen, which is sixty feet high, consists of a truncated cone encircled by sixty Doric columns, the whole standing on a cylindrical base 196 feet in diameter. Though its age, origin, and purpose were long matters for dispute among archæologists, recent investigations have confirmed the theory that it was the burial-place of one of the Numidian kings, perhaps of Masinissa, in which case it must have been erected about a century and a half before the Crucifixion.

Of all the cities I have seen in my peregrinations up and down the globe, none can boast a setting so romantic, a situation so utterly amazing, as Constantine. Nature must have intended it for a fortress, else she would not have guarded it with walls a thousand feet in height nor have encircled it on three sides with a moat which takes the form of a stupendous chasm, leaving the fourth side connected with the surrounding country only by a narrow isthmus. Constantine’s extraordinary aspect is due to the erosion of the soft limestone rock on which it stands by the River Rummel, which, roaring down from the heights of the Aurés, sweeps around three sides of the city through a deep and narrow C-shaped gorge, the sheer walls of which are at one point only fifteen feet apart. The lofty plateau-peninsula thus created is about a thousand yards square and so crowded with houses that many of them overhang the brink of the giddy abyss, their hold on the rock being so precarious that it seems as though a heavy wind would blow them off. But the grandeur of the gorge and the immense height of its walls dwarf the works of man into insignificance; the effect produced by this amazing pedestal of rock holding aloft a city is so overwhelming in its majesty and impressiveness that one scarcely notices the houses clinging to its brow or the river tumbling at its feet.

The Rummel, sweeping down from the sunny country-side to the south, from the grain-fields and olive-groves, from the wooded hill-slopes and the snowy peaks beyond, plunges suddenly into the shadows of the huge vertical cliffs which gird the town to thunder beneath a series of enormous natural arches or to lose itself for a time in gloomy bat-infested caverns, only to emerge into the dazzling sunlight again hundreds of yards further on, finally flinging itself recklessly over a lofty precipice, amid a smother of spray and spume, into the lovely valley below, down which it meanders, subdued and placid now, on its long journey through the Djurjuras to the sea.

From the town it is difficult and dangerous to peer into the depths, for the overhanging cliffs are exceedingly slippery and treacherous, as more than one Arab has discovered at the cost of his life, though hasheesh addicts will frequently descend these same precipices at the imminent risk of breaking their necks in order to enjoy the forbidden drug without interference from the police. On the other side, however, the gorge is followed for its entire length of the Corniche Road, a superb example of highway engineering, here consisting of a narrow shelf blasted from the living rock, there supported above the giddy chasm on buttresses of masonry, in places built around the rocky shoulders of the gorge, in others tunneled through them.

Deep down in the gorge itself winds and climbs the chemin des touristes, a narrow foot-path consisting for the most part of an interminable series of steep stone staircases or creaking iron bridges bolted to the face of the rock. Countless giddy steps, slippery with moss and dampness, lead down, down, down to the dark waters of the Rummel, which race madly between the grim, forbidding walls or swirl in seething caldrons as though stirred by a titanic unseen spoon. Turning up-stream, the way leads beneath four natural arches, none of them less than 400 feet in height (the celebrated Natural Bridge in Virginia is only 215); through dim and awesome caverns, strongly reminiscent of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, where the water forms black pools on the rocky floor and great bats flap overhead; and so into the deepest part of the gorge, where the walls rise sheer for a thousand feet on either hand. From here the sky is but a narrow jagged strip of vivid blue, infinitely remote; the girders of the great iron bridge which the French have thrown across the chasm at a point called El Kantara seem no larger than gossamer strands; of the city itself no sign is to be seen. Continuing to work our way around the base of the tremendous rock on which the city perches, we emerge at length, after two hours of arduous walking and climbing, into a gradually expanding valley, its steep, stone-strewn slopes dotted with stunted palms, aloes, and crimson poppies, and bathed in blinding sunshine.

The history of Constantine is in large measure the history of all North Africa. Originally called Cirta (the Phenician word for city), it was in ancient times the capital of Numidia and the seat of the Massylian kings, who first fought for Rome against Carthage and later for themselves against Rome. It attained its greatest prosperity about two centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, when it was able to place in the field an army of thirty thousand men, though no traces are now left of the splendid palace of Syphax, or of the stately buildings erected by his successful rival, Masinissa—whose wife, Sophonisba, it will be remembered, committed suicide shortly after her marriage rather than fall into the hands of the Romans; by Masinissa’s son, Micipisa; and by his grandson, Jugurtha, who led the Numidians in a revolt against Rome, was defeated, was led in chains behind the chariot of his conqueror, Marius, and died in “the bath of ice” in the subterranean prison beneath the Capitol. Roman rule left a deeper impress on the ancient city; but, barring the remains of the old bridge, dating from the time of the Emperor Constantine, the five remaining arches of the aqueduct built during the reign of Justinian, and numerous fragments of sculptures and inscriptions, little is left of the flourishing colony, founded by Julius Cæsar, which the Romans called Cirta Sittianorum.

Ruined in the wars which during the fourth century rent the Roman Empire, Cirta was rebuilt by Constantine, who gave it his own name. The religious struggles between the orthodox Christians and the Donatist schismatics did no material harm to Constantine, though they tore Roman Africa to shreds. The city escaped capture by the Vandals, but upon the Mohammedan conquest it was looted of its ancient treasures by successive Arab dynasties, such monuments of antiquity as escaped destruction at their hands being finally swept away by “municipal improvements” under the French régime. Through the long centuries when Arab rule lay like a blight upon the land, the history of Constantine is enveloped in darkness, rent, however, by occasional lightning-flashes of siege, assault, capture, and recapture, for it is said to have been besieged eighty times. Yet, despite its reputation for turbulence, it retained sufficient prosperity to attract merchants from Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, who were always willing to take a chance where there was a prospect of gain.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain and Turkey, then at the height of their power, drove out the decaying Arab dynasties which had ruled in North Africa for five hundred years and divided between themselves the empire of the Mediterranean. The Spaniards occupied the African coast as far eastward as Oran, while Tunisia and virtually the whole of Algeria were seized by three enterprising Turkish sea-rovers, Arouj, Isaak, and Khizr (or Khair-ed-Din), better known as the Barbarossa brothers, the nickname being given to the family because of their red beards. Khair-ed-Din took Algiers and so firmly established himself in middle and eastern Barbary that he was made beylerbey of Africa by the Sultan Selim. Recognizing that he who would rule Algeria must hold the rock-girt Constantine, Khair-ed-Din captured it and lost it and captured it again. For upward of three hundred years the star-and-crescent standard of the Turks flaunted above the heights of Constantine, which became under their rule the seat of a bey, subordinate to the dey of Algiers. The job of ruling Constantine was not a healthy one, however, for during the first three decades of the nineteenth century twenty of its beys died with their slippers on, by the sword, poison, or the bowstring.

In 1826 the ruling bey, Hadji Ahmed, led a revolt against the dey of Algiers and proclaimed the independence of Constantine, but when the French invaded the country ten years later he made common cause with his former suzerain against the unbeliever. Upon the fall of Algiers Hadji Ahmed fled to Constantine, raised an army of Kabyles, and defied the French to dislodge him from his precipice-bordered stronghold. In 1836 Marshal Clausel advanced on the city with an army of eight thousand men. He attempted to storm it under cover of night by way of the old Roman bridge at El Kantara but was repulsed with great loss and fell back with his beaten army to Bône. But in the following year a stronger force under General Damrémont approached the town by the connecting western isthmus. To the French summons to surrender Hadji Ahmed sent the curt response, “He who would be master of Constantine must cut the throat of the last of its defenders.” During the course of the siege which followed, General Damrémont and his second in command General Perrégaux, were killed side by side while directing the operations from an exposed position, whereupon the command was assumed by Marshal Valée, who, in spite of enormous losses, carried the town by storm. In their efforts to evade capture, hundreds of Kabyles sought to lower themselves down the cliffs by ropes, but the ropes broke and the fugitives met their deaths on the rocks a thousand feet below. Hadji Ahmed evaded capture, however, and for eleven years defied the French from his stronghold in the Aurés Mountains, but he accepted the rule of France in 1848 and passed to the Moslem paradise two years later. With the unfurling of the tricolor on the heights of Constantine the turbulence and bloodshed which had marked the city’s history all down the ages came to an end. Numidians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, all tried to hold it and failed. But French for three quarters of a century it has been, and French it promises to remain.

Its towering heights crowded with palaces, temples, villas, and triumphal arches, dazzlingly white under the blazing African sun, Constantine must have presented a spectacle of surpassing beauty in Roman times. Yet astonishingly few mementos of its former grandeur remain; for, during the years immediately following the French occupation, the military authorities took no interest in preserving the monuments of the city’s colorful and hectic past, which were ruthlessly destroyed to make way for municipal buildings in the ornate style of the Second Empire, for huge and hideous barracks of red brick, for a whole system of streets and parks and plazas, and for the railway. The greatest vandalism was the destruction of the magnificent triumphal arch erected by one of the Roman emperors; but temples, colonnades, and baths were all swept away by the army engineers in their mania for “modern improvements.” Even the splendid bridge, built during the reign of Constantine, which stood intact until 1857, when two of its arches fell, instead of being restored was battered down by artillery and replaced with a hideous structure of iron. A curious commentary on our boasted modern civilization, is it not, that seventy-five years of peace have destroyed wantonly what was spared by two thousand years of warfare?

Of the public buildings, the most noteworthy is the palace built about 1830 by Ahmed Pasha, the last of the beys, which is one of the finest examples of modern Moorish architecture in existence. In its construction the Turks followed their customary method of tearing down other buildings in order to obtain fine old tiles and beautiful carvings, and by looting the Roman ruins which dot the country-side of their columns, capitals, and marbles. Its exterior, as in the case of so many Oriental buildings, is gloomy and forbidding, but within is a series of sun-drenched courtyards, flagged with marble, filled with orange and lemon trees, and surrounded by cloisters, their carven arches supported by fluted columns in porphyry of many colors, where the bey and his concubines were wont to pass the heat of the day. On the walls of the cloisters which border the central patio, is a series of naïve and crudely executed paintings of land battles and naval engagements, in which, of course, the Turks are depicted as uniformly victorious. They are said to be the work of an Italian shoemaker who, taken prisoner by the Barbary corsairs, painted them as the price of his freedom. Mellowed by time, the general effect of the pictures is not unpleasing, but it is to be hoped that upon his release the cobbler-artist stuck to shoemaking.

The gardens of the palace—which is now the residence of the French general who commands the garrison—more nearly approach those so glowingly described in Eastern poems than any others I have ever seen; for their lofty walls completely shut out the dust and turmoil of the city; the only sound is the gentle splash of water in the marble fountains; the sun, sifting through the foliage of the orange-trees, falls on the marble pavement in patterns of lace-like delicacy; and the air is fragrant with the scent of many flowers.

But when the shadows of night have settled down upon them I wonder if they are not haunted by the wraiths of the wretched Christian women who were torn from their homes and families by the corsairs and brought here to gratify the lust of the bey; if white figures do not flit distractedly through the cloisters or down the lanes of orange-trees; if from yonder latticed balcony do not come strains of ghostly music made by the flutes and fiddles of the poor blinded musicians whose eyes were torn out by order of the tyrant in order that they might not look upon the unveiled loveliness of the dancers for whom they played.

With what terrible memories are they filled, these enchanted gardens! They have looked on countless scenes of misery and horror, resounded to the shrieks of tortured men and outraged women, witnessed the dying struggles of captives who perished by poison, strangulation, or the knife. And all this, remember, was not in the dim and distant past but within memory of men who are still alive. Some of the tales of those days are incredible in their ferocious cruelty. Such is the story of the beautiful white concubine, who, having displeased her lord and master, was hurled by his orders over the cliffs of Sidi Rechad. Miraculously saved from death when her garments caught on a jutting rock, she was rescued with the utmost difficulty only to meet a still more hellish end at the hands of the bey’s torturers.

The remaining sights of Constantine which would appeal to the casual traveler are not numerous and can be visited quite easily in a single day. From the northwestern angle of the plateau rises the kasbah, or citadel, now used as barracks and military hospital; a massive structure dating from Roman times and preserving in its more modern portions numerous remains of other Roman edifices. The Great Mosque, or, as it is called by the natives, the Djamaa-el-Kebir, occupies the site of what was probably an ancient pantheon; like other Moslem places of worship in Algeria it is inaccessible to unbelievers. Hard by the palace, facing on a spacious square, stands the cathedral, formerly a mosque bearing the romantic name of Suk-er-Rezel, Market of the Gazelles, but now known as the Church of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. In the Mairie, a pretentious and highly ornate building decorated in beautiful native marbles and containing some interesting paintings of the military operations which ended in the capture of the city by the French, is a small and mediocre museum, its shelves and cases crowded with the usual collection of coins, vases, inscriptions, and fragments of sculpture. It is well worth visiting, however, for the sake of one real gem—a superbly executed statuette of a winged victory, twenty-three inches in height, which was discovered by excavators beneath the kasbah. Some hundreds of feet beneath the Hôtel de Paris, accessible by numerous flights of steep and slippery stone steps, is a very remarkable grotto, one of a series of caves and passageways which honeycomb the rock on which the city stands, and which, in the old days, were used by the inhabitants as storehouses and places of concealment.

The Arab town, or such part of it as has not been swept away by the march of progress, is tucked away behind a fringe of modern buildings, which is, perhaps, as well, for it reeks with noisome smells and possesses no architectural merits whatsoever. Its streets are steep and tortuous, the upper floors of the houses being built out on supports which look like inverted steps, thus bringing them so close together that their owners can almost shake hands from their second-story windows across the intervening thoroughfare. Here and there, set into the masonry, one recognizes a column, a capital, or a slab of marble looted from some Roman building, but, generally speaking, the quartier indigène is squalid and uninteresting.

The souks, though far smaller than those of Tunis and Algiers, are not materially different from the bazaars of other North African cities, the turbaned merchants sitting somnolently before little open-fronted booths whose interiors are stacked high with merchandise; while artisans, too poor to be lethargic, industriously ply their trades wherever they can find elbow-room and space for a work-bench. It is a busy place, is Constantine, the shopping center of the extensive province which bears its name, and widely known for the manufacture of the richly decorated saddlery affected by the Arab horsemen, for the embossing and engraving of copper and brass utensils, and for the weaving of the haiks and burnouses which form such important articles of native dress, and of other garments, called gandourahs, the best of which are made partly of wool and partly of silk.

The best way to obtain an idea of Constantine life is to take a seat before one of the numerous cafés which front upon the Place de la Brèche—so named from the breach that was here made in the walls by the French storming battalions in ’37—and over an apéritif watch the motley throng. Here East and West meet and mingle on equal terms, for the population of the city is about equally divided between natives and Europeans. French officers rub shoulders with Arab sheikhs; Greek and Maltese traders haggle with Berber farmers and Kabyle mountaineers; Catholic priests nod to Moslem mollahs and Jewish rabbis; fashionably clad women from the Paris boulevards glance askance at veiled women from the Turkish harems: white troopers of the chasseurs d’Afrique joke with tall black tirailleurs from the banks of the Niger.

The Jews of Constantine, who number several thousand, are the finest specimens of their race to be found in the entire East, showing a breeding and refinement rarely found among their coreligionists of the littoral. The Jewesses—many of whom, particularly the young girls, are strikingly handsome, with fine features and clear olive skins—retain their distinctive and highly picturesque costume, characterized by richly embroidered gowns of plush or velvet, gaily colored shawls, and, as might be expected, enormous quantities of heavy, ornate jewelry, which jingles at every movement of the wearer like the pole-chains of a four-in-hand. The older women wear a most curious and striking head-dress, consisting of a gilt-spangled veil surmounted by a high, pointed cone of velvet, in shape somewhat like a dunce’s cap, which, in the case of the rich, is held in place by massive golden chains. The girls and the younger married women, however, have modified this rather trying form of head-gear into a jaunty sort of bonnet, usually of pink, pale-blue, or emerald-green velvet, which they wear tilted rakishly above their raven locks in a fashion which is both coquettish and becoming.

One of the finest views of Constantine is to be had from the terrace of the Hôtel Transatlantique, a new and charmingly designed hostelry standing amid lawns and rose-gardens on a plateau to the northeast of the city, from which it is separated by the gorge of the Rummel. To sit at déjeuner in a perfectly appointed dining-room, surrounded by all the comforts and luxuries of the Ritz, looking out across the tremendous abyss to the white city perched upon its mighty rock, is to enjoy an experience which even the most blasé traveler does not soon forget. There are other hotels, it is true, whose windows command views of entrancing beauty—Bertolini’s in Naples, or the Villa Serbelloni above Bellagio, come to mind—but whereas from them one is gazing upon scenery only, he who peers across the gorge at Constantine is viewing history—he is looking across the yawning gulf of Time.

A two hours’ run by motor to the north of Constantine, along the route nationale, which leads to the coast and Philippeville, brings us to one of the wonders of North Africa, the hot springs of Hammam Meskoutine. They rise amid clouds of smoke and steam from a rocky plateau set in a region of soft outlines, a land of wooded hills and leafy glens and lush green pastures, suggestive of ancient Greece in its peaceful loveliness and sylvan charm. The water, which has a temperature of more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, comes bubbling up through the gray crust to fall into numerous natural basins, in which it deposits thick layers of carbonate of lime, so that they look like enormous wash-bowls of creamy white porcelain. These pools the Arabs of the neighborhood use as open-air kitchens, boiling their eggs in them and cooking their vegetables; while strangers come from afar to drink and bathe in the healing waters, whose medicinal properties have been celebrated since Roman times.

The numerous rivulets which drain the pools meander across the plateau to unite in a stream of considerable volume which plunges over a series of rocky terraces of many colors—ocher yellow, orange, russet, red, pink, and green—into the sylvan valley two hundred feet below. The water, as it falls, leaves on the terraces a thick coating of lime, very much as in winter the cliffs at Niagara are coated with ice, the effect thus produced being that of a petrified cascade of cream. The sediment thrown up by the innumerable geysers at the foot of the cascade has in the course of centuries risen and hardened into a great number of gigantic, fantastically shaped limestone cones, or stalagmites, some of them nearly forty feet in height, which rise like gray ghosts from the plain. Some of the cones are quite bare, but on others sufficient earth has accumulated to provide a root-hold for a great variety of shrubs, grasses, and ferns. One group, distinguished by the size and the peculiar shape of its stalagmites, holds such terrors for the superstitious Arabs that they refuse to approach it after nightfall, holding that its waters are accursed—whence the name Hamman Meskoutine, Accursed Baths.

Back of the superstitions which cling to Hammam Meskoutine is a curious legend. There once lived on this spot, so the natives tell you, a young Arab sheikh named Ali, who was so jealous of his beautiful sister, Ourida, that, rather than see her in the arms of another, he determined to wed her himself. The elders of the tribe, scandalized by the contemplated incest, made violent protest, whereupon Ali had them beheaded before his tent. The wedding day arrived, guests came from afar to attend the nuptials, the festivities were about to begin, when suddenly the judgment of an outraged Allah descended upon the guilty pair; fire burst from the earth, the streams became filled with boiling water, a great cloud of smoke and steam descended upon the scene, and, when it subsided, lo and behold, the whole wedding party had been turned into stone! Perhaps, with the skepticism of the West, you may be led to question the truth of the tale, whereupon the Arabs will point out to you the two great cones, which, they will assure you soberly, are All and Ourida petrified, while the smaller cones scattered over the plain are the heads of the decapitated elders. With the proof of the story there before your eyes, there is nothing more to be said.