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Title: In Barbary
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the Sahara
Author: E. Alexander Powell
Release date: August 10, 2025 [eBook #76665]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Century Co, 1926
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN BARBARY ***
IN BARBARY
_Books by_ E. ALEXANDER POWELL
_TRAVEL AND WORLD POLITICS_
IN BARBARY
_Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and the Sahara_
BEYOND THE UTMOST PURPLE RIM
_Abyssinia, Somaliland, and Madagascar_
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
_Tanganyika Territory and the Congo_
THE LAST FRONTIER
_Politics and Travel in Africa_
THE END OF THE TRAIL
_The Far West From Mexico To Alaska_
NEW FRONTIERS OF FREEDOM
_From the Alps To the Ægean_
WHERE THE STRANGE TRAILS GO DOWN
_Malaysia and Siam_
ASIA AT THE CROSSROADS
_Japan, China, and the Philippines_
BY CAMEL AND CAR TO THE PEACOCK THRONE
_Syria, Arabia, Iraq, and Persia_
THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN MOSLEM ASIA
_Politics in the near and Middle East_
_HISTORY_
GENTLEMEN ROVERS
_American History_
THE ROAD TO GLORY
_American History_
FORGOTTEN HEROES
_American History_
_THE GREAT WAR_
FIGHTING IN FLANDERS
_The Campaign in Belgium, 1914_
VIVE LA FRANCE!
_The Campaign in France, 1915_
ITALY AT WAR
_The Campaign in Italy, 1916_
BROTHERS IN ARMS
_America Enters the Great War_
THE ARMY BEHIND THE ARMY
_America at War, 1917-18_
[Illustration: A SOLDIER OF AFRICA
There is no finer light-horseman on earth than the spahi—a cow-puncher, a
Cossack, an Indian brave, and a Bedouin warrior combined]
IN BARBARY
TUNISIA, ALGERIA, MOROCCO
AND THE SAHARA
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL
WITH EIGHTY-SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND TWO MAPS
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO.
NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright, 1926, by
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
_To_
MY DAUGHTER
BETTIE
_In memory of the days
when we rode across
the desert_
FOREWORD
Unlike most of my preceding volumes, this book deals with countries which
are comparatively near to home. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco—which we know
collectively as Barbary—lie at the very door of Europe; their principal
ports are scarcely more than overnight from Naples, Barcelona, and
Marseilles; scores of tourist steamers drop anchor in their harbors every
winter, and they are visited by increasing numbers of Americans each
year. Yet it is a curious fact, and one difficult to explain, that the
popular misconceptions regarding these easily accessible lands are even
more glaring than those in respect to far remoter regions which the white
man penetrates at every risk.
The truth of the matter is that most Americans, and most Europeans too
for that matter, think of Barbary in terms of the corsairs, the Garden of
Allah, the dancing-girls of the Ouled-Naïl, the Foreign Legion, Raisuli
and Perdicaris, the squalor and confusion of Europeanized Tangier,
the Riff and Abd-el-Krim, the luxurious resort hotels of Algiers, the
Street of the Perfume-Sellers in Tunis, Moroccan leather-work, camels,
tiled gateways, the utterly impossible sheikhs described by Mrs. Hull
and interpreted by Hollywood, and the sand-dunes so frequently pictured
in the “National Geographic Magazine.” With our unfortunate propensity
for generalizing, we have assumed that these high spots were typical of
Barbary, thus forming a mental picture which is as fantastic as it is
inaccurate.
For example, we speak of the inhabitants of North Africa as Arabs, who in
reality are only a minority, the bulk of the population being composed of
Berbers, the earliest known possessors of the soil, who still hold the
highlands which stretch from the borders of Egypt to the shores of the
Atlantic, from the sands of the Mediterranean to those of the Sahara,
that vast extent of territory to which we have given their name, Barbary.
We think of the Berbers as crude and uncultured, as barbaric,
bloodthirsty, and backward as were the American Indians. Yet before
America was so much as heard of, they, not the Arabs or the Saracens, had
raised at Granada and Seville those glorious buildings which are among
the architectural triumphs of the world.
Because of their sun-tanned skins, and recalling, perhaps, the old
term “blackamoor,” we assume that the Berbers are a colored race and
are astounded when we are told that they are of pure Caucasian stock,
racially as white as ourselves.
Because it is in Africa we take it for granted that Barbary swelters in a
torrid climate, whereas it is a cold country with a hot sun. In Algeria
the week after Easter I have seen snow several inches deep, and the
mountains to the south of Marrákesh are topped with snow nearly the whole
year round.
Most of us think of Morocco as a treeless, semi-arid, almost level land,
yet it has vast forests of oak and pine, several rivers comparable with
the Thames or the Hudson, and in the spring its prairies and hill-slopes
are carpeted with countless varieties of wild flowers. Far from being
level, it is a highly mountainous country; the Moroccan Atlas has a
greater average height than the Alps, and at least one of its peaks is
higher than any mountain in the United States outside of Alaska.
We ourselves went to war in ’98 to end the intolerable rule of Spain in
the Western Hemisphere, yet the propaganda skilfully disseminated from
Madrid and Paris has blinded us to the fact that Abd-el-Krim and his
mountaineers of the Riff were fighting for precisely the same reason for
which the Cubans fought—to throw off the yoke of Spanish tyranny and
cruelty.
Because in the geographies of our school-days large portions of North
Africa were painted a speckled yellow, and because of the pictures of
sand-dunes reproduced in certain magazines, we habitually picture the
Sahara as a trackless waste of orange sand, on which grows no living
thing, little realizing that it is broken by mile-high mountain ranges
and dotted with oases, some of them as large as a New England State,
which support thousands of inhabitants and millions of date-palms.
Basing our idea on motion-pictures made in Hollywood, and on novels of
the desert school of fiction, we imagine sheikhs—and for heaven’s sake
pronounce it _shakes_ instead of _sheeks_!—as romantic, picturesque,
debonair gentlemen with chivalrous instincts and charming manners,
whereas candor compels me to assert that most of them are blackguardly
ruffians, lustful, cruel, vindictive, ignorant, debased, as filthy of
mind as of body.
We have long accepted as gospel the assertion that the British are the
only really successful colonizers in the world; the French colonial we
have pictured as a miserable being who spends his days in a hammock,
sipping absinthe, reading “La Vie Parisienne,” and counting the hours
until he can return to _la belle France_. Yet, in the space of a single
generation, these miserable and inefficient beings have in Africa alone
conquered and consolidated and civilized a colonial empire greater in
area than the United States and all of its possessions put together.
And, finally, we cling to the delusion that Barbary, though doubtless
colorful and picturesque, is deficient in monuments of historical or
architectural interest, and that the facilities provided for the comfort
of the traveler are limited and somewhat crude. Let me remark, by way of
answering this objection, that Tunisia is as thickly strewn with Roman
ruins as Italy itself; that the scenery of the Grand Kabylia and the
High Atlas is as impressive as any in Switzerland; that the mosques and
towers and palaces of Morocco were built by the same race which raised
the Alhambra and the Alcázar; that the network of motor-roads which cover
Barbary compare very favorably with the best highways we have in the
United States; and that the hotels which have sprung up all the way from
Tunis to Marrákesh are not far removed in luxury from the great tourist
hostelries of Florida and California.
Extremely misleading too have been the pictures of political conditions
in North Africa as drawn by certain members of self-styled “American
missions,” who have visited the country at the invitation of the
government, have been dazzled by fêtes and flatteries, and have swallowed
the propaganda assiduously fed them by their hosts. I yield to none in my
admiration for what France has achieved in North Africa, but to assert,
as have certain American visitors, that the natives are contented with
French rule and would give their life’s blood to defend it is to take
wholly unjustifiable liberties with the truth.
It is to correct the current misapprehensions in regard to Barbary, some
of which are alluded to above, that I have written this book.
I am perfectly aware that the countries to which the following pages
are devoted have been treated of many times, and that my pages contain
nothing that is startling, little that is really new. But I can at
least make this claim for my book, that it is the only one, so far as I
am aware, which brings the whole of French North Africa, its history,
peoples, customs, places of interest, resources, and politics, between
two covers. During my last two or three visits to Barbary I have been
struck by the lack of such a book, and I have designed this one to fill a
needed want.
Though I have used my last African journey, which occupied the winter,
spring, and early summer of 1925, as a thread on which to string the
incidents and impressions recorded in the ensuing chapters, it should be
explained that much of my information was gathered during earlier visits,
dating back to the early years of the present century. Hence I am in a
position to make comparisons. For it has been my great good fortune to
have seen the preliminary sketches as well as the completed picture. I
was in the Sahara when it was still “the Last Frontier”; I knew Morocco
as it was a decade before the white helmets came.
While having no desire to trespass on the field of Messrs. Baedeker,
Murray, and Cook, I have nevertheless attempted to produce a volume which
will be of real service to the casual traveler by incorporating definite
information as to routes, hotels, and general travel conditions and by
calling to his attention places which, though not always mentioned in
the guide-books, are well worth seeing. I have also sketched the natural
resources of the various regions and have endeavored to acquaint my
readers with the highly involved political situations which exist in
all of them. It may be said, by way of criticism, that my pages are
overburdened with historical matter, but without the background of the
Punic settlements, the Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, and Arab invasions, and
the activities of the corsairs, it is impossible to understand Barbary as
it is under the French.
It may also be assumed by some that, as I was afforded numerous
facilities by the French authorities, this book is a reflection of the
French view. I would remind such critics that the remoter districts of
North Africa are still in military occupation, forbidden to the casual
traveler, and that they may be visited with the permission of the French
military authorities or not at all. Though such permission was promptly
granted whenever I requested it, and though French officials of all
grades went out of their way to show me courtesies and extend assistance,
my judgment has not been affected by the consideration I received, nor
my views biased, as the following pages will testify. To much that the
French have accomplished in North Africa I raise my hat in respect and
admiration; of other phases of their policy I do not approve. In both
cases I have spoken my mind freely. My opinions may not be worth much,
but at least they are my own.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
SUGAR HILL, NEW HAMPSHIRE, AUGUST, 1926.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The journey described in the following pages was first suggested to me by
a dear and deeply lamented friend, the late Hugues Le Roux, senator of
France and a noted African explorer, who had taken an active and highly
helpful interest in my preceding expeditions into the Dark Continent.
Through the kindness of Senator Le Roux and of his charming American wife
I met at their dinner-table many persons, some of them high in the French
political world, who were of immense assistance to me.
M. Albert Sarraut, then minister of the colonies, and General Nollet,
at the time minister of war, placed at my disposal all the facilities
of their departments of the government. M. Jean Jules Jusserand, former
French ambassador to the United States; his successor at the Washington
embassy, M. Berenger; the Hon. Myron T. Herrick, American ambassador
to France; Christian Gross, Esq., secretary of the American embassy in
Paris; M. Marcel Knecht, the famous editor and publicist; M. Joseph
Perret, director of the French Government Tourist Information Office in
New York; and my old friend, James Hazen Hyde, Esq., all aided me with
valuable advice and letters of introduction.
In Tunisia my path was made pleasant by the French resident-general, M.
Lucien Saint; in Algeria by the governor-general, M. Théodore Steeg; and
in Morocco by the resident-general, Marshal Lyautey. General Vicomte de
Chambrun, commanding the French troops in Fez, from whom I have always
received the warmest of welcomes upon my visits to that city; General
Daugan, commanding the forces in Southern Morocco; Colonel Paul Azan,
commanding at Tlemcen, in Algeria; and Vicomte Louis de Trémaudan, of
the civil administration at Marrákesh, were all largely responsible for
the pleasure and interest of my journey by making it possible for me to
visit districts not as a rule open to Europeans. It was my great good
fortune to have as my guide to the ruins of Carthage the Rev. Father
Delattre of the Order of the White Fathers, who is one of the foremost
archæologists in the world; while Miss Sophie Denison, who has been a
medical missionary in Morocco for a third of a century, was of great
assistance to me in Fez. Two voyages on the S.S. _La France_ were made
delightful by the thoughtfulness of her commander, Captain Blancart, and
the second captain, M. Vogel. In fact, throughout a journey of nearly
fifteen thousand miles we were shown unfailing hospitality and kindness
by every official with whom we came in contact, from his Imperial Majesty
the sultan of Morocco, who received me in audience in his palace at
Marrákesh, to subalterns in command of lonely desert outposts.
That the long journey, much of it in desert regions, was so replete with
material comforts, was due to the great kindness of M. Jean dal Piaz,
president of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, and to his able
assistants, M. Maurice Tillier, director-general of the company in Paris;
M. Robert Hallot, Chef du Services des Auto-Circuits Nord-Africains, and
M. Georges Paignon, manager of the North African Tours Department in New
York, who generously placed at my disposal all the facilities of their
vast organization. It will be noted that in the following pages I have
repeatedly called attention to the services provided for the traveler in
North Africa by the “Transat.” Not to mention the part played by this
company in the opening up of Barbary would be equivalent to ignoring the
work of Fred Harvey and the Santa Fé in the development of the American
West.
I also welcome this opportunity of acknowledging my indebtedness to C.
F. and L. S. Grant, authors of “African Shores of the Mediterranean”; to
L. March Phillips, Esq., author of “In the Desert”; to Norman Douglas,
Esq., author of “Fountains in the Sand”; to Frances E. Nesbitt, author of
“Algeria and Tunisia”; to Charles Thomas-Stanford, Esq., author of “About
Algeria”; to the late Budgett Meakin, Esq., author of “Life in Morocco”;
and to Sir Harry H. Johnston, Frank E. Cana, Esq., and Edward Heawood,
Esq., authors of monographs in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” on Tunisia,
Algeria, and the Sahara respectively. From all of the above works I have
obtained historic and economic data and many valuable suggestions.
E. A. P.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. I NEVER SEE A MAP BUT I’M AWAY 3
II. THE GATE TO BARBARY 14
III. THE FACTORY OF STRANGE ODORS 26
IV. MID PLEASURES AND PALACES 42
V. CARTHAGO DELETA EST 56
VI. ASHES OF EMPIRE 82
VII. TO KAIROUAN THE HOLY 100
VIII. TROGLODYTES AND LOTUS-EATERS 119
IX. ACROSS THE SHATS TO THE SANDY SEA 144
X. THE CONQUEST OF THE SAHARA 158
XI. THE LAST HOME OF MYSTERY 179
XII. DOWN TO THE LAND OF THE MOZABITES 203
XIII. BISKRA, DEMI-MONDAINE OF THE DESERT 220
XIV. FRONTIERS OF ROME 238
XV. THE GRAND KABYLIA 263
XVI. THE CAPITAL OF THE CORSAIRS 278
XVII. FOLLOWING THE PIRATE COAST 304
XVIII. THE FOREIGN LEGION 323
XIX. THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN “THE FARTHEST WEST” 339
XX. FROM A FASI HOUSETOP 374
XXI. IN THE SHADOW OF THE SHEREEFIAN UMBRELLA 400
XXII. SOUTH TO THE FORBIDDEN SUS 424
A SHORT GLOSSARY OF ARABIC WORDS AND PHRASES
COMMONLY USED IN BARBARY 459
INDEX 469
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
A soldier of Africa _Frontispiece_
Lo, all the pomp of yesterday 17
Here Scheherazade might have told her tales 32
Church and state in Tunisia 37
Thirteen centuries look down upon you 44
A gate to Barbary 49
They spend their holidays among the dead 64
The city of the mole-men 85
Homes of the Troglodytes 92
The voice from the minaret 97
The marabout in the desert 112
In the land of polygamy and passion 117
One of the most amazing ruins in the world 121
Medenine, the strangest city in the world 124
The Sun-God paints his picture in the West 129
Like feathered bonnets on the heads of a savage army 144
The fantastic dwellings of Mechounech 149
The forgotten of God 156
The sandy sea 161
Basking in the blinding sunlight of the Tunisian Sahara 176
The road to Timbuktu 181
Crossing the sand-dunes of the Grand Erg by motor 185
To prove that we were really there 188
A landmark for those who navigate the sea of sand 193
The shrine in the sands 196
The sand-storm 205
The sport of kings 208
The city of the Mozabites 213
Far hence, in some lone desert town 217
The start from Touggourt 220
The strange capital of a strange people 225
Desert damsels, old and young 229
What the pious Moslem expects to find in paradise 236
A Saharan market-place 240
The glory that was Rome 245
The city of the precipices 252
“Ul-l-l-l-l All-ah!” 273
Algiers, the capital of the Corsairs 280
Veiled women slip like sheeted ghosts 288
The resting-place of Cleopatra’s daughter 304
No, it is not always hot in Africa 321
The Moroccan is not afraid of mephitic maladies 328
The Riff 357
The price of empire 364
From out of the unknown 369
Strange folk from the far places 372
The panorama of the East 381
Forbidden to all save the faithful 384
In the city which gave the fez its name 389
Moroccan vaudeville 392
The Great Prayer outside of Fez 396
The harkas come down from the hills 401
A place of walled delight 408
The peace of Allah 416
The shadow of God on earth 421
A refuge of the rovers 424
The red city 428
The minarets of Marrákesh 433
The Aguenaou Gate of Marrákesh 437
The puppet and the man who pulled the strings 440
The empire-builder 440
Overlords of the southland 444
Most people think of Morocco as a semi-arid country 448
The stronghold of the Caïd Goundafi, overlord of the Forbidden Sus 452
A seat of feudal power 456
MAPS
Outline map showing the French possessions in Africa 8
Map showing the countries of Barbary 24
IN BARBARY
CHAPTER I
I NEVER SEE A MAP BUT I’M AWAY
Beyond the East, the sunrise.
Beyond the West, the sea.
And East and West, the wander-thirst that will not let me be.
The wander-thirst is like the drug-habit. Once you acquire it you are
done for. It will never let you rest. There is no mistaking its symptoms:
a hatred of the prosaic, the routine, and the humdrum; an aversion to
staying long in one place; an insatiable craving to move on, move on—to
see what lies beyond yonder range of hills, around that next bend in the
road.
It is as persistent as it is insidious. There comes the stage when you
think that you are cured of it. You delude yourself into believing that
you have had enough of discomforts and privations and that it is high
time you settled down and had a home. You weigh the respective merits, as
a place of residence, of Long Island and Southern California; you even
consult an architect and subscribe to “House and Garden” and “Country
Life.”
But one day you casually pick up a list of steamer sailings, or stumble
on your battered luggage plastered over with foreign labels, or whiff
some exotic smell which brings back memories of the hot lands (there is
no sense which stimulates the memory like that of smell), or see a vessel
outward bound, or idly open a map, whereupon the old craving suddenly
grips you like an African fever, and, almost before you realize it, you
are on the out-trail once again.
The symptoms usually recur with the approach of winter, when the northern
days grow short and gloomy, when the shop-windows are filled with fur
coats and mufflers and galoshes, when the wind howls mournfully beneath
the eaves o’ nights. But the attacks which are hardest to resist come in
the early spring, when the snow has disappeared, and the smell of fresh
earth is in the air, and the country-side is already green in spots. That
is the time when it is most difficult to control one’s restless feet.
For a quarter of a century the urge of spring had perennially sent me
packing to the Far Places. But when I came up from Equatoria, after a
year spent beneath the shadow of the Line, I said to myself that I was
through with wandering as a vocation—that I was going back to my own
country and my own people and on an elm-shaded street in some tranquil
community buy me a long, low, rambling house—a white house with broad,
hospitable porches and green blinds. I had carefully planned it all
out on the long African marches or during sleepless nights beneath the
Southern Cross. I would join the local golf-club, and amuse myself with
my horses and my dogs and my books, and keep my house filled with friends
over the week-ends, and even go into politics in a mild way, perhaps. In
fact, I proposed to do all the sensible, prosaic things for which I had
never had the time before.
But, before sailing for America to put these laudable resolutions into
effect, I met at a Paris dinner-table the gentleman who was at that time
charged with the conduct of France’s colonial affairs. We had much in
common, it developed, for he too had been on those distant seaboards of
the world where the Gallic empire-builders are creating a new and greater
France. Lingering over the coffee and cigars we talked shop—the future
of Indo-China, Madagascar’s need of harbors, Miquelon and its fisheries,
the Syrian mandate, the control of sleeping-sickness in the Congo,
cotton-growing in the country round Lake Tchad.
“Why don’t you round out your survey of our possessions,” the minister
suggested, “by taking a look at what we’ve accomplished in North Africa?”
“The North African tour?” I asked, laughing. “Algiers, Constantine, and
Tunis, with a side-trip to the Garden of Allah? Thank you, no. After
what I’ve seen I’m afraid that I’d find that sort of thing pretty tame.
Besides, I’ve already been to North Africa any number of times. I once
spent a winter in Tunisia, and Algeria and I was in Morocco back in the
bad old days when unsuccessful pretenders to the Shereefian throne were
carried about the country in iron cages lashed to the backs of camels.”
“I’ll wager that I can name some places in North Africa that you haven’t
seen,” the tempter said persuasively. “How about a visit to Djerba—the
island of the lotus-eaters, you know—and the desert sky-scrapers of
Medenine and the troglodyte dwellings of the Matmata Plateau? Then you
could push down into the Sahara, cross the sand-dunes of the Grand Erg by
twelve-wheeler to Ouargla and Ghardaia, keep on to the Figuig Oasis, and
so over the Atlas into Morocco.”
“Yes,” I remarked speculatively, “if I were going to do it at all I
should certainly include Morocco. There are some parts of it which I have
never seen, and it has rather worried me. I’ve always had a hankering to
have a look at some of those _kasbahs_ in the High Atlas, where the grand
caïds live like the marauding barons of the Middle Ages, I am told. And,
while I was about it, I should like to get into the forbidden Sus, and
even to see a bit of Mauretania and the masked Touareg, perhaps.”
“That can all be arranged quite easily,” the minister assured me. “If you
decide to go, I’ll write to Marshal Lyautey, who runs the show for us in
Morocco, and instruct the officers commanding in the Saharan military
provinces to give you every assistance.”
“Suppose we have a look at the map,” I suggested, half capitulating. (I
could feel the old familiar symptoms coming on; already my feet were
growing restless.)
We appealed to our host, who led us into his library and on the table
spread a large-scale map labeled “Afrique du Nord Française.” There
they lay before me, tempting as jewels, those glowing lands of sun and
sand, of Arab, Berber, and Moor, of mosque and minaret. Set in the
Mediterranean shore-line like great fragments of colored mosaic were the
Barbary States—Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. Below them, sweeping southward
to the Great Bend of the Niger and the swamps around Lake Tchad, was the
yellow expanse of the Sahara, crisscrossed with the thin black lines
which I knew for caravan-routes and sprinkled with the patches of green
which stand for palm-shaded oases. And far to the westward, where Africa
almost rubs shoulders with South America, lay Mauretania, land of the
Blue-Veiled Silent Ones, The Forgotten of God.
Now I maintain that it is as unfair to unroll a map before a man who is
striving to overcome the wander-thirst as it is to offer cocaine to a
reformed drug-addict. For how, I ask you, could one be expected to resist
the lure of those magic names—Kairouan, Gafsa, Touggourt, Ghardaia,
Laghouat, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Oujda, Fez, Mequinez, Mazagan, Mogador, Agadir?
At sight of them my resolutions crumbled like Mexican adobe. Almost
before I realized it my carefully made plans had been tossed into the
discard, and instead of poring over plans and specifications with an
architect I was overhauling my travel-gear and ordering riding-breeches
from my tailor and making inquiries about the sailing-dates from
Marseilles.
Yes, it was the map that was my undoing, for
I never see a map but I’m away
On all the errands that I long to do,
Up all the rivers that are painted blue,
And all the ranges that are painted gray,
And into those pale spaces where they say,
“Unknown”....
There are three routes from France to French North Africa, and they are
all served by the steamers of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, or,
as it is better known to Americans, the French Line. The first is from
Bordeaux to Casablanca, the chief seaport of Morocco; a four-day voyage,
this, half of it in the Bay of Biscay. Speaking for myself, I have never
found that ill-reputed body of water anything save smooth, but doubtless
that has been my good fortune. The second route is from Marseilles to
Algiers by the Mediterranean greyhounds, swift, luxurious vessels which
make the crossing in something under four-and-twenty hours, so that you
have scarcely said good-by to Europe before you are being greeted by
Africa. The third route, and the one which we took, is from Marseilles
to Tunis—a two days’ voyage if the steamer is not detained at Bizerta.
Of course there are other roads to Africa; roads which are more
picturesque and interesting, perhaps, provided that speed and comfort
are not essential. Thus one may travel by the Sud Express from Paris
to Algeciras, a charming little Spanish coast-town across the bay from
Gibraltar, whence small and rather dirty vessels cross the straits thrice
weekly to Tangier in Morocco. The chief objection to this way is that,
in order to reach French Morocco and the main lines of travel, it is
necessary to traverse the Spanish zone by motor-car, a somewhat arduous
trip and one which has heretofore been subject to interruption because of
the troubles in the Riff.
There is an even more out-of-the-ordinary route to Barbary, but it is
uncertain and in parts exceedingly uncomfortable, so, unless the traveler
is prepared to put up with delays and discomforts, I cannot recommend
it. This is by the fortnightly Italian boat from Syracuse, in Sicily, to
Tripoli and thence by narrow-gage railway along the coast of Tripolitania
to the present end-of-steel at Zuara. Here, by making arrangements
well in advance, it is usually possible to obtain a motor-car for the
two-hundred-mile journey across the desert to the French rail-head at
Gabés, in southern Tunisia.
In deciding to enter Barbary through the Tunisian gateway we were
influenced by reasons historical, climatical, and sentimental. To the
historically minded traveler the east-to-west journey is more satisfying
than the reverse route because, going westward, he follows the march of
history, the hoof-prints of the Islamic invaders who, sweeping out of
Asia behind their horsetail standards, carried fire and sword and the
green banner of the Prophet along the northern shores of Africa until,
halted by the Atlantic, they swung northward into Spain. To travel in the
opposite direction would be equivalent to reading history backward.
[Illustration: OUTLINE MAP SHOWING THE FRENCH POSSESSIONS IN AFRICA]
Again, should you go to Barbary, as we did, in the late winter, the
weather is more likely to be favorable in Tunisia than in Morocco, where
cold, rain, and mud usually prevail until well into the spring. If,
moreover, you purpose striking southward from Tunis into the desert, it
is well to get that portion of the journey over with before spring is
too far advanced, as after mid-April the heat becomes intolerable in the
Sahara and the sirocco season begins.
From the dramatic point of view, as well, it is infinitely preferable
to follow the journeying sun, for, whereas Tunisia is as civilized and
well-behaved as Egypt, Morocco, save in spots, remains not far removed
from barbarism, so that the peoples, customs, and scenes, instead
of decreasing in novelty and interest as you press westward, become
increasingly romantic and strange.
In making preparations for a journey in Barbary one should never lose
sight of the fact that North Africa is a cold country with a hot
sun. Most people, I find, labor under the delusion that Africa is
synonymous with heat. This is due, I imagine, to our careless habit
of generalization, of taking things for granted. Just as Canada was
given a wholly undeserved reputation for frigidity by Kipling’s “Our
Lady of the Snows,” so the pictures of sun-scorched deserts made so
familiar by steamship-lines and tourist-companies have led to the
assumption that every African country has, perforce, a torrid climate.
Such misconceptions would be less general if people were more prone to
consult the family atlas. There they would see that Tunis is on the
same parallel as the city of Washington and that Algeria and Tunisia
correspond in latitude to Virginia and North Carolina. The truth of
the matter is that in the countries lying along Africa’s Mediterranean
seaboard there are few evenings between November and May when a warm
overcoat will be found uncomfortable, and even far south in the desert in
the late spring I have shivered beneath three heavy blankets.
Yet an astonishingly large proportion of American visitors to North
Africa appear to be wholly ignorant of the climatic conditions which
prevail in that region. Staying in Biskra while we were there was a
motion-picture company from California. While “on location” the actors
wore pith helmets and white drill riding-breeches and shirts open at
the neck and the other garments associated in the popular mind with
life in the tropics, but, once the day’s filming was over, they wrapped
themselves in sweaters, overcoats, and mufflers and huddled, shivering,
about the open fire in their hotel. Those who saw that picture on the
screen—it was called “Burning Sands” if I remember rightly—little dreamed
that the actors who made it spoke their lines through chattering teeth
and gesticulated with hands blue from cold.
There is one other popular misconception about North Africa which
might as well be corrected now as later on. Save in the extreme south,
Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are not flat, desert-like countries, as is
frequently assumed. On the contrary, they are distinctly rugged and in
parts extremely mountainous. Perhaps it will astonish some of my readers
to be told that the High Atlas has a greater average height than the Alps
and that at least one of the Moroccan peaks is higher than any mountain
in the United States outside of Alaska. Though the Algerian ranges of
the Atlas are not so lofty as those further to the westward, I have seen
several inches of snow on the passes of the Grande Kabylie a few days
before Easter.
* * * * *
I always like sailing from Marseilles. Perhaps it is because I have set
out from there on so many long and fascinating journeys, but to me it has
always been, along with Constantinople and Port Said and Singapore and
Panama, a gateway to adventure.
On those sparkling blue-and-gold mornings for which the Côte d’Azur is
famous I like to sit over my coffee beneath the striped awning of one
of the restaurants along the Cannebière and watch the human panorama
unroll itself before my eyes. Here one sees picturesque types from
the Near, the Middle, and the Farther East; representatives of all of
France’s far-flung colonial possessions. The gaunt, stooped man with the
yellowed skin and tired eyes, in his buttonhole the red rosette of the
Legion d’Honneur, is a colonial administrator, home on a much-needed
and all too brief leave of absence from some God-forsaken outpost of
empire in Syria, Somaliland, Madagascar, Indo-China. Here is a group of
zouaves, boisterous, sun-bronzed fellows in tasseled fezzes and baggy
scarlet trousers, fresh from service with the Army of Africa, who ogle
every pretty girl they pass and pause for a round of drinks at every
café. Tunisian _marchands des tapis_, gaudily colored rugs draped over
their shoulders, shuffle along in heelless yellow slippers, urging their
wares upon the patrons of the sidewalk restaurants until the exasperated
waiters harshly order them away. A trio of bearded, grave-faced men, very
dignified and aloof in their white hoods and flowing white burnouses,
pace by unhurriedly, concealing their wonder at the unaccustomed scenes
behind masks of Oriental imperturbability; they are powerful caïds from
one of the Saharan provinces, visiting France for the first time as
guests of the Republic. Down the center of the street, under the watchful
eye of a grizzled sergeant, briskly marches a platoon of down-at-heel,
out-at-elbow nondescripts—recruits for the Foreign Legion, with five
years of iron discipline and heartbreaking desert service before them.
Sauntering along beside a pretty woman is an officer of chasseurs
d’Afrique, a light-opera figure in his flaring scarlet breeches,
wasp-waisted sky-blue jacket, and képi piped with gold and silver braid.
Staring with childlike curiosity at the displays in the shop-windows
are yellow men from Annam, brown men from Tripolitania and the Red Sea
countries, black men from the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Hulking negro
stevedores rub shoulders with greasy, furtive-eyed seamen from Levantine
coasters and Lascar stewards from the P. & O. boats in the harbor.
Zigzagging along the pavement, arm in arm, comes a row of rollicking
sailors from the fleet, scarlet pompoms on their rakishly tilted caps and
the roll of the sea in their gait. And everywhere, seated at the café
tables, mingling with the moving throng, are the _filles de joie_, the
ladies of easy virtue, bold-eyed and carmine-cheeked, who find in the
streets of the great seaport a happy hunting-ground.
When in Marseilles I like to make a little pilgrimage by funicular to
Notre Dame de la Garde, the church of those who go down to the sea in
ships, and, strolling through its dim, hushed transepts, to read the
inscriptions, some naïve, some pathetic, on the hundreds of votive
tablets placed there in gratitude and thanksgiving by those who have
been saved from storm and shipwreck. I like to dine in the quaint little
restaurants which fringe the waterfront on the delicacies for which
Marseilles is famous—_langouste_, _homard_, crab, scallops, oysters,
fish, and, of course, _bouillebaisse_. But particularly I like to stroll
along the edge of the harbor, with its forest of masts and funnels, and
watch the ships, flying the flags of many nations, coming from or setting
forth for strange, far-off, outlandish ports on all the Seven Seas.
* * * * *
The short winter’s day was drawing to a close when the _Duc d’Aumale_
nosed her way cautiously between the arms of the Marseilles breakwater
and lifted to a choppy sea. From her lofty pinnacle above the city Our
Lady on Guard seemed to bid us a benign farewell. Atop the cliffs off
our port bow the Corniche Road twisted and wound and doubled upon itself
like an uncoiled lariat tossed carelessly upon the ground. Further to
the north, the peaks of the Maritime Alps reared themselves majestically
skyward, purple-cloaked and ermine-caped. To starboard rose the rocky
islet, crowned by the grim Château d’If, where Monte Cristo sought to
ease his solitude by proclaiming, “The world is mine!” And before us, its
foam-flecked surface turned to a field of dancing gold by the westering
sun, stretched the Mediterranean—the road to Africa.
Ah, “outward bound!” The words beget
A dream of mosque and minaret
And golden dalliance
In orange gardens redolent
Of nights of stars and wonderment.
“Down Channel!”—down the foam-besprent
Blue highway to Romance.
CHAPTER II
THE GATE TO BARBARY
Bizerta, the great naval base and fortress on the northern coast of
Tunisia, is a French pistol aimed straight at the head of Italy—or
perhaps it would be a closer simile to say the toe. It commands the
narrowest part of the Mediterranean, where the Middle Sea contracts to a
width of less than four score miles. In fact, were the French to mount on
Cape Bon a gun having the range of the one with which, in the spring of
1917, the Germans shelled Paris, they could drop their projectiles on the
shores of Sicily.
It will be remembered that when, in 1881, the bey of Tunis was forced
to acquiesce in a French protectorate, the most violent resentment was
aroused in Italy, which had long regarded Tunisia, with its large Italian
population, as within her own sphere of influence and was only awaiting a
propitious moment and a plausible pretext to bring that country under the
rule of Rome. Even to-day, indeed, after more than a third of a century
of French occupation, Mussolini and his fellow-imperialists regard
Tunisia as a sort of African _terra irredenta_, which, when a favorable
opportunity offers, they purpose to “redeem.” So, when the French began
the construction of an impregnable stronghold at Bizerta in 1890, they
made no secret of the fact that it was intended as a warning to Italy
that the tricolor which had been raised over Tunisia nine years before
would not be hauled down, and as a reminder to Britain that, Gibraltar,
Malta, and the Canal notwithstanding, the Mediterranean was not a British
lake.
During recent years the French government has poured out money like
water in the development of Bizerta until to-day it is one of the
strongest fortresses in the world. The Lake of Bizerta, which forms the
inner harbor, accessible through the outer harbor and a canal, is nine
miles from the sea and contains fifty square miles of anchorage for the
largest vessels. A great arsenal has been created at Sidi Abdallah, at
the southeastern extremity of the lake, with dry-docks for repairing
the largest battle-ships, wharves, workshops, and warehouses, while at
Ferryville, a few years ago a sandy waste, a modern town with well-built
dwellings for the thousands of laborers employed in the dockyard has
sprung up as though at the wave of a magician’s wand. Barracks have been
built for the housing of the garrison, and the muzzles of long-range guns
peer menacingly from the elaborate chain of fortifications which encircle
the approaches to the harbor and the town. If, as has been hinted,
Mussolini occasionally turns an acquisitive eye toward Tunisia, he should
not overlook Bizerta. It would be a hard nut to crack.
* * * * *
My daughter, Bettie, had never been to Africa before, and so, when the
steamer docked at Bizerta, she was naturally eager to go ashore and see
the sights despite my warning that it was a colorless, uninteresting
town, and that, as her first glimpse of Africa, it would be a
disappointment. Now it is a curious fact that new-comers to a country
frequently have more thrilling experiences in the first few hours of
their visit than befall old-timers in a lifetime. For example, Sir
Theodore Cook, editor of the “Field,” once told me that during his first
day in New York, while drinking a glass of beer in a saloon in Park Row,
the glass was shattered in his hand by a gangster’s bullet intended for
the bartender.
It was a Sunday morning when we went ashore at Bizerta, and the town was
as peaceful as a rural community in France. But as we were strolling
through the tortuous byways of the picturesque Andalusian quarter—founded
by the Moors driven from Spain—a pistol barked in a doorway, and
the report was echoed by a woman’s scream. French gendarmes, native
_goumiers_, and military police came on the run, followed, it seemed, by
half the population of the town. In less time than it takes to tell about
it the narrow thoroughfare was packed from wall to wall with an excited
mob.
“What’s the trouble?” I inquired of a zouave who emerged from the press
about the doorway.
“_N’importe, m’sieur. N’importe_,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders.
“A rascally Senegalese has just murdered an Arab woman.”
“And you told me,” my daughter said reproachfully, “that I wouldn’t find
Bizerta interesting!”
* * * * *
The dense gray fog, which had hung like a pall over the wintry
Mediterranean since shortly after our departure from Marseilles, abruptly
lifted as we left Bizerta, and thence onward to La Goulette the Tunisian
coast unrolled its panorama bright and clear under the February sunshine.
As I leaned on the rail, my glasses trained upon the shore-line, which
slipped past as on a motion-picture screen, a White Father emerged from
the smoke-room and joined me.
[Illustration: LO, ALL THE POMP OF YESTERDAY....
“Delenda est Carthago!” cried Marcus Cato, and so efficiently was
his command carried out that two small lagoons—the one at the left
corresponding to the ancient military harbour, the other to the
commercial port—are almost all that remain of the great city founded by
Dido]
Shortly he tapped me upon the shoulder.
“Look, my son! Look! Over there....”
With my glasses I followed the direction of his outstretched finger. But
all that I could discern was a range of distant violet mountains and in
the middle foreground, rising somewhat abruptly from the plain which
sloped down to meet the shingled strand, a low, isolated hill. Its lower
slopes were clothed with vegetation—fields of barley, vineyards, patches
of cactus—broken here and there by what appeared to be huge rubbish-heaps
and excavation mounds. Higher up, amid dark clumps of cypress-trees,
I could make out some scattered, white-walled buildings, one of them,
judging from the gilded cross which surmounted it, a church. At the foot
of the hill, near the margin of the sea, the sun was reflected dazzlingly
from the surface of two small, curiously shaped ponds.
“_Delenda est Carthago_,” quoted the priest.
“There is all that remains,” he continued, “of what was once the most
famous and powerful city in the world. The horseshoe-shaped lagoon with
the island in its center is a vestige of Hamilcar’s military harbor,
where the war-galleys were moored. On the summit of yonder hill Dido’s
palace is believed to have stood. On that narrow neck of land to the
eastward the army of Regulus was annihilated by the Carthaginians under
Xanthippus, and there, a century later, the victorious forces of Scipio
Africanus pitched their camp. The white chapel atop the plateau marks the
spot where St. Louis died while leading the Last Crusade.”
It was as though he had uttered an incantation. At his words the scene
seemed to change before my eyes as one stereopticon picture dissolves
into another. The fog-banks which had lifted were the mists of
centuries. Now I was looking down the vista of the ages. In my mind’s eye
a mighty, glittering metropolis crowned that green and russet hill. A hot
African sun beat down upon its massive ramparts, upon the gilded roofs of
its towers and temples, upon its marble palaces and porphyry colonnades.
Brazen chariots tore through its narrow, teeming streets; squadrons
of horsemen maneuvered on the plain; elephants with jeweled trappings
rocked and rolled along. The smoke of sacrificial fires rose from the
altar before the great temple, where stood the statue of the horned
god Baal. Relieving the masses of masonry here and there were patches
of verdure, the sacred groves dedicated to the worship of the goddess
Tanith. A vessel with billowing sails of Tyrian purple slipped along the
shore. Out from the harbor-mouth shot a file of lean, long triremes,
ostrich-feathers of foam curling from their bows as they leaped forward
at the urge of the triple banks of oars. I was looking on the city which
had been mistress of the Mediterranean for upward of half a thousand
years; whose argosies had explored the unknown coasts of Africa and Gaul
and Spain, venturing even beyond the Pillars of Hercules in their quest
of the Hesperides; the city whose name is still synonymous with pomp and
pride and power—Carthage, which had disputed the Empire of the World with
Rome!
But the vision faded as abruptly as it had appeared when a French
destroyer, inky clouds belching from her slanting funnels, fled across
our bows. A sea-plane, bands of the tricolor painted on its under wings,
went booming overhead. Fishing-craft with ruddy lateen sails appeared,
swarthy, red-fezzed fishermen hauling at the nets. A puffing tugboat
bustled officiously alongside, and the pilot nimbly climbed the swaying
ladder. Bells jangled in the engine-room. And the _Duc d’Aumale_, slowed
to half-speed, swept past the thickets of bristling masts which fringe
the wharves of La Goulette and entered the throat of the buoyed channel
which leads through the shallow lake of El Bahira to Tunis.
Though a seaport, Tunis, it should be understood, is not on the sea
itself but some seven miles inland. The Tunisian capital occupies a most
peculiar site, being built upon the narrow isthmus which separates the
stagnant waters of El Bahira, “the little sea,” from the salt lagoon of
Sebkhet es Sedjoumi. Notwithstanding the fact that, next to Algiers,
Tunis is the largest and most important city in French Africa, it is only
within recent years that it has been directly accessible to ocean-going
vessels.
The project of creating a port at the very doors of Tunis was first
entertained by the late bey, who in 1880 granted a concession for the
purpose, but with the reorganization of the country after the French
occupation the contract was canceled. Some years later, however, the
enterprise was revived, the task of constructing the harbor, and of
connecting it with the sea by dredging a canal, seven miles in length,
through El Bahira, being undertaken by a French company.
With the completion of the port and the canal, La Goulette—or Goletta,
as the English call it—lost its former importance, declining from a
busy harbor, its roadsteads crowded with the ships of many nations, to
a sleepy fishing-village. During the summer months, however, it regains
a certain measure of its old-time activity, its population being almost
doubled by the Tunisians who, unable to get away to Europe, go there for
the sea-bathing and the breezes. Though La Goulette is of yesterday,
its Venetian charm happily remains undimmed. Its houses, built with the
stones of ancient Carthage, have been mellowed by time and the sun to
ivory and terra-cotta; a reminder of its tumultuous past is provided by
the fortress of Barbarossa, from which thousands of Christians taken
captive by the red-bearded corsair were released when Charles V carried
it by storm in 1535; the encircling waters of the Mediterranean and El
Bahira are of a glorious blue, flotillas of fishing-barks with painted
sails dot its placid surface and flocks of pink flamingos stalk sedately
along its shores.
Darkness was close at hand when we steamed past La Goulette, and the
purple African night had descended upon the land when we entered
the harbor of Tunis. Dimly the old, old city loomed before us, its
proportions clearly defined by twinkling street-lamps which grew fainter
as they climbed the hill surmounted by the _kasbah_ and the palace of the
bey; while in the foreground danced the reflection of the riding-lights
of the vessels in the harbor. I have always maintained that there are
certain cities at which, in order to obtain the full flavor of their
mystery and charm, one should arrive after nightfall, and Tunis is one of
them.
While the steamer was being warped with aggravating deliberation into her
berth, I looked down from the rail upon the picturesque scene and gave a
sigh of contentment. It was good to sniff again the smell of Africa, to
be back in the Orient once more. I breathed deep of the soft night air,
laden with the fragrance of orange-blossoms, jasmine, and bougainvillea.
After the glare of the sea, my eyes were rested by the dim outlines of
the buildings, garish enough by day but of ivory and amber loveliness
when bathed in the light of the moon. I reveled in the color and
picturesqueness of the throng waiting on the wharf below.
Ranged along the edge of the quay, very gorgeous and self-important in
their gold-laced jackets and voluminous trousers, were the dragomans and
runners from the various hotels and tourist-agencies; alert, energetic
fellows, speaking a smattering of many tongues, who spend their lives on
steamship-wharves and railway-station platforms, welcoming the arriving
and speeding the parting guest. Beyond them was a little group of wealthy
young Tunisians, in immaculately ironed tarbooshes and spotless burnouses
of the most delicate colors, one of them with a crimson blossom worn
behind his ear, come to welcome some friend returning from Paris or Monte
Carlo. A pair of bearded, hawk-nosed spahis paced slowly up and down,
their enormous white turbans bound with ropes of camel’s-hair, long
scarlet cloaks hanging to their booted and spurred heels. And well at
the back, kept in their place by the whip of a native _goumier_, was a
vociferous throng of Arab and negro porters, shouting and gesticulating
for the first chance to make a franc by carrying ashore our luggage, and
waiting, like sprinters on the mark, for the lowering of the gang-plank
to storm the ship as their ancestors, the Barbary pirates, did of old.
Drawn up beside the customs shed was a powerful car of American make with
a uniformed kavass from the residency and an alert-faced chauffeur in
trim gray whipcord standing beside it.
“For Colonel Powell?” I asked the chauffeur in French as we set foot
ashore.
“Yes, sir,” was the reply, in the unmistakable nasal twang of New
England. “But you needn’t speak to me in French unless you want to. My
name is Harvey Wilson and I’m from Providence, Rhode Island.”
Wilson, it developed, was a former member of the A. E. F. Instead of
returning to America with his regiment after the Armistice, he had
married a French girl and settled in Algiers as a motor mechanic and
chauffeur. He drove us for upward of six thousand kilometers over
desert roads, mountain roads, and across regions where there were no
roads worthy of the name whatsoever. He had a profound knowledge of the
idiosyncrasies of a motor; under the most trying conditions he never lost
his patience or his temper; and his unfailing good humor won him the
friendship of Europeans, Arabs, Berbers, and Moors alike. When we parted,
months later, on the frontier of Morocco, I told him that it would give
me genuine pleasure to recommend him to any one who contemplated motoring
in North Africa, and I am now keeping that promise.
Mrs. Powell and I had been in Africa so many times that for us the drive
through the brilliantly lighted streets to the hotel held little novelty.
Our chief concern was whether we should find awaiting us a room with
bath, for the hotels of Tunis are limited in number—the good hotels,
I mean—and during the tourist season they are always overcrowded, so
that it is the part of prudence to reserve one’s accommodations well in
advance.
But my daughter Bettie was fascinated by the unfamiliar street scenes:
the ceaseless stream of men wearing every form of head-covering—hats,
helmets, hoods, tarbooshes, turbans; the stately Arabs, the elders
looking for all the world like Old-Testament patriarchs; the bare-legged
Berber porters in ragged garments of coarse brown camel’s-hair, sacks
drawn over their heads to be used as sun-shades or overcoats according
to the weather; the gaudily uniformed soldiers of the Beylical Guard,
who might have stepped straight from a comic-opera chorus; the veiled
women slipping silently along like sheeted ghosts; the groups of natives
squatted about their cooking-pots, from which strange smells assailed
the nostrils; the files of swaying, supercilious camels laden with the
products of the South; the droves of patient little asses trotting
demurely along beneath enormous burdens; the high whitewashed walls of
the houses, broken by mysterious latticed windows, from which the eyes of
unseen, jealously guarded women were peering down, no doubt; the fleeting
glimpses caught through doors ajar of Oriental courtyards filled with
color—to her this was one of the Thousand and One Nights. Ah, me ... what
wouldn’t I give to again be seeing Africa for the first time through the
eyes of youth!
Notwithstanding the French occupation, Tunis remains distinctly Oriental.
The town is like a veiled woman of the harem wearing a pair of European
shoes, incongruous and clumsy. And it is the shoes which the visitor
arriving by sea sees first. For the district bordering on the harbor is
Italian—an unlovely, odoriferous neighborhood of mean streets lined with
squalid hovels where dwell some fifty thousand Sicilians and Maltese,
who outnumber the French by more than two to one—while the quarter
bisected by the Avenue Jules Ferry is characteristically French, with
spacious, tree-planted boulevards, enticing shops, banks, theaters,
cinemas, and electric tram-cars. This really imposing thoroughfare,
with its fine stores and crowded open-air cafés, might be, indeed, a
sort of continuation of the Cannebière in Marseilles interrupted by
the Mediterranean. Its principal mercantile establishment, the Petit
Louvre, is a creditable imitation of the mammoth Magazins du Louvre in
Paris, with which, incidentally, most American women appear to be better
acquainted than they are with the palace of the same name on the other
side of the Rue de Rivoli. But all this, I repeat, is only that portion
of Tunis revealed below the hem of her enveloping Eastern garments.
The old Tunis, with its mosques and palaces, its labyrinth of bazaars
rising gradually to the _kasbah_, is as Oriental as the Baghdad of
Harun-al-Rashid.
Most Europeans seem to be under the impression that Tunis is a modern
city—modern, at least, in comparison with Carthage. As a matter of fact,
however, Tunis (or Thines, as it was originally known) had probably been
in existence for some three or four hundred years when the fugitive Dido
landed on the shores of the Gulf of Tunis and on the little hill of Byrsa
founded Carthage. This view is accepted by no less an authority than the
historian Freeman. But for centuries Tunis was overshadowed and eclipsed
by the magnificence of her younger sister, sinking to the position of
a poor relation, a country cousin, a mere dependency. Yet she had her
revenge. Not only has she outlived her haughty neighbor, but she has
incorporated her very bones, for there is hardly a column or capital in
Tunis which is not of Carthaginian origin. Here, indeed, we see a ghost
of Carthage, for the native city must very closely resemble what the
commercial quarter of Carthage was five-and-twenty centuries ago.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE COUNTRIES OF BARBARY
MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA]
The car came gently to a halt before the Hotel Majestic, a spacious
hostelry whose architect had sought, without conspicuous success, to
graft the Moorish style on the European. An Arab chasseur in red and gold
flung open the door. A swarm of servants in green baize aprons hurled
themselves upon our luggage. We were greeted by the director, a suave
Frenchman, who might have been an undertaker, judging from his somber
garments and excessive dignity. Rooms had been reserved for us by the
residency, he said. I remarked that I hoped that we were to have a bath.
_Mais certainement, un grand bain—un bain de luxe._ Would we ascend and
view it? We crowded, the four of us, into an _ascenseur_ which could not
possibly have been intended to carry more than two, and the Arab lift-boy
squeezed himself in after us. It creaked, groaned, hesitated, almost
stopped, but finally drew level with the floor which was its destination.
I gave a sigh of relief, as I always do upon completing an ascent in a
French elevator. We were ushered down an echoing, marble-paved corridor,
chilly as a tomb, to our rooms. Mrs. Powell tried the hot-water faucet
and inquired about the voltage for her electric curling-iron. I sent the
maid scurrying for extra blankets and softer pillows, and ordered a drink
of Scotch. But my daughter Bettie stood on the balcony in the moonlight,
looking out upon the white city and inhaling the subtle fragrance of the
orange-blossoms. You see, she had never been in Africa before.
CHAPTER III
THE FACTORY OF STRANGE ODORS
The extraordinary success which has marked the rule of the French
in North Africa is in large measure attributable to their policy of
scrupulously refraining from encroachment on native life. Instead of
being ruthlessly mutilated to make way for boulevards and plazas, as
Baghdad and Delhi have been by the British, the old cities have been left
intact; and the French quarters, with their public buildings, theaters,
shops, and restaurants, have grown up outside the walls; so that the
Europeans and the natives really dwell apart, which is best for them both.
The happy results of this policy are particularly noticeable in Tunis,
where the French have made no attempt to modernize the ancient city, the
Medina, access to which is gained from the European quarter through the
old water-gate, Bab-el-Bahar, now known as the Porte de France. Though
electric tramways encircle the city and run far into the suburbs—the
service between Tunis and Carthage, I might remark in passing, is
surpassed only by that between Yokohama and Tokio—all proposals to
disfigure the picturesque native quarter have met with a stern refusal
from the authorities. Street-names, lighting, and sanitation have been
introduced, however, and the old town itself is incredibly clean for
an Eastern city; cleaner by far than many cities in Italy and Spain.
In fact, Tunis merits the title of “The White,” which it has so long
enjoyed, almost as much by virtue of its astonishing cleanliness as
because of its snowy buildings, which mount, tier above tier, to the
citadel, like “a burnous with the Kasbah for a hood.”
In these Moslem lands, where religious fanaticism goes hand in hand with
suspicion of the foreigner, the French have had to exercise the utmost
tact in effecting even the most urgent sanitary reforms. M. Jusserand,
for years French ambassador to the United States, once told me that, when
he was chief of the Tunisian Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the city of Tunis was threatened by an epidemic because the bodies in
the local cemeteries were too near the surface. Instead of arbitrarily
ordering the graves to be deepened, an action which inevitably would have
aroused native resentment and perhaps have precipitated serious troubles,
the French resident-general sent a politely worded message to the chief
cadi, the head of the Moslem religious community, inquiring whether
the depth of graves was specified in the Koran. He was informed that,
according to Koranic law, graves must be deep enough to cover a standing
man to his shoulders. Thus scripturally fortified, the resident-general
called the attention of the chief cadi to the failure of the Tunisians to
abide by the tenets of their own religion, whereupon the natives lost no
time in deepening the graves themselves.
The principal approach to the old city is through the Avenue Jules Ferry,
a wide and handsome boulevard lined on either side with shops, banks,
cafés, and theaters and having a sort of park running down the center.
With its broad pavements, its fine trees, its beds of brilliant flowers,
and its throngs of promenaders, it is strongly reminiscent of the Rambla
in Barcelona. It terminates in the Place de la Résidence, a spacious
plaza flanked on one side by the cathedral, a conspicuous building of
dubious architectural merit which is the seat of the primate of all
Africa, and on the other by the palace of the French resident-general,
so that the representatives of church and state directly face each
other. The residency is a low, unpretentious building with fine gardens,
before whose gilded gates pace sentries in the brilliant uniform of
the Garde Beylicale. Forming a continuation of the Avenue Jules Ferry
is the shorter and narrower Avenue de France, which terminates at the
Bab-el-Bahar, the entrance to the Medina, or old town. Though the Medina
was formerly encircled by walls, these have in large part disappeared,
leaving the gates of the city isolated, like those of Paris.
To pass through the Bab-el-Bahar is to enter another world, to go back
into history for a thousand years, to step from the Europe of to-day
straight into the Orient of the Middle Ages. I can recall few, if any,
places where so abrupt a change takes place within a few paces, where the
contrast is so startling. The gate, in itself quite unimposing, opens
upon a kaleidoscope of color, a chaos of confusion, a pandemonium of
noise. Here wheeled traffic virtually ceases, not because it is forbidden
but because it is impracticable by reason of the extremely narrow and
densely crowded streets. Here the raucous honk of motor-cars is replaced
by the imperative “_Barek balek!_” (take care!) of Arab muleteers. Here,
instead of carts and camions, the draft work is performed by files of
mangy, moth-eaten camels, as far removed from the graceful _méhari_
of the desert folk as a work-horse is from a thoroughbred; by droves
of diminutive donkeys, blue beads festooned around their necks for
superstitious reasons, their ears and tails alone visible beneath their
enormous burdens; and by brawny porters, twin brothers to the _hamals_
of Turkish cities, who stagger along beneath bales and boxes which would
cause an American express-man to go on strike were he asked to handle
them, but which they seem to carry with comparatively little effort by
means of a rope passed round the forehead, like the tump-line of an
Indian guide. I saw one of these fellows, a bare-armed, bare-legged
Hercules, walk off quite matter-of-factly with a grand piano on his back.
Guides, touts, and Jewish shopkeepers do their utmost to ruin the
visitor’s enjoyment by their incessant importunities and whines. “Good
morning, meester.... Good morning, madame.... How are you?... Look
here.... I show you sometheeng ... sometheeng ver’ fine ... ver’ cheap
... no charge ... you come in quite free ... you not buy anything unless
you wish.... No, sare, I not damn nuisance.... I ver’ honest fellow....”
Cringing, impudent, and furtive-eyed, they are as pertinacious as flies
and as irritating as fleas, the only wonder being that they are not
occasionally murdered by Europeans who have been exasperated beyond
endurance. On one occasion I saw a Frenchman kick one of these parasites
the entire length of a _souk_, and I felt like shaking hands with him as
a public benefactor.
Now and then a gorgeously appareled _caïd_, a figure out of the Arabian
Nights, clatters through the narrow streets astride a snorting Arab,
negro slaves trotting at his stirrups. Snake-charmers, fire-eaters,
story-tellers, do their hackneyed stuff in the open spaces before the
city gates, surrounded by spectators packed four-deep who applaud the
performances with the naïveté of children. The faithful squat beside the
fountains of the mosques, bathing their hands and feet and rinsing their
mouths in running water, as the Koran prescribes, before entering the
sanctuaries to prostrate themselves in prayer with their faces toward the
Holy Places. Occasionally one sees a wild-looking scarecrow of a figure,
a holy man from the desert, caked with filth, his hair and beard matted,
his patchwork rags of many colors, beseeching the passers-by in a shrill
whine for alms in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful—and
cursing them with enviable fluency if his importunities go unheeded.
The most characteristic and interesting feature of Tunis is the _souks_,
or covered bazaars. Nowhere in the Nearer East are there any _souks_
which can equal them; for in Constantinople, by virtue of the Angora
government’s passion for westernizing everything Turkish, the men have
been compelled to discard their turbans and tarbooshes for hats and
caps and the women to doff their mystery-suggestive veils, more’s the
pity! The bazaars of Cairo are not only deficient in architectural merit
but, particularly during the tourist season, are not much better than
the Oriental section of an exposition. In Damascus the bazaar buildings
resembled railway-stations even before French shells laid in ruins the
Street Which Is Called Straight. Indeed, one would need to go as far
eastward as Tehran or Ispahan to find _souks_ which can compare with
those of Tunis in extent, beauty, color, and picturesqueness.
The bazaar quarter of Tunis is, as it were, a whole city under one roof—a
city teeming with Oriental life; carrying on its trade in the traditional
Eastern fashion; transacting its business without tables or chairs in
doorless, windowless stalls, raised three or four feet above the ground
and most of them only a few yards square, which their owners close
at night by means of stoutly built, gaily painted shutters. In these
recesses the merchants sit cross-legged, like so many Buddhas, with their
merchandise spread about them, dozing, smoking, sipping black coffee, and
gossiping with their neighbors.
The _souks_ of Tunis cover an enormous area. They consist of a labyrinth
of narrow, tortuous, wholly irregular streets, lanes, alleys, and
passages; some of them vaulted, lighted only by shafts of sunlight
falling through square apertures overhead; others roofed with sloping
planks, uneven and rotting with age but highly picturesque, their gaping
crevices permitting the street below to be flooded with sunshine or with
rain. But most fascinating of all, at least in clement weather, are those
bazaar lanes which are shielded from the elements only by vine-covered
trellises, like pergolas, the sunlight, sifted and softened by the
leaves, casting shadows of lace-like delicacy upon the worn, uneven
pavement.
Each of the trades has its own _souk_, and each _souk_ has its own
distinctive character. Thus one street is devoted to perfumes, another
to shoes, a third to jewelry, a fourth to saddlery, and so on; an
arrangement which tends to make shopping easy, as the visitor in quest
of a particular article is enabled to compare prices and quality and,
not infrequently, to play off one merchant against another. Some of the
_souks_ contain only goods for sale, but most of them are workshops as
well, the goods being made by native artisans on the premises. Here, if
you require an article of special design, the merchant does not tell you
that he will “order it from the factory,” but instead he cuts it, or
carves it, or paints it on the spot and under your supervision. They are
as enchanting as they are bewildering, these Tunisian _souks_—a source
of unending novelty, a panorama of pure color, the dusky light which
prevails beneath the vaulted roofs serving to harmonize the tints, to
soften the harsher outlines, to fill the dark recesses with mystery.
And everywhere is the loot of Carthage. Those fluted marble columns, now
striped in green and scarlet, like sticks of peppermint candy, may once
have supported the roof of Dido’s palace. Those exquisitely sculptured
capitals, their delicate tracery all but concealed beneath repeated
coatings of whitewash, were in all likelihood executed by Phenician
workmen, dead these twenty centuries and more, for the temple of the
goddess Tanith. Yonder slab of polished stone, on which the shoemaker is
seated, quite possibly stood in ancient times before the statue of the
great god Baal, dripping with the blood of human sacrifices. Who knows?
On a first visit to the _souks_ it seems impossible to think of
finding one’s way unguided through this bewildering network of narrow,
winding thoroughfares, this human rabbit-warren. Here, as in the even
more extensive and confusing bazaars of Tehran, I felt like taking
a ball of string along and unwinding it behind me, like an explorer
of a subterranean cavern, so that I might find my way back to my
starting-point again. But after a time the general topography becomes
clear, and then it is easy to wander in and out at will, with the
assurance that confusion, or even a total loss of bearings, means nothing
worse than an extra turn or two and then the sight of some unmistakable
landmark, such as the green sarcophagus which all but blocks the narrow
way through the street of the leather-workers. It is the coffin of a
marabout—an itinerant holy man—set there to confer a special blessing
on the _souks_ by its presence. It is painted a vivid green, ornamented
with designs in red and yellow, and the garments of the endless stream
of humanity which pushes past it have put a high polish on its edges.
Personally, were I a merchant, I should not care to have a coffin resting
permanently at the front door of my business premises, but the Tunisians
seem to regard it very much as Grant’s Tomb is regarded by the dwellers
on Riverside Drive.
[Illustration: HERE SCHEHERAZADE MIGHT HAVE TOLD HER TALES
Seated cross-legged on the cushion-piled divan, with silken carpets at
her feet, soft music of flute and viol floating down from the balcony,
the air heavy with the fragrance of flowers and incense, black slaves to
wait upon her, and guardian eunuchs at the gate]
Sooner or later every visitor to Tunis finds his way, or is led by
his guide, to the Souk-el-Attarin, the street of the perfume-sellers.
Architecturally, this is one of the finest bazaars in the city and
probably one of the oldest. From its hole-in-the-wall shops drift the
scents of all the world—attar of roses and ambergris, musk and incense,
violet and orange-flower, jasmine and lily-of-the-valley. Before the
shops stand sacks stuffed with the dried leaves of aromatic plants from
which is made the incense used in the mosques and the henna with which
the native beauties redden their hair and their finger-tips and the soles
of their feet, for even the veiled women of the East are addicted to the
use of war-paint.
The scents are very powerful, and for toilet purposes must be largely
diluted with alcohol. Nor are they by any means inexpensive, even
according to American standards, a tiny vial of certain of the rarer
essences frequently costing several hundred francs. They are sold in
slender, fragile bottles, charmingly decorated with gold and color,
but, unfortunately, their glass stoppers rarely fit, and, as my wife
and daughter learned by costly experience, the scent will evaporate
unless the stopper is replaced with a cork. Here one’s nostrils are
assailed not only by the old familiar perfumes but by the strange scents
characteristic of the East—musk, amber, incense, attar of roses, and,
of course, the celebrated _parfum du bey_. The last-named is the royal
scent, a composite essence, the odor of which is alleged to change from
hour to hour and which is unobtainable, at least in theory, save by those
connected with the court or who are honored by the bey.
The perfume-sellers are the aristocrats of the _souks_, claiming to be
descended from the Moors who were expelled from Spain and to possess the
keys of the Andalusian castles owned by their ancestors. Be this as it
may, they are very haughty and condescending, deeming it vastly beneath
their dignity to haggle with their customers or to solicit the patronage
of the passers-by. In fact, these small, luxuriously furnished shops,
with their silken cushions, their seven-branched candlesticks, their
array of slim, glass-stoppered bottles inscribed in gilt with mysterious
Arab characters, and the hint of incense in the air, resemble shrines
of Venus rather than places of business, the sleek, urbane proprietors
exhibiting their wares with the reverence of officiating priests.
Here the purchase of scent is not a commercial transaction but a
ceremony. The customer is seated upon a divan, piled high with cushions,
and the turbaned merchant takes his place behind a table, on which
are laid out fantastically shaped vials and vessels, like a sorcerer
about to begin his mystic rites. The perfumes sold here, remember,
are not the ordinary scents of commerce with which we Westerns are
familiar, but concentrated quintessences, the merest drop of which
upon a handkerchief or glove or sleeve confers a fragrance which will
last for days. A silent-footed attendant serves tiny cups of coffee,
thick, sweet, and black as molasses, and scented cigarettes. A charcoal
brazier is smoldering in the corner, and from it rises a faint
suspicion of incense. Daintily opening with delicate, tapering fingers
the glass-stoppered bottles ranged before him, the perfume wizard runs
through the whole gamut of odors; he plays upon the sensitive olfactory
nerves as a great musician plays upon an organ. For, of all the senses,
that of smell is most closely associated with remembrance. It can
recreate a vanished vision on the human motion-picture screen we call
the mind. It can arouse the emotions—pain, pleasure, passion, longing,
sadness—and fan into flame the embers of the past. It can bring back, as
at the wave of a magician’s wand, the thoughts and scenes of far away and
long ago.
Perhaps I myself am more susceptible than most to the effect of perfumes
... I do not know. But the scent of roses brings back with overwhelming
vividness the loveliness of a Capri rose-garden where I wandered with Her
in the fragrance and the moonlight, long, oh, long ago. The redolence
of cedar, and I see in my mind’s eye a carpenter’s shop which I passed
daily when I lived in Syria, with the white-turbaned, patriarchal
carpenter working at his bench amid a litter of shavings, and camels,
laden with logs from the Cedars of Lebanon, kneeling patiently at the
door. Sandalwood conjures up a vision of Indian temples, with shafts of
sunlight striking through the murky interiors to be reflected by brazen
buddhas, inscrutable of face; of twilight on the Ganges at Benares;
of the pink palaces and towers of Jaipur. Geranium, heliotrope, lemon
verbena—these show me once again the stately, white-pillared house in
which I was born, with my grandmother bending lovingly over the flowers
in her old-fashioned garden, the stretches of close-cropped greensward,
the leaves of the old, old elms whispering ever so gently in the summer
breeze.
Because I am a collector of weapons and curios in a modest way, and
because I positively revel in colors, I lose no time when in Tunis
in making my way to the Souk des Etoffes. To my way of thinking it
is one of the most fascinating streets in the world, its tiny shops
literally filled to overflowing with silks, damasks, velvets, brocades,
embroideries, of every tone and texture—turquoise blue, pale green,
amethyst, ruby red, old rose, burnt orange, purple, magenta, vermilion,
saffron yellow—the fruit of looms all the way from India to Morocco.
Stacked high are piles of carpets from Anatolia, Kurdistan, Daghestan,
Persia, Afghanistan, Kairouan; the last-named a Tunisian product,
surprisingly cheap but well worth buying, for it is as thick and soft as
a fur rug, in lovely, mellow shades of ivory, red, and brown.
These Tunisian rug-merchants are past masters in the fine art of
salesmanship; they will fling a silken carpet into the air with the hand
of a magician and permit it to settle gradually upon the floor, not flat
but in little hills and valleys of rich, tempting colors, the folds
serving to reveal the intricacy of the design and accentuating the silky
sheen.
I have no slightest intention of purchasing a carpet, no place to use one
if I had it, but, for the sake of politeness, I feel constrained to ask
its price.
“Twelve hundred pounds,” says the merchant, without batting an eyelash.
“_Trop cher_,” I remark, as though buying six-thousand-dollar carpets was
with me an everyday affair.
[Illustration: CHURCH AND STATE IN TUNISIA
Father Delattre, in charge of the excavations at Carthage
H. H. Sidi Mohamed el Habib, Bey of Tunis]
The merchant shrugs his shoulders as though pitying my ignorance of
values. It is a very fine carpet, he assures me earnestly, very old, very
rare. The “ivory” in it is quite exceptional. Only last week he sold a
pair of such carpets to the American millionaire, Meester Otto Kahn. By
way of convincing me he displays the New York banker’s visiting-card.
“But I am not a millionaire,” I explain.
“Monsieur is pleased to jest with me,” says the merchant flatteringly.
“Is he not an American?”
Realizing that to deny the imputation is worse than useless, I turn my
attention to the other objects in the crowded little room—silver-mounted
rifles with enormously long barrels, their stocks inlaid with ivory,
mother-of-pearl, or turquoise matrix; poignards with jewel-studded
hilts; exquisitely damascened simitars, their curved blades inscribed
with verses from the Koran; Saracenic helmets with hoods of chain-mail;
exquisite embroideries worked by the deft fingers of harem women; quaint
pieces of enamel jewelry out of the Grande Kabylie; miniatures on ivory
of ferocious-looking, fiercely mustached beys and pashas, their turbans
the size of sofa-cushions; strings of perfectly matched amber beads, as
large as cherries and as red.
These things fascinate me, not only on account of their intrinsic beauty
but because they stand for romance and adventure. The diamond-studded
hilt of that simitar hanging on the wall may once have lain in the palm
of Barbarossa and run with Christian blood. It pleases me to imagine that
Scheherazade wound that gold-and-silver girdle about her slender, supple
form. It is within the bounds of possibility, at least, that the strand
of pearls glowing against its velvet background belonged to a Spanish
donna before it was torn from her white neck by the hand of a corsair
chief. Who shall say with certainty that yonder gold-damascened casque
did not once rest on the head of Saladin?
So I spend my money recklessly, for I revel in the possession of
such things. True, they will find a resting-place for the present
in an American museum, but some day, I trust, when I am old and the
wander-fever does not surge so fiercely in my veins, I shall bring them
together under a roof of my own and beguile the long winter evenings in
their contemplation and in the memories which they evoke.
Doubtless more foreign money is spent in the Souk des Selliers—the
saddlers’ bazaar—than in any other of the Tunisian _souks_. Not on
saddles, however, but on the innumerable other articles manufactured
from the vividly tinted leathers—sofa-cushions, pocketbooks, purses,
portfolios, cigarette-cases, and the embroidered sacks which every
Tunisian carries slung over his shoulder by a silken cord. For though
it may be difficult to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear (even though
silk stockings are commonly made from tree-bark), these Tunisian
leather-workers produce the most fascinating things imaginable from the
skin of a goat. Perhaps I should remark parenthetically, however, for the
benefit of those purposing to visit Morocco, that the leather-goods of
Tunis are far inferior in color, design, and workmanship to those of Fez
and Marrákesh.
But the saddlery of Tunis is unequaled throughout North Africa, a
veritable Tunisian saddle being as highly prized by an Arab as a
Whippey is by an English hunting man. The city has been celebrated
for its horse-gear ever since the Middle Ages, when caravans from
Timbuktu, Darfur, and the Sudan brought slaves, gold, gum, ivory,
and ostrich-feathers and took back costumes, embroideries, arms, and
saddlery. And even to-day the merchants of the Souk des Selliers supply
their wares to customers as far afield as Morocco, Algeria, Tripolitania,
and the Saharan hinterland. For, like the American cow-puncher, the Arab
loves his horse and is fond of displaying him to the best advantage,
always being ready to lavish his money on richly ornamented and expensive
trappings.
The Arab saddles, which are usually of scarlet leather embroidered with
ornate designs worked in vividly colored silks, are immensely heavy,
cumbersome affairs, so thick that the rider is perched several inches
above the horse’s back, and so broad in the seat that it is torture for
a European to sit them. The shovel-like stirrups are often of silver
damascened in gold, their sharp edges being used by the rider in lieu of
rowels. The housings used by the wealthy caïds and pashas are generally
of velvet stiff with gold and silver bullion and in some cases ornamented
with leopard-skin. In fact, the leopard-skin holsters on the state saddle
of a _maréchal de France_ are undoubtedly of African origin; a reminder,
no doubt, of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
A sort of by-product of the Souk des Selliers are the enormous hats of
woven grass, somewhat resembling Mexican sombreros, which are to be seen
throughout Tunisia when the weather becomes really hot. They have huge
crowns, thus permitting them to be worn over the turban, and, though
very heavy, are as supple as Panamas. It is their extreme flexibility,
in fact, which brings them to the saddlers’ bazaar, for before they
can be worn the flappy brims must be stiffened by four leaf-shaped
pieces of leather, which are dyed and embroidered to suit the fancy of
the customers. They are fitted with a sliding chin-strap, which can
be loosened so that the hat may lie on the back when not needed as a
protection from the sun. In Tunis itself one sees these gargantuan hats
only rarely, but during the hot season they are worn universally by the
Arabs of the hinterland. Thus panoplied, on their little wiry horses,
when seen from a distance they bear a striking resemblance to Mexican
vaqueros.
Speaking of hats reminds me that the national head-dress of Tunis is not
the high, cylindrical tarboosh of Egypt, nor the lower, more tapering fez
which formerly proclaimed the Turk, but a round-topped affair of soft
red felt, somewhat akin to a skullcap, known as a _chéchia_. They are
provided with thick blue tassels, and wound about them, so as to conceal
all save the top, is a snowy scarf. The making of _chéchias_ was formerly
an important industry of Tunis, but in recent years it has declined, as
they can be manufactured more cheaply in England and Germany. A curious
circumstance, is it not, that the decree of the Turkish government
prohibiting fezzes should have brought hardship to hundreds of Manchester
workmen? It goes to prove how closely the countries of the modern world
are bound together economically.
The Souk-el-Blagdjia, the shoemakers’ bazaar, is a long narrow, winding
thoroughfare somewhat reminiscent of the Street of the Shoemakers in
Athens. It possesses no architectural attractions, but the dyed goatskins
hung up before the shops form charming bits of color. Here are made
the soft, heelless slippers of lemon or pomegranate color which the
natives wear and which the Arab keeps on so easily, to the mystification
of Europeans; of course it is only by shuffling that they can be kept
from falling off. To see an Arab shuffling along in his saffron-colored
slippers is to realize the true significance of the term “slipshod,” for
they are utterly incompatible with energy or haste.
Leaving the bazaars by the Bab Souika, one finds himself in the narrow
Rue Halfaouine. This thoroughfare might more appropriately be called the
Street of the Barbers, for in no other city have I ever seen so many
tonsorial establishments in so short a distance. This multiplicity of
barber-shops is explainable, perhaps, by the fact that Tunisian barbers
do not confine themselves to the duties customarily associated with that
calling, but are likewise manicurists, pedicurists, dentists, and, on
occasion, surgeons. They stand ready alike to trim your beard, to shave
your head—taking care of course, should you be a Moslem, to leave the
little topknot whereby, on the Judgment Day, the faithful may be jerked
to heaven—to manicure your hands, to care for your feet, to extract your
teeth, to cup or bleed you, and to perform any other minor operation.
In warm weather all of these are performed in the publicity of the open
street, thus giving the barber a better opportunity to gossip with his
friends and providing entertainment for the passers-by. By way of giving
confidence to his prospective victims and for purposes of advertising,
the barber sometimes has before his place of business two glass
show-cases lined with velvet. One is filled with the molars, canines,
incisors, and bicuspids which he has extracted. In the other, arranged
like a collection of white and yellow butterflies, are neatly mounted
rows of corns!
CHAPTER IV
MID PLEASURES AND PALACES
From the Porte de France, where Europe comes to an abrupt end and the
Orient dramatically begins, the walls and roofs of Old Tunis rise like
terraces, one above the other, to the Kasbah, which, as in the case
of all Oriental citadels, occupies the highest point, so that in the
event of a revolt its guns may sweep the city. In the days when Tunis
was a corsair stronghold, its swift-sailing galleys the terror of the
Mediterranean, the Kasbah was the seat of power, its massive ramparts
inclosing the palaces of the beys, the barracks of the Janizaries, and
the bagnios in which were confined the Christian slaves. To-day, however,
there is little about the Kasbah to suggest its one-time importance, for
only the exterior wall remains, and the old buildings have disappeared to
make room for the _casernes_ in which are housed the troops of the French
garrison.
Yet few areas of like size in the world have witnessed so much bloodshed,
cruelty, and suffering. At the height of the pirate power the Christian
captives in Tunis alone numbered upward of ten thousand; they were
treated like wild beasts; worked like draft-animals, and sold like cattle
to the highest bidder. But they had their revenge, for when, in July,
1535, the Spaniards under Charles V besieged Tunis, the Christian slaves
confined in the citadel suddenly rose in revolt, massacred their guards,
and helped to secure the victory of the emperor.
This reverse was very far from crushing the power of the corsair chiefs,
however, and a few years later found them again ravaging the seaboards of
Italy, France, and Spain, exacting tribute from every seafaring nation.
Even the European coastwise traffic was not immune. In the closing years
of the sixteenth century a young Frenchman of a religious turn of mind,
while voyaging from Marseilles to Narbonne, was captured by the corsairs,
taken to Tunis, and sold at public auction. His heart stirred with pity
by the sufferings which he witnessed during his two years of captivity
in the city, he dedicated the remainder of his life to ameliorating the
wretched lot of Christian captives and galley-slaves. In recognition
of the great services which he rendered to suffering humanity, he was
canonized by the Church of Rome, being known to history as St. Vincent de
Paul.
Though vanished are its glories, the Kasbah is well worth visiting if
for no other purpose than to view the superb panorama commanded by
its ramparts. Seen under the morning sun, the Tunisian capital is a
pearl-white city, though its whiteness is relieved from monotony and
glare by numerous patches of green—the palms and orange-trees in the
gardens of the Dar-el-Bey, the shade-trees along the Avenue Jules Ferry,
the Avenue de France, and other thoroughfares, and the blue-green tiles
used so effectively in the decoration of the mosques, particularly on
their domes and pointed minarets.
The view from the Kasbah, especially in the late afternoon, when the
shadows begin to lengthen and the fort-crowned hills which encircle
the city are tinged with coral, is one never to be forgotten. To
the southward, an opal imbedded in green velvet, lies the salt lake,
Sebkhet-es-Sedjoumi. Two or three miles to the west the white palace
of the Bardo rises from a sea of verdure. To the northward, beyond
the Park of the Belvedere, with its sweeping drives and charming
Moorish pavilions, the fir-clad peaks of Djebel Merkez and Djebel
Ahmar rear themselves against the African sky. Eastward, across the
turquoise-colored, flamingo-haunted lagoon of El Bahira, bask in the
sunshine the ivory buildings of La Goulette; while somewhat more to the
north, beyond the rose-brown arches of the Roman aqueduct, are the slopes
on which Carthage once stood so proudly, the whole dominated by the twin
peaks of Bou-Kornein.
Descending from the heights of the Kasbah, a few hundred paces bring us
to the town palace of the rulers of Tunisia, the Dar-el-Bey, now seldom
used as a royal residence save during the month of Ramadan, for during
the rest of the year the bey dwells at his suburban palace of La Marsa,
on the sea-shore beyond Cape Carthage. The interior of the Dar-el-Bey is
an unhappy combination of Oriental taste and European tawdriness. Though
some of the reception-rooms and the private apartments of the bey are
as fine as anything in the Alcázar or the Alhambra, their walls done in
tiles of exquisite design and color, their ceilings decorated with the
delicately chiseled, lace-like plaster-work called _nuksh hadida_, the
state apartments present a painful contrast, having been perpetrated in
the early years of the Victorian epoch, when Turkey-red carpets, crimson
brocade hangings, ornate crystal chandeliers, and an excessive use of
gilt were considered the acme of richness and good taste.
[Illustration: THIRTEEN CENTURIES LOOK DOWN UPON YOU
From the lofty minaret of the Djamaa-es-Zeitoun, the largest mosque in
Tunis, which was already hoary with antiquity when Columbus sailed into
the West]
Save, as I have already remarked, during the fasting month of Ramadan,
when he finds his city palace more convenient for participating in the
numerous religious ceremonies, the present ruler visits the Dar-el-Bey
only once or twice a week for the transaction of official business and to
sit in judgment on criminals. For, though the regency is French in pretty
much everything but name, it has been deemed wise to maintain the fiction
of Tunisian independence by permitting the bey a good deal of latitude
so far as the punishment of his own subjects is concerned; his ideas of
justice (_la justice du bey_ it is called, in contradistinction to _la
justice française_) usually working out in a fashion truly Oriental.
In Tunisia all death sentences must be confirmed by the bey in person,
the condemned man being brought before him as he sits on his great gilt
and velvet throne in the Hall of Judgment. Until quite recent years
the condemned were put to death in the grounds of the Bardo, a hanging
being one of the sights offered to European visitors, but of late this
barbarous custom has fallen into desuetude, executions usually being
carried out in the barrack-yard of the Beylical Guard at La Marsa.
In the days of the present ruler’s father the murderer was suddenly
brought face to face with the members of his victim’s family in the
presence of the bey, for such things are always done dramatically in
the East. The bey then inquired of the family if they insisted on the
murderer paying the death penalty, or if they were willing to accept
blood-money, a sum equivalent to one hundred and forty dollars, which
in theory was paid by the murderer to the relatives of the deceased as
a sort of indemnity if he was permitted to escape with his life. If,
however, he did not possess so large a sum, as was frequently the case,
the bey made it up out of his private purse. Nine times out of ten, if
the victim was a woman, the blood-money was promptly accepted—and praise
be to Allah for getting it!—for in Africa women are plentiful but gold is
scarce. In case the blood-money was accepted the murderer’s sentence was
commuted to imprisonment for twelve months and twenty-seven days (which
is a considerably severer punishment than murderers usually receive in
certain American cities; say, Chicago), though I have never been able to
ascertain the reason for adding the odd twenty-seven days.
But it may have been that the victim was an only son, or the father of
a large family, or a person of political importance, in which case the
relatives invariably demanded the extreme penalty of the law.
“Do you insist on his blood?” inquired the bey, a portly, easy-going
Oriental who was known to have a marked aversion to taking human life,
even in the case of murderers.
“We do, your Highness,” the spokesman of the family would reply,
salaaming until his _chéchia_ tassel swept the ground.
“Be it so,” said the bey, shrugging his shoulders. “I call upon you to
bear witness that I am innocent of his death. May Allah the Compassionate
have mercy upon him! Turn him toward the gate of the Bardo,” which last
is the local euphemism for, “Take him out and hang him.”
* * * * *
The Palace of the Bardo, a short distance to the north of the city, is
the Tunisian Windsor, though nowadays it is seldom if ever occupied.
Formerly the winter residence of the sovereign, it is the center of a
congeries of villas, kiosks, pavilions, offices, barracks, and stables,
which are grouped helter-skelter in the inconsequential Oriental fashion,
without the slightest regard to harmony, order, or convenience. Though
the French destroyed the fortifications which originally surrounded it,
there is much that is majestic and beautiful about the place, its white
walls, marble terraces, and fluted columns rising from well-kept lawns
and hedged gardens ablaze with flowers.
The Bardo is divided into three parts: the private apartments of the bey,
which, though almost never used, are as rigidly closed to the public as
the dwelling of any other Moslem gentleman; the state apartments, which
he occasionally uses instead of those in the town palace, the Dar-el-Bey,
for holding courts of justice, official audiences, and receptions; and
the Alaoui Museum.
Access to the Bardo is gained by the Staircase of the Lions, which is
flanked on either side by numerous undersized and not at all imposing
marble images of the _Felis leo_, couchant, rampant, and in attitudes
suggestive of a well-trained poodle asking for a biscuit. Yet the
general effect is pleasing, for the slender columns with their carved
capitals are beautifully proportioned, and the Moorish ceilings, strongly
reminiscent of those in the Alhambra at Granada, are superb.
Through porch and patio floored and colonnaded with white marble and
paneled with glorious old tiles arabesqued in soft yellow, peacock
green, and Persian blue, we enter a typical Oriental palace, with guards
in tawdry uniforms dozing in the corners and with the atmosphere of a
somewhat garish stage-setting. A purely Oriental interior is nearly
always pleasing, for your Arab’s sense of the beautiful is generally
well developed. But once Europe is permitted to intrude, everything is
spoiled, for the Oriental’s taste in regard to things European is quite
untutored and garish. Cut-glass chandeliers, gilt clocks, oil paintings,
and Louis Seize furniture are as absurd and out of the picture when
introduced into a room with marble floors, tiled walls, and exquisitely
fretted Moorish ceilings as were the horrible “Turkish corners” found in
nearly every American home a generation ago.
The principal state apartments of the Bardo are the Throne Room, the
Hall of Justice, and the Salle des Glaces, so named, I suppose, from its
mammoth crystal chandeliers. The last named is just such a room as may
be found in almost any European palace, the walls lined with life-size
paintings of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Victor Emmanuel of Italy—the
first of the name, I mean—an incredibly ugly man with a pug-nose and
enormous mustachios, Francis Joseph as a youth in a white uniform so
tight at the waist as to suggest the use of corsets, and, of course,
a whole portrait-gallery of the beys who have reigned in Tunisia ever
since the Cretan adventurer, Hussein ben Ali, made himself master of the
country at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The pictures of the
present bey, Sidi Mohamed el Habib, and of his immediate predecessor on
the throne, Sidi Mohamed En Naceur Bacha, show dignified, intelligent,
amiable looking men; but the earlier rulers, with their fierce, dark
faces, glowering from beneath enormous turbans, suggest the pirates that
they were.
Adjoining the state apartments, in the rooms formerly occupied by the
women of the royal harem, has been gathered a remarkable collection of
antiquities and of Moorish and Arabic work under the name of the Musée
Alaoui. As this is not intended to be a guide-book to Tunis, I have
no intention of trespassing on the field of Herr Baedeker and Messrs.
Thomas Cook & Son by enumerating the many beautiful and interesting
objects—sculptures, faiences, arms, glassware, terra-cotta—which the
museum contains, though passing mention should be made of its collection
of ancient mosaics, which is one of the finest in existence. Occupying
nearly half of the floor of the great hall, an apartment sixty feet
in length, is an enormous mosaic in almost perfect preservation, “The
Triumph of Neptune,” found at Sousse; while set in the walls are mosaics
brought from various other parts of the regency—pagan mosaics from
Zaghouan; representations of a circus from Gafsa; a mosaic unearthed at
Tabarca depicting a Roman farm; and numerous other scenes. From these
the visitor possessed of a little imagination can obtain a very graphic
conception of the domestic life, recreations, and religious observances
of North Africa under the Romans. What a pity, I thought, that these
mosaics cannot be seen by the youth who is struggling with high school
and college Latin! Then he would realize that the ancients were not the
unreal, stilted figures portrayed in our dry-as-dust text-books, but that
they lived and loved and fought and played games and went to circuses
very much as we do, the chief difference being that they wore togas
instead of trousers and shouted, “To the lions with the Christians!”
instead of, “Kill the umpire!” But one of these days, perhaps, we shall
teach Latin more intelligently.
[Illustration: A GATE TO BARBARY
To pass through the Bab Souika, in Tunis, is to enter another world, to
go back into history for a thousand years; its ancient portals frame a
fascinating picture of the Djamaa Sidi Mahrez, which suggests, without
actually resembling, Santa Sophia in Constantinople]
When the French occupied Tunisia they announced that they would respect
the religious prejudices of the Moslems in those cities whose inhabitants
offered no resistance. Kairouan, the holy city of Africa, in sanctity
inferior only to Mecca itself, disregarded this ultimatum, which explains
why unbelievers have the privilege of entering its mosques and other
sacred buildings. But the people of Tunis did not actively oppose the
occupation and consequently its mosques and marabouts’ tombs, its Moslem
schools and cemeteries, may not be polluted by infidel feet. In thus
excluding from their places of worship the adherents of other faiths, the
Moslems have the coöperation of the French authorities, the doors of the
mosques bearing a warning printed in four languages: “_Reservé au culte
mussulman. Entrée interdite._”
To disregard this injunction, either by attempting to enter a mosque
or to gain a surreptitious glimpse of its interior from without, is to
invite serious trouble. Religious fanaticism runs high in Tunisia, and,
even if the intruder escaped serious injury at the hands of infuriated
natives, he would almost certainly feel the heavy hand of the French
law; for the French have spared no effort to gain the friendship and
confidence of the native population, and they have no intention of
permitting the amicable relations which exist between the races to be
endangered by the inquisitiveness of some irresponsible European.
Yet there are certain high points in the city accessible to Christians,
from which, by not making themselves conspicuous, they can look down
unmolested upon some of the mosques, catching distant glimpses of their
marble-paved courts and richly tiled cloisters. There are one or two such
spots in the Souk-des-Attarins, for example, from which can be seen the
central court of the Djamaa-es-Zeitouna, or Mosque of the Olive Tree, the
largest sanctuary in the city. From the lofty minaret of this venerable
edifice close on thirteen centuries look down upon you, for it dates from
the end of the seventh century, though its marble columns, spoils from
Carthage, are at least a thousand years older. Like most of the great
mosques of Islam, it is also a college, where several hundred Moslem
youths receive instruction in literature, philosophy, mathematics,
history, and religion.
On the birthday of the Prophet—June 7, according to the Roman
calendar—the bey goes in state to the Great Mosque. On this occasion
the _souks_ unbar their gates at night and are ablaze with lights from
end to end, and the effect is magical. By day the _souks_ of Tunis are
only narrow passages with holes in their vaulted roofs, through which
the sun pours down on the flagged, uneven pavement. But on the Night of
the Prophet they are turned into fairy-land, for hanging from the roofs
are cut-glass chandeliers aflame with candles, supplemented by thousands
and thousands of diminutive oil-lamps with glass shades of every hue,
while the fronts of the shops are concealed beneath priceless silken
carpets and wonderful old brocades and embroideries, so that the narrow,
tunnel-like lanes are aglow with light and color. The painters have been
busy too, the vaultings, pillars, and carven capitals being vivified by
the lavish application of vermilion and emerald green; and set before
the stalls on either side are rows of richly upholstered divans and
benches, piled high with silken pillows, for the use of the merchants and
their friends and the musicians whom they have hired. The covered ways
resound to the throbbing of string and reed instruments, the chanting of
priests, the shrill appeals of holy men and mendicants, and the deep,
low hum of countless voices. The approach of the bey is heralded by a
fanfare of trumpets and the wild, barbaric strains of a native military
band, and, as he passes along the street, guarded by twin files of the
Garde Beylicale in their picturesque uniform and followed by a throng
of staff-officers, religious dignitaries, and officials, the spectators
salaam to the ground, costly rugs are thrown down for him to walk upon,
and the flowers which the natives wear behind their ears are cast beneath
the feet of this portly, gray-bearded, benevolent-looking old gentleman,
his blue uniform glittering with stars and crosses, who is venerated by
his subjects as the descendant of the Prophet, the Shadow of God on Earth.
On the northern fringe of the bazaars, hard by the Bab Souika, rises
the Djamaa Sidi Mahrez, a renowned saint of the fifth century of the
Mohammedan calendar, whose tomb makes it a sanctuary for debtors. The
mosque, which is the largest in the city, was built in the seventeenth
century, having been designed by a French architect taken prisoner by
the corsairs. This explains, no doubt, why it is so radically different
in plan and general design from the other mosques of Tunis, the great
central dome, surrounded by several smaller cupolas, suggesting, if not
actually resembling, Santa Sophia in Constantinople. At twilight, when
its domes, their outlines softened by an amethyst and violet sky, are
transformed by the westering sun into great globes of rosy coral, the
beauty of effect is positively startling. There are certain scenes—the
Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Taj Mahal by moonlight, sunset on
the Upper Congo—which, by reason of their surpassing loveliness, are
indelibly engraved upon the tablets of my memory, and the Mosque of Sidi
Mahrez at nightfall is one of them.
* * * * *
Among the innumerable types forming the river of humanity which
flows continually through the streets of Tunis, the women, whether
Moslem or Jewish, are among the strangest and certainly are the most
curiosity-provoking. Unlike the custom prevailing in other Islamic lands,
where the women are usually veiled only to the eyes, the faces of the
Moslem women of Tunisia are entirely covered with tightly drawn veils,
usually black, but quite frequently blue, bright pink, or saffron yellow,
so that they appear to be wearing the cheap cotton masks with which their
sisters across the Mediterranean conceal their faces during the gaieties
of carnival-time. They flit like apparitions between the high, blind
walls or peer down from the latticed windows of the harems in which they
are immured, as much prisoners as the Man in the Iron Mask. One wonders
how much longer the women of North Africa will endure this intolerable
tyranny; how many years must pass before, following the example of their
Turkish sisters, they will refuse any longer to hide their pretty faces,
to stay within their prisons, on days when the sun is shining and the sky
is blue.
Even more fantastic of costume are the Jewish women, of whom one sees
great numbers, for nearly one third of the city’s population is of
the Hebrew faith. Though some of the young Jewish girls are quite
slim and very pretty, with satiny skins, carmine lips, and lustrous,
heavily-fringed eyes, most of the older women are of an enormous
stoutness, their excess avoirdupois accentuated rather than camouflaged
by their voluminous mantles and baggy pantaloons. Veritable mountains of
flesh, they go waddling along on absurdly small and high-heeled slippers,
only half as long as their feet, which go _flap-flap-flap_ upon the
pavement as they roll by like full-rigged sailing-ships wallowing in a
heavy sea.
Many of the Jewish women still wear, set well at the back of the head,
the old-fashioned pointed head-dress, shaped somewhat like a dunce’s
cap, which bears a close resemblance to the “steeple-horn” hats worn
by European women of rank in the Middle Ages. From the point of this
depends a white silk _haik_ which envelops the whole figure, a form of
head-gear still further reminiscent of that worn by the great ladies of
medieval Europe. Less frequently one sees the tight-fitting trousers or
drawers, which have now been quite generally discarded in favor of the
more comfortable if less picturesque pantaloons worn by Moslem women.
These nether garments are cut somewhat like riding-breeches save that
they fit more tightly to the leg, which is invariably a fat one, so that
the effect is comic rather than alluring, particularly as the costume
is usually completed by a short, loose, elaborately embroidered garment
such as women wear when combing their hair. When arrayed in this costume
a Jewish woman looks for all the world as though she had rushed from her
boudoir at an alarm of fire without pausing to put on her skirt or take
off her dressing-jacket.
On Fridays, and on the last day of the month, the Jews of Tunis make
an excursion to the Jewish cemetery, which is about a mile and a half
outside the town, to visit the graves of their relatives and to lament
over the dear departed. For they believe that on those days the spirits
of the dead revisit the earth, and hence their weekly visit to the
cemetery to keep them company. On either side of the dusty, unshaded
avenue which bisects the cemetery are acres of white marble slabs, raised
a foot or so above the ground. They are all of the same shape and size,
and all on the same level, so that they form what amounts to a vast
marble pavement, which beneath the sun becomes as hot as the top of a
stove. Seated cross-legged on this terrace are groups of portly Jewesses,
their white _haiks_, supported by their pointed bonnets, giving them the
appearance of so many cone-shaped tents. And when they rock themselves
back and forth, prostrating their corpulent figures in what would appear
to be an utter abandonment to anguish, they look like a whole encampment
swaying in a heavy wind. It does not take the visitor long to realize,
however, that these ostentatious genuflections and lamentations are
largely a shibboleth, a simulation of sorrow, being no more indicative
of real grief than the behavior of the mourners at the Wailing Place in
Jerusalem.
Speaking of cemeteries reminds me that no American should leave Tunis
without paying a visit to the little Protestant cemetery of St.
George, now disused, which lies just within the inner city walls, here
demolished, not far from the Bab Cartagena. It is a spot which holds
poignant memories for every man and woman who speaks the English tongue,
for here was buried John Howard Payne, author of “Home, Sweet Home,” who
died at Tunis in 1852 while serving as American consul. Thirty years
later the body was disinterred and removed to America, but the spot is
marked by a cenotaph similar to that erected over the poet’s present
burial place in Washington. As you stand there in the tranquillity of
that forgotten back-water, with the teeming Eastern city flowing all
around, it is not difficult to picture the longing for a cleaner, greener
land of the lonely man who so truly voiced the thoughts of other homesick
exiles when he wrote those immortal lines:
Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam,
Wherever I wander there’s no place like Home.
CHAPTER V
CARTHAGO DELETA EST
Close on eight-and-twenty centuries ago (in 846 B.C. according to one
historian) a young Phenician princess fled from her native country,
Sidon, after abetting her brother in the murder of her husband, and,
putting half the length of the Mediterranean between her and her
pursuers, beached her purple-sailed galley on the shores of Africa, not
far from the promontory which to-day we call Cape Bon. Her given name
was Elissa, so tradition tells us, but she is better known as Dido—“the
fugitive”—and from her day down to this a girl who indulges in capers of
which her family do not approve is said to be cutting up didos.
Now it should be clearly understood that this region was already in a
fairly civilized state when Dido landed on its coast, for Phenician
adventurers, sailing westward in quest of the Hesperides, had established
themselves there nearly four centuries earlier and had founded
cities—Cambē, on the very site afterward occupied by Carthage; Outih,
or Utica; Hadrumetum, later known as Sousse; Hippo Zarytus, the modern
Bizerta; and Thines, which to-day we know as Tunis. So the fugitive
princess and her followers, instead of being pioneers in an unknown land,
found themselves hospitably received by settlers of their own race and
by their ruler, King Iarbas, who quickly became a suitor for the young
widow’s hand.
But she had had enough of matrimony, and, denying his pleadings to share
his throne, she set about building a kingdom of her own. She chose for
the site of her future capital a low hill beside the sea-shore, looking
down upon a little sheltered bay, and guilefully induced its Berber
owners to sell her as much land as could be covered by the hide of a
bull. Thereupon—and for the sake of her reputation the less said about
the ethics of the transaction the better—she proceeded to cut the hide
into a long and narrow strip, as sometimes, for amusement, one strives
to see how long a paring can be obtained from an apple. With the lengthy
strand of rawhide thus ingeniously obtained, she inclosed an area of
sufficient size on which to build her city, which, it is to be assumed,
was in the beginning a mere collection of wattle-and-daub huts. At first
the settlement was known as Byrsa (the name means bull’s hide), but later
it took the name of Carthage, or Karthadasht, “the New City” in the
Phenician tongue.
So much for the legendary version, which Virgil gave to the world in the
Æneid and which has been so expanded and embroidered in the centuries
which have intervened that even the men of science have been unable to
determine with any certainty where the fable ends and history begins.
* * * * *
We have grown so accustomed to referring to the inhabitants of the city
traditionally founded by Dido as Carthaginians or Phenicians that it
is difficult to realize that the name by which they called themselves
was neither of these, but Canaanite—a lowlander, a man of the plains.
The Greeks gave the country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean,
from which these people came the name of Phœnike, the Land of Purple—so
called, no doubt, from the purple dyes for which the Tyrians were famous;
the Romans in their turn corrupted the name into Pœni; yet well into the
Christian era the farmers of Libya, which roughly corresponded to the
Tunisia of to-day, were wont to speak of themselves as being of the land
of Canaan.[1]
The Carthaginians, be it understood, never fought if they could help
it. Essentially a commercial-minded, luxury-loving people, they had no
lust for empire, save that of the sea, mastery of which insured them
control of the ports and markets which were necessary to their commercial
supremacy. But as the city grew in wealth, power, and population,
territorial expansion became imperative, and they pressed forward
gradually until they occupied, more or less completely, a territory
roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia plus the Algerian department of
Constantine. This gradual expansion of Carthage’s sphere of influence was
effected not so much by the sword, however, as by treaty with the warlike
native tribes, from which she recruited her armies of mercenaries. Even
in Carthage itself, whose inhabitants at one period numbered close to
three quarters of a million, but a small minority of the population was
of pure Phenician stock, the bulk of the people consisting of the native
Libyans with a sprinkling of half-castes, negro slaves, and traders of
all races. The Carthaginians might be said, indeed, to have occupied a
position somewhat analogous to that held by the French in the Tunisia of
to-day.
The government of Carthage was a pure oligarchy, in which none save the
old Punic families had any voice. All powers of government, legislative,
executive, and judicial, were vested in the Council of One Hundred,
whose decrees were carried out by officials known as “suffetes.” As
these offices were for sale, the oligarchy eventually degenerated into a
plutocracy, corrupt, vulgar, arrogant, and heartless, in which political
dominance was exercised by one or another of the great families, as was
the case in medieval Italy.
Save in the single field of agriculture, which they developed
scientifically and with remarkable success, the Carthaginians have to
their credit no achievements in science, literature, or art, even their
architecture showing the effect of Greek and Egyptian influence. As has
been said, they were first, last, and always traders, money-makers,
possessing to an exceptional degree that Semitic aptitude for business
and banking which has made the Jews the financiers of the world.
The religion of the Carthaginians was characterized by cruelty and lust.
The state religion, the established church, as it were, was based on
the worship of the deity called Eschmoun, identified by the Romans with
their god of healing, Æsculapius, whose chief sanctuary was within a
vast inclosure, half-temple and half-fortress, on the brow of the Byrsa
Hill, from which an imposing flight of marble steps led down into the
city. But there were other gods as well, the most venerated being Hammon
and Tanith. That fear of their anger and faith in their power—they could
hardly have inspired affection—was deeply implanted in the hearts of
the common people is indicated by the fact that, whereas the worship of
Eschmoun virtually ended with Punic Carthage, the other two not only
survived the destruction of the city by the Romans, but, under the names
of Saturn and Ceres, their cult was adopted, developed, and disseminated
by the conquerors.
They were always dark and terrible, these gods of Carthage, worshiped
with bestial and bloody rites which had their beginnings in the very dawn
of time. Of his priests Hammon demanded the sacrifice of their manhood;
of her priestesses Tanith required the sacrifice of their chastity.
Though there can be little doubt that both had temples within the
confines of the city itself, the principal sanctuary of Hammon was set
in the saddle formed by the twin peaks of Bou-Kornein, which are clearly
visible some miles to the southward, beyond the lagoon of El Bahira. It
was in this macabre setting, consisting in all probability of little
more than a sacred grove within an inclosure, that there took place the
awfulest rites of all, the human sacrifices. Here the victims of Baal,
who comprised not only slaves and prisoners of war but children of the
most aristocratic families in Carthage—usually girls of marriageable
age—were laid naked upon the brazen arms of the god to be roasted alive,
their bodies dropping thence into a fiery furnace. Though we know
that the worship of Hammon and Tanith was characterized by rituals so
hideous and obscene as to stagger the imagination, their details—and it
is well that it is so—can only be conjectured. Small wonder that the
superstitious Arabs shun the slopes of Bou-Kornein after nightfall,
asserting that the lonely spot is cursed with the evil deeds which were
performed there, and that with the coming of darkness can be heard the
shrieks of tortured men and maidens, can be seen the dull glow of the
fires on the altar of the unclean god.
* * * * *
The Carthaginians first came into armed collision with their historic
enemies, the Romans, 264 years before the Crucifixion. For nearly two
centuries Carthage had been undisputed Mistress of the Mediterranean,
dominant in the East and so supreme in the West that her ambassadors
told the Romans that they might not even wash their hands in the
sea without her permission. Her empire stretched from end to end
of the Middle Sea: North Africa was fringed with her outposts and
trading-stations; the south of Spain owed her fealty; her rule was
accepted in Sardinia, the west of Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands.
But she was as an idol of brass with feet of clay; the foundations of
her supremacy were rotten, for they rested upon her sea-power only. And
history has shown, over and over again, that no nation can endure unless
it can make its might felt upon the land. The Carthaginians, as has been
said, were not a fighting race, so that when Carthage needed troops she
had to recruit them from the warlike and barbarous Berber tribes which
surrounded her. It is said that when Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain at
the beginning of the Second Punic War he had not a single Carthaginian
soldier in the ranks of his army, the officers of his general staff alone
being Carthaginians. And, as Carthage discovered to her cost, it is not
safe for a nation to trust to the very uncertain loyalty of a mercenary
army.
In 264 B.C. began the series of tragic events known to history as the
three Punic wars, which lasted 120 years, cost millions of lives, and
terminated with the capture and destruction of Carthage by the younger
Scipio, who left not one stone of the famous city resting on another.
As I have already remarked, Carthage’s supremacy rested on her sea-power,
and her sea-power, in turn, rested on her vast armada of triremes—galleys
with three banks of oars, each manned by ten soldiers and 130 rowers,
the latter being slaves who never left the benches to which they were
chained. It has been estimated that the average length of a trireme was
about 130 feet, or approximately that of a small destroyer. The naval
tactics of the Carthaginians, be it understood, consisted in sinking
the enemy by ramming, not in boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now
they turned their attention to the development of a much larger class
of fighting ship, the quinquereme, its five banks of oars manned by 300
rowers, and each carrying about twenty marines. The Romans improved on
this, however, for they not only copied the quinqueremes, but they fitted
them with gangways which could be lowered upon contact with an enemy
vessel, so as to permit the complement of 120 legionaries which each
Roman war craft carried to gain access to the adversary’s decks. Relying
on this combatant superiority of six to one, they endeavored always to
get alongside and board the enemy by means of the “flying-bridges”; with
the Romans, as with Nelson and John Paul Jones, it was always, “Broadside
to broadside! Boarders up and away!”
The first sea-battle under these new conditions was fought off Lipara in
260 B.C. and ended in complete disaster for the Romans, their admiral
and his entire squadron being captured. But shortly thereafter the
fortunes of war were reversed, for in a second encounter, near Palermo,
fifty Carthaginian vessels were captured or sunk. Four years later, off
Agrigentum, was fought one of the greatest sea-battles of all time, in
which upward of three hundred thousand men were engaged and in which
nearly a hundred Carthaginian galleys, together with a like number of
Roman, went down. Though the Carthaginian fleet was only temporarily
put out of action, the Romans were enabled to bring their transports in
safety across the narrow seas and to effect a landing on the eastern side
of Cape Bon, their army under Marcus Attilius Regulus capturing Tunis
and menacing Carthage itself. But the Carthaginians summoned to their
aid the renowned Spartan general, Xanthippus, thanks to whose brilliant
leadership the invaders were all but exterminated, Regulus himself being
taken prisoner.
The Romans having been repulsed, the Carthaginians now carried the war
into Sicily. The long series of reverses suffered by the Africans in
this campaign, which lasted nine years, were somewhat alleviated by
the genius of Hamilcar Barca, then a youth in his early twenties, who,
had he been adequately supported, might have made by sea that attack
on Rome which his son, Hannibal, was forced to attempt a quarter of a
century later by the long and perilous overland route through Spain
and across the Alps. But after the great Roman sea-victory at Ægusa
the Carthaginians instructed Hamilcar to make peace on the best terms
he could obtain. And onerous indeed were these terms. By them Carthage
was compelled to evacuate Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta and to pay an
indemnity of thirty-two hundred talents—about six millions of dollars.
Thus ended, in 241 B.C., the First Punic War, which had dragged along for
three-and-twenty years, greatly to the disadvantage of Carthage. She had
lost the most important of her insular possessions; the Mediterranean was
no longer a Carthaginian lake, a _mare clausum_; and her prestige as a
naval power had been irretrievably shattered.
* * * * *
They were always poor losers, the Carthaginians, and so, despite the
brilliant generalship of Hamilcar, when he returned to Carthage he was
deprived of his command, which was given to his bitterest rival, Hanno.
But, knowing the temper of his people, it is to be presumed that the
famous leader did not complain, for he doubtless considered himself
lucky to escape crucifixion, the fate usually awarded to defeated
generals according to the pleasant custom of the Carthaginians. Their
ingratitude quickly brought its own reward, however, for, within a few
months after the disastrous end of her struggle with Rome, Carthage was
called upon to suppress the revolt of her mercenary and barbarian allies.
This bloody business, which lasted from 240 to 237 B.C., was precipitated
by Hanno’s refusal to give the returned troops their pay, which was
greatly in arrears. The conflict which followed was known as the War of
the Mercenaries, or as the Truceless War, for no quarter was asked or
given.
The mutinous mercenaries were now joined by hordes of barbarians from the
hinterland, who saw in Carthage’s enfeebled condition an opportunity to
overwhelm and loot the richest and most luxurious city in the world. From
every quarter of North Africa they came, drawn by the prospects of rapine
and plunder as buzzards are attracted by a dying animal. An unforgettable
picture of the assembling of these Barbarian hordes has been given us by
Flaubert in his “Salammbô”:
Nomads from the table-lands of Barca, bandits from Cape Pluscus
and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmarica,
they had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells
walled in with camels’ bones; the Zuacces, with their covering
of ostrich-feathers, had come on quadrigæ; the Garamantains,
masked with black veils, rode behind on their painted mares;
others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebras, and buffaloes;
while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped
huts together with their families and idols. There were
Ammonians, with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs;
Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their
dead with laughter beneath branches of trees; and the hideous
Auseans, who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachidæ, who eat lice;
and the vermilion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes.
[Illustration: THEY SPEND THEIR HOLIDAYS AMONG THE DEAD
On Saturdays the Jewish women of Tunis visit the cemetery
And on Fridays the Moslem women do the same]
Because of the stubbornness and incapacity of Hanno, disaster followed on
disaster. Tunis was taken by the mutineers, and Carthage was threatened.
At length the situation became so critical that Hanno was superseded and
the command restored to Hamilcar, who, enlisting the aid of the Numidian
sheikhs, drove the mercenaries back into the mountains to the east of
Bou-Kornein, eventually hemming them in a narrow pass known as the Defile
of the Hatchet. Here forty thousand of them were trapped like wolves,
encircled by a ring of unrelenting steel. When their food was exhausted
they warded off starvation for a time by eating their dead and their
prisoners. But even cannibalism could not save them, and in the end the
mutineers, too weak to offer further resistance, were trampled by the
ponderous feet of Hamilcar’s war-elephants until all that remained of
them was chunks of bloody pulp.
* * * * *
In the very nature of things, a peace made after so inconclusive a
struggle as the First Punic War could not endure, for the Carthaginians
still despised the Romans and thought only of obtaining revenge. Thus it
came about that only three years after the conclusion of hostilities an
expeditionary force under Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain with the avowed
purpose of checking Roman penetration of the peninsula and of building
up there an empire which should more than compensate Carthage for the
insular territories which she had lost.
In nine years Hamilcar brought under Carthaginian rule all the country
south of the Tagus; then—229 B.C.—he fell in battle. He was succeeded by
his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, who continued the course of conquest until,
eight years after the death of Hamilcar, he met his own end by the knife
of an assassin. Thereupon the command passed to Hamilcar’s son, Hannibal,
then only twenty-six years of age. I doubt not that when the youngster
was advanced to the supreme command the graybeards of the general staff
shook their heads dismally, and said, “Too young; too young,” and
prophesied failure and disaster. For how could they have dreamed that,
when history should grant him the justice of perspective, this youthful
Carthaginian would be recognized as one of the greatest captains of all
time? For, in the whole history of the world, there have been only two
other men—Alexander the Great and Napoleon—who approached him in military
and administrative genius.
As a boy of nine, before the altar of the gods, Hannibal had taken an
oath of undying hatred for Rome. And this oath he now proceeded to
fulfil. Just as Sherman broke the heart of the Confederacy by his March
to the Sea, so Hannibal determined to smash the power of Rome by carrying
the war into the enemy’s territory, by sweeping across Italy itself. So
audacious a plan of campaign depended for its success upon the rapidity
with which it was executed. The Romans must be paralyzed by the speed
of his advance. They must know of his coming only when they heard the
trample of his elephants and saw the sun glinting on his spear-heads.
What he planned was, in short, a great raid through Spain and Gaul and so
down the whole length of the Italian peninsula, capturing Rome itself,
if that were possible, and, if it were not, joining hands with Carthage
across the narrow seas.
Intrusting the command of the troops he left in occupation of Spain to
his brother, Hannibal left New Carthage (Carthagena), which had been
founded by his father some years before, and, late in the May of 218
B.C., set out with an army of ninety thousand men and a great number of
elephants, on one of the most daring enterprises recorded in military
history. Crossing the Pyrenees, and evading the Roman army which had
been set to watch the mouth of the Rhone, he made friends with the Gauls
and pressed on unhindered to the foot of the Alps. Though the savage
Alpine winter, with its deep snow and bitter cold, was already at hand,
though the barbarians hung on his flanks like ravening wolves, and
though his losses in men and animals from exposure were enormous, he
crossed into Italy by the Pass of the Great St. Bernard, as it is known
to-day, cutting his way through the snow-drifts and splitting the rocks
which impeded the passage of his wagon-trains with vinegar, for, be it
remembered, he had to make his own roads as he advanced. In the words of
Napoleon, “Hannibal forced the Alps; I turned them.”
Smashing Scipio on the Ticinus and Sempronius on the Trebua, he went into
winter quarters on the Upper Po, where he contracted the ophthalmia which
cost him an eye. In the following spring he resumed his southward march,
annihilating the army with which the consul Flaminius sought to check
him. Rome he did not venture to attack, deeming his decimated force too
weak to justify the venture, and therein he committed his fatal error.
But at Cannæ, on the second of August, 216 B.C., he turned suddenly upon
Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had closed in upon his rear, and out of a
Roman army numbering seventy-six thousand men, seventy thousand perished
in the awful slaughter. Again the road to Rome was open to Hannibal, but
without the reinforcements which he had asked from Carthage, he did not
dare to attack, though he once stood within three miles of the city’s
walls. For thirteen years he held his ground in southern Italy, winning
victories of which he was too weak to take advantage and straining his
eyes seaward in quest of the troop-laden galleys which never came.
But, while Hannibal was being kept at bay near Capua, the arms of Rome
had not been idle elsewhere. Under Publius Scipio—who in later years
was destined to gain imperishable fame as Scipio Africanus—a Roman
army had invaded Spain and, defeating the small Carthaginian force
which garrisoned the peninsula, had undone all the work that Hamilcar,
Hasdrubal, and Hannibal had accomplished.
Crossing over into Africa, Scipio sought to form an alliance with
Syphax, king of the Massæsylians, whose capital was Cirta, the modern
Constantine. But, thanks to the influence of his beautiful Carthaginian
wife, Sophonisba, daughter of Hasdrubal Giscon (whom Scipio had defeated
in Spain), Syphax remained faithful to Carthage. Sophonisba’s marriage
to Syphax, however, cost Carthage the allegiance of another great
Numidian chieftain, Masinissa, to whom she had been betrothed. Piqued
by this rejection, the haughty Berber deserted Carthage, for which he
had always fought, and became the stanch ally of Rome. Yet how strangely
does history reverse itself! For some years later, when the kingdom of
Syphax, who had been defeated and had died in captivity, had been given
to Masinissa by the Romans, and that chieftain came riding into his new
capital, Cirta, in triumph, there was the widowed Sophonisba, beautiful
as ever, awaiting him at the entrance to the citadel. The lovely creature
threw herself at the feet of the conqueror and begged with tears in her
eyes that she be not handed over to her hereditary enemies, the Romans.
So he married her, for he loved her still and doubted not that she would
be safe under his protection. But when Scipio heard of it he bitterly
upbraided Masinissa for having betrayed his Roman allies by marrying a
Carthaginian. More, he demanded Sophonisba’s surrender, for he wanted her
to grace his triumph when he returned to Rome. Whereupon Masinissa, who
dared not keep her yet would not give her up to the Romans, escaped the
dilemma by sending her poison. By drinking it Sophonisba saved herself
from dishonor and degradation, her husband from humiliation, and the
Roman Republic from an embarrassing situation.
But I am getting ahead of my story. So let us go back to the autumn of
206 B.C., when Scipio, having returned to Italy, persuaded the Senate to
let him carry the war into Italy, the dwindling forces of Hannibal, who
had been callously abandoned by Carthage, still being held at bay near
Capua. Landing near Utica, Scipio was joined by his new ally, Masinissa,
their combined forces making a night attack upon the camps of Hasdrubal
and Syphax and burning them both. Two decisive battles followed. Syphax,
as has already been mentioned, was utterly defeated and taken prisoner
and his kingdom handed over to his rival, Masinissa. The Carthaginians,
their capital invested, sued for peace. The terms imposed by Scipio
were amazing in their moderation: Spain, already lost, and the Balearic
Islands were to be formally ceded to Rome; the transfer of Syphax’s
kingdom to Masinissa was to be recognized; all vessels of war, save ten,
were to be surrendered; and an indemnity of five thousand talents—not far
from ten millions of dollars—was to be paid the conquerors. These terms,
which deprived Carthage of her battle-fleet and her remaining overseas
possessions and exacted a huge indemnity, are strongly reminiscent of
those which were imposed two thousand years later at Versailles upon the
Germans.
The envoys of Carthage formally accepted the terms and an armistice was
declared while they were being ratified by the two governments. Then, too
late, Carthage repented her desertion of the one man who might have saved
her and recalled Hannibal from Italy. When the hero of a hundred battles
landed at Leptis with the remnant of his ever-victorious army, the hopes
of the mercurial Carthaginians revived. The terms of peace which they had
just accepted were brazenly repudiated. Hannibal, though disheartened and
disillusioned, did his best to save a cause which was already lost and
which did not deserve saving. Gathering an army consisting mainly of raw
levies and undisciplined mercenaries, he met Scipio in battle at Zama,
five days’ march to the west of Carthage, in the spring of 202 B.C. But
Hannibal’s green troops were unable to withstand the assault of the Roman
shock-battalions, and his defeat—the first he had ever known—was utter
and complete. With a handful of followers he escaped to Carthage and
advised the Council of One Hundred to make the best terms it could with
the thoroughly exasperated Romans.
The conditions now imposed by the victors were far more humiliating than
the original ones. In addition to the former demands the Carthaginians
were required to pay an annual tribute of two hundred talents for a
period of fifty years; they were not to wage war outside of Africa; and
in Africa they were not to make war without the permission of Rome, or
of Rome’s allies, and then only within Carthaginian territory. By the
acceptance of these terms, which left the once haughty Mistress of the
Seas little more than a Roman protectorate, there ended in 201 B.C.,
after seventeen years’ duration, the Second Punic War.
Just as, centuries later, the Allies believed that they had permanently
crippled Germany by the terms imposed on her at Versailles, so the Romans
congratulated themselves on having crushed their rival forever. But
their gratulations were premature. Relieved of the burden of maintaining
great military and naval establishments, free to devote themselves to
the profitable pursuits of peace, the Carthaginians proceeded to come
back with a rapidity which amazed and alarmed the Romans. Under the wise
administration of Hannibal, Carthage set its house in order, reorganized
its finances, suppressed its political abuses, and paid off in less than
half the allotted time the enormous war indemnity which had been imposed
upon it.
Ere long the anxiety of the Romans turned to something not far removed
from panic. Though Hannibal had scrupulously observed the terms of
peace, with such a man at liberty, Rome could not sleep o’ nights and
the Senate peremptorily demanded his surrender. Carthage was powerless
to refuse the demand; so Hannibal, who had no illusions as to the fate
his malignant and unchivalrous enemies, smarting from their long series
of defeats at his hands, had in store for him, fled from the city which
he had served so long and brilliantly and to whose arms he had brought
imperishable fame. At first the illustrious fugitive sought refuge on
the Kerkenna Islands, off the eastern coast of Tunisia, near the modern
Sfax; but, when the long arm of Rome reached out to pluck him thence, he
again sought safety in flight, this time to Asia Minor, where he found
a welcome at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia. But even there he
was not safe from the hatred of Rome, and in 183 B.C., rather than bring
disaster on those who had befriended him, the great captain died in
exile by his own hand.
Though Rome and Carthage remained outwardly at peace for fifty years,
Carthage, in spite of the numerous restrictions with which her rival
sought to cripple her, so waxed in prosperity and wealth that the Roman
leaders, despairing of wresting from her commercial supremacy, determined
on her destruction. This ruthless decision was inspired by both jealousy
and fear, and, in some measure at least, by the eloquence of the
celebrated orator Marcus Cato, who, as chairman of a commission sent to
Carthage to settle a boundary question, had been so impressed by what he
saw there that thenceforward he devoted himself to inflaming the passions
of his countrymen against Carthage. It is said that after his return
from Africa he never failed to conclude a speech with the impassioned
declaration, “_Delenda est Carthago!_”—“Carthage must be wiped out!”
History has shown that, when one power has determined to attack another,
it has never been found difficult to invent a plausible pretext. In this
instance, however, no pretext was necessary; in deliberately forcing
war upon a people with whom she was at peace, and who wished to remain
at peace, Rome was scourged by the lashes of those terrible sisters,
Hatred, Jealousy, and Fear. No demands, no ultimatum, no declaration of
war preceded the outbreak of hostilities, the news that the Roman fleet
was approaching being the first intimation the Carthaginians had that
they were again to undergo the horrors of war. The expedition landed
unopposed at Utica in 149 B.C., where the Roman commander was waited
upon by peace commissioners sent by Carthage to learn the city’s fate.
They were informed that peace terms would not even be discussed until
the complete disarmament of the city had been effected. Whereupon all
military and naval stores, all arms and armor, whether owned privately
or by the state, even the insignificant remnant of the once all-powerful
fleet, were surrendered.
Now that the city was apparently helpless, and even a semblance of
resistance was out of the question, the Roman commander informed the
Carthaginian envoys of the brutal sentence which had been passed by the
Senate and which he had been ordered to carry out. Carthage was to be
utterly destroyed! But the Romans had made one serious miscalculation;
they had failed to take into account the fighting spirit which can
be aroused in the most unwarlike of peoples, as in the most timid of
animals, when driven to desperation. In fact, the Roman ultimatum had
precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended, for, instead
of paralyzing the Carthaginians with fear, it fanned their smoldering
resentment into a fierce flame of heroism; it inspired them with a
determination to sell their city and their lives at a price which would
stagger Rome.
Now it must be kept in mind that, though the Carthaginians had
surrendered their arms and engines of war, there remained intact the
remarkable system of defenses which made Carthage the most strongly
fortified city of its time. The city, whose population at this period
numbered something over seven hundred thousand, was built upon a
fan-shaped peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, the handle of
the fan corresponding to the narrow isthmus, barely three miles in width,
which afforded communication with the mainland. The sea-front, naturally
precipitous, was rendered virtually impregnable by massive ramparts,
while across the neck of the isthmus, so as to afford protection by an
attack from land, ran a tremendous wall, thirty-three feet in thickness
and forty-five feet high, broken at frequent intervals by lofty towers
from which a withering cross-fire could be brought to bear upon besiegers.
That they had surrendered their catapults—the heavy artillery of the
ancients—did not weaken the determination of the Carthaginians to defend
their beloved city to the bitter end. With beams obtained by tearing
down public buildings, they hastily constructed new engines of war; to
provide the ropes for these, the women (since this was before the vogue
of the boyish bob) sacrificed their hair; for ammunition they tore up the
great stones which paved the Forum. So, when the Romans jauntily advanced
to take possession of a presumably defenseless city, they found the
Carthaginians prepared for a last desperate stand, a hopeless but heroic
defense whose epic story was destined to reverberate down the endless
corridors of time.
The Roman commander, belatedly realizing how formidable had become the
undertaking on which he had embarked so confidently, sat down before
the city walls. For two long years the siege dragged on, the occasional
attacks delivered by the Romans doing more harm to the besiegers than
to the besieged. But Rome’s determination to end for good and all the
threat offered by her great rival never wavered, and in 147 B.C. she
intrusted the command of her armies in Africa to her most brilliant
general, Scipio Africanus the Younger, then only thirty-seven. Scipio was
quick to realize that his most powerful ally in the taking of the city
was famine. Up to this time the Carthaginians had succeeded in obtaining
supplies both by sea and by land, but Scipio now proceeded to build
across the neck of the isthmus a great fortification which effectually
cut off the city’s communications on the land side. His next step was
to block the entrance to the commercial and military harbors by throwing
across the entrance to the little bay on which they opened a gigantic
jetty of hewn stones, thus making impossible relief from the sea. Then,
the enemy completely hemmed in, he sat himself down and waited with such
patience as he could summon for famine to do its ghastly work. So passed
the terrible winter of 147-6 B.C. When, early in the spring, Scipio
renewed his attacks, he was confronted by an enemy gaunt with hunger and
decimated by disease but indomitable still.
Every stronghold, no matter how formidable its defenses, has its weak
point, and Carthage’s, as Scipio discovered, was at the entrance to its
harbors. This, he decided, must be his immediate objective; here he
determined to deliver his grand assault. So, utilizing the jetty which
he had built, he poured his storm-battalions of seasoned legionaries
upon the breakwater and so by the harbor-mouth into the edge of the city
itself. Hurling his troops forward in the mass formations for which the
Romans were famous, gaining ground foot by foot and then only by sheer
weight of numbers, he slowly drove the defenders back upon the Cothon,
or military harbor. This also he stormed, and that night his weary
legionaries bivouacked in the Forum, within the innermost of the city’s
triple walls.
From the Forum to the foot of the precipitous Byrsa Hill, from the brow
of which the citadel frowned down upon the city, is barely a quarter of
a mile, yet so desperate was the house-to-house fighting in the maze of
narrow alleys and crowded, high-walled buildings which formed the lower
town, so frenzied the resistance of the Carthaginians, that it took the
Romans six terrible days to cover that short distance.
Street fighting is always a savage business; in this labyrinth of
lanes and passages and culs-de-sac it was terrible beyond description.
Quarter was neither asked nor given. Women and children were slaughtered
as remorselessly as the men. The streets were carpeted with dead and
dying; their entrances were barricaded with cadavers; the pavements
were slippery with blood; the waters of the harbor and the bay beyond
were reddened by the sanguinary torrent which descended from the city’s
gutters. Huge paving-stones, hurled by the improvised Carthaginian
catapults, crashed into the Roman ranks, crushing their victims into
masses of reeking, quivering flesh which resembled nothing human.
War-elephants, trumpeting with rage and fear, tore through the teeming
thoroughfares, trampling the soldiers underfoot or dashing their brains
out against the walls of the buildings. From the housetops disheveled,
wild-eyed women poured molten pitch upon the attackers, who shrieked
in agony as the flesh was scalded from their bones. Other women, armed
with knives, slipped from their hiding-places as the storming-columns
passed to cut the throats of the wounded and to hideously mutilate them.
Men fought breast to breast with swords and daggers and battle-axes
and spears, and when these were shattered they used their naked hands,
gouging their enemies’ eyeballs from their sockets, tearing out their
throats, even biting each other to death like famished wolves.
Hanging low over the stricken city was a dark pall of dust and smoke,
beneath which the grim specters of lust and hatred went about their
dreadful work. Women were raped in the presence of their dying husbands.
Children were transfixed with spears or torn asunder before their
mothers’ eyes. The priests were murdered on their own altars and sobbed
out their lives at the feet of their gods. Houses were sacked and set
aflame. The barbarian allies of the Romans, with their braided hair and
painted bodies, flitted through the inferno, intent on loot and rapine,
like creatures escaped from the Pit.
The din of battle was terrific; the deep-throated roar of the charging
legionaries, the answering war-cries of the defenders, the shrieks and
groans of the wounded, the shrill imprecations of frenzied women, the
wailing of terrified children, the trumpeting of the war-elephants, the
clash and clang of metal, the thunderous concussion of the catapult
stones, the twang of bowstrings, the whine of arrows, the sickening
_plunk_ as they sank in human flesh—all these combined to make a
hurricane of horrors, a very hell of sound.
Then, at last, came a pause in the slaughter, but not until the proudest
city in the world had been transformed into a shambles, a human
abattoir. Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, agreed to surrender on
the sole condition that the lives of the survivors should be spared.
Scipio accepted, and fifty thousand half-naked, starving wretches—all
that were left alive out of the city’s seven hundred thousand—emerged
from the citadel to claim such mercy as the blood-drunk victors might
show. They were sent to Rome in chains and sold in the market-place as
slaves. But nine hundred fighting-men, deserters to whom Scipio sternly
refused amnesty, barricaded themselves in the great temple and, setting
it on fire, perished in the flames. With them died Hasdrubal’s wife
and children, Hasdrubal himself, a prisoner of the Romans, being an
eye-witness of their heroic end.
The work of Scipio was accomplished, and he returned to Rome. When
consulted by the Senate as to the future of Carthage he declined
to express an opinion, though he is said to have opposed the wanton
destruction of what remained of the city. But the Romans closed their
ears to the counsels of moderation and reason. Too proud to admit it,
they knew in their hearts that fear would haunt them as long as one stone
of Carthage remained upon another. It was decreed, therefore, that the
city should be razed to the ground, the ruins plowed under, and a solemn
curse laid upon any one who should venture to build upon or cultivate the
site. Ten commissioners were appointed to execute the decree. But they
were forestalled in this final act of spite and hatred, in their craving
to wreak vengeance on a corpse, for when the residents of the suburb of
Megara learned that the obliteration of the city had been determined
upon they themselves set the torch to what remained. The conflagration
raged for seventeen days, and when at last it died for want of something
further to consume the once-proud Empress of the Seas lay in ashes.
Cato’s demand had been complied with. _Carthago deleta est._
But the site of Carthage was too important to remain unoccupied for
long, or to be permitted to fall into other and perhaps hostile hands,
and, within less than a quarter of a century of its destruction by
Scipio, Caius Gracchus was despatched with six thousand settlers to
establish there a Roman colony. The project failed to meet with success,
however—perhaps the curse of Rome was still in working order—and, though
Julius Cæsar, sleeping on the Byrsa for a night after the battle of
Thapsus, dreamed of rebuilding the city, the work was not undertaken
until Augustus had ascended the imperial throne.
Then arose upon the Punic ruins a great metropolis which took rank as
the third city in the Roman Empire, rivaling in her opulence and glory
Antioch, Alexandria, even Rome herself. The new Carthage was richer, more
beautiful, more luxurious than the old, the repository of the arts of
Greece and the sciences of Rome, and the cradle of early Christianity.
Whereas the Phenicians had sought merely to produce an effect of massive
weight, the architecture of the Roman city was characterized by beauty of
outline and an almost unequaled wealth of sculptural detail and richness
of decoration. During the second century A.D., Carthage, its material
prosperity now greater than ever, was the scene of the persecution and
martyrdom of thousands of Christians, even women of the noblest birth,
such as Perpetua and Felicitas, being devoured in its amphitheater by the
lions.
Notwithstanding the immense importance of Carthage, the Romans, curiously
enough, made but little attempt to expand their African frontiers, their
trans-Mediterranean territory at this period consisting of little more
than that portion of the modern Tunisia which lies to the east of a line
drawn from Tabarca to Sfax. This formed the Provincia Africa, and it was
from this little triangle of land that the whole of the vast continent
took its name.
But the haughty spirit and iron will of the Romans were broken by
Alaric the Goth, who sacked Rome in 410, so that the empire was already
tottering to its fall when the terrible Genseric, deformed in body and in
mind, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with his barbarian hordes, swept
like a cyclone along the northern shore of Africa, took Carthage in 439,
and made it a Vandal stronghold. But the African empire which the Vandals
had built in a day perished in a night; for less than a century later, in
533 to be exact, the barbarians were defeated and Carthage occupied by a
Byzantine army under the leadership of the famous soldier Belisarius—or
Beli-tzar, the White Prince, to give him his proper name. Within three
months of his landing Belisarius was able to send word to his master
Justinian, at Constantinople, that the Provincia Africa was once more a
part of the empire of Rome.
For a hundred years the Greek emperors kept a precarious hold on what is
now Tunisia; then the flood of Arab conquest broke upon the shores of
North Africa, Roman civilization was swept away along with Christianity,
the priests were murdered on their own altars, the crescent replaced the
cross above such towns as were permitted to remain standing, and Carthage
was stormed by Hassan, who laid the afflicted city in ruins for a second
time, everything that was left above ground being carried away to be
used in the reconstruction and adornment of Tunis, Kairouan, and other
Arab cities. Thenceforward Carthage was to be but a quarry for Arab and
European builders, the Genoese sailors boasting that they never returned
from an African voyage without a ballast of Carthaginian marbles, great
quantities of which, it is said, were utilized in the construction of the
cathedral of Pisa. Only once more does Carthage make its bow to history,
when Louis IX of France, leading the Last Crusade, died from the plague
while encamped upon its site.
For upward of twelve hundred years Tunisia suffered under Arab barbarity
and misrule, and the shores of the Western Mediterranean from Arab
depredations. Then the troop-laden transports of a regenerated France
dropped anchor off La Goulette, and the harassed, war-torn country
entered on a new era of civilization and prosperity under the tricolor.
All this is history, of course, and to my readers doubtless already
familiar, but I offer no apologies for repeating it here, because,
without the background of the Punic Wars, of the Roman, Vandal, and
Byzantine occupations, and the Moslem conquest, it is impossible to
realize the tremendous significance of that sun-drenched hill-slope,
littered with heaps of débris and dotted with excavation mounds, strewn
with the rubble of crumbling walls and shattered marbles, where the
Mistress of the Mediterranean once sat enthroned in her pomp of pride and
power.
CHAPTER VI
ASHES OF EMPIRE
Just as we make the mistake of studying geography with the aid of
large-scale maps, so we are prone to use a magnifying-glass in the
study of ancient history. We envision the classic sites as being far
larger than they really were because we see them through the eyes of
the classical writers. To the stages on which the ancients enacted
those mighty dramas, which shook the world and shaped the course of
history, we have attributed a spaciousness they did not possess. We
think of them in the terms of our own far-flung, mushroom cities,
we measure them by modern municipal standards, when, as a matter of
fact, they were comparatively insignificant in extent according to
present-day ideas. Compared to Greater London, with its area of seven
hundred square miles, or to New York, with its three hundred, the famous
cities of antiquity—Troy, Tyre, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Palmyra, Babylon,
Athens, Rome—would be reckoned to-day as little more than medium-sized
communities and classified as cities of the second and third class by the
Post Office Department at Washington.
And Carthage, despite her wealth and world-power, was no exception, for
the Empress of the Seas never had as great a population as has Baltimore,
and her area, as delimited by the city walls, probably did not equal
that of Camden, New Jersey. The city, as has been said in the preceding
chapter, stood on the outer edge of a small, fan-shaped peninsula bounded
on the north by a large salt lake, the Sebkha en Rouan, on the east and
southeast by the Gulf of Tunis, and on the south and southwest by the
lagoon of El Bahira; while on the west a narrow isthmus, barely two
miles in width, afforded communication with the mainland. The entire
area of this peninsula does not exceed half a hundred square miles, if
that, and considerably less than a fourth of this was contained within
the ramparts, which are said to have measured twelve and a half miles in
circumference.
Of none of the famous cities of antiquity do we possess a more careful
description than that which Appian has given us of Carthage as she stood
at the outbreak of the Third Punic War. In its wealth of facts and
figures it is worthy of Herr Baedeker himself.
The side of the city toward the isthmus was defended by a wall forty-five
feet in height (Diodorus says sixty) and thirty-three in thickness,
interrupted at intervals of two hundred yards by lofty towers; the
“topless towers,” no doubt, for which the city was famous. The seemingly
unnecessary thickness of these tremendous ramparts is explained by
the fact that they were hollow and contained four floors of rooms or
casemates. On the ground floor were stables for three hundred elephants;
on the second, stalls for four thousand cavalry-horses, together with
space for the storage of vast quantities of fodder; while in the two
upper stories were quartered twenty-four thousand fighting-men, who had
with them supplies sufficient to last through a siege of several years’
duration. This single landward wall was, in short, a great fortress,
containing more men and animals than are comprised in two modern army
divisions.
Carthage within the walls—I am referring, of course, to the Punic
city—consisted of three distinct districts. Atop of a small hill, six
hundred feet in height, from which it dominated the entire city, stood
a vast walled inclosure, half-citadel, half-temple, known as the Byrsa.
From this, three broad thoroughfares and an imposing flight of marble
steps led down to the Cothon, or military harbor, which lent its name to
the entire mercantile quarter of the city. To the northward, climbing
part way up the mountain slopes, lay the vast suburb of Megara, where the
wealthy merchants had their villas.
Perhaps the most singular features of the most singular and interesting
city of its time were the two great harbors, both artificial, which
together covered an area of seventy acres. The outer, or commercial,
harbor, a long quadrilateral in shape, had direct access to the sea, or
rather to a sheltered bay, by a canal, the entrance to which was closed
by enormous chains. From the commercial harbor another cutting led into
the Cothon, or naval port, which was circular and fringed by 220 slips,
each large enough to accommodate a war-galley. Flanking the entrances to
these slips were massive Ionic columns, the effect produced being that
of a vast circular arcade. In the center of the Cothon, connected with
the shore by a narrow jetty, was a small round island, on which stood
the Admiralty Palace, surmounted by a lofty lookout tower from which
the grand admiral could obtain an unobstructed view of the harbors, the
city, and the sea. At the back of the slips lay arsenals, storehouses,
workshops, and the barracks of the marines and galley-slaves, the
whole encircled by a wall so high that no inquisitive eye in the outer
harbor or in the city could see what was going on within. In these two
great harbors were respectively fitted out the argosies which made
Carthage the greatest commercial power of her time and the armadas which
threatened Rome with destruction. When, in the seventh century, Carthage
was destroyed by the Arabs under Hassan, he filled up the harbors for
fear the city should rise from its ruins to rival his capital at Tunis.
In recent years, under the direction of French archæologists, they have
been dug out, but only in part, so that to-day the sites, but not the
size, of the original ports are indicated by two insignificant-looking
ponds.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF THE MOLE-MEN
Far to the south, where the Tunisian Sahel runs down to meet the sands
of the Sahara, is the Matmata Plateau, a lofty ridge of limestone
rock honeycombed by the dwellings of a forgotten folk who have led a
troglodyte existence since the world was young]
A few paces to the west of the Cothon, between it and the Byrsa, lay
the Agora, or Forum, within whose precincts the legionaries of Scipio
bivouacked on the night preceding his final onslaught on the city. It
was one of the most important public buildings of Carthage, frequented
by orators, politicians, merchants, and bankers; a combination, as it
were, of the House of Representatives, the New York City Hall, the Law
Courts, and the Stock Exchange. In its spacious colonnaded courtyard
were crucified the admirals and generals who, in accordance with
Carthaginian custom, paid the price of defeat with their lives. From his
lofty watch-tower in the Cothon the grand admiral could look down upon
the scene, could see quite plainly the stark figure of his unfortunate
predecessor gasping out his life upon the cross.
In the Forum, under Roman rule, numerous Christian martyrs died by
torture, though the great amphitheater was probably the scene of the
wholesale executions of the followers of the Nazarene which took place in
the third century of the Christian era. And from the Forum started the
great trade-routes which led into the far interior.
Now it should be clearly understood that the meager remains which the
archæologists have thus far unearthed on the site of Carthage are
almost wholly Roman or Byzantine, and that, barring a number of archaic
Phenician tombs, some enormous blocks of stone which were probably
used in the construction of the Admiralty Palace, and a miscellaneous
collection of objects—vases, votive tablets, inscriptions, utensils,
sacred images, fragments of sculptures—which have been brought
together and arranged by the White Fathers in the little museum they
have established on the Byrsa, almost nothing which can positively
be identified with the Punic city has been found. This is scarcely a
matter for surprise, however, when it is remembered that the Carthage
of the Phenicians was literally wiped out—not merely laid in ruins, you
understand, but the ruins plowed under—upward of two thousand years ago,
and that the great Roman city which later rose upon the site was in its
turn razed to the ground, so that the remnants of Punic civilization must
be buried under many feet of débris, earth, and ashes.
These russet hill-slopes, patched with grass and sprinkled with wild
flowers, present, indeed, an epitome of human history, for they have been
built upon, over and over and over again, by Phenicians, Romans, Vandals,
Greeks, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, and French. To drive a shaft straight
downward through this blood-drenched soil to a depth of, say, a hundred
feet, would be equivalent to retracing the march of mankind for three
thousand years—from the Tunisia of the French to the Karthadasht of Queen
Dido.
* * * * *
It was a perfect spring morning—one of those mornings when one
congratulates one’s self on being alive—when we motored out to Carthage.
Fleecy clouds drifted lazily across the sky, like newly washed sheep
browzing on a hillside pasture. Under the brilliant African sun the
placid surface of the Mediterranean gleamed and glittered as though
strewn with diamonds. The weather was warm, but not too warm for comfort,
and the gentle land-breeze brought to us the fragrance of the wild
flowers which lay in bands of the most vivid colors—scarlet, purple,
bright blue, yellow—across the lower slopes of the encircling ranges.
It is rather less than a dozen miles from Tunis to Carthage, and during
nearly the whole distance the road runs within sight of the great Roman
aqueduct, whose rose-brown arches stride in an undeviating line across
the plain. This titanic work was constructed by the Emperor Hadrian
at a time when the country was threatened by a devastating drought in
order to bring water to Carthage from Zaghouan, eighty miles away. Some
idea of the immensity of the undertaking may be gained from the fact
that it delivered six million gallons a day, part of the way by means
of underground canals, and over the intervening valleys by thousands of
magnificent arches, hundreds of which are still standing. The aqueduct
was destroyed by the Vandals, who appear always to have justified the
modern significance of their name; was restored by the Byzantines; was
again destroyed by the Spaniards; and in 1859 was rebuilt by the reigning
bey in order to supply Tunis, as well as Carthage and the other suburbs,
with pure water. Though iron pipes were used to replace the arches which
had been demolished, the Roman route was followed, and wherever possible
the European builders utilized the ancient masonry channels constructed
by Hadrian’s engineers. They built well, the Romans. I wonder if two
thousand years hence the Croton Aqueduct will be utilized in some form to
supply water to New York.
Of all the famous sites of antiquity, save only Troy (and I speak as one
who has seen all, or nearly all, of them), Carthage is at first view
the most disappointing. It is not difficult to identify the principal
features at Nineveh and of Babylon, both of which probably antedated
the Phenician city by many centuries; but of Carthage literally nothing
remains above the level of the ground, its obliteration having been so
methodically carried out, first by Scipio and then by Hassan, that it is
only within very recent years that the archæologists have succeeded in
obtaining even a general idea of the ground-plan.
Particularly disappointing is the Byrsa, the six-hundred-foot hill on
which stood the citadel and the great temple of Eschmoun. Instead of
being an abrupt, clearly defined eminence, like those on which the
Italian hill-towns stand, it gives the impression, when approached from
the land side, of being not much more than a low ridge topped by a rather
insignificant knoll, so gradual is the ascent from the plain. Its seaward
face, however, falls away quite abruptly.
Looking down from the summit of the Byrsa, one’s attention is immediately
attracted by two small, curiously shaped ponds which lie within a few
yards of the shore. Seen from above, they bear a striking resemblance
to a sickle, the elongated lagoon corresponding to the handle of the
implement and the crescent-shaped one to the blade. And, in a manner
of speaking, a sickle, is what they were; the sickle with which the
Carthaginians reaped the sea-trade of the world and all but mowed
down the Roman sea-power. For the larger of the two ponds is the sole
remaining vestige of Carthage’s great commercial harbor; the smaller, of
the naval port, or Cothon.
It requires a sturdy and well-oiled imagination, however, to recreate on
the grassy shores of these two insignificant ponds the wharves, slips,
dockyards, workshops, storehouses, walls, and watch-towers which made
this now tranquil spot the greatest naval base of ancient times; to
realize that this was once the emporium of all the sea-borne trade of
the world from Syria to Cornwall; that here were launched those terrible
war-galleys, with their brazen prows and bristling banks of oars, which
enabled the Carthaginians to keep the Mediterranean for centuries a Punic
lake. But cross by the narrow isthmus to the little island—an island no
longer—on which the Admiralty Palace stood, and look down into the great
pit dug by the excavators, and any lingering doubts you may have as to
the authenticity of the site will disappear; for on the huge hewn blocks
which lie tumbled pell-mell in the bottom of the cavity is still plainly
discernible the _Tanith_ in red paint which was the Punic sign manual and
crest.
Of the excavated, or partly excavated, remains of Roman Carthage, the
most interesting are the Odéon, the Amphitheater, and the Circus. The
Odéon, or opera-house, a semicircular building with a roof, was erected
in A.D. 204, when the Carthaginians obtained permission to hold the
Pythian Games. Little of it now remains, but its ruins have yielded two
of the finest statues yet unearthed at Carthage, those of Juno Regia and
Venus.
The Amphitheater, judging from what is left of it, must have been
a structure of enormous size—it measured a fifth of a mile in
circumference—and of extreme magnificence, for it was built when Rome was
intoxicated by her wealth and power. Here, during those blood-drenched
years when pagan Rome sought vainly to stamp out the steadily spreading
cult founded by the Man of Nazareth, that “white-robed multitude” of
martyrs died horribly—some on the cross, some at the stake, others
by the claws and fangs of snarling beasts. How little could their
executioners have dreamed that, in the fullness of time, one of the
dungeons in which the martyrs awaited death would be transformed into a
Christian chapel dedicated to two of the most illustrious of them, the
twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, who, accompanied by her friend Felicitas,
left her parents and her baby-in-arms behind, and walked unafraid into
the arena to meet the lions! No wonder that Tertullian of Carthage wrote,
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” For the simple,
loving faith preached by the humble peasant of Judea has spread around
the world and is to-day a living force, while the men who sought to stamp
it out are remembered only by virtue of that fact.
Doubtless because of its tragic associations with the early days of
Christianity, more excavating work has been done in the Amphitheater than
anywhere else in Carthage; the dens for the wild beasts, the dungeons in
which were confined the Christians who were sentenced to fight them, and
a portion of the vast arena in which these dreadful ordeals took place
have been laid bare. They were terribly unequal, those combats between
naked men and savage animals, but, despite the fearful odds, a Christian
occasionally emerged from them alive, as is testified by the inscription
found upon a marble column in one of the subterranean chambers, probably
a dungeon. It was scratched with some sharp instrument—perhaps the point
of a sword—and consists of the single pregnant word, “_Evasi_”—“I have
escaped.”
The Circus, of which only the outline remains, was an enormous structure,
twenty-three hundred feet in length and accommodating nearly a quarter
of a million spectators. The Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, the stands
at the Polo Grounds, are insignificant in comparison. In the Circus were
held the chariot-races to which the Carthaginians were as whole-heartedly
devoted as Americans are to baseball; for if a passion for racing was
ingrained in the character of the European Romans, even more was such the
case with the peoples of their African possessions, where the love of
horses was indigenous.
The colorful and stirring scenes presented by these great race-meetings
need not be left to the imagination, for they are illustrated with a
wealth of detail in the mosaics which have been brought together in the
Musée Alaoui at the Palace of the Bardo, and are described at great
length by the writers of the period. How thoroughly human, how like a
similar event to-day, is the description given us by Ovid, who relates
how he took a girl to the races, how he shielded her face from the sun
with his race-card, how he admired the shapeliness of her leg, and how he
wished that he might see more.
The racing world was divided into four great parties or factions: the
Reds, the Whites, the Greens, and the Blues. The members of each party
regarded those of the others with deep-seated animosity and suspicion,
and, when they eventually developed into political factions, their
rivalries shook the Roman world. Four chariots, each of one color and
each drawn by four horses, raced in a heat. The “racing silks” of the
charioteers consisted of round vizorless caps with floating ribbons and
cloth jerkins in the colors of the faction for which they drove. Round
their bodies were tied the ends of the reins, an arrangement which added
greatly to the excitement of the races by insuring the death of any one
who was thrown, for no Roman holiday was considered complete without its
quota of fatal accidents.
Down the middle of the elliptical course ran the _spina_, a marble
barrier 330 yards in length, adorned with statues, carvings, and columns.
At either end of the _spina_ stood the _metæ_, the turning-points for the
chariots; on these were placed marble dolphins and eggs, seven of each,
corresponding in number with the laps of the race, one being removed by
the attendants as each circuit was completed, very much as signals are
hoisted for the information of the spectators at the conclusion of each
lap of an automobile race. Judging by this, and by the length of the
_spina_, each heat must have been close to three miles in length.
The charioteers received from their enthusiastic adherents the admiration
and adulation which is to-day accorded to a famous baseball player, a
champion prize-fighter, or, in Spain, to a successful matador. Though
they did not earn as much, perhaps, as a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey, a Red
Grange, or even a Tod Sloan, they were lavishly rewarded according to the
standards of the time; for it is recorded that in ten years an African
driver named Crescens won prizes totaling upward of a million and a half
sesterces, or about seventy-one thousand dollars in our money. And one of
the handsomest residences unearthed at Carthage is that of Scorpianus,
one of the most famous charioteers of his time.
[Illustration: HOMES OF THE TROGLODYTES
The dwellings of the Matmata mole-men at Bled-Kebira consist of vaulted
rooms hewn from the living rock, even the bed being one with the floor
The windowless rooms open upon a court or well, the bottom of which is a
score or so of feet beneath the surface of the earth, thus providing the
troglodytes with light and air]
The Carthaginians were confirmed gamblers, and enormous sums were
frequently wagered on the outcome of a chariot-race. This, as might
have been expected, gave rise to the bitterest jealousy between the
adherents of the various factions and to demonstrations of hostility
toward a charioteer who was a favorite in the betting. Many curious
exemplifications of this spiteful spirit may be seen on the _tabulæ
execrationis_ which have been discovered at Carthage. These, as the
name implies, were tablets, usually thin sheets of lead, on which were
scratched execrations or curses directed against those to whom the
authors wished evil. In order that they might speedily gain the attention
of the gods of the underworld to whom they were addressed, they were
either tied by leathern thongs to the gravestones in the cemeteries,
or dropped down the funnel with which each grave was provided so that
libations could reach the ashes of the dead. Of the thousands of such
tablets, dealing with matters of love, lust, war, politics, and sport,
which have been found in the cemeteries of Carthage, one of the most
interesting, as it is one of the most venomous, runs, in part, as follows:
I invoke Thee, by the Great Names, to bind fast every limb and
every nerve of Biktorikos, whom Earth, the Mother of every
living soul, brought forth, the Charioteer of the Blues, and
his horses which he is about to drive.... Bind fast their legs
that they may not be able to start or to bound or to run.
Blind their eyes that they may not see. Rack their hearts and
their souls that they may not breathe.... Bind fast the legs
and hands and head and heart of Biktorikos, Charioteer of the
Blues, to-morrow, and his horses which he is about to drive....
Again I adjure Thee by the God of Heaven above Who sitteth upon
the Cherubim, Who divided the Earth and severed the Sea, Iao,
Abrico, Arbathiao, Sabao, Adonai, to bind fast Biktorikos,
Charioteer of the Blues, and the horses which he is about to
drive ... to-morrow in the Circus. Now! Now! Quickly! Quickly!
As a really polished and comprehensive example of high-class cursing, I
don’t know of anything which can compare with that effort unless it is
the outburst of the exasperated golfer, who, after spending ten strokes
in a sand-bunker, damned “everything over a minute old and an inch high.”
It is a curious and disappointing fact that the largest and most
conspicuous monument on the site of Carthage, the Cathedral of St.
Louis, is not even remotely associated with the great city of antiquity,
but was erected during the eighties to commemorate the achievements of a
French king, Louis IX, who, as has been remarked elsewhere, died in 1270
of the plague when encamped on the Byrsa plateau while leading the eighth
and last crusade. Louis who was canonized in the fullness of time, sleeps
in the church of Monreale, above Palermo, but some relics of the royal
crusader have been brought from Sicily and enshrined in the cathedral
which bears his name. Not far away a small and unimposing chapel, not
much better than the _koubba_ of some Arab marabout, built by Louis
Philippe in 1841, marks the spot where the monarch actually expired while
murmuring the words, “Jerusalem ... Jerusalem....”
But in a tomb under the high altar of the cathedral rests the body of
another fighter for the Faith, who, though as yet uncanonized, deserves
sainthood if the word has any meaning. I refer to Charles Martial
Allemand Lavigerie, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate
of all Africa, superior of the Order of White Fathers, successor to the
see of St. Cyprian, who at Algiers, in 1892, hung up his red hat forever.
Of all that remarkable company of courageous men who have entered the
Dark Continent on missions of exploration, civilization, colonization,
or proselytism, none rendered a greater service to suffering humanity
than this devoted missionary-statesman. He founded the Pères Blancs, that
remarkable order of African missionaries whose humanitarian activities
extend from Morocco to Mozambique; in his relentless war against the
slave-trade he established a chain of missions right across the Sahara
and the Sudan; his tactful and statesmanlike handling of native problems
so raised the prestige of France in North Africa as to draw from Gambetta
the celebrated declaration, “_L’anticlericalisme n’est pas un article
d’exportation_.” Though he has been dead these thirty years and more,
the name of Cardinal Lavigerie is still one to conjure with among
those strange and barbarous peoples who inhabit that vast region which
stretches from the Mediterranean to the Congo, from the Atlantic to the
Nile.
The scientific researches on the site of Carthage, though under the
official supervision of the Department of Antiquities and Arts of the
beylical government, are being mainly conducted by a small group of White
Fathers under the personal direction of the celebrated archæologist and
explorer, Père Delattre. With his powerful frame, his ruddy cheeks, his
twinkling eyes, and snowy, patriarchal beard, Father Delattre is one
of the most picturesque and interesting figures whom I met in Africa.
In accordance with the highly sensible custom of the order, he wears a
modified form of the native costume—a flowing burnous of creamy white and
the red _chéchia_ with its long blue tassel—so that he resembles a jolly
old Moslem _mollah_ rather than a Christian priest. An octogenarian, he
is as robust and agile as most men of half his years, and I must confess
that as he strode across the rugged terrain where the work of excavation
is being carried on it taxed my endurance to keep pace with him.
Father Delattre’s chief interest is the Lavigerie Museum, housed in a
modest building on the Byrsa, where, thanks to his indefatigable effort,
there has been brought together an absolutely unique collection of
columns, statues, sarcophagi, mosaics, amphoræ, stellæ, inscriptions,
bas-reliefs, jewelry, and utensils of various kinds illustrative of the
various phases of the city’s long and varied history. Here, brought from
the early Punic tombs behind the Byrsa, are tear-glasses of Phenician
glass, fragile and iridescent as the wing of a butterfly, in which the
great ladies of Dido’s time carried their cosmetics just as American
women carry “compacts” to-day. In this glass case is a necklace of as
exquisite design and workmanship as anything that Tiffany or Cartier
could show; perhaps—who knows?—it once encircled the white neck of
Sophonisba. Over there is an extraordinary collection of lamps, the
finest and most complete in existence: cheap little lamps of terra-cotta
which gleamed from the windows of humble dwellings; elaborately carved
lamps which shone on the sumptuous dinner-tables of great nobles and rich
merchants; lamps of porphyry and marble which guttered on the altars
of the gods. And there are thousands and thousands of bas-reliefs and
inscriptions, on which appear such familiar religious symbols as the
fish, the lamb, the anchor, and the crown, associated with the worship,
persecution, and martyrdom of the early Christians.
[Illustration: THE VOICE FROM THE MINARET
As the sun sinks behind the rim of the Sahara the shrill voice of the
muezzin quavers across the housetops and palm-groves in the call to
evening prayer, the Moslem profession of faith—_Ash hadu illa illaha ill
Allah, wa ash haduinna Mohammed an rasool Allah_....]
The most interesting objects in the museum, however, according to my way
of thinking, are three or four sarcophagi, some of them dating back to
seven hundred years before the Christian era, which have been brought
here from the ancient tombs. Their immense significance to the student
of history lies not so much in their great age, or in the tolerable
state of preservation of the bodies which they contain, but rather
in the recumbent figures of the dead which are carved upon the lids
and which enable us to know how they looked in life. For, as careful
comparison with the bodies has shown, they are unquestionably portraits
of the deceased. One of them represents a priest of Eschmoun, a man with
serene and dignified features, an abundance of curling hair, luxuriant
mustaches and beard. So benign is his expression that it is difficult to
conceive of him as having laid the quivering bodies of little children
on the brazen, white-hot arms of Baal. Another, judging by the richness
of the dress and the extreme refinement of the features, is evidently
that of a lady of the aristocracy, her hair combed back from her brow
and braided into two long plaits which fall down to frame her face, her
slender figure clad in a girdled robe of some soft, diaphanous material
which sweeps down in stately lines to her little sandaled feet, half
concealing, half revealing, her exquisitely proportioned figure. A third,
which has been identified as that of a priestess of Tanith and is the
finest of all, shows a grandly modeled woman in the prime of life clad in
a semi-transparent garment of rose-color. In one hand she holds a dove,
in the other a bowl of offerings; the Egyptian head-dress which enframes
her graciously beautiful face is surmounted by a vulture, the symbol
of Isis. They must have been, on the whole, a fine-looking race, these
people of Punic Carthage, the innate dignity which stamps their faces
causing one to overlook the over-prominent Semitic noses and the sensual
Eastern lips.
Throughout our visit to Carthage we had been pestered almost beyond
endurance by a horde of Arab ragamuffins who clamorously besought us to
purchase coins of bronze and silver of whose authenticity I was more than
a little doubtful, but which they claimed to have picked up on the site.
One of these importunate youngsters, bolder than his fellows, followed us
into the museum garden. I was about to purchase his wares in order to get
rid of him when Father Delattre intervened.
“Would you care,” he asked, “to have a genuine Carthaginian coin?”
I assured him earnestly that few things would give me greater
satisfaction, whereupon he presented me with a sesterce of the Roman
period bearing on its face in high relief a portrayal of a chariot drawn
by four horses; one of the very sesterces, it pleases me to think, which
were flung into the arena of the Circus to reward the famous charioteer
Scorpianus, the Pop Geers of his time. I carry it in my purse, along
with a coin of Alexander the Great which I picked up in Macedonia, and
another, minted during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, which I acquired in
Babylon. They serve to remind me, these tiny pieces of silver, that there
have been other civilizations than those epitomized by Fifth Avenue and
Piccadilly and the Rue de la Paix; that there were great cities, mighty
empires, culture, luxury, in those dim and far-off days when history was
beginning and the world was very young.
Before he would say good-by Father Delattre insisted on presenting us
with his picture, to obtain which he ran as nimbly as a boy up the steep
Byrsa Hill on which the monastery of the Pères Blancs stands. With my
fountain-pen he wrote his name across it; then we shook hands with the
grand old man and stepped into the waiting car.
“Just a moment,” I said to Harvey, as we breasted the brow of the plateau
and the road to Tunis unrolled its twenty kilometers like a lariat tossed
idly upon the ground. “Stop the car. I wish to take a final look.”
Standing in the tonneau, I looked down upon that stage on which has
been enacted so much of the history of the world—the little bay where
Dido landed; the harbor in which the galleys of Hamilcar were moored;
the slopes up which the legionaries of Scipio fought their bloody way;
the site of the Amphitheater in which the martyrs died; the traces of
the Forum which was turned into a stable by Genseric’s Vandal horsemen;
the rolling plain across which surged behind their green standards the
Moslem hordes of Hassan; the little knoll on which St. Louis pitched his
final camp.... “_Sic transit gloria mundi_,” I thought.
But my reflections were rudely interrupted as, with a great wheezing and
puffing, a little covered motor-van came rocking toward us. It was driven
by a fresh-faced, blue-eyed youngster in khaki trousers and a flannel
shirt, bare of head and neck and arm. Beside him on the narrow seat sat
two other youngsters similarly clad. They waved their hands in friendly
fashion and shouted greetings to us in our own language. As the car
plunged past on its way to Carthage we could see the legend, painted in
staring black on its gray sides:
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHÆOLOGY
CARTHAGINIAN SECTION
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
ANN ARBOR, U. S. A.
CHAPTER VII
TO KAIROUAN THE HOLY
It is a fortunate circumstance for foreigners of an inquiring turn of
mind that the French occupation of Tunisia met with armed resistance from
the fanatical inhabitants of Kairouan. Had they peacefully accepted the
protectorate, the beautiful and highly interesting religious sanctuaries
of the Holy City of Africa would be rigidly closed to unbelievers, as is
the case in all the other cities of the regency. But they _did_ resist
and were punished in a fashion peculiarly humiliating to the proud spirit
of the Moslem by having their sacred places thrown open to the inspection
of infidels, Kairouan being the only place in all of French North Africa
where non-Moslems enjoy this privilege.
Personally, I always feel a sense of embarrassment upon entering a
mosque; to do so is an affront, whether intentional or not, to another
people’s religion. To see hordes of tourists, guide-book in hand, camera
under the arm, over-size slippers flapping from their heels, shuffling
about an edifice where men are engaged in their devotions, peering
inquisitively into venerated shrines, commenting in audible whispers
on the genuflections of the pious, always strikes me as a rather sorry
spectacle, a breach of good manners and good taste. Were a party
of Moslem visitors to enter a Christian place of worship and behave
precisely as I have seen Christian tourists conduct themselves in Moslem
mosques in Egypt and Turkey, a scandalized sexton would promptly ask them
to leave, if, indeed, no worse befell them.
As the motor goes it is about six score miles, over a tolerably smooth
highway, from Tunis to Kairouan, the route which we followed being the
one taken thirteen hundred years before by the Arab invaders of Tunisia,
though in the opposite direction. It has been in turn a highway of
history, a course of conquest, a path of piety, a trail of torture, a
thoroughfare of travel, a track of trade, a route of romance, this great
trunk-road which leads from the Mediterranean to the desert. It has
shaken to the ponderous tread of Carthaginian elephants, has been rutted
by the tires of Roman chariots, has felt the padded feet of Numidian
camels, has been trampled by the hoofs of Arab chargers, has known Berber
slippers and Byzantine sandals, the calloused soles of monks and friars,
the spurred heels of knights and men-at-arms, the dragging footsteps of
slaves and captives, the measured tramp of modern soldiery. He who can
travel that road without being stirred by thoughts of the mighty events
which have taken place along it has no poetry or imagination in his soul;
the only thing that would give pause to such a person is the upraised
hand of a traffic-cop.
Strange figures flit past us in endless panorama as the big car hurtles
southward, its siren roaring a hoarse warning. A group of Berber women,
their garments of home-dyed blue cut in graceful, classic lines, their
foreheads tattooed with the cross which is a reminder that the natives
of this country were once Christians. A wealthy Arab, wrapped in a
burnous of palest blue, astride a handsome mule with gold-incrusted
saddle-cloth and scarlet leather trappings. A party of desert nomads,
lean, hawk-nosed men, their mouths and nostrils swathed in blue veils
against the suffocating dust, rock by atop of camels, driving before them
a herd of other, camels, destined for the Tunis market. Close to the road
a peasant is tilling his fields with a yoke of snow-white oxen, his plow
an iron-shod beam of wood, as in the days of Abraham. On yonder hillside
a slim, dark-eyed Bedouin girl tends her flock of painted sheep. We
roar through straggling, mud-walled hamlets, before whose coffee-houses
lounge turbaned, white-robed sheikhs—bearded, patriarchal figures who
might have stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament. Droves
of produce-laden donkeys scatter suddenly at the sound of our horn, the
cursing muleteers sometimes throwing the stubborn little animals bodily
into the ditch to give us room. We pass a compact column of khaki-clad,
dust-caked _tirailleurs_, rifles bristling on their shoulders, sweating
beneath their packs, foot-slogging over Africa. Herds of foul-smelling
goats kick up tornadoes of yellow dust as they stampede across the plain.
We take the narrow bridges, spanning the deep gorges which the mountain
streams have gashed as with a knife in the soft soil, like a frightened
cat on the top of a back-yard fence. And away to the southward, in the
far blue distance, towering above Tunisia, rise the wild crags of the
Djebel Zaghouan.
For hour after hour we traverse waterless and treeless wastes, their
yellow-brown expanses broken here and there by patches of bright green
where peasant farmers are striving to wring a meager living from the arid
soil. The hills which fringe the horizon have been stripped of their
forest clothing by fire and wanton destruction, and now they rise, naked
and grim, against the hot blue sky. It is hard to conjure up a picture
of those golden days when to Horace an African farm was a synonym for
boundless fertility, luxury, and wealth; or to accept the assertions of
the early chroniclers that, before the Arabs laid the country bare, one
could ride from Tripoli to the Atlantic with trees to shade him all the
way.
Yet, if the ancient writers are to be believed, what is now an exception
must have been at one period the rule. Vast areas of plain and mountain,
now destitute of tree or shrub, must have been green with forest or
jungle. Great numbers of savage beasts once roamed a region which to-day
can show no wild animals save prowling jackals and occasional gazelles.
From the Tunisian forests came the wild beasts which were used not only
in the arenas of Roman Africa but in the Colosseum of Rome itself.
Elephants roamed the land in herds and were used as the first wave of
attack by the Carthaginian armies; it is recorded that Juba lost the
Battle of Thapsus because his war-elephants, recently captured in the
forests, were untrained. The Roman mosaics preserved in the museums at
Sousse and the Palace of the Bardo depict hunting scenes in which the
game were lions, tigers, leopards, deer, and wild boar. In “Salammbô”
Flaubert tells us how the mutinous mercenaries, marching upon Carthage,
found the road through Sicca Veneria (the modern Kef) lined with crosses
bearing crucified lions.
Insufficient rainfall, a scarcity of springs and streams—these always
have been and always will be the chief problems of the Tunisian farmer.
The soil itself, even the sand of the Sahara, is amazingly fertile; make
no mistake about that. All that it needs is water to cause it to blossom
like the rose. This difficulty the Romans overcame with astonishing
energy, patience, and success, as is attested by the ruined waterworks
which to-day strew not only the plains but the high, desolate plateaus.
They did in Africa two thousand years ago what we are doing to-day in New
Mexico and Arizona, transforming deserts into gardens by the miracle of
water. Not a gallon of the precious fluid was permitted to go to waste.
Every stream was dammed at frequent intervals, just as we have dammed the
Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Gila, the water thus impounded being
distributed by a vast network of canals and aqueducts. Every farmstead
had its wells and tanks, every city and town its elaborate water-system.
The land thus systematically watered was cultivated with a science and
thoroughness which many of our own farmers might profitably emulate
to-day. Horses and cattle, sheep and goats, found rough but ample
pasturage upon the hills. Vineyards covered the lower slopes with their
ordered rows. Figs, dates, apricots, and pomegranates flourished in the
warmer districts. In the spring the alluvial plains became a sea of
waving grain, which was produced in such quantities that Tunisia became
the granary of Italy, and it was commonly said that he who held Africa
could starve Rome.
Nestling in the shadow of the rugged Djebel Zaghouan, from whose summit,
forty-two hundred feet in height, can be obtained a view which embraces
half Tunisia, is the unkempt little village of Zaghouan. One’s first
impression is of a pleasant, restful place, for in the outskirts are
many gardens, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of roses, lilies,
violets, and orange-blossoms; but the town itself, dirty, unpaved,
and squalid, reeks with odors of quite a different kind. Zaghouan is
the Danbury of Tunisia, having a virtual monopoly of the manufacture
of _chéchias_, the tasseled caps of red felt which are the universal
head-gear of the natives. A mile or so above the town are the ruins of
the Nymphea, the colonnaded temple built by the Romans over the famous
spring which eighteen hundred years ago supplied Carthage with water as
it now does Tunis. Here commenced that remarkable system of conduits and
aqueducts, constructed in the reign of Hadrian, whose mammoth arches
still march across the Carthaginian plain.
Another hour or so of dusty motoring, and the domes and minarets and
turreted ramparts of the Holy City rise to view. What induced the Arab
conquerors to choose such a site for their capital and chief sanctuary
passes the comprehension, for Kairouan lies in the middle of a dreary,
waterless expanse, thirty-odd miles from the sea and even farther from
the mountains, without an adequate water-supply or natural resources,
swept by cold winds in winter and scorched by the pitiless summer sun.
It does not even have military strength to recommend it, for it has
never withstood a siege successfully, having been taken and retaken at
least a dozen times. Though it is on the road to nowhere, so far as its
geographical situation is concerned, the followers of Mohammed regard it
as a half-way stop on the road to heaven, seven pilgrimages to Kairouan
being deemed equivalent to a _hadj_ to Mecca itself.
A distinctly medieval appearance is lent the city by its massive
crenelated wall, pierced by five gates and broken by numerous bastions
and towers. The essentially religious character of the place is
immediately made apparent by its most fantastic sky-line, which is broken
by the domes and minarets of the hundred or more _zaouias_ and mosques,
the whole dominated by the enormous tower of the Djamaa Sidi Okba, which,
visible for many miles, rears itself skyward like a great brown finger
pointing to heaven.
Bear with me for a single paragraph while I give a thumb-nail sketch
of Kairouan’s history, which is the history of Arab rule in North
Africa. Twelve years, then, after the camel-driver of Mecca who became
the Prophet had gone to join the houris in the Moslem paradise, his
son-in-law Othman ibn Affan (his son-in-law twice over, in fact, for
he had married two of Mohammed’s daughters) was elected Khalifa, or
Successor. To him fell the congenial task of carrying on the work of
invasion and conquest which had been prosecuted with such success by
the preceding khalifas, Abou Bekr and Omar, who, having subjugated the
decaying empires of Byzantium and Persia, had turned their attention to
the Maghreb—“the West.” When, in 644, Othman assumed the green mantle
of the Prophet, Egypt had already been conquered by the Arab armies
under Amr ibn al Asi, who, by way of celebrating his victory, destroyed
the Alexandrine library, which contained the finest collection of books
and manuscripts in the world. He gave as a reason for this utterly
inexcusable act of vandalism—an act which at one stroke wiped out unique
and authentic records of the ancient world covering many hundreds of
years—the naïve explanation, “If these books contradict the Koran, they
are false; if they agree with it, they are useless.” In the year of
Othman’s succession, Amr ibn al Asi occupied Tripolitania, and three
years later the Arab hosts poured through the south of Tunisia into
Ifrikya and drove out the Byzantines. The administration of the new
province was intrusted by the khalifa to that fiercest of all Moslem
warriors, Okba ibn Nafi, better known as Sidi Okba, who, in the year 670,
founded the city of Kairouan, which became in time the capital of all
the Moslem possessions in the Maghreb, and, by virtue of the sanctity
conferred upon the place by the saints who were buried there, a religious
focus which drew pilgrims all the way from Egypt to Morocco.
By getting an early start from Tunis, one can lunch at Kairouan, spend
the afternoon in visiting the principal mosques, and sleep that night in
the really comfortable hostelry at Sousse. For the casual traveler this
is perhaps the best plan, for the accommodations at Kairouan, though
tolerable enough, are remarkable neither for cleanliness nor comfort, the
Hôtel Splendide—named with a singular lack of appropriateness—being one
of those cold, gloomy little hotels, so common in North Africa, where the
sheets, table-cloths, and napkins are always damp, and where, between
courses, the guest produces a fictitious warmth by sitting on his hands.
To visit the mosques of Kairouan an order is required from the
_controleur civil_—a mere formality. That, together with a pair of red
slippers large enough to pull over one’s shoes, and a handful of small
coins with which to reward the numerous attachés of the ecclesiastical
buildings and to bestow on the holy men and mendicants who crouch at
their entrances, and we are all set for a tour of the sacred city.
On arriving in Rome for the first time, one’s footsteps turn
instinctively in the direction of St. Peter’s; the visitor to Kairouan
makes directly for the Great Mosque, the Djamaa Sidi Okba. As befits the
premier sanctuary of Africa, it is of enormous size, covering an area of
three acres. Next to nothing of the original structure remains, however,
for it has been rebuilt four times, that which we now see dating from
the early part of the ninth century. Just as the Campanile at Venice
overshadows and dwarfs those two most beautiful buildings, St. Mark’s
and the Doge’s Palace, so the tremendous height and bulk of the square
minaret of the Great Mosque reduces the lovely cloistered building at
its feet to comparative insignificance. As is the case with most of
the famous sanctuaries of Islam, the mosque is built about an enormous
court, surrounded by a very imposing double colonnade, paved with marble,
and provided with fountains in which, as prescribed by the Koran, the
pious must bathe their faces, hands, and feet before entering the place
of worship. Rising from the center of the court is an ancient stone
sun-dial. As the hour of prayer approaches a venerable employee of the
mosque intently watches the creeping shadow, and from the summit of the
lofty tower another attendant watches him. When the edge of the shadow
touches the proper meridian, the man by the sun-dial abruptly raises his
arm, like a semaphore, whereupon a large white flag is broken out from
the gallows-like staff on the tower, and the musical drone of the muezzin
floats out across the city summoning the faithful to prayer: “_Ash hadu
illa ill Allah, wa ash hadu inna Mohammed an rasool Allah!_”
Though the exterior of the Great Mosque leaves much to be desired from
an architectural point of view, the interior, with its maze of horseshoe
arches supported on a forest of marble and porphyry columns, is a very
miracle of form and color. At the end of the central nave, orientated,
of course, toward Mecca, is the _mihrab_, or sacred niche, flanked by
two magnificent columns of variegated marble from Cæsarea in Algeria,
which, it is said, one of the Byzantine emperors offered to buy for
their weight in gold. The _mihrab_ is lined with glorious old tiles in
the “lost shade” of Persian blue, brought from Baghdad by one of the
princes of the Aghleb dynasty, who contributed them to the mosque, along
with the rare Eastern woods which form the _mimbar_, or pulpit, as an act
of penance for having defiled the sacred precincts by a drunken orgy.
The endless vistas of columns and arches; the rich, mellow tints of the
tiles, woods, and marbles; the soft light which filters in through the
colored glass of the windows in the great dome—these combine to produce
an effect of beauty, dignity, and solemnity unsurpassed by any religious
edifice in the world.
Very imposing, with its five great domes, is the Djamaa Amor Abbada,
or, as it is better known, the Mosque of the Saber. A purely modern
structure, with an interior which has little to recommend it, it takes
its name from the enormous saber, as long as a man and almost as heavy,
which hangs against the _mimbar_ as a reminder, I suppose, that Islam is
a religion of the sword. It is venerated as the work of the founder of
the mosque, Amor Abbada, an illiterate blacksmith saint, who, doubtless
bored to extinction by the austere life expected of a marabout, amused
himself by forging these huge clumsy swords. Another of his efforts
took the form of a great pipe, fully five feet in length and painted a
vivid green, which, so the attendant gravely informed us, the saint was
wont to smoke. When my daughter flippantly remarked that it must have
required two strong men to hold it and a five-pound sack of Bull Durham
to fill its capacious bowl, the priest replied reprovingly that Amor
Abbada was a giant and that such things were trifles to him. Which serves
as an illustration of how quickly legends grow in the credulous and
superstitious East, for Amor Abbada, far from being a figure of remote
antiquity, died only a few years before the outbreak of our Civil War. As
a matter of fact, it has never been very difficult to acquire sainthood
in Moslem countries; almost any one can do it who has a well-developed
sense of the dramatic.
By far the most interesting and important of all the religious edifices
of Kairouan is the Djamaa Sidi Sahab, more usually referred to as the
Mosque of the Barber. In it rests, within a richly decorated catafalque,
the body of Sidi Sahab (the Companion), or, to give him his own sonorous
name, Abou-Zamat Obeid Allah ibn Adam el Beloui, who earned his title by
being one of the original ten disciples of Mohammed. Mortally wounded
during the storming of Sbeitla in 656, he found his last resting-place in
the soil of Kairouan. The frequently repeated assertion that El Beloui
was the Prophet’s barber is absurd, as every student of Islamic history
knows, for his nearest approach to the tonsorial trade was in shearing
off the heads of unbelievers when he took part in the conquest of Egypt
and the invasion of Ifrikya. Here is how the ridiculous legend arose.
(It is Mr. Cyril Fletcher Grant who tells the story.) At the last solemn
interview when the Prophet bade farewell to his Sahabs—his Knights of
the Round Table—he gave El Beloui three hairs from his beard, that by
them he might be recognized on the Day of Judgment. El Beloui directed
that the precious relics should be buried with him, one to be laid on his
lips, one on his heart, and one under his right arm, in token that his
eloquence, his love, and his strength had all been devoted to the service
of his adored master. And, as his reward for a loyalty which reached
beyond the grave, he is to-day referred to as a barber!
“But,” exclaimed the American flapper whom we met in the hotel in
Kairouan and to whom I repeated the story of El Beloui, “I always
supposed that the mosque was named after the Barber of Seville. I
thought he was one of those Moors who were driven out of Spain by Queen
Elizabeth. But history is so hard to remember, isn’t it?”
The architectural glories of the Djamaa Sidi Sahab I shall leave to
those who are better qualified than I am to describe them, and lead
you straight through the bewildering series of tiled atria, colonnaded
courts, and marble cloisters to the holy of holies itself, the shrine in
which the Companion lies sleeping. He rests beneath a splendid catafalque
covered, as is the Moslem custom, with magnificent shawls, brocades, and
embroideries. Crossing the floor one’s slippered feet sink deeply into
the soft mellow-toned carpets with which it is overlaid, and for the
manufacture of which Kairouan is famous. The tomb is surrounded with an
elaborately wrought iron grille on which tiny lamps, ostrich-eggs, glass
balls, and little sacks of earth from the sacred soil of Mecca have been
hung by the pious. From above droop, in folds of red and green, dozens of
religious banners, sent by the rich and powerful from all corners of the
Moslem world in tribute to this great Islamic hero.
The sun, a dazzling sphere of reddish gold, was sinking behind the Djebel
Zaghouan when we left the Holy City by its eastern gate and took the road
to Sousse. The multitude of towers and minarets and domes which proclaim
afar the city’s sacred character rose, as though hewn from amethyst
and coral, against the painted sky. To our ears, borne faintly on the
night breeze, came the Angelus of Islam, the muezzin’s quavering call to
evening prayer.
* * * * *
Though the regency of Tunisia barely exceeds in area the State of New
York, it has an amazing variety of scenery, soil, and climate for so
small a country. I can recall no other region where one can see so many
of North Africa’s physiographical characteristics in so brief a time. In
a journey no longer than from Albany to Buffalo, a journey which can be
made quite comfortably by motor-car between dawn and dark of a single
day, the traveler can see the sun rise out of the Mediterranean from the
heights of Carthage; traverse a highly cultivated country-side checkered
with prosperous farms and thriving gardens; plunge into great forests of
cork and oak and pine; follow through leafy glens and rocky gorges the
course of a river longer than the Hudson; climb a mountain range whose
peaks tower for a mile into the blue; drop down upon treeless steppes
carpeted with fields of grain; whirl through endless orchards of olive,
fig, and orange; and dine on a desert oasis, amid a grove of date-palms,
while the sun sinks behind the Saharan sand-dunes.
[Illustration: THE MARABOUT IN THE DESERT
A straggling, low, white building—the burial-place and shrine of some
long-dead holy man—a mysterious green door, a plastered dome, a solitary
palm-tree, the brooding desert all around, and the heavens aflame with
the unforgettable glory of an African sunset]
Tunisia may be divided into five districts, each having its distinctive
topography, climate, and products. In the extreme north, in that little
triangle formed by the Tunisian Atlas, the frontiers of Algeria, and
the sea, is a mountainous, well-watered region with fertile, highly
cultivated valleys and, on the slopes of the mountains, great forests
of cork and pine. The northeastern corner of the regency, including the
peninsula of Cape Bon, the country around Tunis, and the Carthaginian
plain, has a soil and climate peculiarly adapted to the growing of citrus
fruits—the land of the orange and the lemon. Extending from the Atlas
southward to the fringes of the desert are the grain lands of Tunisia—a
bleak, treeless, monotonous expanse of high plateaus and rolling steppes,
normally arid but fertile under irrigation, known as the Tell. Lying
to the east of the Tell, bordering the eastern coast of the regency
from the Gulf of Hammamet to the Gulf of Gabés, is a slender strip of
well-watered, highly fertile land, nowhere much over a dozen miles in
width, called the Sahel. And far to the south, below both the Tell and
the Sahel,
That narrow strip of herbage strown, between the desert and the sown,
are the sand-dunes, _shats_, and oases of the Tunisian Sahara.
Of these five districts, the most important from an agricultural point
of view is the Sahel. This narrow coastal plain, whose _chef-lieu_ is
Sousse, is a region of almost inexhaustible productiveness, a fat land, a
land of live stock, grain, fruit, and vine. For ages past the rich earth
has been washed down from the hills to collect along the shore in deep
layers of alluvial soil, which, scratched and watered, becomes a Garden
of the Lord.
That portion of the Sahel in the vicinity of Sousse is one vast forest of
olive-trees. For miles we motored between the ordered gray-green rows,
the trees so old, so bent, so gnarled, so twisted, that they might well
have been planted by the Romans. Nor, indeed, is that at all improbable,
for olive-trees frequently attain enormous age. In the Garden of
Gethsemane, above Jerusalem, the monks reverently point out two venerable
olive-trees beneath which, they assert, Christ was accustomed to converse
with His disciples.
Sousse, the second most important city of Tunisia, is a charming place.
Its buildings, white as though cut from chalk, are set on the slopes
of a natural amphitheater which rises quite sharply from the harbor,
so that, seen from the sea, it bears a certain resemblance to Algiers.
The Hadrumetum of the ancients, it was already old when Dido ruled at
Carthage; it was hoary with antiquity when London was a cluster of wattle
huts inhabited by painted savages, when Paris had yet to be founded amid
the swamps beside the Seine. In the beginning a Phenician commercial
outpost, established by merchants trading out of Tyre, it become a
Roman colony under Trajan and so remained until the second century of
the Empire, when the Vandals came. But the Vandals were driven out by
Belisarius the Byzantine; and the Byzantines, in their turn, gave way
before the fierce onslaught of the Arab hosts; whereupon the crescent
replaced the cross, its churches were destroyed or converted into
mosques, the Citadel was renamed the Kasbah, and Sousse became a corsair
stronghold, one of its rulers being the terrible Dragut, the most feared
sea-rover of his time.
At Sousse, as elsewhere in French North Africa, the modern city, the
European quarter, has sprung up outside the walls of the old town. And
in no other African city that I know is the contrast thus presented so
striking. _La ville française_, with its broad boulevards and double rows
of shade-trees, its banks, consulates, hotels, churches, brasseries,
cinemas, and ornate public buildings, its numerous little parks and
its inevitable Grande Place, is just such a provincial town as may
be found by the dozen in the south of France. But stroll through one
of the ancient gateways which give access to the Arab city, and you
step backward a thousand years, for crowded within the bastioned and
crenelated ramparts is a tangle of tortuous lanes and dim bazaars lined
by hole-in-the-wall shops (here not a figure of speech, for many of them
are actually built in the wall itself), while, high above the noisy,
noisome town, rise, slender, serene, and snowy, the minarets of the Great
Mosque and the frowning battlements of the Kasbah.
One of the most conspicuous buildings of the old town is the
Ksar-er-Rabit, originally a Byzantine stronghold, but upon the Moslem
conquest transformed into a _rabit_, one of the military outposts,
half-monastery and half-fortress, established by the Arabs along the
frontiers of their far-flung empire. These rabits were garrisoned by a
sect of militant monks, somewhat akin to the Knights Templars, known as
_Mirabits_, who were praying when they were not fighting, and from their
name was derived the word _marabout_—a religious ascetic, a fakir, a holy
man.
* * * * *
The traveler in Tunisia cannot but be impressed by the evidences which
he sees on every hand of the enormous population and amazing prosperity
of this region under the Romans. The whole country-side is strewn with
reminders of this vanished civilization, for Byzacium, as the Romans
called this region, supported a numerous agricultural population and
was dotted with flourishing cities and towns. Everywhere rise the ruins
of cities, buildings, aqueducts, and arches, monuments, monoliths, and
heaps of sculptured stones. Yet, despite these indisputable proofs of a
one-time wealth and greatness, it is difficult, nay, almost impossible,
to realize that dense forests once spread themselves over yonder naked
hills, that great cities stood on their flanks, and that from these arid
steppes came the grain which fed the mouths of Rome.
Of all the monuments of this departed glory, the most impressive, the
most astounding, is the amphitheater at Thysdrus, or, to give it its Arab
name, El Djem. Set in a solitude of orange sand, where the Sahel runs
out in the Sahara, it is one of the most remarkable structures that I
have ever seen. It rises from a shallow, saucer-like depression in the
plain, as grandly as the pyramids at Gizeh, as abruptly as the walls
of the Grand Cañon. As we topped a rise in the road we could see its
towering, rose-brown walls, honeycombed with arches, twenty kilometers
away. From a distance it is profoundly imposing; close at hand it is
positively overwhelming. The grandest Roman monument in all Africa, it is
perhaps the best preserved building of its kind in the world, scarcely
inferior to the Colosseum at Rome. There is nothing to compare with it
in the monumental architecture of modern times. It is so large that it
completely conceals the native town which lies behind it. Though used
by the Arabs for centuries as a quarry, it was so colossal, so strongly
built, as to defy their attempts at destruction. The achievement of
building it is the more astounding when one realizes that the stones
used in this mountain of masonry were hauled by gangs of slaves and
teams of elephants and yokes of oxen, over roads specially constructed
for the purpose, from quarries twenty miles away. The mere sight of
that tremendous structure, rising solitary, majestic, and time-defying
from the lonely plain, does more than all the histories ever written to
impress one with the might of Rome.
Of Thysdrus, the splendid city which once stood upon the site of El Djem
and which gave to Rome three emperors named Gordian, nothing remains save
the amphitheater and some stones and marbles built into the wretched
native dwellings. The construction of the amphitheater is attributed to
Gordian the Elder, who sat on the imperial throne in the first half of
the third century A.D. During the blood-stained years which followed
its erection its arena was the scene of the torture and martyrdom of
thousands of Christians; the dungeons in which the condemned were
confined and the dens of the wild beasts may still be seen.
Perhaps the most dramatic chapter in the long history of the great
building took place, however, shortly after the Arab invasion, when the
Berbers, under the leadership of Koceila, rose in revolt against their
Moslem conquerors. When, toward the close of the seventh century, Koceila
fell in battle on the Medjerda, his place was taken by a remarkable
woman, an African Joan of Arc, known to history as El Kahena, the
Priestess, for her real name is unknown. Convinced that the Arabs were
fighting only for booty, she met and defeated them in a great battle
near Gabés and then proceeded to lay desolate the whole Sahel, razing
the cities, destroying the water-systems, burning the forests and the
orchards. But in 703, realizing that a further prosecution of the war was
hopeless, she intrenched herself in the amphitheater of El Djem. Here she
sustained a long siege, but, driven by starvation to lead a forlorn hope,
she was killed in battle, her head being sent to the khalifa as a sign
that Berber resistance to Arab rule was at an end.
[Illustration: IN THE LAND OF POLYGAMY AND PASSION
The heroine of Mrs. Hull’s novel ran away with an Arab sheikh. Would you
care to run away with this one?
But this beauty of the harem, though only her lustrous and provocative
eyes show above her veil, is undeniably alluring]
It is a little over two score miles from El Djem to Sfax, and, providing
you have sufficient horse-power under the hood of your motor, you can
cover the distance in as many minutes, for the road, like all of those
which the French have constructed in Tunisia, must have been laid out by
the simple method of laying a ruler down on the map and drawing perfectly
straight lines from town to town. It utterly ignores such things as
grades and contours, sometimes driving straight ahead for twenty
kilometers at a stretch. There was no traffic to speak of, and, once
clear of the town, Harvey pressed his foot hard upon the gas. The big car
leaped forward like a thoroughbred at the raising of the starting-gate.
As we topped the rises in the road its wheels seemed to leave the ground
completely; it was like taking off in an airplane. With horn a-blare
we went booming down into little valleys, sky-hooting across narrow
bridges, and roaring up the opposite slopes. The country-side became
a blur of green and brown. The white kilometer-posts seemed as close
together as the beads of a necklace. The telegraph-poles slid past like
the palings in a picket-fence. The needle on the dial of the speedometer
rose to seventy ... eighty ... ninety ... one hundred kilometers....
Africa was slipping away beneath us at the rate of sixty miles an hour.
CHAPTER VIII
TROGLODYTES AND LOTUS-EATERS
The white city which the Carthaginians built on the northern shores
of the Gulf of Gabés was called Taparura by the Romans, but its Arab
conquerors, finding that the _fakous_ (cucumber) grew there in great
abundance, changed its name to Sfax. It may strike a European as somewhat
curious to name a large and flourishing city after a vegetable, but
that is because the European fails to realize what a gift from heaven a
cool and juicy cucumber is to a parched and dusty land. In Mesopotamia
cucumbers are sold everywhere and munched like apples, while in the
desert they are considered a rare luxury, being regarded by the Arabs
very much as we regard hothouse grapes and alligator-pears. Indeed, I
have always maintained that, when I was captured by the Bedouins on the
Upper Euphrates in 1920, it was the basket of cucumbers I presented to
the sheikh which effected my release.
Though named for a vegetable, Sfax does not vegetate. On the contrary, it
is one of the most up-and-doing places in Tunisia, its eighty thousand
inhabitants, of whom six thousand are Europeans, driving a prosperous
trade in fruit, cattle, olive-oil, wool, and sponges. The Arab town,
surrounded by a crenelated wall and dominated by the lofty tower of an
ancient mosque, is noisy, busy, and dirty; but the European quarter
is characterized by broad, scrupulously clean streets, a spacious
tree-planted square, and new and handsome public buildings, including
a really fine _hôtel de ville_ and a municipal theater, all built,
appropriately enough, in the modified Moorish style of architecture which
the French have used so successfully throughout North Africa.
The people of Sfax are as justly proud of their water-system as are the
inhabitants of Poland Springs. In addition to two enormous reservoirs or
_fesquias_, owned by the municipality and supplied with water from the
wells of Sidi Salah, ten miles away, there is, just outside the town,
a large walled inclosure containing five or six hundred bottle-shaped
reservoirs called _nasrias_, given by wealthy Arabs to the town. These
cisterns are maintained by the municipality, and the water is supplied to
those who prefer it to that from Sidi Salah.
Sfax is the most important olive-growing center in Tunisia, for
the beylical government has wisely encouraged the industry by
liberal concessions, and it is estimated that there are upward of
a million and a half olive-trees in bearing on the Bokaat-el-Beida
plateau. What with its countless olive-groves and oil-presses, its
almond-orchards, cucumber-gardens, henna-plantations, soap-factories, and
sponge-fisheries, this remote African city plays a not unimportant part
in supplying toilet accessories to the bath-rooms and beauty-parlors of
the world. Its name might appropriately be changed to Cosmétiqueville.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING RUINS IN THE WORLD
Is the great amphitheater at El Djem—the Thysdrus of the ancients—in
southern Tunisia; in size and magnificence scarcely inferior to the
Colosseum at Rome, it rises solitary and with startling abruptness from
the expanse of yellow desert]
Instead of wearing the flowing burnous which is the universal costume of
the natives elsewhere in the regency, the Arabs of Sfax are distinguished
by their short, hooded jackets of dark brown, hand-woven wool or
camel’s-hair elaborately worked with light brown embroidery. These,
with the troops of the garrison—officers of _chasseurs d’Afrique_ in
tight-waisted sky-blue tunics and enormously baggy scarlet trousers;
spahis with great crimson capes, their enormous turbans bound with
_agals_ of camel’s-hair; black _tirailleurs_ from Senegal whose high
tarbooshes, trim uniforms, and smartly wound puttees are all of khaki—to
say nothing of the strange desert types who drift in from the Saharian
provinces and Tripolitania, lend to the streets and _souks_ of Sfax a
diversity and color not found in the more northerly cities of the regency.
A few hours by native sailing-boat off this storied coast are the
Kerkenna Islands, Chergui and Gharbi, which in ancient times were joined
by a bridge whose traces are still visible, but now separated by a
channel of considerable width. They are interesting to every student
of ancient history because of their tragic associations, for it was
here that the fugitive Hannibal, seeking to escape the wrath of Rome,
found refuge for a time, and from here that he fled to Asia Minor. The
Kerkennas were the home, in later years, of another illustrious exile,
that Sempronius Gracchus who dared to lift his eyes to Julia, daughter of
the Emperor Augustus, and paid for his presumption with banishment and
eventually with his life. But the Kerkennas, despite their hectic past,
are to-day a pleasant, friendly, _dolce far niente_ spot, the islanders,
a mixture of many nationalities, being engaged in sponge-fishing and the
manufacture of an inferior but very potent variety of date brandy.
Sfax is the “farthest south” for most visitors to Tunisia, but we kept
on along the edges of the gulf to Gabés, which is the starting-point for
those, prepared to put up with discomforts if not actual hardships, who
wish to visit the cliff-dwellings of Matmata, the _rhorfas_ of Medenine,
the island of Djerba, and the military provinces which adjoin the
Tripolitanian frontier. Though so difficult of access, so far removed
from the beaten paths of travel, as to be rarely visited by Europeans,
these regions are by long odds the strangest and most interesting in
Tunisia, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. Not to see the underground
city of Bled Kebira and the desert sky-scrapers of Medenine is to miss
two of the most extraordinary communities on earth.
Gabés, the Tacape of the Romans, is to France’s Saharan frontier what
Fort Leavenworth was to our own frontier in its wild and woolly days.
In the edge of the desert, close to the borders of Tripolitania, it is
the most important military outpost in the South, a large garrison being
maintained there to hold in check the lawless nomad tribes. The town
itself is wholly without interest, merely a collection of mud houses set
in a large oasis amid a forest of palms. But the Hôtel de l’Oasis, run
by a stout and jovial Frenchwoman, was tolerably comfortable, and the
cuisine was surprisingly good, considering the difficulties of obtaining
supplies, provided one did not object to the use of goat’s milk and
butter, whose rancid taste and revolting odor I myself detest.
The officers and men of the garrison are saved from ennui by the
constant drills and occasional punitive expeditions which form the life
of frontier posts; they have their little _cercles_, where they hold
occasional dances; twice weekly, in the dusty _jardin public_, the band
of the _tirailleurs_ plays the latest pieces from Paris; and on the
beach, about a mile away, a ramshackle pavilion and a string of unpainted
shacks, called by courtesy _cabines des bains_, make a pathetic attempt
to bring to the frontier the distractions of Dinard and Deauville; but
I felt sorry for the handful of Frenchwomen who had accompanied their
soldier husbands into exile and who were dragging out an inconceivably
dreary and monotonous existence in this lonely spot. I have always
maintained that, whether in Africa, India, or the Philippines, it is the
women who are the real builders of empire. They spend their lives far
from home and friends, often separated for years from their children, yet
they serve their countries no less faithfully than the men, but, unlike
the men, without the stimulus of recognition or reward.
* * * * *
Along with their other legends and superstitions, the ancients had a
vague tradition of a curious, semi-mythical people, dwelling in an
inaccessible region near the Syrtes, who made their homes in the bowels
of the earth. They were said to live upon the flesh of snakes and
lizards, to practise customs strange beyond belief, and to speak some
outlandish language which Herodotus compared to the cry of a bat. As
Africa was gradually opened up to civilization these fantastic tales
were set down as unfounded myths and were accounted but examples of the
folk-lore which accumulates about a mysterious and unknown land. But
there the scientists were wrong. For when, in 1869, the first French
columns penetrated the great mountain ranges to the southwest of Gabés in
their initial attempts to conquer the Sahara, they found the Troglodytes
of the ancient tales in the strange inhabitants of the Matmata Plateau.
The Matmata region consists of an isolated, winding, highly mountainous
ridge, with numerous rocky spurs, upward of a hundred and twenty-five
miles in length. Commencing a score of miles or so to the south of
Gabés, it winds southward and eastward across the desert like an
enormous snake. On the backbone of this ridge, a quarter of a mile above
sea-level, is a vast upland plain completely hemmed in by mountain peaks.
Here, in a region of appalling loneliness and desolation, cut off from
the outer world by leagues of mountain land and desert, is the home of
the Troglodytes, among the strangest of the strange peoples who inhabit
this earth.
Provided your car is powerful enough to negotiate the precipitous
ascents, and you are prepared to sacrifice its tires and springs, the
Troglodyte capital, Bled Kebira, can be reached from Gabés in a long
and exceedingly arduous half-day. But this means getting started at
the crack of dawn. Until the foot of the mountains is reached the
going is good enough, the road zigzagging in long salients across a
dusty russet plain. An hour or so of rapid traveling amid clouds of
suffocating dust, and then, reaching the foot-hills, the ascent begins.
As the car pants upward, the terrain steadily becomes more stoney and
broken, the country-side more desolate and forbidding. One moment the
tires are gashed by beds of knife-sharp flints; the next they sink deep
into patches of yellow sand. The way is not only steep and rough but
very narrow, so narrow in places that there is scarcely room between
the outer wheels and the edge of the sheer precipice for a starved
cat to pass. Barring occasional patches of barley or small groves of
discouraged-looking olive-trees, there is no vegetation, and the mountain
slopes are as barren as the walls of the Grand Cañon. No people, no
houses, no animals, unless we except a few stray goats, are to be seen.
Solitude and desolation reign supreme.
[Illustration: MEDENINE, THE STRANGEST CITY IN THE WORLD
The _rhorfa_ look like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete stacked
in tiers. Windowless, and with doors no larger than those of dog-kennels,
they are admirably suited for defence
The doors of these primordial apartment-houses are reached by small
stepping-stones projecting from the face of the building; note the
keyholes beside the doors]
Now the ascent becomes so steep that Harvey is compelled to stop at
frequent intervals to cool his engine. The rapid reports of the exhaust
echo in the still mountain air like the clatter of a machine-gun. Still
the interminable trail leads on, dropping down into the beds of dried-up
rivers, crossing by narrow bridges the _arroyos_ cut in the soil by
smaller torrents, crawling cautiously around rocky shoulders, skirting
the brinks of chasms whose walls drop away from our wheels half a hundred
fathoms sheer, scaling the face of towering cliffs by a series of narrow
shelves hewn from the living rock, but climbing, climbing, always
climbing, that portion of the road which is yet to be traversed unwinding
itself before us like an endless yellow ribbon as it reaches toward the
higher levels. It seems as though we would never reach our destination;
but at long last, topping a final rise, we debouch upon a lofty
table-land, sprinkled with palms and sparsely covered with ill-nourished
grass, with the great peaks of the Djebel Matmata rising in a rocky
rampart all around. Bled Kebira, the largest of the troglodyte towns,
is on the plateau, just ahead, but to reach the far older and fortified
village of Gelaa Matmata, now deserted, we must leave the car and climb
another half a thousand feet or so, for it is perched on the very summit
of the mountain. Even when we gain this fortress in the clouds there is
no sign of human habitation, barring a few fortifications, now in ruins,
but the flanks of the mountains are pitted with what appear to be the
entrances to gigantic rabbit-burrows, which are in reality the doorways
to the former homes of the cave-dwellers.
Though the Matmatas are unquestionably of pure Berber stock, a fine,
upstanding people possessed of extraordinary tenacity and courage, their
origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. They themselves claim to have
been led to this mountain refuge by that remarkable woman, El Kahena, the
African Joan of Arc already mentioned, who made her last desperate stand
at El Djem after defying for years the Arab invaders of her country.
That the Matmatas were originally lowlanders, pasturing their flocks
and tending their olive-trees on the rich plains bordering the Syrtes,
there is good reason to believe. But, constantly harassed by bands of
Arab raiders from Tripolitania and the desert, who burned their towns,
drove off their flocks, and killed those whom they did not carry into
slavery, the Berbers realized that their only hope of existence lay in
seeking refuge amid the wild fastnesses of the Matmata Mountains. Here,
within sight of the fertile plains which they had been forced to abandon,
they intrenched themselves, and, resisting all attacks of their enemies,
succeeded in eking out a precarious existence for centuries, though how
they managed to obtain sufficient food remains a mystery. As the years
passed, however, they grew weary of their enforced seclusion upon the
mountain-top; so, coming to terms with their hereditary enemies, the
nomad tribes, they abandoned Gelaa Matmata and descended to the arable
plateau, five hundred feet or so lower down, where, in the soft, porous
soil, half-clay, half-sandstone, which forms the sides of the hills, they
built, or, rather dug themselves, the present town of Bled Kebira.
They continued to live in their subterranean dwellings partly because
they had become accustomed to them, no doubt, but primarily because
they were still necessary as a defense against marauding bands, for it
was not until the French bayonets came that this much persecuted people
acquired even a speaking acquaintance with peace and security. Now, their
stronghold on the mountain-top long since abandoned, the Matmatas have
their _chef-lieu_ at Bled Kebira, where some twelve thousand of them
live like moles beneath the surface of the earth. Though Bled Kebira
has a population equal to that of many an American community holding a
city charter, there is nothing to suggest its presence, for a small,
whitewashed mosque and the _caserne_ occupied by a handful of French
troops are the only structures above ground.
The troglodyte dwellings of Bled Kebira are extremely difficult
to describe because I can think of nothing which will serve as a
satisfactory basis of comparison. The method of digging one of these
_ghars_, as they are called, is as follows. Selecting a site where the
soil is firm and where there is good drainage, the home-builder proceeds
to sink a shaft, perhaps twenty feet square and from twenty to thirty
feet deep. The bottom of this shaft is leveled off and forms a patio or
courtyard. The next step is to excavate the rooms, the doors of which
open on the shaft; some are on the same level as the courtyard, others
are higher up and reached by ropes. Finally, a tunnel, sometimes several
hundred feet in length, is driven from the courtyard to the surface
of the earth, its entrance, usually in a cranny of the hills, secured
against intruders by a stoutly timbered door with enormous hinges of
hand-wrought iron. Some of these massive doors, like the dwellings
to which they gave admittance, were quite obviously of enormous age,
possibly a thousand years or more.
The rooms, generally of good size, with vaulted ceilings, were
astonishingly neat and clean, their walls whitewashed and decorated with
primitive designs in vivid colors; the scanty furniture—beds, tables, and
divans—cut from the rock itself. The disadvantage of this is that the
furniture cannot be moved, but it has its compensation in the fact that
dust cannot be swept, and refractory collar-buttons cannot be lost, under
pieces of furniture which rise solidly from the floor, of which, indeed,
they are a part. In one dwelling which we visited, that of the sheikh,
the bed, which was about the size of a billiard-table, had been plastered
over and the plaster whitewashed, and the whitewash, in turn, had been
rudely frescoed in brilliant reds and greens. Ranged along one side
of the kitchen, which was separated from the bedroom only by a calico
curtain, stood great jars of pottery, recalling those in which the Forty
Thieves were boiled alive, but here used for such prosaic purposes as the
storage of water, olive-oil, and wine.
Though from the open patios, which served as stable-yards for camels,
donkeys, goats, sheep, and chickens, a stench rose to high heaven, we
were impressed with the scrupulous cleanliness which characterized the
interiors of these underground dwellings: the earthen floors had been
scrubbed and sanded; the beds were made up with spotless linen; the
copper cooking-utensils hanging on the walls had been scoured until
they shone like mirrors. Despite the fact that many of these troglodyte
dwellings are thirty feet or more below the level of the ground, I should
imagine that in dry weather they must be quite comfortable to live
in—indifferently lighted, perhaps, but cool in summer and quite immune
from the chilling winter winds. But I must confess that I should not care
to live in one during the rainy season—and when it rains in Tunisia, it
_rains_—for, though there is a certain amount of drainage, I could see no
reason why a really torrential downpour would not transform the central
courtyard, which is really nothing but a large well, into a cistern.
[Illustration: THE SUN-GOD PAINTS HIS PICTURE IN THE WEST
Have you ever seen a Saharan sunset? No? Then you have missed the
sublimest spectacle that nature has to offer. On the palette of the sky
the Almighty mixes His colors with a beauty of effect which is positively
overwhelming—but, like all really beautiful things, it is of brief
duration]
In their stooped shoulders and prematurely wrinkled faces the Matmatam
women show the effects of their bitter struggle for existence; but some
of the young girls were really lovely, with slim, supple figures, clear
olive skins, and large, lustrous eyes. At the house of the sheikh, with
whom the guide we had brought from Gabés was acquainted, we found his
wives and numerous children assembled in the courtyard to greet us; but
in most of the other dwellings the women fled into their burrows on our
approach and remained concealed until my departure, though, once I had
left, they were shyly eager to welcome my wife and daughter, crowding
about them, fingering their clothes, and asking innumerable questions.
I had rather expected that the Matmata dwellings would contain some
specimens of indigenous art, such as one finds among other very ancient
peoples, as, for example, the Hopi. Yet, so far as I could discover, the
Troglodytes possess no art of their own. The walls of the tunnel-like
entrance to one of their houses, it is true, were decorated with a
sort of dado of colored hand-prints, easily recognizable, however, as
the hand of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, and hence an Arab form of
decoration. The people seem to have an innate if quite undeveloped love
for the beautiful, however, as is evidenced by the pride with which
they display the paltry trinkets—bits of the cheap pottery common in
North Tunisia, gaudy lithographs of Turkish origin, empty wine-bottles
with flowers stuck in the necks, looking-glasses, cracked pieces of
European chinaware, in one case a tin which had contained a well-known
smoking-mixture—which are _objets d’art_ to them. These things are not
beautiful, it is true, but many of the objects which we treasure because
of their rarity are not beautiful either.
A funeral was held in Bled Kebira while we were there, but on account
of the presence of numerous women, and of the fact that the Matmatas
object to having their religious ceremonies witnessed by non-Moslems,
we could view it only from a distance. The services were conducted in
one of the larger _ghars_, and at their conclusion the coffin, borne on
the shoulders of several men, was carried through the winding tunnel to
the open air and thence up a precipitous foot-path to the little unkempt
cemetery, where deceased Matmatas are laid to rest beneath far less soil
than they are accustomed to live under when alive. It was one of the most
bizarre spectacles I have ever witnessed: the multitude of white-veiled,
white-robed figures issuing in seemingly endless procession from a black
hole in the ground, their voices raised in a plaintive, barbaric chant.
“It reminds me,” said Mrs. Powell, “of Doré’s picture of the Day of
Judgment, when the sheeted dead arise from their graves.”
Just then there came from the French _caserne_ on the hill the shrill
notes of a bugle sounding the noon mess-call.
“Yes,” remarked my daughter, “and there goes Gabriel’s horn!”
* * * * *
Midway between the eastern slopes of the Matmata Plateau and the coast,
close to the Tripolitanian border, is Medenine. It is one of the most
extraordinary places in the world; I know of nothing even remotely like
it. Here too the inhabitants are troglodytes, if by troglodytes are meant
those who creep into holes, which is the classic definition. But, whereas
the troglodytes of Matmata lives in holes beneath the ground, those
of Medenine have their holes above it, in what might be termed desert
apartment-houses, four, five, occasionally even six stories in height.
Medenine lies in a shallow depression in the desert, and you come
upon it quite unexpectedly as you top a rise in the yellow plain. A
curiously uncanny sensation is produced by the first sight of this most
amazing city. You rub your eyes and wonder if you are not the victim of
a hallucination. You feel that you are very near to the beginning of
things. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was transported to the Age of
Chivalry. But here you are back in the Age of Stone.
The town consists of some two thousand dwellings called _rhorfa_, which
rise from the ground as abruptly as the chimney of a factory. These
dwellings are not detached, as in most communities, but are closely
packed together in rows and squares. It is next to impossible to find
words which will adequately describe them, for, as human habitations,
they are absolutely unique. Seen from a distance, they look as much as
anything else like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete, ten feet in
diameter, a few ranged in rows on the ground, but most of them stacked in
tiers which in some cases rise to a height of half a hundred feet.
Though there is no intercommunication, they are built side by side, their
walls touching, so that a row of them looks like a series of inverted
U’s—⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂ But superimposed on the first row is a second, and on
the second row a third, some of those primordial apartment-houses rising
to a height of five, and, in a few cases, six stories, with a hundred or
more rooms. Perhaps they might best be compared to the tiers of burial
vaults which are to be seen in certain Italian _campi-santi_ or, better
still, to the cells of a honeycomb.
The walls, of enormously thick rubble roughly plastered over with a
sort of adobe, are windowless, each _rhorfa_ obtaining light and air
only through the single narrow doorway, not much larger than that of
a dog-kennel, about two feet wide and three and a half feet high, or
just large enough to permit a man to squeeze through if he enters on his
hands and knees. The doors are of wood very stoutly built and secured by
enormous wooden bolts. To the right of the door, some two or three feet
from it, is the keyhole, which consists of an aperture in the wall just
large enough to permit a man to insert his arm. When a troglodyte leaves
home his method of locking up the house is a most curious and ingenious
one. His key consists of a piece of wood two or three feet long, its end
fitted with pegs which exactly correspond in size, number, and position
with holes sunk in the end of the bolt. When he is ready to leave he
pulls the door to from the outside; then, inserting his arm in the
keyhole, he gropes about until the pegs on the key drop into the holes in
the bolt, which are spaced differently on each lock, the bolt thus being
drawn forward to lock the door, or pushed back to unlock it. The system,
though clumsy, is much more effective than it sounds, for the bolt is too
far from the opening to permit of its being reached save with the key,
and, unless the holes in the one exactly correspond with the pegs on the
other, there is no way to gain admittance except by breaking the door
down. His door locked, the householder slings his enormous key, as large
and heavy as a policeman’s night-stick, over his shoulder by a leathern
thong. He is not likely to lose it, or to forget it, and in it he has a
formidable weapon. In Medenine, as has been remarked, we are very near
the beginning of things, for this is the “key of the house of David,”
which Isaiah saw resting on the shoulder of Eliakim, that, in the quaint
phraseology of the Scriptures, “he shall open, and none shall shut; and
he shall shut, and none shall open.”
Even when a Medenine householder returns home completely soused, to put
it inelegantly, he has no difficulty in finding his keyhole, which is so
large that he could scarcely miss it. But to find the stairs, and, once
they are found, to avoid falling down them, is quite another matter, for
reaching the door of one of these troglodyte apartments is as hazardous
a performance as entering an upper-story window of an American hotel by
means of a fireman’s scaling-ladder. Occasionally, but not often, these
lofty dwellings are reached by flights of rude stone stairs, extremely
steep and narrow and perilously slippery in wet weather. But in most
cases the inhabitants have to climb up and down by means of small stones,
barely large enough to afford a foothold, which project a few inches
from the face of the house. A monkey would experience no difficulty
whatsoever in gaining the top floor of one of these singular houses, and
neither would an experienced mountain-climber provided he was accustomed
to rock-work, but it required all my strength and agility to reach a
fifth-floor doorway, and even then I had several narrow escapes from very
nasty falls. How a troglodyte who has imbibed over-freely of palm wine
manages to get home at all is a mystery, for some of the doors are fifty
feet above the ground, and, if his foot slipped, there would be “more
work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”
What, you may ask, is the _raison d’être_ of these extraordinary
habitations? The best reason in the world—self-protection. For it has
always been a savage, untamed region, here along the Libyan border, and
life was one desperate, unending struggle for existence until the white
helmets came. There was, it is to be presumed, a semblance of law and
order under the stern rule of Rome, but when the Roman power collapsed
the land was overrun by the Vandals, and after them by the Arabs, and
in the wake of Arabs came veiled raiders from the desert and loot-hungry
corsairs from the coast. Hence it was essential that the inhabitants
devise a form of dwelling which could be successfully defended against
marauders, no matter how numerous or how well armed. And the _rhorfa_
answered the purpose admirably, for, being built of masonry, they cannot
be burned down; the walls are of such thickness as to be proof against
anything short of shell-fire; they are so arranged in squares and rows
that a withering cross-fire can be brought to bear upon assailants; and
they are easy to defend, for the ground floors are used only as granaries
and storehouses, and the householder, living high above the ground, has
only to shoot down through his keyhole, or to batter out the brains of
the first enemy who attempts to enter, in the unlikely event that the
stout door should be broken in.
Not far from Medenine is the smaller community of Metameur, which is a
fortress rather than a village. Here all the houses are built in the
form of a hollow square, inclosing a spacious courtyard, from which they
rise to a height of five or six stories. As has already been mentioned,
none of the houses have windows, and so the outside of the square is
merely a blank wall of rough stone covered with cement, too lofty to be
scaled and too thick to be breached except by modern artillery. In the
center of the courtyard is a well, which insures the inhabitants of a
water-supply should they be besieged. Access to the courtyard is gained
through a tunnel-shaped entrance, so low that one has to crawl through
it almost on all fours. But once inside the inhabitants were perfectly
secure, as long as their food and water held out, for there was no means
by which an enemy could dislodge them. To me these troglodyte towns were
particularly interesting because they illustrate how, even in a region
wholly destitute of natural defenses, a primitive but ingenious people
can protect themselves when dire necessity compels.
As, even to-day, the southern marches of Tunisia are not wholly immune
from attacks by bands of raiders from the desert, Medenine is garrisoned
by a considerable force of _méharistes_, _tirailleurs_, spahis, and
_chasseurs d’Afrique_, whose trim white barracks are in the outskirts of
the town. Rising beyond the squat, vault-like rows of _rhorfa_, perhaps
the most primitive dwellings in the world, and in striking contrast to
them, are the slender masts and cobweb-like aërials of the military radio
station—the last word in twentieth-century civilization.
Circumstances made it necessary for us to lunch at Medenine. It was the
last place on earth where I should have expected to get a decent meal,
for the single European café in the town was at first sight anything but
appetizing. But appearances are sometimes deceiving, for, as it turned
out, the proprietor had once been a chef in a famous Paris restaurant,
and he set before us one of the best-cooked _déjeuners_ that we had in
Africa. My recollections of it are particularly vivid because for the
modest sum of ninety cents I obtained a bottle of fine old Château Yquem!
* * * * *
In pushing so far southward into Tunisia we had a double-barreled
motive: to see the troglodyte communities which I have just described,
and to visit Djerba, the Island of the Lotus-Eaters. This fabled isle,
so alluringly described in the Odyssey, was known to those mariners of
ancient Greece who ventured beyond the rim of their world before the dawn
of history, and the reports which they brought back served as foundation
for the epic tales of Jason and Ulysses. There the Argonauts dwelt for a
time in happy idleness; there they ate of the lotus and the sweet fruit
of the date-palm; there they found a land where it was always afternoon
and life passed like a dream.
Djerba, which in ancient times was connected with the mainland by a
causeway, lies within cannon-shot of the Tunisian coast. It can be
reached in a few hours from Gabés by a coasting-steamer, small and none
too clean; but we chose the longer and more interesting land route,
through Medenine and Zarzis, once an important seaport of the Romans,
to the tip of the peninsula, whence there is a ferry service across the
narrow strait, here barely four miles wide, to El Kantara.
The French resident-general at Tunis had notified the _controleur
civil_ at Houmt-Souk, the island capital, of our intended visit, and
had obtained the promise of a launch to take us across the strait to El
Kantara and a motor-car to take us across the island. But when we arrived
at the place of embarkation, marked only by a police post and a small
stone pier, no sign of a launch was to be seen. After several hours spent
in fruitless attempts to reach Houmt-Souk by telephone, we arranged to be
ferried across to El Kantara by an Arab boatman, a swarthy, black-browed
ruffian who, if appearances count for anything, must have been descended
from the pirates who once terrorized this coast. Judging from the
price demanded, I had assumed that we were chartering the whole boat,
a broad-bowed, clumsy craft with an enormous lateen-sail, but, once we
had paid our passage-money, the skipper insisted on taking aboard not
only a varied assortment of lousy native passengers but donkeys, goats,
sheep, chickens, even a camel, as well, crowding them in until the boat
looked—and smelled—like Noah’s famous vessel. But eventually the tawny
lateen-sail was hoisted with much shouting and we got under way, a
leaning boat on the tranquil turquoise waters, with a palm-fringed strip
of shore to lead us on. As a matter of fact, we could almost have walked
across, for the water of the strait is very shallow, and the stones
of the great Roman causeway which once connected the island with the
mainland were plainly visible, a foot or so beneath the surface.
We landed at El Kantara (the name means “bridge”), the ancient Meninx.
Once a magnificent city, as attested by the sculptured stones, broken
columns, and fragments of marble sarcophagi which still strew the
site, it is now a mere cluster of mud hovels inhabited by native
sponge-fishers, the sole Europeans in the place being the French
_douanier_ and his young and pretty wife. The _controleur civil_ had
telephoned from Houmt-Souk that a car had been sent for us, but as it
had not shown up and as it was now long past noon and breakfast ancient
history, the _douanier_ took pity on us and invited us into his little
house, bringing out for our entertainment a plate of biscuits and a
bottle of the rather pungent cordial called Cap Corse. When at last the
car sent by the _controleur_ made its appearance—it belonged, as might
have been expected, to the ubiquitous Ford family of Detroit—the plate
had been emptied, the bottle had been drained, and the hospitality of our
host and hostess had been strained to the breaking-point, I fear.
It is about five-and-twenty kilometers across the island, the smooth
white road skirting the edges of venerable olive-groves or running
between the walls of prosperous farms. I had expected to find a rugged
land, with lofty peaks and brawling streams and leafy glens and lush
green valleys, for Homer speaks of the “three mountain peaks” and the
“gleaming river” and the high cascades of “downward smoke”; but there
was not a hill or valley worthy of the name; not a single stream of any
sort, let alone a river; nor was there a mountain anywhere in sight.
Physiographically, Djerba is, as might be expected, merely a continuation
of the mainland, but, unlike the mainland, every foot of its gently
rolling surface has been irrigated and cultivated and fertilized until
its naturally arid soil has attained an amazing degree of productiveness.
Numerous palms give it a semi-tropical appearance; the fields are
carpeted with wild flowers; the climate is delightful; and the vast
groves of old, old olive-trees provide ample shade; so it is easy to
understand how the Hellenic mariners, coming here from the bleaker shores
of the Ægean, thought it was a paradise indeed.
The villages are immaculately neat and clean; the little white-walled
houses rise from blazing gardens whose fragrance fills the air; the
fortified farmsteads, built for defense, are cultivated with meticulous
care; half a million olive-trees and three times that number of palms
cover the island with a sea of verdure; and in the spring, when we were
there, the poppies overlaid as with a scarlet mantle the green of the
sprouting grain. Barring only central Morocco, I have never seen any
country where wild flowers grow in such amazing variety and profusion.
During a brief halt while our driver was changing tires Mrs. Powell
gathered specimens of twenty different kinds in half as many minutes. In
places they were so thickly intermingled that the country-side seemed to
be covered with a gorgeous Oriental rug.
The islanders are a simple, friendly folk, willing, industrious, and
hospitable. They have numerous industries, including sponge-fishing,
the making of oil, the manufacture of a kind of white pottery, and
the weaving of the silk and woolen tissues known as burnous stuffs,
though agriculture is their chief pursuit. There are few evidences of
poverty, the inhabitants being, on the whole, extremely prosperous, with
quite a sprinkling of men who, according to island standards at least,
are wealthy. In dress they are distinctive from their fellows of the
mainland, the men wearing the short brown coats of loosely woven homespun
which, being characteristic of the island, are called _djerbas_: the
short but extremely baggy Cretan trousers, so loose in the seat that
it is often used for carrying groceries, chickens, and other objects;
the whole being topped off by the jaunty Tunisian _chéchia_ with its
long blue tassel. The women, when at work, wear dresses of blue cotton
and broad-brimmed hats of braided straw with enormously high crowns, so
that, seen from a little distance, they look like Chinese coolies. They
are of Berber stock and commonly speak a Berber idiom, though the use of
Arabic is rapidly increasing. Curiously enough—for in most things they
are tolerant and easy-going—the islanders are Wahabis, the most fanatical
of the various sects of Moslems. The Puritans of Islam, they practise a
faith of the utmost austerity: they frown on all forms of religious pomp
and circumstance; their places of worship are of the simplest character,
destitute of all decoration; and they carry their insistence on “the only
God” so far as to deny divinity to Mohammed.
Djerba has a large and prosperous Jewish population, Hara Srira, a little
town in the center of the island, having been a place of pilgrimage
for pious Jews for untold centuries. In the middle of the town is the
synagogue, a very ancient building, its interior being most curiously
decorated in marbles of various colors, crude but interesting tiles, and
carved and painted wood. The chief rabbi, a white-bearded patriarch in
flowing robes who might have posed for a portrait of Moses, met us at the
door and conducted us through the semi-darkness of the nave to a sort of
sacristy at the back of the high altar, where he proudly displayed the
ancient manuscripts and massive silver plate which are the synagogue’s
chief treasures. He showed me one splendid volume, a copy of the Talmud,
I believe, its cover studded with semiprecious stones, which had been in
this same synagogue for close on fifteen hundred years; others of the
sacred manuscripts were engrossed on long rolls of vellum which were
contained in cylindrical cases of silver, curiously chased and wrought.
Across the street from the synagogue is the pilgrims’ house, a kind of
religious hostelry, like those common in medieval Europe, containing
hundreds of small rooms, not much more than cells, opening on a spacious
inner court. Here, packed in like sardines, a dozen or more to a room,
are lodged the thousands of pilgrims who, during the season of the
pilgrimage, flock to Djerba not only from Tunisia and Tripolitania but
from all of the Mediterranean countries. I once had the unforgettable
experience of crossing the Mediterranean on a ship loaded with Russian
pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, so I had no difficulty in imagining what
the hostel at Hara Srira must be like—and smell like!—when, in the heat
of an African summer, it is packed to the doors with the pious but
unwashed.
Houmt-Souk, the island capital, is a charming, restful little town with
fine, broad streets, white houses embowered in flowers, and a _jardin
public_ where a French horticultural expert does interesting things with
shrubs and trees. On the beach, not far away, stands an old fort, a relic
of the Spanish power, built some two hundred years before Columbus
sailed westward out of Palos, with carronades still frowning from its
bastions. But the rule of the Dons in Djerba came to a bloody end in
1560, when a Turkish squadron under Piali Pasha and the corsair Dragut
annihilated the Spanish fleet and took the Spanish fort, along with five
thousand prisoners. They were massacred to the last man, and with their
bones was raised a great mound, twenty feet in height, Skull Fort, it was
called, which stood nigh the beach until the middle of the last century,
when it was pulled down at the instance of the Christian community and
the bones given decent interment in the Catholic cemetery.
The single inn boasted by Houmt-Souk is quite impossible, but we were
befriended by fortune in the persons of the _controleur civil_ and his
charming wife, who took compassion on us and invited us to stay at
the residency. After dinner the caïd, who is the head of the Moslem
community, the mayor, the doctor, and a few others dropped in for
bridge, followed by music and dancing. The caïd, a swarthy, portly,
black-mustached Arab in fez, dinner-coat, scarlet sash, and baggy Turkish
trousers, was a most picturesque figure, somewhat reminiscent of one of
the characters in Anthony Hope’s “Phroso.” He had been to Paris, could
converse entertainingly on many subjects, and played a brilliant game
of bridge, as I discovered when he bid six spades against my five no
trumps—and made it.
I had not forgotten that we had come to Djerba because of its renown
as the home of the Lotophagi, and I had determined to do a little
lotus-eating myself, provided, of course, I could get some lotus. To
leave Djerba without tasting its lotus would be equivalent, it seemed
to me, to visiting Astrakhan without trying its caviar or Mocha without
sampling its coffee. But getting the lotus was not so simple a matter
as I had assumed. Neither the _douanier_ at El Kantara nor the man who
drove the car nor the landlady of the inn had so much as heard of it. The
_controleur_ ventured the opinion that the lotus described by Homer was
nothing more or less than the date, which here grows in great profusion,
and cited several authorities in support of his contention. The doctor
reminded us that the lotus of the Egyptians was a variety of water-lily,
and that there were no water-lilies in Djerba for the excellent reason
that there was no water in which to grow them. But the caïd maintained
that the ancients had reference to a prickly shrub, indigenous to the
island, known to botanists as _Zizyphus Lotus_, but locally as jujubier,
from whose sweet-tasting fruit the natives have been accustomed from
time out of mind to ferment a highly intoxicating drink. He promised,
moreover, to procure me a sample of it, and the following day he kept his
word. A single draft of that fiery liquor did more than all the Homeric
verse I ever read to give me an understanding of the strange actions
attributed to Ulysses. No wonder that he forgot his friends in Hellas,
that he lost all ambition to go back and build up ruined Troy, after
having had a dozen gourds or so of that prehistoric white mule. All he
wanted to do was to stretch himself in the shade of a palm and sleep it
off.
* * * * *
Instead of returning to the Tunisian mainland as we had come, we chose
another route, motoring to Adjim, on the southern coast of the island,
and crossing thence by sailing-boat to Djorf. It was a holiday, and our
fellow-passengers had evidently imbibed too freely of the juice of the
lotus, for they were boisterous when we started, and when, half-way
across, the skipper attempted to collect their fares, they became
threatening and abusive. The argument culminated in a fair imitation of
an old-time sea-battle—just such an episode, I imagine, as Ulysses and
his companions would have loved—the shipmaster and his sailors beating
the obstreperous passengers over the head with the oars, while the cargo
of braying donkeys, bleating sheep, and cackling fowls contributed to
the confusion. It was most entertaining for a time, for no one offered
to molest us, but the boat was small and laden to the water’s edge, the
wind was rising, and the sea, like the passengers, was beginning to get
distinctly rough. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see Harvey and
the faithful Cadillac awaiting us on the shore.
CHAPTER IX
ACROSS THE SHATS TO THE SANDY SEA
To one who has been brought up in the belief that cleanliness is next
to godliness, the most unpleasant feature of desert travel is the lack
of facilities for bathing. You never appreciate the luxury of a tub,
soap, and an unlimited supply of warm water until you find yourself in a
hot and dusty land where they are unobtainable. The Compagnie Générale
Transatlantique—or, as it is usually referred to in North Africa, the
“Transat”—has supplied this need in the score or more of admirably
equipped hotels which it has established along the main routes of travel,
but, once you leave the beaten paths, a bath-tub, or the water with which
to fill it, is as unobtainable as ice in Hades. In the Hôtel de l’Oasis
at Gabés, and again at the residency at Houmt-Souk, we had been provided
with large, circular receptacles of tin into which the Arab servants
had poured an inch or so of tepid water, but these extremely sketchy
ablutions had about as much resemblance to a real bath as the shivering
damsel depicted in “September Morn” has to the surf-riders at Waikiki. So
when I learned that the hot springs of El Hamma, a little oasis town on
the route to Tozeur, had been famous as a bathing-resort ever since Roman
times, I insisted that we spend the night there instead of at Gabés.
[Illustration: LIKE FEATHERED BONNETS ON THE HEADS OF A SAVAGE ARMY
The date-palms rise against the sky line. An oasis is not necessarily a
well, a patch of grass, and a palm on either hand, as the novelists and
the motion-picture makers would have you believe. Some of the Saharan
oases are hundreds of square miles in extent, supporting thousands of
people and hundreds of thousands of date-palms]
Though spring was now well advanced, and though we were in the edge of
the Sahara itself, it was a cold gray day when we set out for El Hamma,
and the biting, dust-laden wind which swept across the steppes struck
through our heavy rugs and greatcoats and chilled us to the marrow.
Shivering, I thought wryly of our friends at home who were doubtless
picturing us as sweltering beneath the torrid sun of Africa. Why the
Transat considers it worth its while to operate a rest-house at so remote
a spot as El Hamma, where European visitors are few and far between, I
cannot imagine. But there it was, a Mexican-like, one-story structure
of adobe, quite unprepossessing as to its exterior but really charming
within, its patio or inner courtyard inclosed by a sort of cloister
with Moorish columns from which opened the rooms. In the center of the
courtyard there was a small pool and fountain, flanked by palm-trees;
and later on, when the weather became warmer, there would be a profusion
of flowers. The place was in charge of a Frenchman who had received his
culinary training in a Paris restaurant, an exiled Boniface whose sole
object in life appeared to be to make his rare guests comfortable and
contented. The sight of European faces and the sound of European voices
must have been very welcome to him, for he was the only white man in the
town.
The _hammam_, we learned, was about half a mile away, on the other side
of the village. Guided by a domestic from the rest-house, we lost no time
in starting thither, for we were tired, chilled, and thickly veneered
with desert dust and looked forward eagerly to the luxury of immersing
ourselves to the chin in steaming water. Remembering its fame under the
Romans, I had pictured in my mind’s eye a rather imposing place, with
comfortable dressing-rooms and, no doubt, a series of marble pools and
steam-rooms such as one finds in native bathing establishments of the
better class throughout the East. A rickety wooden door in a high mud
wall was unlocked by an Arab attendant, who ushered us into a spacious
inclosure, nearly the whole of which was occupied by a stone-bordered
tank. Everything was in the state of untidiness and disrepair
characteristic of Arab countries. The tank was filled with boiling water,
it is true, from which rose clouds of steam, but its surface was covered
with a thick green scum, and the place reeked with the noxious fumes of
sulphur. The “dressing-rooms” consisted of a series of cubicles, floored
with stone and thatched with palm-fronds and so cold and cheerless that
the mere thought of disrobing in them made me shiver. Though, as it
happened, no one was using the _hammam_ at the time, the bathing was, I
gathered, extremely mixed, Europeans and natives, any one, in fact, who
could afford to pay the fee of a few francs, mingling in the pool in a
state of complete nudity. I have spent too much of my life in frontier
regions to be finical, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Our
decision to abandon the idea of bathing was hastened when we saw three
large gray water-rats furtively emerge from one of the dressing-rooms.
This was, we learned, the bathing-establishment _de luxe_ of El Hamma,
patronized only by the wealthier natives; the general run of Arabs
utilize the numerous hot streams which meander in all directions through
the town. These streams are supplied by springs which gush from sandy
hillocks, and almost all of them are at a very hot temperature, often
at the boiling-point. As in the case of the other hot springs found
throughout Tunisia, most of them have medicinal properties and are
said to be highly efficacious in the treatment of certain ailments, a
fact which explains, no doubt, the Roman settlements in remote parts
of the country, for, particularly during the luxurious and dissolute
days of the empire, the Romans, as is well known, were subject to gout,
rheumatism, eczema, and syphilitic diseases. The Arabs, who are extremely
superstitious, assert that the springs of El Hamma were originally cold
and devoid of medicinal properties, but that a beneficent marabout, a
holy man of exceptional sanctity, was persuaded to spit into them one
day, whereupon they became hot and mineralized!
In places the streams have eroded narrow gulches in the soft soil, and
these the natives have here and there roofed over with palm-branches and
matting so as to afford a measure of privacy, of which, however, they did
not appear to avail themselves, for on every hand we encountered Arab men
and boys splashing about and soaping themselves in the steaming waters,
stark naked but quite unashamed. In a somewhat more secluded spot, where
one of the streams broadened out into a fair-sized pool, was a bath
reserved for the other sex, its banks dotted with women and girls in
various stages of dishabille. Despite all that has been written about the
excessive modesty of Moslem women-folk, who, when on the street, swathe
themselves in shapeless garments and cover their faces to the eyes,
the slim brown maidens of El Hamma disrobed themselves before us with
utter unconcern, displaying their charms with as little reserve as the
show-girls in Earl Carroll’s “Vanities.” Some of the younger ones were as
graceful as the bronzes in a museum, with slim rounded bodies and firm
pointed breasts, their clear olive skins suffused with pink and as smooth
and lustrous as satin. They completely ignored our presence, disporting
themselves in the pool with the abandon of water-nymphs, until I
indiscreetly unslung my camera, whereupon a Cerberus in the person of a
wrinkled crone suddenly appeared with a cudgel and, loosing a torrent of
shrill Arabic invective, drove us away. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it
struck me that the nymphs were sorry to see us go.
Dinner was awaiting us when we returned to the rest-house. It was a meal
which prompted me to raise my hat, metaphorically speaking, to the genius
and organization of the Transat, which feeds and lodges the traveler
along the fringe of the Sahara as efficiently as Fred Harvey does along
the line of the Santa Fé. We had vegetable soup, and fish fresh-caught
in the Gulf of Gabés, and roast lamb (which is to all Moslem lands what
roast beef is to England), and a crisp green salad, and for dessert such
a soufflé as only a French chef can produce, the whole topped off by a
cobwebbed bottle of Mouton Rothschild and the syrup-like Arab coffee.
Then we huddled about a meager wood fire—for wood is a luxury which must
be use sparingly in the desert—to smoke and sip our liqueurs and peruse
two-months-old copies of “_L’Illustration_” and “_Le Rire_” until it was
decently late enough to go to bed.
The bedrooms were as damp and chilly as a refrigerator, but, having in
mind the tragic experience of three Americans at this same rest-house
some weeks before, we did not insist on any attempt to heat them. The
Americans in question had, despite the warnings of the Arab servants,
ordered no less than four charcoal braziers lighted in their room. Then,
in order still further to raise the temperature, for it was a bitterly
cold night, they had proceeded to close all the doors and windows,
thereby transforming the room into what very nearly proved to be a lethal
chamber. When their chauffeur sought to arouse them the following morning
there was no response. The door was broken down, and the travelers were
found unconscious in their beds, overcome by the charcoal fumes and at
the point of death from asphyxiation.
[Illustration: THE FANTASTIC DWELLINGS OF MECHOUNECH
Rise like Chinese pagodas above the pools and palm-trees of an oasis in
the Tunisian Sahara]
We breakfasted by candle-light and then set off into the chilly dawn.
Harvey had urged on us the wisdom of starting early, for the way to
Tozeur lies across the salt lakes of the Djerid, a dismal and treacherous
morass which is none too safe by day and exceedingly perilous after
nightfall. These salt lakes form one of the most singular features of
the Tunisian Sahara, stretching in a charm which has only two short
breaks right across the southern end of the regency from the Gulf of
Gabés to the frontier of Algeria, which they penetrate for a considerable
distance. They are called by the French (with their usual inaccuracy of
spelling and pronunciation) _chotts_, whereas the word should really be
the Arabic _shat_, the native term for a broad canal, a lake, an estuary.
Strictly speaking, however, the shats are not lakes at all at the present
day, but shallow depressions, some feet below sea-level, which during
more than half the year are expanses of dried mud thickly incrusted with
white salt, this saline veneer giving them at a little distance the
appearance of broad sheets of ice or water. During the winter, however,
when the effect of the rare rains is felt, the shats frequently contain
several feet of water, which, by liquefying the mud into a quicksand,
makes them quite impassable for man or beast. But during the other seven
months of the year they can be crossed on foot or horseback, and, when
the sun has baked the surface to a sufficient hardness, a motor-car may
venture on them with reasonable safety.
Even during the dry months, however, the shats are exceedingly
treacherous; surfaces which give every indication of solidity at a few
yards’ distance are often but thin crusts which will give way without the
slightest warning beneath the weight of animals or men, precipitating
them into a sea of slime from which escape is frequently impossible. One
hears innumerable stories of the tragedies which have been enacted in the
shats. “A caravan of ours,” relates one Arab writer, “had to cross the
shat one day; it was composed of a thousand baggage-camels. Unfortunately
one of the beasts strayed from the path, and all the others followed it.
Nothing in the world could be swifter than the manner in which the crust
yielded and engulfed them; then it became like what it was before, as if
the thousand camels had never existed.”
It seems probable that at no very distant period, as time is measured
by geologists, the shats formed an arm of the Mediterranean, for, as
has already been remarked, they are several feet below its level, and
shell-fossils in great quantities have been found in them. Unfed by
tributary rivers, this inlet gradually contracted and silted up. Meantime
the sand-banks extended across its mouth until they joined, whereupon,
cut off altogether from the sea, the waters rapidly evaporated under the
fierce African sun, leaving the chain of saucer-like depressions which
we see to-day. Confirmation of this theory is found in the legend which
exists among the desert tribes, of a sea, with ports and ships, which
once stretched across the northern end of the Sahara from the shores of
the Syrtes to the foot of the Aurés; this Arab legend is corroborated by
Greek myth; and support is lent to both by the findings of the scientists.
By some authorities this one-time Saharan sea has been identified with
the semi-mythical Lake Tritonis, in whose foul depths dwelt the old
sea-god Triton, who, it will be remembered, befriended Jason and his
Argonauts. According to Greek mythology, the _Argo_, while on her
homeward voyage from Colchis, was driven south by unfavorable winds to
the coast of Libya, the little vessel eventually becoming entangled in
the ooze of an inland sea. Here the Hellenic adventurers were entertained
for a time by certain alluring nymphs of the neighborhood—ancestresses,
no doubt, of those whom I saw disporting themselves in the pool at
El Hamma—but were rescued by Triton, the patron deity of seafarers,
who guided them to the open sea again. Merely a fable, you say? Well,
perhaps. But don’t be too certain. For, when you stop to think about
it, there is nothing inherently improbable in the narrative that has
been handed down to us of the wanderings of a Hellenic sea-adventurer
named Jason, who, with an equally adventurous crew, set out from Greece
in quest of gold (the ancients were accustomed to gather alluvial gold
in sheep-skins; hence, the Golden Fleece), just as the Argonauts of a
later day set out for the gold-fields of California. Their frail craft
driven from its course by a Mediterranean norther, the exhausted mariners
eagerly availed themselves of the shelter offered by an arm of the sea
which opened from the Syrtis Minor, now known as the Gulf of Gabés; but
the waters grew shallower as they sailed eastward, the sand-bars more
frequent, and finally the _Argo_ went hard and fast aground. This much
being admitted, surely it is quite within the bounds of probability that
some wild-looking native fisherman, bearing the three-pronged fish-spear,
or trident, which has always been associated with the sea-god, and which
is commonly used in those parts to-day, offered his services as a pilot
and helped them out of their difficulties. The truth of the matter is
that most of the Greek myths, when stripped of the fanciful embroideries
with which seamen of all periods have been prone to embellish their
tales, will be found to have a very substantial substratum of fact.
Those of the elder generation will doubtless recall the scheme,
widely discussed in the early eighties, which was deceptively styled
“the flooding of the Sahara.” Its author, Colonel François Roudaire,
maintained that, by connecting the shats with the Mediterranean at a
point a few miles to the north of Gabés, it would be possible to create
an inland sea with an average depth of seventy-eight feet and an area
of more than three thousand square miles, or nearly twice the size of
Great Salt Lake in Utah. Ferdinand de Lesseps reported favorably on the
proposed enterprise, which was based on the following facts. The Gulf
of Gabés is separated by a sandy ridge one hundred and fifty feet high
and thirteen miles across from the Shat-el-Fejej, a depression which
extends into the Shat-el-Djerid which in its turn is separated by a
still narrower ridge from the Shat Gharsa. The Shat Gharsa is succeeded
westward by a chain of smaller depressions, and beyond them lies the
Shat Melrir, whose northwestern end is not far from the Algerian town of
Biskra. Were these shats connected and flooded, the Algerian hinterland
would be brought into direct communication with the sea. De Lesseps
estimated that the work could be completed in five years’ time at a cost
of about thirty million dollars, and on the strength of this a company
was formed to carry the project out. But with the death of Colonel
Roudaire and the odium attaching to all enterprises with which de Lesseps
was associated as a result of the Panama scandals, the scheme fell into
abeyance. The company became simply an agricultural concern, devoting
its energies to the creation of oases by the sinking of artesian wells.
In view, however, of the pronounced interest which the French are now
taking in the development of their North African possessions, a revival
of the enterprise may be looked for in the not far distant future, and
the lost sea the _Argo_ sailed long, long ago may again become a fact.
We sighted the shats when about a half-day out from El Hamma, whence our
way had led across a most dismal and depressing land, sans inhabitants
and sans vegetation. The stony plain which we have been traversing since
daybreak now broke away in a long, irregular slant, sloping down to the
banks of what appeared to be a broad river of ice. The illusion was
perfect. Even in the Syrian Desert, famous for its mirages, I have never
seen anything so deceiving. Sweeping in either direction in spacious
curves to the horizon, its level surface twinkling and flashing in the
sunlight until one is blinded by the glare, this amazing phenomenon looks
for all the world like a mighty frozen river winding out of the nowhere
into the unknown. The brooding silence, the utter solitude, the ancient
myths associated with it, the feeling of eeriness and oppression—all
these served to recall that other mystery-enshrouded region described by
Matthew Arnold:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
From caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
As we rolled cautiously out upon the surface of the shats the illusion
of an ice-field gradually disappeared, and I would have taken an oath
that we were approaching a broad sheet of water. Even Harvey was deceived
and apprehensive, speculating uneasily on its probable depth and on
whether we should be able to get through. Yet, like the lake-mirages of
Arabia, the water seemed always to keep just ahead of us, receding as we
advanced, tantalizingly beckoning us on. That others had preceded us
across the shats was evidenced by the numerous imprints of camels’ feet
in the yielding soil, and by the stakes with which the _méharistes_ of
the Camel Corps had marked the route. These we followed meticulously,
as, in the Alps, one follows the red-painted stones which show the way
across a glacier. Nor was it reassuring to note here and there the
tracks of animals which had strayed from the beaten path; as there were
no return tracks, it was to be assumed that they had been engulfed in
the hungry quicksands. To venture upon the shats with so heavy a car as
ours involved, as I knew full well, a certain measure of risk, and I
experienced a distinct feeling of relief when we gained the other side.
Now we were in the Djerid, as the Arabs call the oasis-sprinkled region
immediately to the south of the shats. _Djerid_ is the Arabic for
palm-frond, and, inferentially, for palm-grove, the name being given to
this tract of sand because of the numerous oases which dot it, in the
words of some old writer, like the spots on a leopard’s skin. To those
who have obtained their ideas of the desert from motion-pictures (made in
California) and certain popular but quite inaccurate works of fiction,
the word “oasis” conveys a picture of a small patch of vegetation, some
scattered clumps of palm-trees, a limpid pool, and, perhaps, a few
striped Arab tents, the whole surrounded by a sea of yellow sand. The
description is accurate enough as far as it goes, perhaps, but it should
be understood that oases are not necessarily of small area. Many of them,
on the contrary, are of the size of American counties, with numerous
villages, extensive systems of lakes and streams, and vast forests of
date-palms. Indeed, some of the great oases of the Inner Sahara, such as
Gourara, Tuat, Tafilet, Tidikelt, and Timbuktu, are as large as the State
of Rhode Island and support considerable populations, both sedentary and
floating, for the larger oases are nearly always important centers of the
caravan trade.
Our immediate objective, our jumping-off place for the country of the
great dunes, was Tozeur, a sand-locked oasis town built on the narrow
isthmus which separates the Shat-el-Djerid from the Shat Gharsa. Tozeur
is one of the most beautiful, prosperous, and interesting oases in the
Tunisian Sahara, its ten score springs supplying a perfect network of
streams, rivulets, and irrigation canals, which in turn support upward
of half a million date-palms. Seven little villages nestle amid this
palm-forest, the tops of the trees, when seen from a little distance
peeping above the intervening sand-dunes, looking like feathered bonnets
on the heads of a savage army.
Though a site so lavishly supplied with water, and commanding the great
trade-routes from Carthage and Cirta to the south, must have been
occupied and cultivated since the very earliest times, the origin of
Tozeur is hidden behind the misty curtains of antiquity. It was evidently
a place of considerable importance in the days of Ptolemy, who calls it
Tisouros; in the depths of its palm-groves one is shown the remains of
what was once a Roman watch-tower, later a Byzantine campanile, then a
Moslem minaret, and is now a crumbling ruin; it was the scene of many
bloody and stirring incidents during the Fatimite wars of the ninth and
tenth centuries; in 1068 the Arab geographer Bekri wrote that almost
every day caravans of a thousand camels or more left Tozeur laden with
dates. Then, for eight hundred years, it seems to have dropped from
sight, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot.” But now it is
coming into its own again. Already a narrow-gage railway has been pushed
southward, across the steppes, across the shats, through Gafsa and
Metaloui, and now the hoot of the tin-pot, ten-mile-an-hour locomotive
is echoed by the palm-groves of Tozeur. In preparation for the expected
tide of tourist travel the Transat has erected in the edge of the oasis
a fine modern hotel, with French-made furniture, and porcelain bath-tubs
with hot and cold running water, and excellent _table d’hôte_ meals,
and a spacious terrace where in the evenings the guests may lounge in
deep cane chairs over their coffee, listening to native music and gazing
dreamily into the brooding, star-lit desert. And from here set out the
great Renault twelve-wheelers, which churn their way across the sandy sea
to Touggourt, to Ourgla, to Ghardaia, and beyond. A few more years, a
very few, and Tozeur, so long a wild and woolly frontier town, will be as
sophisticated—and as spoiled—as Biskra.
I think I have already remarked that Tozeur has upward of half a million
date-palms, most of them of the _deglat_ variety, whose luscious,
semi-transparent, amber-colored fruit melts in the mouth like so much
honey. These date-palms form a veritable forest, along whose paths you
may wander for hours and never weary of its beauty. And in your ears
is always the pleasant sound of running water. Overhead the palm-tops
interlace to form a continuous canopy of glossy green, through whose
interstices the sun sifts to carpet the ground with shadows as delicate
as lace. Beneath the palms, peach and apricot and almond trees blossom in
pink and snowy clouds, and the brown earth beneath is thickly inlaid with
the green patina of gardens and little patches of sprouting grain; for
land is so scarce and valuable in the oases that every foot is cultivated
with almost pathetic care, the owners grudging even the narrow paths
which separate their holdings.
[Illustration: THE FORGOTTEN OF GOD
A harka of the terrible masked Touareg—“the Blue-Veiled Silent Ones”—who
have terrorized the Sahara as the Sioux terrorized the Western plains]
Quite unforgettable is the memory of my first excursion into the
green depths of Tozeur. All about me the stately date-palms rose in a
wilderness of vertical lines. Fascinating brooks gurgled across my path
to lose themselves amid the trees. The air was heavy with the fragrance
of peach and orange blossoms. Toiling amid the groves were bronzed,
bare-limbed, brawny men in snowy turbans. Groups of tattooed women
in flowing garments of blue homespun shuffled by, baskets of produce
balanced on their heads, their heavy necklaces and anklets tinkling.
Bathing in a secluded pool were some naked nut-brown maids who, uttering
cries of feigned dismay, fled precipitately at our approach. From the
leafy depths beyond came the plaintive strains of some reed instrument.
My guide said that it was an Arab boy tootling on a native flute. But I
knew better. The music _I_ heard came from the Pipes of Pan.
CHAPTER X
THE CONQUEST OF THE SAHARA
The ring of colonies, regencies, protectorates, spheres of influence,
military districts, and mandated territories which comprise France’s
colonial empire on the continent of Africa have the Sahara for their
core. Their front windows overlook the Mediterranean and the Atlantic,
the Senegal, the Niger, and the Congo, but in every case their back doors
open upon the desert. The linking of these distant and disconnected
possessions, which have so long beckoned to each other across the
enormous gulf, is, then, the ultimate aim of the French empire-builders;
and every move which France has made on the checker-board of
Africa during the last half-century or more has had in view such a
consolidation. In other words, it has long since been realized by the
government at Paris that the Sahara must be made a means of communication
rather than of obstruction if the republic’s vast holdings in the Dark
Continent are to be an empire in anything save name.
No nation was ever confronted with a task of such titanic dimensions nor
one calling for such patience, energy, and courage; not England in India,
nor Russia in Siberia, nor the United States beyond the Mississippi.
But the reward is commensurate with the task, for if France succeeds in
subjugating the Sahara, and thereby bringing into easy communication
with each other those of her possessions which abut upon it, she will
have created a continuous and homogeneous overseas domain, approximately
equivalent in area to the continent of Europe, sweeping almost without a
break from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea and the Congo, from
the Atlantic to the valley of the Nile.
Though the French had established themselves at the mouth of the
Senegal about the same time that the Dutch founded their colony of New
Netherland at the mouth of the Hudson, it was not until the middle of the
nineteenth century that they awoke to a realization of the opportunities
which awaited them across the Middle Sea. The first step on the road
to empire was the conquest of Algeria, which may be said to have been
concluded by the submission of Abd-el-Kader in 1847. But even then France
did not become alive to her imperial destiny, the colonization of the
newly acquired territory across the Mediterranean at first appearing
as little more than a means toward the extinction of pauperism in the
mother-country. Not until the tribes of the Oued Rir rose in revolt was
France introduced to the desert. Laghouat was seized by a flying column
in 1852. The tricolor was raised over Ourgla the following year. In 1854
the victory of Meggarine brought about the submission of Touggourt.
As the frontier had now been pushed nearly four hundred miles south
of the Mediterranean, the work of sinking wells to revive certain of
the decaying oases was immediately undertaken and met with conspicuous
success. France was beginning to get acquainted with the desert, which
was found to be not quite the utter void that had been supposed. In some
parts oases dotted its surface, and its surface was crisscrossed by the
routes of caravans, which in the old days had carried on a thriving trade
between the Sudan and the cities of the Barbary Coast. Frenchmen of
enterprise and vision began to see that the Sahara offered possibilities
after all, and steps were taken toward a still wider occupation.
This movement was temporarily halted by the disastrous war with Prussia
and the collapse of the Second Empire, but the echoes of the Commune
had scarcely died away before the empire-builders were again at work,
building up in Africa a new and greater France. In 1873 General Gallifet
entered El Golea. And in 1881 the proclamation of a protectorate over
Tunisia, which Italy had earmarked for her own, gave the world its first
hint of the scope of France’s African ambitions.
Meantime a similar spirit of expansion was manifesting itself along the
southern borders of the future colonial empire. Guinea and the Ivory
Coast had been annexed in 1843. The expeditions of Savargnan de Brazza in
the late seventies and early eighties won for France the vast territory
which is now known as French Equatorial Africa. In 1887 the Binger
expedition gave a decided stimulus to French enterprise in West Africa
by linking together the hinterlands of Senegambia and the Ivory Coast.
French gunboats were a-prowl up the Niger and the Senegal seeking further
opportunities to plant the tricolor. Thenceforward the occupation of
the interior was swift and uninterrupted, a long series of expeditions
pushing the French frontiers northward and eastward until they occupied
the whole bend of the Niger and flowed around the British colony of
Nigeria to join, at Lake Tchad, with the French Congo advancing from
the south. From all sides the French colonies, north, west, and south,
were pushing forward in a simultaneous advance. The foundations of this
vast colonial structure having thus been completed, the corner-stone
was officially laid in 1890, when, by the signing of the Anglo-French
Convention, England formally recognized France’s claim to all that
portion of the Sahara lying between the Algerian-Tunisian frontiers on
the north and a line drawn from Say, a town on the Niger, to Lake Tchad
on the south. When, by this treaty, France secured her claim to the
Sahara, Lord Salisbury remarked dryly that “the French cock seems to
enjoy scratching in the sand.”
[Illustration: THE SANDY SEA
In parts, but not throughout, the Sahara resembles a frozen ocean, its
tremendous billows of gray-white sand seemingly arrested in the very act
of breaking. But by far the greater part is not sandy at all; rather,
a series of undulating steppes, strewn with broken stone, dotted with
oases, and broken by numerous mountain chains, some of which are upward
of a mile in height]
Though the territory lying within the great bend of the Niger, embraced
in what is now the French Sudan, was occupied in 1893, and though two
years later the tricolor was hoisted over the mud-walled citadel of
Timbuktu, the great caravan-center and trade-mart of the south, it was
not until the very close of the nineteenth century that the central
Sahara was crossed by Europeans. This remarkable journey was made by
Fernand Foureau, the greatest of all the long line of French African
explorers, who, setting out from Algeria with a small military escort,
succeeded in reaching Zinder, an important trade center on the Nigerian
frontier, in November, 1899.
Foureau’s achievement was of immense value to France, not merely because
it demonstrated that the desert could be crossed from one edge to the
other, but because it proved the truth of the explorer’s oft-repeated
assertion that the first step in the conquest and pacification of the
Sahara was to break the power of the great Touareg confederation. These
robber tribes occupying the oases which stretch from Ghadames in the
east to Tuat in the west, formed a cordon which stretched right across
the desert south of Algeria, completely masking the southern frontiers
of that colony. The Touareg were to the central Sahara what the Sioux
and the Apaches were to our Western plains. From their inaccessible
strongholds amid the hills and oases of the mid-desert, they kept watch
upon the trade-routes, levied blackmail upon or plundered caravans,
murdered explorers and pioneers, sacked frontier towns, and preyed
on the trans-Saharan trade as the Barbary corsairs had preyed on the
Mediterranean merchantmen. Consequently the Sahara was in a constant
state of turmoil and insecurity; theft, pillage, and massacre were so
common as scarcely to evoke comment. Armed to the teeth, mounted on
their swift _méhari_, bands of these masked riders would wipe out a
whole caravan or swoop down upon some defenseless oasis-town, regaining
their distant desert strongholds long before a force could be organized
to pursue them. Fearless, arrogant, treacherous, and inhumanly cruel,
the only law they recognized was that of superior force. Until the
great robber confederation was smashed France could not hope to solve
the Saharan question. “You will never traverse the Touareg country,”
Foureau said in one of his reports, “with any kind of security except by
depending on force and by establishing all along the route well-manned
positions, the garrisons of which will police the road throughout. This
you will have to do if you wish to open up communications between the
Sudan and Algeria.”
The government at Paris accepted his advice and proceeded to the task
with the utmost energy. A battalion of the Foreign Legion, transformed
into mounted infantry by mounting the men on mules, formed one of the
flying columns. Other punitive expeditions were composed of native
troops, who were provided with _méhari_ as speedy as the racing
dromedaries ridden by the Touareg themselves, and accompanied by
batteries of light mountain-guns. For, when the French once determine to
do a thing, they usually do it well. From the outposts in Algeria, in
Senegal, in the Sudan, the columns pressed forward relentlessly into
the sandy wastes. The attacking hordes of tribesmen were mowed down by
the withering fire of rifles and machine-guns; the strongholds which the
Touareg had deemed impregnable hastily capitulated when they heard the
terrifying whine and crash of the French shells. Soon the redoubtable
Touareg confederacy was completely subjugated, its principal centers were
occupied in force, a highly efficient police force was recruited from the
tribesmen themselves—just as Porfirio Díaz recruited his famous _rurales
nacionales_ from outlaws and bandits—and travel was made possible, if not
altogether safe, from one border of the Sahara to the other.
Shortly after France’s African empire had been completely reorganized
in 1902, the effective area of French control in the western Sahara was
increased to the extent of some 150,000 square miles by inducing the
Moorish emirs of the Adrar, a fertile but sparsely inhabited region lying
to the north of the Senegal, between the sand-wastes of El Juf and the
Atlantic, to place themselves under the direct supervision of French
officials. In the following year these regions were consolidated into a
single territory to which was given the historic name of Mauretania.
France set the capstone to her African empire on March 30, 1912, when
His Shereefian Majesty the Sultan Mulai Yusef, in his palace at Fez,
set his signature to the document which formally accepted a French
protectorate over Morocco. By that single stroke of the pen was added
to the overseas dominions under the tricolor a territory larger than
France itself. Be it clearly understood, that the control of Morocco
was as vital a fact in the French scheme for acquiring the hegemony of
Northwest Africa as the annexation of California was to the dominance of
the North American continent by the United States. France’s style was
cramped, to make use of a popular expression, as long as Morocco remained
independent. Had the Shereefian Empire been a strong, well-governed
country, the situation would have been different; but it was, on the
contrary, a hotbed of disorder, unrest, intrigue, and corruption. To
have attempted the pacification of the Sahara and the reëstablishment of
the old trade-routes, with the hinterland of Morocco offering a secure
refuge and recruiting-ground for all the lawless and unruly elements of
desert life, would have been to court endless difficulties if not to
invite complete disaster. For centuries Morocco had been a thorn in the
flesh of all those European nations having political interest in Africa;
this source of irritation and infection must be got rid of if France’s
elaborate and carefully worked out plans for the consolidation of her
African possessions were to succeed. That her action was justified has
been proved beyond cavil by the striking success which has marked her
administration of Morocco during the past dozen years.
The most recent additions to France’s African domain were acquired at
the close of the World War, when Germany unconditionally surrendered her
overseas possessions to the Allies. When the spoils of war came to be
apportioned, France obtained control of about two thirds of the former
German colony of Togo, and nearly the whole of Cameroon (both of which
adjoined her possessions on the Gulf of Guinea), under mandates granted
by the League of Nations.
Omitting the little enclave of French Somaliland on the East Coast and
the great island colony of Madagascar, France’s African empire to-day
consists of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, French West Africa (comprising the
colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, the French
Sudan, and the Upper Volta, and the civil territories of Mauretania and
the Niger), French Equatorial Africa (in which are embraced the colonies
of Gabun, Middle Congo, Ubanghi-Shari, and Tchad), and the mandated
territories of Togo and Cameroon.
Every step in France’s African policy during the last half-century has
been as carefully considered as the moves in a championship chess-game.
The ultimate effect on the grand plan of every military movement,
every expedition, every rectification of a frontier, every treaty, has
been meticulously weighed and pondered in advance. They have all been
parts of a sagacious and brilliantly executed scheme; nothing has been
left to chance. There has been none of the “muddling through” which
characterized the British policy in South Africa; little of the stupidity
and blundering which marked our winning of the West. The French conquest
has been marred by no petty or selfish or contradictory aims; it has
been hampered by no irresolution, no moving forward and then turning
back; energy in one quarter has not been counteracted by indifference in
another; patriotism has not been subordinated to politics.
Since the conquest of Algeria, moreover, France’s course of empire in
Africa has been obstructed by no great colonial wars and few wars of
any kind; she has had no Indian Mutinies, no Adowas, no Omdurmans, no
Modder Rivers. Wherever possible she has employed a process of pacific
penetration—winning the confidence of the tribes instead of threatening
them, granting broad measures of autonomy to the great sheikhs and
the grand caïds, flattering their vanity with salutes, rewards, and
decorations. The social gulf which separates the British officials in
Egypt, the Sudan, and India from the native chieftains is unknown in
French Africa, for the French tolerate neither racial discrimination nor
the color-line.
Everywhere—north, south, and west—the advance has been gradual and
general. The black-coated cabinet ministers in Paris, the administrators
in the various colonial capitals, and the helmeted pioneers scattered
along the frontiers have worked toward a common end, the pioneers keeping
their superiors constantly informed of every fluctuation in local
conditions and native sentiment, just as the intelligence officers of an
army in the field relay the information they have gathered to the high
command. Let it be added that no nation has been more faithfully served
by its explorers and pioneers than France. Henri Duveyrier, the first
of the French explorers, whose great journey into the Sahara dates from
1859; Victor Largeau, who reached Ghadames in 1875; Savargnan de Brazza,
whose name will always be linked with the creation of the French Congo;
General Faidherbe, founder of the French Sudan; General Dodds, conqueror
of Dahomey; Montiel, who won for France the great country around Lake
Tchad; Fernand Foureau, the hero of the march to Zinder—these, and many
like them, were to French Africa what Lewis, Clarke, Boone, Crockett,
and Frémont were to our own frontier. But of the intrepid company of
French explorers who have carried the tricolor into the darkest corners
of the Dark Continent, Africa has taken a heavy toll. Joubert and
Dourneaux-Duperré were assassinated near Ghadames; Lieutenant Palet
was murdered at Gurara; Camille Douls laid down his life for France
at Tidikelt; the expedition led by Colonel Flatters was ambushed by
Touareg in the central Sahara and wiped out to the last man; Louis Say,
Lieutenant Lamy, Brière de l’Isle all died by Touareg spear; Coppolani
was killed by tribesmen in the conquest of Mauretania; Colonel Bonnier
was slain at the taking of Timbuktu. Such is the price of empire.
The most gallant and dramatic figure in all this company of courageous
men is, however, the least known to fame. I refer to Vicomte Charles de
Foucauld—“de Foucauld of the Sahara” as he was known—who left among the
wild tribes of the desert a name which has already passed into tradition.
A son of the nobility, he lost his parents when he was six and was
brought up by his uncle, an old colonel of engineers, from whom he got a
taste for the classics. When he left school, while still in his teens,
young de Foucauld was a confirmed atheist, a fact which is of special
significance in view of his end. Joining a hussar regiment, he saw active
service in Algeria, an experience which left him with a deep affection
for the common soldier, an affection which his troopers warmly returned.
Fighting against the Arabs had imbued him with a keen desire to make a
study of the race, and with this in view he obtained leave of absence
for the purpose of making a journey into the interior of Morocco, which
was then a forbidden country to Europeans. Disguise of some sort was
imperative, so, deciding to go as a Jew, he applied himself to the study
of Hebrew as well as Arabic. He went in rags and barefoot, apparently the
poorest of the poor, and was often insulted and stoned; but he always
carried in the palm of his left hand a tiny writing-tablet on which he
surreptitiously noted all the features of the country or took compass
bearings. When he returned to civilization after nearly a year spent
in the unknown he had more than doubled the length of routes known and
surveyed in the Shereefian Empire and brought back other topographical
data of immense military value.
Some years after his return from Morocco de Foucauld embraced
Christianity and became a devout Catholic, eventually resigning from
the army in order to become a Trappist monk, a member of that sternly
penitential missionary order which devotes itself to the salvation of the
heathen. As a monk he lived for a time in Asia Minor, two days’ march
from Alexandretta. After spending two years in the study of theology at
Rome, he resolved, while in Nazareth, to become a hermit priest. For the
field of his labors he chose the Moroccan Sahara, one of the most savage
regions in all Africa, as it was one of the least known. His first post
was at Beni Abbés, a desert town in the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental,
four hundred miles to the southeast of Fez. Here he purchased a few acres
of palm-sprinkled sand and built a mud-walled chapel in which he slept.
He lived on coarse barley bread, a few dried dates, and “desert tea,” a
beverage made from an herb. No European willingly ate twice at his board,
and even the negroes whom he redeemed from slavery, though eager to work
for him, found his fare too slim. He made no formal conversions, but both
French soldiers and natives swarmed about him, knowing that he always
stood ready to aid them with money or advice. On one occasion his little
church was attended by General (afterward Marshal) Lyautey, who wrote: “A
plank was the altar. The decorations were a calico sheet with the picture
of Christ on it; two candlesticks on the altar. Very well. I never heard
Mass as Father de Foucauld said it. I could have believed myself in the
Thebaid. It is one of the things in my life which have moved me most.”
In the spring of 1905 de Foucauld set out on a still more extended
journey among the Touareg, eventually establishing himself at
Tamanrasset, a village of twenty hearths in the very heart of the Sahara,
midway between In Salah and Timbuktu. Here he was alone among the veiled
Touareg, “the Forgotten of God,” hundreds of miles from the nearest white
man. The place he chose for himself was perhaps the loneliest and most
dangerous ever occupied for any length of time by a European. Though the
Touareg are suspicious and savagely intolerant of others, the lone priest
so completely won their confidence and friendship that in 1913 he took
with him to Paris the son of their sheikh.
Then came 1914—“_l’année terrible_.” The outbreak of the Great War found
de Foucauld back among the veiled tribesmen, and although he burned to
go to the front as a chaplain or stretcher-bearer, his ecclesiastical
superiors urged him to stay at his post, advice which was strongly
seconded by the French military authorities, who were well aware that
German emissaries were at work stirring up discontent among the tribes
of the hinterland. In December, 1916, a Touareg war-party, whooped on by
the enemy, decided that de Foucauld would be a valuable hostage and laid
plans to attack the mission station, which had been transformed into a
rude fort. A traitor gave them the password, the gate was opened, and
the Blue-Veiled Ones poured in. The hermit was overpowered, bound hand
and foot, and propped against a wall while the place was looted of such
poor things as it contained. While the plundering was in progress two
natives whom de Foucauld had befriended approached to offer him a word
of cheer. Whereupon a blood-drunk Touareg put the muzzle of his rifle to
the priest’s head and pulled the trigger. In the words of Mr. Stephen
Gwynn, his biographer: “There was no cry or word; gradually the corpse
sank down. He had had his will; for many passages in his journals and his
letters prove that he aspired to death by violence. That he should have
been betrayed would undoubtedly to his strange nature have been welcome;
it completed that imitation of Christ which was his life’s work. Soldier
and Frenchman, he died uncertain of the war’s issue; Christian priest
among the unbelievers, he died without converts made. Yet assuredly he
was in his heart convinced that by such means he might make ready the way
for others, and he asked no more, he refused to desire more.”
He was buried beneath the shadow of the little church which he had
built, in the heart of that Sahara which he knew and loved so well. To
paraphrase the lines of Matthew Arnold:
Far hence he lies,
Near some lone desert town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The southern stars look down.
To those observers who may have thought that France’s policy in North
Africa is inspired solely by the hope of adding to the military power
of the republic, one of de Foucauld’s letters, as quoted by Mr. Gwynn,
cannot fail to be of extraordinary interest. It was written only six
months before his murder at Tamanrasset.
My thought is that if the Moslems of our Colonial Empire in
the North of Africa are not gradually, gently, little by
little, converted, there will be a national movement like that
in Turkey. An intellectual élite will form itself in the big
towns, trained in the French fashion, but French neither in
mind nor heart, lacking all Moslem faith, but keeping the name
of it to be able to influence the masses, who remain ignorant
of us, alienated from us by their priests and by our contact
with them, too often very unfit to create affection. In the
long run the élite will use Islam as a lever to raise the
masses against us. The population is now about thirty millions;
thanks to peace, it will double in fifty years. It will have
railways, all the plant of civilization, and will have been
trained by us to the use of our arms. If we have not made
Frenchmen of these people, they will drive us out. The only way
for them to become French is by becoming Christians.
It would be interesting to know to what extent this strange, wonderful
son of France represented the feelings of France as a whole.
* * * * *
After perusing the long list of those who have paid the price of empire
with their lives, the thoughtful man may ask whether the reward has
justified the sacrifice. The atlas gives the answer. Glance at a map
of, say, 1880, and you will find the extent of French occupation marked
by a few wedges driven into the coast-line of Northwest Africa, while
as for the Sahara, it is merely an expanse of speckled yellow labeled
“Unexplored.” But unfold a map of to-day and we find that, barring Libya,
Liberia, and a few British and Spanish enclaves along the West Coast,
the whole of that portion of Africa lying between the Mediterranean and
the Congo, between the Atlantic and the valley of the Nile, is tinted
the same color, is overshadowed by the same flag, is ruled by the same
nation—and that nation is France. It is one of the most astounding
achievements in the history of the world, this building of a colossal
empire from savagery and sand.
* * * * *
Were a map of Africa to be superimposed on a map of North America it
would be found that in area and dimensions the Sahara Desert very closely
corresponds to the United States. Yet it is a singular fact that more
misconceptions exist in regard to this vast region, the fringes of which
are visited annually by thousands of tourists, than about almost any area
on the face of the globe. Doubtless because the makers of maps were so
long accustomed to painting the Sahara a speckled yellow, ninety-nine
persons out of every hundred visualize it as an illimitable stretch of
sun-scorched sand, flat as a floor, quite incapable of supporting life,
and utterly destitute of vegetation. Nothing could be farther from the
truth.
The impression of flatness is an optical illusion. Were a region that is
as rugged as, say, New England to be completely stripped of its cities,
villages, and farmsteads, its forests, lakes, and streams, its trees
and grass, I imagine that, despite the pronounced irregularity of its
surface, it would appear to one traveling across it to be a dead flat
plain. So it is with the Sahara. In reality it is not flat at all. It has
its mountains, its valleys, and its plains. Topographically speaking,
it is a region of the most varied surface and irregular relief, broken
by lofty table-lands and deep depressions, massive buttes and fantastic
crags, vast steppes covered with water-worn pebbles and loose stones,
cañons winding between precipitous walls, seas of shifting yellow sand
and oases green with forests of date-palms and other fruit-trees. Its
surface is still further diversified by numerous and extensive mountain
ranges, at least one of which, the Ahaggar, has an area greater than the
Alps and several peaks higher than any in the United States east of the
Rockies. Yet the children in our public schools are still taught that the
Sahara is nothing but a waste of sand, flat as a school-room floor!
From this it will be seen that the Sahara has the makings of much
picturesque and interesting scenery if it were properly upholstered. Its
deadly monotony is due to a lack of diversity in color rather than to a
lack of diversity in surface. The mountains, the plateaus, the crags,
and the cañons are all there, but there is nothing to bring them out,
to emphasize their presence. Since there is in that vast spaciousness
nothing with which to compare them, they appear insignificant, hardly
noticeable. Another thing. We of more favored lands are accustomed to
what might be described as vertical scenery—trees, crops, church-spires,
houses, fences—whereas the scenery of the desert is wholly horizontal.
This still further makes for monotony, so, instead of examining the
physical features of the country, the eye becomes wearied and is always
looking off toward the horizon.
I trust that I have now made it amply clear that the popular conception
of the Sahara as an expanse of sand—a conception which motion-pictures
and novels of desert life, as well as the illustrations in the popular
magazines, have done much to foster—is quite erroneous. There are broad
stretches of sand, it is true, the most extensive being the Igidi of
Mauretania, the Grand Erg Occidental to the south of Algeria, and the
Grand Erg Oriental to the south of Tunisia; but the actual area of pure
sand is relatively small, covering only about _one tenth_ of the Sahara’s
surface.
The remaining nine tenths of the desert consist of stony, wind-swept
plateaus, known as _hammada_, vast tracts strewn with water-worn pebbles,
called _serir_, and scattered highland regions. Of the latter the most
extensive is the Ahaggar, or Hoggar Plateau, which lies in the center
of the Sahara, nine hundred miles due south from Algiers. Covering an
area considerably greater than that of the Swiss, French, Italian, and
Austrian Alps put together, this mass of mountains is dominated by two
great peaks, Hikena and Watellen, whose summits during five months of the
year are covered with snow. To the northeast of the Ahaggar is the Tasili
Plateau, and directly to the east, forming the southwestern boundary of
Italian Libya, stretch the Tummo or War Mountains. In the extreme east,
near the frontier of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is the great table-land
of Tibesti, with an average height of nearly a mile and a half above
sea-level, the volcanic cone of Tussid rising eighty-eight hundred feet
into the African blue. On the east and south the highlands of Tibesti run
down to connect with the lower ranges of Ennedi and Borku, which merge,
in turn, into the rich plains of Darfur and Wadai. In addition to the
plateaus and ranges mentioned, there are several disconnected mountain
masses, such as the rugged region in Mauretania known as the Adrar of the
Iforas, and, to the north of the Nigerian frontier, the Hills of Air.
The country of the sand-dunes, which has provided so many fiction writers
and motion-picture directors with highly romantic settings, consists of
a broad belt which, starting on the Atlantic seaboard, in the vicinity
of Cape Blanco, sweeps in a great arc northward and eastward, completely
masking the southern frontiers of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, to
the shores of the Gulf of Gabés. That portion of this sand-belt which
stretches from the Senegal River to the Moroccan Atlas is generally
referred to as the Igidi (the Berber word for sand-dunes); then, to the
south of Algeria, comes the region known as the Grand Erg Occidental,
separated by a narrow valley at El Golea from the Grand Erg Oriental,
which sweeps right across the southern end of Tunisia. The Igidi and the
Ergs can best be described as sandy oceans—the simile has been used many
times before but I cannot think of a better—with waves of sand instead of
water. The dunes of the Eastern Erg, which range in height from sixty to
three hundred feet or more, lie in long parallel rows, with a gradual
slope to windward and an abrupt descent to leeward, so that, particularly
in the gray mists of early morning or at nightfall, they present a
striking resemblance to a stormy sea. Generally speaking, the dunes
maintain a state of comparative permanency, certain of the larger ones
having been given names of their own, though it is by no means unusual
for their contours to change almost beyond recognition in a single
night under the influence of the wind. The oft-told tales of caravans
and armies engulfed in the moving sands may be set down as imaginary,
however, save, perhaps, in some instances in the Libyan Desert, where
such tragic episodes are known to have occurred.
The investigations of French geologists have completely disproved the
theory that the Sahara represents the dried-up bed of what was once a
vast inland sea and that its dunes are composed of sand left there at
that period. It appears, on the contrary, that the sand, instead of
having been deposited by the sea, comes from the stony plateaus of the
_hammada_. The soft Cretaceous sandstone, heated by the sun until it
is as hot as the top of a stove, is suddenly chilled at night by rapid
radiation. The rock, fractured by the abrupt change from heat to cold,
disintegrates; and the sand thus produced, sifted and drifted by the
wind, takes the form of dunes. The slightest breeze is enough to make
the desert smoke with dust, while a strong wind produces a weird singing
of the sands, a peculiarly eery sound which indicates that the dunes
themselves are shifting.
The loose particles of sand which cover wide tracts of the Sahara are
a cause of acute discomfort not only to the countries lying along the
whole north coast of Africa but even to those on the opposite side of
the Mediterranean, for the sand-laden wind from the Sahara, known in
southern Europe as the sirocco and in Egypt as the _khamsin_ (because
during the spring it blows at intervals for about fifty days) frequently
affects regions a thousand miles away, covering them with fine red dust.
Though to all intents and purposes waterless so far as rivers are
concerned, the Sahara is thickly sprinkled with fertile spots, varying
in area from a few acres to hundreds of square miles, where the water
comes to the surface in the form of springs or is found in shallow wells.
Thanks to the enterprise of the French government and the ability of
French engineers, these oases have been greatly expanded during recent
years, for experiments have proved that an unlimited supply of aërated
water is obtainable from the great reservoirs which underlie the Sahara
by the sinking of artesian wells, water generally being found at a
maximum depth of two hundred feet. When one is in the midst of the
desert, surrounded by blinding white sand-dunes which support no living
thing, the very idea of water seems absurd and its existence impossibly
remote, yet it is often only a few yards beneath one’s feet. In this
fact of a secret water-supply lies the hope of the regeneration of parts
at least of the Sahara, for, once it has been introduced to water, this
seemingly hopeless region will blossom like the rose.
With the desert we are accustomed to associate the date-palm, of which
there are upward of four million in the Algerian oases alone, and
without which life in the Sahara would be virtually impossible; for they
provide the natives not only with food, but with shelter, fuel, timber,
building-materials, and even clothing. But do not get the idea that the
soil of the oases is capable of supporting palms alone, for apples,
peaches, oranges, lemons, figs, pomegranates, grapes, wheat, barley, and
rice are all commonly and successfully grown. So comparatively limited
are these areas of great richness and fertility, however, so precious is
the land, that it is cultivated with almost pathetic care, the natives
grudging even the narrow foot-paths which separate their holdings from
those of their neighbors. Yet dates are, and always have been, so much
the staple of food and commerce in the Sahara that, instead of computing
the size of a village by the number of its inhabitants, it is always
spoken of as having so many date-palms.
[Illustration: BASKING IN THE BLINDING SUNLIGHT OF THE TUNISIAN SAHARA
Is Tozeur, a picturesque and very ancient town, long the starting-point
of the caravans bound for Libya and Lake Tchad, and now the stepping-off
place of travelers across the Grand Erg; it is noted for its arcaded
houses, whose arches and highly decorative brick-work façades are
supported by columns looted from Roman ruins]
The eventual conquest of the desert depends not on the success of
military expeditions, the establishment of trade-routes, and the building
of railways, but rather on the expansion of the present oases and the
creation of new ones. Pacification depends on fertilization. The Touareg
and Arab nomads will be a source of trouble as long as they can find
refuge in the desert, but, like the Indians of our own West, whom they
so greatly resemble, they must eventually give way before the steadily
advancing line of cultivation, either betaking themselves to remoter
regions of the continent or becoming agriculturists themselves. What
it comes to, as Mr. L. March Phillips has so aptly put it,[2] is this:
the tribes can only be subdued by subduing the desert; the desert can
only be subdued by planting oases; and oases can only be planted by
sinking wells. When all is said and done, it is not the soldiers but the
well-drillers who are the real conquerors of the Sahara.
The French conquest of North Africa has shifted the southern frontier
of Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the fringes of the
Sahara. No longer is the sea a barrier between the continents; it has
become a link. It may lash itself into a rage, but its rage is jeered
at by the cable, the radio, the airplane, and the great steamers. The
desert is now the true divide. And deeper and deeper into the desert
the French outposts are being pushed, for the indomitable spirit of
adventure—the spirit which led King Louis and his Crusaders to the Holy
Land, Champlain to Canada and La Salle down the Mississippi, the armies
of Napoleon to the Pyramids, which took Foureau down to Zinder, and de
Brazza up the Congo, and Marchand to Fashoda—still runs hot and strong in
the blood of France. Everywhere the Touareg raiders are being halted by
the harsh “_Qui vive?_” of the French videttes. French well-drillers and
agricultural experts are at work all the way from Libya to the Atlantic.
The tribes of the far interior are becoming accustomed to the drone of
the airplane and the panting of the motor-car. Twin lines of steel and
festoons of copper wire have been flung far into the central wastes. The
radio operators of Algeria gossip with their fellows at Lake Tchad and
Timbuktu. France is striding southward in seven-league boots, carrying
the frontier of civilization with her as she goes. In a much nearer
future than most people dream of, her southern boundary will not be the
Mediterranean, nor yet the Sahara, but the Equator.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST HOME OF MYSTERY
Tozeur, the ancient oasis town on the northern edge of the Grand Erg
Oriental, is the jumping-off place for the desert; from here we were to
plunge into the real Sahara. It was the end of the line, so far as Harvey
and the Cadillac were concerned, and the day after our arrival he headed
north again on the long detour, via Tunis and Constantine, to Biskra, in
southern Algeria, where he was to await our arrival.
For our journey across the trackless sand-wastes of the Grand Erg, where
travel is entirely by compass and the sun, the officials of the Transat
had placed at our disposal one of the curious twelve-wheelers designed by
Renault, the great French automobile manufacturer, to solve the problem
of transportation in the desert. The huge, cumbersome-looking vehicle,
which in general appearance is a cross between a five-ton truck, a
military reconnaissance car, and an overgrown station-wagon, deserves
a paragraph or so of description, for it gives promise of playing as
important a rôle in the conquest of the Sahara as the prairie-schooner
did in the opening up of the American West.
Surprisingly enough, it is not of excessive horse-power—only about 18
H.P., I believe, according to European rating, though more than double
that by American methods of computation. Its limited horse-power, which
appeared, however, to be amply sufficient for the purpose, is compensated
for by special gearing, the car having six forward speeds and four in
reverse. It is provided, moreover, with six pairs of twin wheels—that is,
twelve in all—all six pairs being geared to the engine on the principle
of the four-wheel drive used by certain American truck manufacturers. The
wheels are fitted with enormous balloon-tires, studded with copper rivets
as a protection against the flinty stones with which great areas of the
desert are strewn, and inflated to a pressure of less than twenty pounds,
thus obtaining a maximum of traction in the yielding sand.
The body, which is very stoutly built, resembles those of the
reconnaissance cars used by staff-officers during the World War, its four
leather-covered arm-chairs, and the broad seat which extends right across
the rear of the tonneau, providing accommodation for five passengers in
addition to the chauffeur and the native guide. Great speed could hardly
be looked for in a vehicle of this type; over a smooth, hard surface
eighteen to twenty miles an hour is the maximum, while in the dune
country, where any speed at all is out of the question, eighty miles is
considered a good day’s run.
Perhaps the most novel feature of this sand-wagon, however, is the highly
ingenious device which has been contrived for enabling it to extricate
itself from cups or pockets in the dunes, where the ascent is so steep
and the surface so soft that it is impossible to obtain traction. This
device consists of a metal hoisting-drum, about the size of a nail-keg,
which is fixed between the forward springs just in front of the axle.
Wound on this drum, which is operated by the engine, are some fifty
feet of stout steel cable. When, as not infrequently happens, the car
slides down into one of the craterlike cavities formed by the dunes and
is unable to climb out because of lack of traction, the steel cable is
unwound, carried up the slopes, and attached to a sort of steel anchor,
which is driven deep into the sand. The driver then throws in the clutch,
the drum revolves, winding up the cable, and the car lifts itself out of
trouble by its own boot-straps, as it were.
[Illustration: THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU
It is close on two thousand miles from the Mediterranean to the
mysterious city on the Niger, and caravans spend three months upon
the way, but already the motor-car has cut the journey down to two
weeks. In a day now not far away the caravan will be as extinct as the
prairie-schooner]
The chauffeurs of these desert-going cars are carefully chosen for their
skill as drivers, their mechanical ability, and their endurance, most of
them having served as airplane pilots or mechanicians during the war.
Accompanying each car is an Arab guide who is presumed to be thoroughly
familiar with the baffling topography of the regions to be traversed,
though even the most experienced frequently encounter difficulty in
getting their bearings, so completely is the aspect of the dunes changed
by a violent sand-storm. In order to provide against emergencies, each
car carries a tightly rolled tent on the roof and a week’s supply of
emergency provisions.
The cars originally used for the conquest of the Sahara were of quite
a different type than the Renault. They were ten horse-power machines
designed by André Citroen, the Henry Ford of France, and, in addition to
the regular front wheels, were equipped with caterpillar treads, similar
to those used on tanks and farm tractors. During the winter of 1922-23
a fleet of these cars crossed from Touggourt to Timbuktu, making the
two-thousand-mile journey in twenty days. In October, 1924, a second
Citroen expedition of eight cars traversed Africa from Algeria to the
Great Lakes, where it divided, one group going on to Madagascar and
another keeping southward to the Cape. The latter journey of fifteen
thousand miles occupied nine months. Though it is generally admitted, I
believe, that the tractor type of machine is able to negotiate country
which would be quite impassable for the twelve-wheeler, it cannot attain
the speed of the latter, its accommodations for passengers are far less
commodious and comfortable, and, on account of the sharp stones which
strew vast stretches of the central Sahara, its rubber-shod treads are
quickly cut to pieces and cannot be replaced as readily as tires.
It is a far cry from the Chamber of Deputies in Paris to the Sahara, yet
the repercussion of political feuds in the one are sometimes felt in
the other. This close relation between politics and private enterprise
in France was strikingly illustrated by a recent episode, which aroused
considerable speculation at the time, but of which, so far as I am
aware, the inside story has never been published. It will be recalled,
perhaps, that during the early months of 1925 the American and European
newspapers devoted considerable space to accounts of the automobile
service which M. Citroen was about to establish between Algeria and
Timbuktu. It was announced that preliminary expeditions sent out by the
millionaire manufacturer had surveyed a route across the desert; that
at frequent intervals along this route rest-houses, provided with all
the comforts demanded by present-day travelers, had been erected; that a
great fleet of tractors had been assembled at one of the rail-heads in
southern Algeria; and that, for the equivalent of twenty-five hundred
dollars, the tourist in search of novelty and adventure could purchase
a round-trip ticket, rooms and meals included, from the French capital
to the mysterious city on the Niger. In order to give the enterprise
the necessary éclat, it was to be inaugurated by a distinguished party,
including the King of the Belgians and Marshal Pétain. Then, only a
few days before the date set for departure, the project was suddenly
abandoned, the reason given being that the War Office had notified
the promoters that the route was unsafe and that it was impossible to
guarantee adequate military protection.
That, at least, was the ostensible reason. But the real cause for the
abandonment of this highly picturesque project was not so much military
as political. Citroen, one of the richest men in France, was allied with
the political party then in the saddle. His great rival, Renault, was a
stanch supporter of the opposition. But on the very eve of the departure
of the inaugural expedition there occurred one of those sudden political
crises so frequent in France; the government was overturned and the
opposition came into power. Citroen suddenly found himself with the outs
and Renault with the ins. A day or so later the new minister of war sent
word to M. Citroen that because of trouble among the tribes conditions
in the desert were insecure and that the government could not assume
responsibility for the safety of the expedition. M. Citroen took the
hint. He knew when he was beaten. The invitations to the distinguished
guests were canceled; the chain of rest-houses which had been erected
right across the Sahara were stripped of their furnishings and abandoned;
hundreds of employees were recalled; the tractors were ordered to Oran,
where they are now rusting in a storage warehouse; and an investment of
more than fifteen million francs was written off. Political jealousy,
the curse of France, had, for a time at least, turned back the hands of
progress in the Sahara.
Though the Citroen project was, in its inception, a publicity stunt, a
money-making scheme, its success indubitably would have proved the first
step in the realization of a great imperial dream. For, as I have sought
to point out in the preceding chapter, the consolidation into an empire
of France’s scattered possessions in North, West, and Central Africa must
hinge, when all is said and done, on the establishment of direct and
rapid communications between them. Let us take a concrete case by way of
illustration. The distance from Algiers to Timbuktu as the motor goes is,
in round figures, two thousand miles. But the distance between the same
points by the only route now open to travelers—Algiers-Marseilles-Dakar
by steamer, Dakar-Kayes-Bamaku by rail, and Bamaku-Timbuktu by river-boat
and launch—is upward of four thousand miles.
[Illustration: CROSSING THE SAND-DUNES OF THE GRAND ERG BY MOTOR
Combines the thrills of riding a roller-coaster at Coney Island,
tobogganing on the Cresta Run at St.-Moritz, and descending Pike’s Peak
in a car without brakes. The cars are specially built Renaults with
twelve wheels arranged in six sets of two wheels each. The picture at the
left shows what happens when the sand begins to slide. Between the front
wheels of the car is slung a revolving drum wound with a steel cable,
which is used to get the car out of trouble when the pitch is too steep
to afford traction]
Not until its sprawling bulk has been fettered by some regular means
of communication can the Sahara be considered as effectually subdued.
There has been much talk from time to time of a trans-Saharan railway
from the rail-head at Colomb-Béchar in Southern Algeria to Timbuktu,
whence one branch would continue southward to link up with the Ivory
Coast system, while another would swing sharply westward to Dakar, on
the coast of Senegal, and a third branch might be pushed eastward to
the Lake Tchad country. The chief advocates of such a scheme are the
French imperialists and military authorities, who see in such a railway
a means of rushing vast numbers of black troops from the trans-Saharan
territories to the aid of the mother-country in the event of another
war. Personally, however, I do not look for this ambitious project to
be realized until some time in the distant future. True, there are
no insurmountable obstacles from the engineering point of view, as
preliminary surveys have shown, but there are numerous objections. First
of all, of course, comes the question of cost, which would necessarily be
enormous—an expense which France, in her present impoverished condition,
is quite unable to bear. Serious difficulties would be encountered in
finding sufficient labor and in providing adequate supplies of water and
fuel. It is generally admitted that it would be extremely difficult, if
not impossible, effectively to protect a desert railway of such length
from attacks by Touareg tribes. Such a system could not hope to be
self-supporting, for the length of haul would be enormous; most of the
country through which it would run is uninhabited and unproductive; and
there would be almost nothing in the way of freight or passengers to be
picked up along the route. Moreover it is becoming a grave question among
authorities on transportation whether, even under the most favorable
circumstances, railways can successfully compete with motor routes, the
initial cost of which is far less, and which can be operated far more
economically. The truth of the matter is that the recent conquest of the
desert by the motor-car has been a serious blow to the project for a
trans-Saharan railway, and I am inclined to believe that passengers and
goods will be borne across the Great Sands on rubber instead of rails for
many years to come. I doubt not that the desert motor service projected
by M. Citroen will shortly be revived, either by himself or others, and
that, in a much nearer future than most people suppose, it will be as
simple a matter to cross the Sahara to Timbuktu by automobile as it has
become to cross the Syrian Desert to Baghdad.
When that day comes—and I repeat that it is not far distant—the merchants
of Nigeria and the Sudan will run up to Algiers, or even to Paris, to
do their buying, just as Mid-West merchants go to New York; the sons
of the great Mohammedan chieftains of Darfur and Wadai will be sent
to the Moslem universities of Fez and Tunis as the sons of Western
ranch-owners are sent to Yale and Harvard; the products of French
Equatorial Africa—the greatest untapped reservoir of raw materials on
the continent—will go rolling northward to the factories of Europe in a
steady stream, while the manufactured goods of Europe and North Africa
will find their way in ever-increasing quantities to the rich markets of
the South. Caravans of motor-buses, doing their twenty miles an hour,
will bear merchants, drummers, students, soldiers, scientists, officials,
tourists, across the great divide. The road is perhaps the most effective
agency of civilization. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc has so admirably put it:
“More than rivers and more than mountain chains, roads have moulded the
political groupings of men. The Alps with a mule-track across them are
less of a barrier than fifteen miles of forest or rough land separating
one from that track.”
* * * * *
The sun was but a slender crimson arc above the horizon when we set out
from Tozeur in the twelve-wheeler to push southward into what some one
has aptly termed “the last home of mystery.” The early morning is always
cold in the Sahara, and even our Arab guide shivered beneath the folds
of his camel’s-hair burnous. For the first few miles our route led us
across a rocky, stone-strewn plain, the big car rumbling and shaking
like a motor-truck. Then, topping a rise in the _hammada_, we beheld
the sand-dunes. Silent, mysterious, forbidding, they reared themselves
across our path, their flanks as trackless, as destitute of vegetation,
as the polar snows. I don’t know how high they were, for everything is
enormously magnified in the clear air of the desert, but they seemed
appalling as they rose abruptly from that bleak, monotonous expanse.
As for climbing them in a motor-car, I should as soon have thought of
driving up the side of the Great Pyramid. But I leaned back in my snug,
leather-cushioned seat unconcernedly, confident that the chauffeur, a
veteran at the business, knew a way to circumvent them.
But instead of making a detour, as I momentarily expected, he held his
course straight for the largest dune. It grew larger as we drew near
until it loomed above us like the Equitable Building. Still we kept on
at steadily increasing speed. The man must have gone daft, I thought.
We had at the wheel a lunatic. For anything on wheels to attempt that
towering wall of sand was as crazy a performance, it seemed to me, as
Don Quixote’s encounter with the windmill. We charged it like a tank
attacking the Hindenburg Line. The lower slopes we took with a rush and
a roar; then came a perceptible slackening of speed as we lost momentum.
With a clash of gears the chauffeur went into second speed, then third
... fourth ... fifth. The exhaust barked like a machine-gun. The big car
reared itself up until it seemed to be standing on its stern. I felt the
seat tilting under me, as one does when an airplane goes into a steep
climb. We went into sixth speed. The staccato crackle of the exhaust
changed into a sustained roar. The sandy slopes slipped by us slower and
slower—ten ... eight ... six miles an hour. Would we make it? Would the
power hold out? By way of answering my unvoiced question the chauffeur
jammed his foot hard upon the throttle, the car flung itself forward in a
final surge of power—and we were at the top.
My sensation of relief died half born, however, for, though we were on
the summit of the ridge, our front wheels rested upon the brink of a
sandy precipice which seemed to drop away a hundred fathoms sheer. If the
ascent of the windward slope had seemed perilous, the descent of this all
but perpendicular leeward slope would, I felt certain, inevitably end
in disaster. Yet to back down the declivity we had just ascended with
so much effort was out of the question, while the space at the top was
too narrow to permit of turning around. But our pilot showed no signs of
perturbation. Nonchalantly lighting a cigarette, he shifted into lowest
gear and gently nosed the cumbersome machine over the brink. The little
flags out front, then the hood, seemed suddenly to drop out of sight, and
I was thrown forward with great abruptness to find myself looking down
upon the top of the driver’s head. Do you know the sensation of diving
in an airplane? Well, it was like that, only more so. I would have sworn
that no wheeled vehicle ever built could have descended that declivity
and remained right side up at the bottom. But this one did. Indeed, it
seemed entirely to defy the law of gravitation. If the ascent had been
exciting, the descent was paralyzing. We went down with a rush and a
roar, choked and blinded by the whirling sand, at a speed so terrific
that it literally took the breath away. I gripped the sides of the seat
until my fingers ached. You can see their imprints sunk in the steel arms
to-day! Half-way down the driver shut off his power, and from there on we
coasted. I glanced at the speedometer. The needle showed 130 kilometers
an hour!
When we ran out upon the floor of the narrow valley which separated the
range of dunes we had just crossed from the next one, I tapped the driver
on the shoulder.
“Stop a moment,” I said.
“What is the matter?” asked my wife, as I started to clamber down. “Are
you going to take a picture?”
“No,” I told her. “I am going to take my hat off to the car.”
[Illustration: TO PROVE THAT WE WERE REALLY THERE
Our camp in the Sahara. By day it was as hot as the stoke-hole of an
oil-tanker in the Red Sea in midsummer, but with the setting of the sun
the mercury frequently fell sixty degrees and we shivered beneath our
heavy blankets]
Thenceforward, for hundreds of miles, we zigzagged, now up, now down,
through a bewilderment of dunes, a hopeless confusion of sand hills and
ridges, valleys and hollows, which stretched away on one hand to meet
the mountains of the Aurés and on the other to vanish in the vast spaces
of the mid-Sahara. It was like motoring over an unending succession
of very steeply pitched and lofty roofs, roaring up one side, pausing
for an instant on the ridge-pole, and then hurtling down the other.
Under the midday sun the dunes were as dazzling as snow, and a few
chimneys here and there were all that was needed to make me feel like an
up-to-the-minute Santa Claus. Though tremendously exhilarating, it was
also extremely fatiguing, for the constant swaying and pitching of the
car like a small boat in a heavy sea, the necessity of hanging on for
dear life, put a severe strain on every bone and muscle in the body. When
we camped that night I ached as I have ached but once before, at the end
of my first long camel-ride in Arabia.
Only once did we encounter serious trouble. We had charged an
exceptionally steep dune, and, unable to arrest the momentum of the
car when we gained the top, had hurtled down the reverse slope to find
ourselves imprisoned in a deep pocket, or hollow, in the sands. The dunes
rose so precipitously on every hand that there was no space in which to
get a flying start. It looked to me as though we were going to have an
opportunity to qualify as Shriners by a long, long march over the hot
sands, for the nearest human habitation, so our Arab guide informed us,
was a hundred kilometers away. But as soon as the chauffeur realized
the hopelessness of trying to extricate the car by ordinary methods, he
resorted to the windlass contrivance I have already described, which
hauled us out of trouble as easily and almost as quickly as a steam-winch
hoists cargo out of the hold of a steamer.
Though I indulged in a good deal of speculation as to the height of
the dunes, I was unable to estimate their altitude with any degree of
accuracy, for there was absolutely nothing with which to compare them.
We saw a few quite imposing hills, which in certain localities would be
called mountains, and which, so the guide told us, enjoyed names of their
own; but, generally speaking, I imagine that the dunes are by no means
as high as they appear in that wonderfully clear air—probably not much
over four hundred or five hundred feet as a rule, though I have since
been told that some of them are six hundred feet in height, which is
considerably higher than the Washington Monument.
Because, in our school geographies, the deserts were invariably tinted
saffron, we have become accustomed to speak of them as “yellow.” But the
Sahara, though frequently tawny in spots, runs through the whole gamut
of colors. In the early morning it is a dirty bluish gray, of much the
same tone as the refuse from a soda-ash manufactory; but as the sun rises
it becomes a dazzling white, like drifted snow, so glaring that the
eyes must be protected with tinted glasses. Under certain atmospheric
conditions, however, I have seen the outcropping rocks of the _hammada_
become as red as the walls of the Grand Cañon. But the desert assumes its
loveliest tints with the approach of nightfall, when it gradually changes
from white to vivid orange, to blue, to amethyst, to deepest purple.
Then, when the stars come out, it changes to gray again, an indescribably
soft and misty gray, like smoky chiffon over silver tissue.
Far from being monotonous, the dunes present an infinite variety of form,
their sweep of line and beauty of contour being in singular harmony with
the wild, free life of the desert. I have remarked before that they can
best be likened to a sea, for the wind which blows almost incessantly
across these wastes has left the sand in waves and combers, arrested
in the very act of breaking and stricken into immobility and deathly
silence. But when the wind rises to a gale this paralyzed sea suddenly
comes to life, for the dunes begin to move, or, as the Arabs term it, to
“walk.” The word is highly descriptive, for the whispering of the sand
as it tumbles along, and the rapid changes which take place in the shape
of the drifts, their crests melting and smoking in the wind, give the
impression that the whole landscape is in motion. When the dunes walk in
good earnest, as in the case of a real sand-storm, nothing can arrest
them. Whipped by a roaring wind, the sand rises in suffocating clouds;
the sun is obscured; the hot blue sky changes to a murky red, then to an
angry purple; the landscape is completely blotted out; it is impossible
to see objects a hundred yards away; a sullen twilight descends upon the
land, enshrouding it in gloom; the dunes heave and crumple; the surface
of the earth flits past dizzily, as in a motion-picture taken from a
moving train. It is one of the most curious, and at the same time one of
the most terrifying, spectacles that Africa has to offer.
The second night out from Tozeur we experienced a sand-storm. I have
seen far more violent ones in the Sudan and in Northern Arabia, but it
was exciting enough while it lasted. During the late afternoon menacing
purple clouds had been piling up along the southern horizon. As darkness
fell the gentle breeze which had been blowing throughout the day suddenly
died down, to be succeeded by an oppressive hush, like that which in
Mexico generally precedes an earthquake. On the desert a great silence
fell, deathly and oppressive. Then, without the slightest warning, came
the wind, a veritable hurricane, driving the sand before it as chaff is
scattered by the propeller of an airplane. The flying particles cut our
faces like driven sleet. Our skins felt as though they had been rubbed
with emery-paper. The stars were obscured; the purple velvet sky deepened
to the blackness of ink. The tent-pegs had been too firmly anchored to
be torn out, but the canvas billowed like the sails of a racing-yacht;
the guy-ropes hummed like bowstrings. The air was dense with driven
sand; though we wrapped our heads in blankets, the dust filled our eyes,
our ears, our nostrils, producing a sensation not far removed from
suffocation. The palm-trees of the little oasis where we were encamped
bent before the blast until their plumed tops swept the ground. From the
darkness came eery shrieks and wails—the cries, so say the superstitious
Arabs, of the malignant _afrits_ who let loose the sand-storms. Earth
and sky seemed to mingle in a chaos of confusion, a pandemonium of
sound. Then the wind subsided as abruptly as it had arisen, leaving a
thick veneer of red-brown dust on everything. The air became fresh and
clear again. The palm-fronds stirred ever so slightly in the gentle
night breeze. One by one the stars came out, as at nightfall the lights
are turned on in a great city. Peace and utter silence descended on the
desert. The Sahara slept once more.
[Illustration: A LANDMARK FOR THOSE WHO NAVIGATE THE SEA OF SAND
In order to prevent caravans from losing their way in the sandy waste,
the French have marked the great trade-routes across the Sahara at
ten-kilometer intervals with lofty towers of stone; the curious
superstructure atop the _bassourab_, or camel-tent in which the women
travel, enables the tribe or caravan to be identified from afar]
But the morning light revealed an astounding transformation. The whole
landscape had been remade. Nothing was the same. Hills stood where
hollows had been before, and ridges had been replaced by rifts. Even
our Arab guide, who knew the desert as a housewife knows her kitchen,
seemed to have difficulty in orienting himself and stood for some minutes
alternately glancing at the sun and studying the transformed terrain.
For the first time I understood how it was possible for caravans to lose
their way when overwhelmed by a sand-storm and to perish in this dreadful
land from thirst and exhaustion.
In order to lessen the chance of such disasters, however, the French
government has undertaken the task of marking the main trade-routes
across the desert with lofty signal-towers of stone, some of them fifty
feet in height. Set on the highest eminences, about ten kilometers
apart, they rear themselves above the sandy sea like lighthouses along
a perilous coast. In places we could see them, through the glasses,
rising at intervals across the desert, marking the courses of the great
trade-tracks which run down to Tchad, to Zinder, and to Timbuktu.
* * * * *
Nefta, reputed to be the most beautiful oasis in all of Saharan Africa,
lies almost athwart the Tunisian-Algerian frontier, and our driver
insisted that it would be a thousand pities if we did not make the short
detour necessary to visit it and to view its famous sunken gardens. The
oasis occupies the bed of what was presumably once a small lake, and from
the summit of the arid sand-hills with which it is ringed about we looked
down into a circular vale so dense with verdure, so thickly set with palm
and fruit trees, that it well deserves the name which the French have
given it of _la corbeille_. The floor of the oasis is so much lower than
the level of the encircling desert that, standing as we were on the rim
of the depression, we were above the tops of the tallest palms. Here,
in this sheltered spot, the _deglat-nour_ date, the most delicious in
the world, grows in supreme luxuriance, “its feet in the water and its
head in the fires of heaven.” For the date-palm has this singular and
apparently contradictory characteristic: it demands moisture but cannot
stand rain. Those unfortunates who know the date only when it has been
dried and pressed into a sugary viscous mass, covered with flies in a
grocer’s window, can hardly imagine how luscious is the semi-transparent
amber-colored fruit when eaten, fresh from the tree, beside one of the
purling streams which meander through the green gardens of Nefta. It is
an enchanting.spot, is Nefta, and I should have liked to dally there for
several days, but the desert was calling and I had to go.
A quarter of a mile outside the wretched, mud-walled little town of El
Oued, the Transat, we found, had established a semi-permanent camp in
a sort of amphitheater formed by the sand-dunes. There was a spacious
dining-tent before which had been laid out a sort of flowerless garden
composed, appropriately enough, of hundreds of empty wine-bottles,
up-ended and planted in geometric designs in the sand. Hard by was
another tent, for lounging purposes, provided with comfortable cane
chairs and lined with bright-colored native hangings; while at the back,
ranged in a semicircle, were a dozen or more small sleeping-tents for
the use of travelers and their servants. The encampment was in charge
of a genial old Kabyle from the mountains of Algeria, whose astonishing
proficiency in numerous European tongues had been acquired, so he
explained, during a lengthy engagement with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Though he was well on
in years and held a responsible position, I think that the old warrior
secretly hankered for the blare of brass bands, the roar of cheering
crowds, and life under the “big top.”
After quite an excellent dinner, considering the remoteness of the place
and the limitations imposed on culinary efforts, we ranged our chairs
around the camp-fire—a mighty roarer fed with palm-logs the length of a
man—and the ex-rough rider put on a very creditable variety show with
local talent for our entertainment. The program opened with a plaintive
Bedouin love-song by the camp cook, an Arab from the Tunisian Sahel. His
two assistants, one of them a really remarkable ventriloquist, gave an
extemporized skit which must have been highly amusing, judging from the
roars of laughter with which it was greeted by the native onlookers. Four
Arabs, armed with sword and spear, then gave a kind of war-dance, during
the course of which they became so excited that I feared they would turn
the farce into reality and do each other bodily harm. The program was
concluded by a quartet of local prostitutes, unveiled, tattooed, and
festooned with jewelry, who performed the strange and sensuous dances
of the desert folk to the wail of flutes and the boom of tom-toms. The
brooding desert, gray white beneath the stars; the purple velvet sky; the
ghostly sand-hills; the little circle of natives, so closely cloaked and
hooded that only their eyes were visible, squatting on the ground; and
the slim, supple bodies of the dancing-girls twisting and swaying in the
light of the leaping flames—all these combined to form a scene which is
etched deeply on the tablets of my memory.
Because of the rapid radiation which takes place at nightfall, the
temperature in the desert is subject to almost unbelievably sudden and
extreme variations. This characteristic of the Saharan climate was
particularly noticeable at El Oued, the thermometer registering a drop
of nearly sixty degrees in not much over an hour. During the day the
heat in the little hollow where our tents were pitched was so intense
that we fairly gasped for breath; the stray currents of air which
occasionally reached us, far from affording relief, were like blasts
from the open door of a furnace; before the sun was an hour high the
mercury climbed to 120 and stayed there; to stay within one’s tent was
to invite suffocation, to stay without, where a thermometer probably
would have registered 150, was to be broiled alive. Yet the sun had
scarcely disappeared below the horizon ere we were shivering beneath
our greatcoats, and that night I slept under three heavy blankets—and
suffered acutely from the cold! That is why the climate of the Sahara
must be treated with profound respect by Europeans, for exposure to the
sudden chill which comes at sunset is frequently as deadly as exposure to
the sun itself.
_Oued_ is the Arabic word for river, and, when applied to a village or
locality, presupposes the presence of a stream. I saw nothing about El
Oued which even remotely suggested the proximity of water, however,
until, climbing one morning to the summit of the range of sand-dunes
which encircled the camp, I looked down upon a dozen acres or so of as
prosperous looking a fruit-orchard as I have ever seen. I rubbed my eyes
incredulously, so astonishing was it to see this patch of brilliant green
set down in the heart of that arid, sun-scorched, apparently hopeless
waste. Yet there it was, with its ordered rows of fruit-trees—pears,
apples, peaches, apricots, figs, pomegranates—in full blossom; its long
trellises of grapes, the stems of the vines as large as a man’s wrist;
its ranks of towering date-palms with their huge clusters of rapidly
ripening fruit; and, in the heart of it all, a really charming little
bungalow embowered in flowers and vines. The place was, I learned, the
property of a prosperous and progressive Arab, who had obtained an
unlimited supply of pure water by sinking a number of artesian wells
to a depth of not much over a hundred feet. El Oued was appropriately
named after all, it seemed, for the river was there, even though it was
below the surface. But the anxieties of a Saharan husbandman are not
ended once he has obtained an adequate and assured supply of water, for
he must still guard his hard-won area of fertility against the stealthy
encroachments of the shifting sands, which can be held at bay only by
maintaining along the edge of the oasis a sand-break composed of certain
trees, shrubs, and grasses. And, if prosperity is to be maintained, that
barrier must be guarded as vigilantly as a Hollander guards his dikes.
For the desert, like the sea, never becomes discouraged, never gives in;
you can never say that you have conquered it. It can be held in check
only by unceasing vigilance.
[Illustration: THE SHRINE IN THE SANDS
Si Sayah Laroussi, Grand Marabout of the Tidjania, welcomes us to his
palace in Guemar
Caïds of the Tidjania in the courtyard of the mosque at Guemar]
Some hours after leaving El Oued we sighted across the dunes the
walls of a small desert town called Guemar, the site of an important
_zaouia_ of one of the numerous sects of Islam and the seat of a
powerful marabout. The term “marabout,” it should be explained, is of
the widest application, and takes in every man who in any way devotes
himself to religion, from dignified officials of the church to the
demented creatures, clad in filthy rags, who frequent the bazaars and
the courtyards of the mosques, eking out an existence on the alms they
solicit from the charitable. Throughout North Africa the marabouts enjoy
extraordinary influence, political as well as religious, being venerated
as living saints and harkened to as prophets, soothsayers, and mediators.
They are generously supported by alms, are listened to with awe by
the ignorant and with respect by the enlightened, and are invariably
consulted in family disputes, intertribal quarrels, and other matters of
consequence or inconsequence. On the death of a marabout his sanctity
is transferred to his tomb (also called a marabout), which frequently
becomes a place of pilgrimage for the pious. The marabouts whom one
sees shuffling about the streets of North African cities are generally
mere charlatans, who have adopted a life of piety as the easiest means
of gaining a living; but these should not be confounded with the great
marabouts, some of whom, such as the Senussi, the head of the powerful
secret fraternity whose headquarters are at Jarabub in Tripolitania,
are extremely able men and exercise enormous influence in the Moslem
world. The French, whose whole policy in Africa is based on winning the
confidence and friendship of the natives, have never made the mistake of
underestimating the power of the great marabouts, but, on the contrary,
treat them with marked respect and frequently bestow on them honors and
decorations.
When our driver learned that we contemplated passing through Guemar
without stopping, he ventured to express polite but unmistakable
disapproval. To do so, it seemed, would be to commit an unpardonable
breach of etiquette.
“All strangers passing through the town must visit the grand marabout,”
he informed us. “It is the custom.”
I still demurred, but the chauffeur was insistent.
“He has given orders that all visitors must see him; he expects it.”
Realizing that the man was evidently under orders to do nothing which
might offend so powerful a chieftain, I consented to pay my respects.
Si Sayah Laroussi, who, according to the legend on his visiting-card, is
grand marabout of the Tidjania, chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and
commander of the Order of Nichan Iftikhar, is a very important person
indeed in the northeastern Sahara, exercising political as well as
religious authority. His residence, which fronts on a spacious square
in the center of the town, is a substantial whitewashed building in the
Moorish style, the entrance, with its horseshoe arches and bands of
vividly colored tiles, being faintly suggestive of some of the palaces
in Fez and Marrákesh. Si Sayah, an impressive and colorful figure in
his vivid green turban, his caftan of pale pink silk, and his snowy
burnous, on the breast of which gleamed the cross of the Legion of Honor,
received us with some show of ceremony, surrounded by the officials of
his miniature court, in the audience-chamber, a finely proportioned room
whose decorations combined Oriental taste with European tawdriness.
After serving us with Arab coffee, some native cakes made from sickly
sweet almond paste, and cigarettes, and displaying with much pride a
series of photographs of Mecca, to which he had made the _haj_, Si Sayah
conducted us through the gardens, which contained several gazelles and
a flock of pink-legged flamingos, to the really impressive mosque which
was being erected over the tomb of the late grand marabout, who, if I
mistake not, was our host’s father. I was particularly interested in the
architecture of the marabout (I am referring now to the building, not
to the man), for its doorways, instead of having the Moorish horseshoe
arches which are characteristic of religious edifices in French North
Africa, were high and rectangular, with a curious serrated border,
suggesting, without actually resembling, the doorways of the Temple at
Karnak, in Upper Egypt. Upon my expressing surprise that a town as small
as Guemar could afford so large and beautiful a place of worship, Si
Sayah explained that the funds for its erection had been subscribed by
the pious throughout North Africa, adding that generous contributions had
been made even by unbelievers. Taking the hint, I begged the privilege
of making a modest donation to the building-fund, which was promptly
accepted in the name of Allah.
As we were saying our farewells I asked Si Sayah’s permission to take
his picture, explaining that I wished to use it in my next book. This
so gratified him that he urged us to remain in Guemar as his guests for
a few days and join him on a hunting expedition, adding that he had
the finest falcons and Salukis in North Africa. The Saluki, or gazelle
hound (the French erroneously call them _sloughi_), is, I should perhaps
explain, peculiar to the Sahara and Arabia, where the type has been
carefully bred for sport by the great sheikhs for generations, some of
these dogs having pedigrees which run back for a thousand years. Though
of sturdier build, the Saluki bears a strong resemblance to the Russian
borzoi. They locate their quarry not by smell but by sight, amazing tales
being related of their sagacity, speed, and endurance. Falconry, like
coursing, has been practised in Barbary for ages, the nomad tribes of the
Sahara having developed a very large type of falcon—possibly a species of
eagle—which is flown at partridges, wild fowl, cranes, bustards, and even
gazelles. To gallop across the desert as the guest of the grand marabout
of the Tidjania “astride a steed of the Prophet’s breed,” with a hooded
falcon on my wrist, and a pack of lean gazelle hounds racing on before,
would have provided me with material for many a dinner-table story, but
time pressed, and I felt compelled reluctantly to decline the tempting
invitation.
* * * * *
The mud-brown walls of Guemar lay far behind when we saw approaching us
across the desert a rolling cloud of yellow dust.
“_Une caravane?_” I asked our Arab guide.
With his hand he shaded his keen eyes against the intolerable sun-glare,
then shook his head.
“_Non, m’sieu’_,” he answered. “_Les méharistes._”
A moment later there emerged from the enveloping dust-cloud a long line
of grim fantastic figures, mounted not upon the lumbering dromedaries of
commerce but astride the lean gray racing-camels called _méhari_ by the
desert folk. At the head of the column rode a slim, sun-bronzed young
Frenchman in the uniform of a captain of _chasseurs d’Afrique_. As the
cavalcade swept by us at a brisk trot, saddles creaking, accoutrements
clanking, carbines thudding in their buckets, I noted that the riders
were veiled like women, their faces muffled to the eyes with dark blue
scarfs. By these I knew them for masked Touareg; raiders and robbers no
longer, however, but camel cavalry, _méharistes_, in the service of the
republic. Unlike the ordinary Arab, who invariably wears white, their
_gandourahs_ were somber in color—dark blue or black—and girt about with
broad belts of camel’s-hair. The black _lithams_, or face-cloths—which,
by the way, are worn not for purposes of disguise but in order to
protect the throat and nose from the sand—permitted nothing save the
fierce smoldering eyes of their wearers to be seen. Perhaps it was their
reputation for cruelty, perhaps it was their black masks and somber
apparel, but there was something awesome and impressive about these
veiled riders and the stealthy, quiet tread of the great beasts they
bestrode, as they sped southward into the infinite spaces of the desert.
Possessed of a skill in desert-craft and tracking equaled only by the
American Indian, mounted on their wonderful running-camels, capable of
covering enormous distances in a day, these “People of the Veil,” some of
them at least, have accepted the pay of France and are bringing security
to the caravan-routes and the desert towns which they terrorized so long.
They have not yet beaten their long, two-edged swords into plowshares,
it is true, but they have turned them into policemen’s batons; and a
policeman is a sure indication that civilization is not far away.
CHAPTER XII
DOWN TO THE LAND OF THE MOZABITES
Linked to Biskra and civilization by the slender thread of steel which
the French have thrown across some two hundred kilometers of dusty
desert, Touggourt, the dark-green mass of its palm-groves floating
betwixt the sky and the tossing dunes, suggested a boat moored to the
shore by a long hawser. Cut that hawser, and Touggourt would, you feel,
drift away upon the sea of sand, for it is the southernmost rail-head in
the Algerine Sahara.
Until very recent years Touggourt was to all intents and purposes an
island, a port of call for caravans plying between Algeria and the Niger
territories, to be reached only by a five days’ voyage on a swaying “ship
of the desert.” But with the completion of the railway its age-long
isolation has become a thing of the past, and it is visited each winter
by an increasing number of hardy tourists, who, foregoing for a time the
bath-tubs, table-d’hôtes, and gaming-tables of Biskra, summon up the
courage to brave the hardships of the eight-hour journey by narrow-gage
railway in order that they may send picture post-cards to their friends
at home from what it pleases them to term “the heart of the desert.”
When I first went to Algeria, more than twenty years ago, the journey to
Touggourt was a real adventure, to be undertaken only with the consent
of the French military authorities and with an adequate escort from the
Camel Corps. The oasis was as remote from the beaten paths of travel as
Baghdad, or Addis Ababa, or Khiva. But to-day it is only an excursion,
to be made by unaccompanied women in comparative comfort and perfect
safety. That is what comes from civilization. It is ruining the world
for those of an adventurous turn of mind. The motor-car has crossed the
Desert of Gobi to Urga; the mysterious mountains of Abyssinia resound
to the hoot of the locomotive; seats in the Cairo-Baghdad mail-planes
are booked for months in advance; the radio has become a commonplace
to the sophisticated savages of the Upper Congo; motor-buses rumble
through the jungles of Cambodia; Cooks sell through tickets, meals and
rooms included, from Cairo to the Cape. For the Outer Lands are almost
all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly
finished, and in a few more years, a very few, we shall see their like no
more.
Forming a lofty hedge of green between the mud-brown town and the
encircling desert is a vast forest of date-palms—nearly a quarter of
a million of them—whose amazing luxuriance is due to the fact that
Touggourt lies in the valley of the Oued Rir, the largest of that system
of unseen rivers which drain the southern slopes of the Aurés and which
has rewarded the efforts of the well-drillers with a supply of artesian
water that has made this one of the most fertile and prosperous regions
in the whole Sahara.
[Illustration: THE SAND-STORM
Whipped by a roaring wind, the sand rises in suffocating clouds; the sun
is obscured; the hot blue sky changes to a murky red, then to an angry
purple; a sullen twilight descends upon the land; the crests of the dunes
melt and smoke, giving the impression that the whole landscape is in
motion]
From an architectural point of view, Touggourt is one of the most curious
towns in Africa, the labyrinthine native quarter being penetrated by
long, dim tunnels, just large enough to permit the passage of camels,
and running beneath the houses themselves. In places the walls of these
subterranean passageways are honeycombed with little booths and shops,
just as in New York establishments of a more pretentious order open
on the subway. The houses, their walls unwhitewashed and unpierced by
windows, are built of blocks of sun-dried mud, wisps of the straw used
in their manufacture still protruding from them, with domed roofs of the
same material. Seen from the top of one of the numerous minarets, the
maze of tortuous lanes and alleys, the black mouths of the tunnels, the
hundreds of earth-brown domes, and the mud walls, of the same monotonous
color, give the impression that one has wandered into a town inhabited by
some gigantic species of mole.
The native town is indescribably filthy, unkempt, and foul of smell,
its streets littered with refuse, swarming with whining mendicants,
scrofulous children, and great numbers of savage yellow dogs. But the
French quarter is very neat and clean, with broad sandy streets lined
by double rows of palm-trees; the inevitable Grande Place, deep in dust
and with rather discouraged-looking vegetation; a sprinkling of European
cafés and trading-establishments; and two hotels; a well-appointed
and comfortable one operated by the Transat and a considerably less
pretentious establishment called the Oued Rir.
For the blasé tourist, fresh from the casinos, dance-halls, and _cafés
chantants_ of Biskra, Touggourt holds few attractions, though one may
take some really delightful rides through the extensive date plantations,
the most fascinating vistas unfolding themselves at every turn of the
road. The horses, however, far from being the beautiful Arab steeds of
which the poets sing, are poor gaunt creatures, hard of gait and mouth,
while the high, broad-seated native saddles, with their small stirrups
and short leathers, might have been used with great effectiveness as
instruments of torture by the Spanish Inquisition.
It so happened that we found ourselves in Touggourt in the fasting month
of Ramadan, when no devout Mohammedan permits either food or water to
pass his lips between sunrise and sunset for a period of thirty days.
When the shadows began to lengthen with the approach of nightfall, we
were wont to climb to the lofty platform atop the minaret of a disused
mosque, from which could be obtained a superb view of the whole oasis
and the adjacent desert. Just as the upper edge of the blood-red sun
coincided with the western sky-line, an ancient field-piece, posted in
the square below, crashed in smoke and flame. As the reverberations died
away the white figures of the muezzins appeared on the balconies of their
minarets, as the little figures pop out of Swiss clocks when they strike
the hour, and over the waiting city rolled the high-pitched call to
evening prayer: “_Al-lah-hu il Al-lah ... Al-lah Ak-bar_!” At the eagerly
awaited signal the covers were tossed from the steaming cooking-pots, the
sellers of _cous-cous_ and sweetmeats were suddenly besieged by clamorous
customers, and the entire population of Touggourt fell to with knives and
fingers, ravenous after the day-long fast.
My daughter is passionately fond of animals, so, when she came upon
two Arabs boys tormenting a desert fox cub which they had captured,
she became its owner for a small consideration. It was an amusing
little creature, as soft and furry as a chow puppy, and quickly became
domesticated, following her about on a string. She announced at dinner
that she intended taking it back to America with her, remarking that
as a pet a Saharan fox would be much more chic than a sheep-dog or a
Pomeranian. I did not attempt to dissuade her; I knew better. She
retired happily, with the cub, a pile of blankets, and a bowl of milk.
But when she appeared for breakfast it was obvious that she had passed a
restless night.
“I didn’t sleep a wink,” she greeted us. “That fox is the most
exasperating creature I have ever seen. He kept me awake until long after
midnight with his barking. I fed him some milk, and he went to sleep
for a time, but a little later I heard a noise under the bed. He was
busy chewing the toes of my best dancing-slippers. I put him back in the
blankets and tried to snatch a little sleep, but when I woke up he was
gone. After looking everywhere for him, I finally found him hidden under
the bath-tub. I’m through. A bull terrier for mine. It may not be as
romantic as a Saharan fox, but it couldn’t possibly be as troublesome.”
* * * * *
One afternoon, for want of something better to do, we rode out to
Temacin, a pretty little oasis, fifteen miles to the south of Touggourt,
with white houses peering out from amid the palm-groves and the
inevitable marabout’s tomb. Though it was an insufferably hot day, with
the mercury hovering around 120 in the sun, the first two or three miles
were delightful, for the road led through the date plantations, with
the great leaves forming a canopy of green overhead and in our ears the
pleasant sound of running water. But when we debouched upon the desert,
to strike one of the seven main caravan-routes which cross the Sahara, it
seemed as though we were riding upon the top of a stove at white heat and
that we would be broiled alive.
The great trade-track on which we now found ourselves was very wide, a
broad swath trodden below the level of the desert by the heart-shaped
pads of the camels which have followed it since long before recorded
history began. When half-way to Temacin we met a caravan coming up from
the south; five months out of Timbuktu, our guide informed us after
a brief colloquy with the leader; an endless file of men and animals
plodding slowly across the burning waste. Some of the camels bore huge,
round, tent-like arrangements, called _bassourabs_, in the privacy of
which the women rode, protected alike from the sun and from the eyes
of men. Atop of the _bassourabs_ were curious wooden frameworks, six
or eight feet high, resembling the lattice masts of battle-ships or
miniature Eiffel Towers. The tops of these towers must have been fully
sixteen feet above the ground, and from them fluttered colored rags or
streamers, which were visible long before the camels themselves had
appeared above the sky-line. I could not even hazard a guess as to
their use, but the guide informed us that they were for purposes of
identification, like the numerals at the bows of a destroyer or the
emblems painted on the under wings of a battle-plane. His French was
very sketchy, but, as nearly as I could make out, every tribe, or every
caravan—I am not certain which—can be recognized by the shape of its
camel-towers and by the color of the rags which flutter from them. This
is a wise precaution, for in the vast stretches of the Sahara, where life
is none too safe at best, it is essential that the leader of a great
convoy, responsible for hundreds of lives and millions of francs’ worth
of merchandise, should be able to determine before they come within
rifle-shot whether those he sees approaching are enemies or friends.
[Illustration: THE SPORT OF KINGS
In the Barbary of to-day, as in medieval Europe, the great lords
a-hunting go with horse and hawk and hound. Some of the falcons, probably
a species of eagle, are powerful enough to bring down gazelles]
When Nature fashioned the camel she must have had the peculiar
requirements of the Arab in mind, for without the ungainly beast life
in the desert would be impossible. It frequently attains an age of
fifty years; it is capable of carrying a burden weighing up to half a
ton, though six hundred pounds is usually the maximum; because of the
structure of its stomach it can, as every one knows, go without water for
several days on end; it finds ample pasturage in regions where a horse
would die from starvation; and the fleet _méhari_, or racing-camels, such
as are used by the Touareg, can, when pushed, cover incredible distances
without resting. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, were it not
for the camel, vast tracts on the maps of Africa and Asia would still be
labeled “unexplored.”
The term “camel,” strictly speaking, should be used to designate only
the single-humped dromedary of Africa, Arabia, and India, though it is
also frequently applied to the two-humped Bactrian species found in
Central Asia. Though motion-picture producers frequently use animals of
both species in the same scenes, this is an amusing solecism, for their
habitats are as widely separated as those of the bison and the buffalo.
Of the Arabian camel there are almost as many breeds as there are of the
horse; the clumsy, lumbering, moth-eaten beasts of burden made familiar
to stay-at-home Americans by the circus have about the same relation to
the slim, graceful, cream-colored _méhari_ as a draft-horse has to a
thoroughbred.
On desert journeys camels are expected to carry their loads about
twenty-five miles a day for three days without drinking, being watered,
however, on the fourth; but an animal of the fleeter breeds will carry
its rider fifty miles a day for five days without water; while a Bedouin
whom I once employed to carry an urgent message for me in Arabia covered
120 miles of desert in about eighteen hours.
The training of the camel as a beast of burden begins in its fourth year,
when it is taught to kneel or rise at a given signal, and is gradually
accustomed to bear increasing loads, which, in the case of exceptionally
sturdy animals, sometimes weigh a thousand pounds. When too heavily
laden, however, the camel, which can be as stubborn as a mule, refuses
to rise—it was the last straw, you remember, which broke the camel’s
back—but on the march it is exceedingly patient, yielding beneath its
burden only to die. When relieved from its load it does not, like other
animals, seek the shade, but prefers to kneel beside its burden in the
full glare of the sun, seeming actually to enjoy the red-hot sand, a
peculiarity which it shares only with the salamander. Overtaken by a
sand-storm, the camel kneels with its back to the wind, and, stretching
its long neck flat upon the ground, closes its eyes and nostrils and
remains to all intents and purposes inanimate until the storm has passed,
while its driver, muffled in his burnous, crouches in the lee of the
beast, whose great hump affords some measure of protection from the blast.
The camel is the only animal in the world that provides its owner with
transportation, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and fuel. The flesh of
the young camel, particularly the fat of the hump, is considered a great
delicacy, though camels are rarely slaughtered for eating purposes save
on occasions of ceremony. The Arabs either drink its milk or curdle,
strain, and press it into small balls, which are dried in the sun and
provide a sour but sustaining beverage when crushed and mixed with water.
Its long hair is made into the garments with which the folk of the desert
clothe themselves, the carpets on which they sleep, and occasionally into
tents, though goat’s-hair is more commonly used for the latter purpose;
while the hide is tanned into an extremely durable leather. In those
regions where wood is unobtainable, the camel’s dung is used for fuel,
and from it the Arabs of Upper Egypt and the Sudan extract sal ammoniac
for export. Given a camel and a date-palm, the desert holds no terrors
for the Arab.
Though classified as a domestic animal, the camel is by nature a wild and
savage beast. During the rutting-season male camels become exceedingly
dangerous, evincing their anger by a curious bubbling sound, half-snarl,
half-roar, engaging in fierce struggles with other males, and frequently
attacking their drivers. Once, while crossing the Syrian Hamad, I saw a
camel almost sever the arm of an Arab who had incautiously approached it;
and on another occasion, in Mesopotamia, I was called upon to treat a
Bedouin whose whole face had literally been smashed flat by a blow from
the foot of an infuriated camel.
A great deal of sentimental nonsense has been written about the camel,
which, as a matter of fact, is the stupidest, the most ungrateful,
and the most ill-tempered of all domesticated animals. “If,” says Sir
Francis Palgrave, “docile means stupid, well and good; in such a case
the camel is the very model of docility. But if the epithet is intended
to designate an animal that takes an interest in its rider so far as
a beast can, that in some way understands his intentions, or shares
them in a subordinate fashion, that obeys from a sort of submissive or
half-fellow-feeling with his master, like the horse or the elephant,
then I say that the camel is by no means docile—very much the contrary.
He takes no heed of his rider, pays no attention whether he be on his
back or not, walks straight on when once set a-going, merely because
he is too stupid to turn aside, and then should some tempting thorn or
green branch allure him out of the path, continues to walk on in the new
direction simply because he is too dull to turn back into the right
road. In a word, he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage
animal rendered serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on his
master’s part, or any coöperation on his own, save that of an extreme
passiveness. Neither attachment nor even habit impresses him; never tame,
though not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.”
* * * * *
In the desert, about two hundred and fifty kilometers east-southeast
of Touggourt, lies a group of seven small oases, the largest of which
is Ghardaia. This archipelago is the home of a confederation of Berber
tribes known as Mozabites, or the Beni-M’zab, to give them their proper
name. The Mozabites, who number only about forty thousand, are not
Arabs, but one of the ancient Berber races which lived in North Africa
long before the Arabs came. Nearly all of them read and write Arabic,
but in conversing among themselves they employ the Zenata dialect of
the Berber tongue, for which, in common with the other branches of the
old Berber stock, such as the Riffi and the Kabyles, there survives no
written form. Though Moslems they belong to a sect of extreme dissenters,
branches of which are also found in Oman and Zanzibar, being shunned by
orthodox Mohammedans as the worst of heretics. Their creed is based on
the precepts of Abdallah-ibn-Ibad, the assassin of Ali, the son-in-law of
the Prophet, and hence the traditional hatred in which they are held by
the conventional followers of the faith, who refer to them as _Khammes_,
“the Fifth,” because they are outside the four great branches of Islam.
In their form of government, their extreme austerity of life, and their
intolerance of other beliefs, as well as in their energy, industry, and
commercial integrity, they strongly resemble the Puritans who settled
on the shores of New England three hundred years ago. Like the Puritans,
they went into exile in a remote land for the sake of their faith, while
still another point of resemblance is found in their form of government,
which is by a body of elders, called the Assembly. The laws promulgated
by this body are as strict and as rigidly enforced as were the Blue
Laws of early New England, a Mozabite found guilty of drinking wine or
coffee, of smoking, or of frequenting houses of ill fame being punished
by flogging.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF THE MOZABITES
Narrow lanes between high walls ... dim, covered passageways, inviting
in their comparative coolness ... _souks_ teeming with half the races
of North Africa ... black shadows falling on orange sand ... a huge,
fantastic minaret dominating all ... such is Ghardaia, the capital of the
Berber confederation of the Beni-Mzab]
The most direct route from Touggourt to the country of the Beni-M’zab
lies straight across the desert, via Guerrara, which is also a Mozabite
community; but should you be traveling by twelve-wheeler, in which case
a few score miles or less do not greatly matter, it will repay you to
take the somewhat longer road through Wargla—or Ourgla, as the French
spell it—which, barring breakdowns and sand-storms, can be reached from
Touggourt quite easily in a day.
Ourgla, said to be the oldest town in the Sahara, has a curiously
medieval aspect, due, no doubt, to its being encircled by a massive wall
pierced by six bastion-flanked gates. For centuries it was independent, a
sort of Saharan counterpart of the free cities of the Hanseatic League;
but, unable successfully to resist the aggressions of the desert tribes,
it eventually was driven to seek the protection of the sultans of
Morocco. Moorish protection proved but nominal, however, and about the
middle of the last century Ourgla was occupied by the forces of France’s
Arab allies, though French authority was not effectively established in
the oasis until 1872, since when it has been an important outpost on
the Algerine frontier and a base for military operations against the
Touareg. In the old, bad days, Ourgla was a thriving trade mart on the
trans-Saharan route to the Niger countries, its slave-market crowded with
blacks brought from Central Africa and with buyers from all parts of
Barbary, but its importance rapidly declined upon France’s suppression of
the trade in “black ivory.” In recent years, however, it has regained a
considerable measure of its ancient prosperity through the efforts of the
French engineers, who, by sinking numerous wells, have expanded the area
and enormously increased the fertility of the oasis.
Ghardaia, the Mozabite capital, lies about a hundred miles to the
northwest of Ourgla, in the middle of the Wadi M’zab, nearly eighteen
hundred feet above the level of the sea. It is one of the most
picturesque towns in the entire Sahara, its square, flat-topped houses,
which are built on the flanks of a hill, rising in terraces, one above
another, so that the place bears a certain resemblance to the New Mexican
pyramid-pueblo of Taos. Crowning the hill is the _kasbah_, an ancient
fortress with enormously thick ramparts, above which, like a slim white
finger pointing toward heaven, soars the tapering minaret of the Grand
Mosque. It is a profoundly impressive thing, this minaret, unusual in
shape and clearly visible from every quarter of the city and from far off
in the desert, as it rises in lonely majesty against the hot blue sky.
Unlike most Saharan towns, whose houses are built of sun-dried
mud-blocks, the buildings of Ourgla are substantially constructed from
sandstone. They are, as a rule, of a blinding whiteness, by reason
of repeated applications of lime-wash, but the dazzling monotony is
broken here and there by house-owners, more original-minded than
their neighbors, who have painted their dwellings lemon yellow, pale
pink, cobalt blue. Wandering through the narrow, tortuous lanes, one
frequently notices, pressed into the plaster above the lintels of the
doors, the imprint of a hand painted in red or blue; this represents the
hand of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, an emblem which is supposed
to bring good luck to the household, like the horseshoe in Occidental
countries.
Ghardaia is divided by walls into three districts: the eastern quarter
belongs to the Jews, of whom there are several hundred families in the
town; the western is occupied by the Metabia, an Arab tribe from the
Djebel Amur; while the central quarter, which contains the _kasbah_ and
the Grand Mosque, is the home of the ruling race, the Beni-M’zab, to
whom the gardens also belong. The Jews and the Arabs are regarded by the
Mozabites as inferior peoples and have virtually no voice in the affairs
of the community, the government of which, as I have already remarked, is
directed by an assembly composed of Mozabite elders.
Of all the Berber tribes the Mozabites have remained the freest from
foreign admixture, their persistent refusal to have social intercourse
with other tribes having produced so pronounced a type that even a
Mozabite child is recognizable at a glance. They are usually of small and
wiry figure, with very short necks, high, somewhat rounded shoulders,
and under-developed legs which are frequently bowed. They are further
distinguished from their Arab neighbors by flat faces, short noses, thick
lips, and pale, almost sallow, skins, while one not infrequently sees a
Mozabite with the red beard and blue or gray eyes which Genseric and his
Vandal hordes left as a reminder of their visit to Berber Africa.
Unlike the Arabs, whose burnouses are invariably white or a dirty brown,
the Mozabites array themselves in garments of many colors. The dress of
the common people consists of a sleeveless woolen shirt, as short and
full as kilts, called _gandourah_, with tassels of camel’s-hair hanging
from their broad belts, their lower faces concealed by loosely bound
_haiks_, a necessary precaution in that torrid country. The costumes
of the emirs, caïds, and sheikhs are frequently of exceeding richness,
however, their enormous turbans, containing yards and yards of fine
material, bound with _agals_ of gold thread; their high, soft boots of
scarlet Moroccan leather; their delicately colored silk _gandourahs_
girt with broad, silver-studded belts from which protrude the ivory and
gold-inlaid hilts of a miniature armory of weapons. As they sweep by
astride their splendidly caparisoned horses they seem to have ridden
straight out of the pages of the Arabian Nights.
While wholly lacking the cleanliness, the sociability, and the charm
of manner of the Arabs, the Mozabites far surpass them in industry,
in commercial enterprise, and in dependability, their integrity being
proverbial in matters where money is concerned. It is said of them, as
it is of the Montenegrins, that their word, once given, is never broken,
and that they will die rather than betray a trust. In consequence of this
enviable reputation, though they are detested by the Arabs for religious
reasons, the Arabs will unhesitatingly intrust them with their last franc.
A warlike tribe, one of the last to submit to France, most of them have
now settled down as peaceful and prosperous agriculturists, cultivators
of dates and breeders of live stock, though their other industries
have not been neglected, the burnouses and carpets manufactured in the
M’zab finding ready purchasers throughout North Africa. Industrious
and enterprising, as successful at money-making as the Armenians or
the Jews—it is said that a Jew has to work with his hands in the
M’zab—they are prone to seek their fortunes outside their native land,
finding ready employment in the cities along the Barbary coast all the
way from Tangier to Tripoli, where many of them occupy positions of
trust and responsibility in banks and mercantile houses or are engaged
in businesses of their own. The men usually leave home to engage in
commercial pursuits as soon as they attain their majority; but, once they
have succeeded in amassing what passes for a fortune among the desert
folk, they return to their wives and families in the M’zab, where they
settle down to enjoy the fruits of their labors, while the eldest son
goes north in turn to carry on his father’s business.
[Illustration: FAR HENCE, IN SOME LONE DESERT TOWN
White-robed Arabs squat patiently in the sun-baked market-place; the
mud-walled houses radiate heat like a red-hot stove; rising above the
low, flat roofs and the fringe of date-palms is the inevitable minaret
from which the muezzin drones his call to prayer]
So strict are the rules of the caste that any intercourse with
non-Mozabites, save in the way of trade, is rigorously forbidden; nor may
a Mozabite take his wife, or a child under ten years, away from his own
country; nor may he marry elsewhere for any reason whatsoever. Those of
other cults, including orthodox Moslems, may not set foot within Mozabite
places of worship, while Beni-Isguen, the holy city of the Mozabites, not
far from Ghardaia, is held in such sanctity that no outlander, none but a
born Mozabite, is permitted to sleep in it. Until the French intervened,
the Mozabites refused to bury any member of their sect, no matter where
he died, except in the sacred soil of the homeland, the bodies of those
who died abroad being kept by their relatives or friends until there came
an opportunity to ship them by caravan to the M’zab. The Arabs will tell
you that, until the French authorities put an end to the practice for
sanitary reasons, there was a corpse in the back room of every Mozabite
shop in Biskra.
The market-place of Ghardaia, a great sun-baked square surrounded by
whitewashed arcades, and packed with men and animals, is one of the most
interesting spots in all North Africa, for to it are drawn caravans,
merchants, and traders from all the countries bordering on the Sahara to
dispose of their peculiar wares. Here come fat, greasy Jewish merchants
to tempt the spendthrift, splendor-loving Arabs with the magnificent
red saddlery manufactured in the _souks_ of Tunis; _commerçants_ from
Oran and Algiers to purchase dates for the European market; furtive,
shifty-eyed Moorish gun-runners, who, evading the desert patrols,
have slipped through the passes of the Atlas with cases of rifles and
ammunition concealed beneath bales of innocent merchandise; smart-looking
cavalry officers in quest of horses for the Algerian remount stations;
sun-darkened men who have come with caravans of salt from the far-off
Hills of Air; masked Touareg with their brindled, white, or piebald
camels, and, occasionally, a rare and valuable beast of the tawny
reddish-buff variety, so prized for speed and endurance; hawk-nosed
Arab horse-dealers from the Ziban and the slopes of the High Atlas;
wild-looking shepherds of the Fringe, driving great flocks of sheep,
their wool dyed in various vivid colors for purposes of identification;
ubiquitous Levantines from the littoral, hawking the tawdry European
articles which the desert people prize; and, mingling with these men
of business, stalwart Senegalese _tirailleurs_; swaggering _goumiers_
in enormous turbans and voluminous blue cloaks; hard-eyed soldiers of
the Foreign Legion, whose pipe-clayed helmets and linen uniforms seem
several sizes too large for them; dignified, richly appareled emirs
from regions as widely separated as Tibesti and Mauretania; marabouts,
clothed in rags and sanctity, pleading for alms; negro clowns from the
Sudan, drums slung about their necks and ostrich-plumes in their fuzzy
hair, who have accompanied some caravan across the dreary desert miles;
dervishes, snake-charmers, sand-diviners, story-tellers ... all these,
and many more, make of Ghardaia’s market-place a panorama of Saharan life
inconceivably rich in interest, variety, and color.
Upon leaving the capital of the Mozabites, two routes offer themselves to
the traveler bound for Algeria. If impatient for the food, the music, and
the lights of the hotels of Mustapha Supérieur, he had best turn straight
northward, through Laghouat, a prosperous border town of some size but no
particular interest, to Djelfa, the southern terminus of the railway to
Algiers. Djelfa, by the way, is the best starting-point for an excursion
into the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, the home of that highland clan
from whose dusky, dashing daughters are recruited half the prostitutes
and dancing-girls of French North Africa. Time permitting, I should have
liked to visit these ladies of easy virtue on their native heath, but
I knew that Harvey and the Cadillac had been for some days at Biskra
and that awaiting us beyond the Atlas were peoples and places equally
colorful and strange. So, bidding farewell to the Mozabites, we mounted
our twelve-wheeled Pegasus and, turning our back upon Ghardaia and its
tall white tower, purred out across the desert toward the dawn.
CHAPTER XIII
BISKRA, DEMI-MONDAINE OF THE DESERT
Facing each other, though separated by four thousand miles of African
desert, jungle, and veldt, stand two of the most significant and
inspiring statues in the world.
From a little triangle of green set in the middle of the Rue Berthe, the
principal street of Biskra, rises in marble the commanding figure of a
priest, a bearded, vigorous, eagle-eyed man in the flowing vestments
and pointed miter of an archbishop, who holds a primate’s cross aloft
in one hand and with the other confers an apostolic benediction as he
strides southward into Africa. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie was
the priest’s name, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate
of All Africa, founder of the Order of the White Fathers. His fairness,
tact, and statesmanship in handling thorny native questions won for
France the confidence and friendship of the warlike border tribes; he was
largely instrumental in putting an end to the trans-Saharan slave-trade;
and he and his _Pères Blancs_ did more than all the French military
leaders put together to carry the tricolor beyond the Great Sahara.
[Illustration: THE START FROM TOUGGOURT
Mrs. Powell embarks on a ship of the desert
But Miss Powell prefers her Arab steed]
At the other end of the continent, in Bulawayo, in the dusty, sun-baked
thoroughfare known as Main Street, stands another statue—the bronze
image of a short, thick-set, carelessly clad man, his hands clasped
behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound
meditation northward over Africa. The name of the dreamer was Cecil John
Rhodes, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the
Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a
railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the center and
picking up trade all the way.” Though the stupendous project which he
envisioned is yet to be completed, it is due to him, more than to any
single individual, that the eastern and southern portions of the map of
Africa are painted red.
No two men were ever more unlike than Lavigerie and Rhodes. Both
empire-builders, both apostles of civilization, one gained his
ends by tactfulness, the other by ruthlessness; one stood for the
mission-station, the other for the machine-gun; one relied on the power
of prayer and proselytism, the other on the pick and the pound sterling.
The _Pères Blancs_ organized by Lavigerie carried the cross and the
tricolor southward to the Ubanghi; the engineers employed by Rhodes
carried the railway and the Union Jack northward to the Congo. As far as
the poles apart in character and methods, they yet had this in common:
both were inspired by deep patriotism, both were possessed of boundless
imagination and inexhaustible enthusiasm. Between them they opened up a
continent to civilization.
* * * * *
Whoever had the placing of the great missionary-statesman’s statue in
Biskra must have known the man. For the eyes gaze eagerly out into the
clean, wind-swept spaces of the desert, while the back is turned in
contempt and aversion upon the gaming-houses, the dance-halls, and the
brothels of the town. Perhaps because they are so avid for the extremely
dubious entertainments which the place has to offer, the thousands of
tourists who flock to Biskra every winter find time to bestow on the rapt
white figure no more than a cursory glance. To most of these the name
of Lavigerie means less than nothing, whereas that of Robert Hichens is
familiar to them all!
In the old days, before the railway and the tourists came, before Hichens
wrote “The Garden of Allah,” Biskra was no better and no worse than other
desert towns. But the hordes of winter visitors which soon began to
descend upon the place clamored for the Oriental forms of entertainment
which the English author painted so alluringly, and these the avaricious
Arabs, who always have an eye out for the main chance, were only too
willing to provide, so that to-day Biskra spreads before her guests
every form of vice to be found in Europe, and some varieties of which
Europe never dreamed. Sensual, provocative, hot with desire, painted of
face and barbaric of attire, she beckons from beneath her palm-trees, a
demi-mondaine of the desert, a siren of the sands.
Biskra is the capital of the Ziban, or the country of the Zab, a people
of mixed Arab and Berber stock, whose villages of sun-hardened mud,
nestling amid groves of date-palms and fruit-trees and waving fields of
grain, dot that portion of the desert lying between the Shat Melrir and
the southern slopes of the Aurés. The water which keeps the oasis green,
except a certain amount from wells, all comes from a single stream, the
Oued Biskra, which, coming down through the Gorge of El Kantara, forty
miles to the north, carries the melting snows of the Atlas to the Sahara
and finally drops from sight amid the sands. Biskra itself consists of
half a dozen villages, separated by large plantations of palm and olive
trees, scattered through an oasis three miles in length by less than
a mile in breadth. The native houses are of the usual Saharan type,
earth-brown, thick-walled, and flat of roof; but dwelling in black
tents along the outer edges of the oasis is a considerable transient
population—nomads who have come in from the outer desert to refit
themselves for another voyage, for Biskra is, in its way, as much a port
as Algiers.
Strongly garrisoned and further strengthened by the fort of St. Germain,
Biskra is a place of great strategic importance; the end of one of the
fingers, as it were, with which France maintains her grip on the desert.
Colomb-Béchar, the present terminus of the railway running south from
Oran, is another. So are Gabés, and Tozeur, and Touggourt. Thanks to the
chain of outposts which she has flung along the southern frontiers of
Barbary from Libya to the Atlantic, France’s hold on the desert is now
tolerably secure, but the French have not been lulled into a feeling of
false security. They are fully alive to the possibility of one of those
general conflagrations which sweep across these fiery regions with the
suddenness and violence of a sand-storm, as is denoted by the significant
number of uniforms—legionaries, _tirailleurs_, colonial infantry, spahis,
_méharistes_, _chasseurs d’Afrique_—which fill the streets of Biskra with
color. They are firemen, ever on the alert for an alarm.
The foreign settlement of Biskra, _la ville européene_, is toward the
northern end of the oasis. Barring the Arabs and the camels, it does
not differ materially from scores of other winter resorts in the south
of France. In the center of the town is a beautiful public garden on
which front cafés, restaurants, and small arcaded shops for the sale of
post-cards, photographs, native curios, and European goods. Set well back
from the broad, rather dusty main thoroughfare, the Rue Berthe, are
several luxurious hotels, a pretentious casino in pseudo-Moorish style,
where visitors may dance, drink, and engage in various games of chance,
and numerous white villas embowered in flowering vines and surrounded by
gorgeous gardens. During the season the town is gay with color and music
and laughter. Long strings of stately camels stalk slowly through the
crowded streets; on the pavements before the native coffee-houses groups
of turbaned Arabs chat and smoke; _hiverneurs_ from America and half the
European countries lounge on the terraces of the hotels, lean over the
green tables of the casino, or rub shoulders in the curio-shops; young
men and girls in vivid sport-clothes dash madly about the tennis-courts
or canter by on well-groomed ponies; lovely ladies, gowned in the height
of the Paris fashion, saunter beside cavalry officers gorgeous in
wasp-waisted jackets of sky blue and scarlet riding-breeches; from the
_cafés arabes_ come strains of the weird and plaintive music the desert
people love; in the afternoons the band of the _tirailleurs_ plays Sousa
marches and Irving Berlin jazz in the public gardens.
In the crystal clearness of its air, the vivid blueness of its skies,
the brilliancy of its sunlight, and the unbroken sweep of the encircling
desert, Biskra reminds one of an Upper Nile town, such as Luxor, if one
can imagine Luxor without the river and without the temples at Thebes.
From November to April its climate is, generally speaking, delightful,
but in the summer the thermometer often registers 110 in the shade during
the day and 90 at night, though the absence of humidity makes even such
excessive heat endurable. Yet Biskra can hardly be recommended for those
who are actually ill, for its glorious winter climate is marred by high,
bitterly cold winds which frequently bring the mercury down to the
freezing-point and cause the shivering tourists to curse the person who
assured them that the Sahara and heat are synonymous.
[Illustration: THE STRANGE CAPITAL OF A STRANGE PEOPLE
Chalk-white beneath the sun of Africa, the square, flat-roofed buildings
of Ghardaia, the city of the Beni-Mzab, a Berber tribe of the Algerian
Sahara, rise in terraces, like those of the pyramid-pueblo at Taos, to
the _kasbah_, above whose massive walls the minaret of the Great Mosque
soars skyward, like a finger pointing toward heaven]
I find it somewhat difficult to analyze the charm of Biskra. That it has
great charm is undeniable, but its charm does not lie altogether in the
brilliance of its sunshine, the richness of its colors, or the novelty
of its setting. It has no monopoly of these. I think that its peculiar
appeal is to be found, rather, in its innate barbarism, for, beneath its
thin coating of civilization, it is African to the core. This may seem
rather far-fetched when one remembers that it is reached from the north
by comfortable trains with _wagons-lits_ and dining-cars; that its larger
hotels compare very favorably with the great hostelries of Florida and
the Riviera; that its casino is crowded nightly with men and women in
evening-dress risking their money at _petits chevaux_ or roulette. Yet
the barbaric note is never wholly absent; it rings more shrill by force
of contrast; one has the uneasy feeling that the veneer of civilization
is none too thick, that one is walking on a perilously thin crust. The
caravans which slip in so silently from the great wastes and steal out
again with equal mysteriousness bound for God knows where; the hooded
figures which crouch motionless in the dimly lit interiors of the native
cafés; the tattooed harlots who flaunt themselves in the narrow streets
of the Ouled-Naïl quarter; the wild-looking, sullen-eyed men from the
depths of the desert who furtively whisper together in the market-place;
the momentary flash of a steel blade as a burnous is carelessly thrown
back; the eery wail of flutes and the muffled throb of drums; the
moonlight gleaming on the bayonets of night patrols—all these combine to
remind us that we are in Africa, a tiny island of white men amid a sea
of mysterious, fanatical, menacing brown ones; and that out there in the
brooding desert, under cover of the darkness, who knows what ominous
plans are hatching. As in other places on the edge of the unknown, one is
constantly oppressed by an undefinable sense of lurking peril, the uneasy
feeling that something is about to happen.
Biskra, as every reader of modern fiction knows, is the Beni-Mora of
Robert Hichens’s “Garden of Allah,” and to leave there without visiting
the gardens of the Villa Landon which the novelist so graphically
describes would be as unthinkable as to leave Versailles without seeing
the Trianon. For the setting of his story Hichens chose the beautiful
estate of Count Landon, a French nobleman who has devoted his life to a
study of Arab life, which lies in the extreme outskirts of the oasis,
on the very margin of the desert, its walls rising abruptly from the
illimitable sea of sand.
The creators of northern gardens strive primarily for color; here, amid
the glare of the sun and the desert, the chief object sought is _shade_.
Almost wholly absent are the velvety stretches of close-cropped lawn, the
brilliant “flower-beds,” the formal avenues and exactly trimmed hedges
to which we are accustomed. There are flowers, of course—great clumps of
geranium, hedges of red and white hibiscus, cascades of bougainvillea,
purple and crimson, clambering roses, and unfamiliar plants and vines
with gorgeous blooms—but instead of being set out in formal rows or
geometrical designs, as European gardeners are so fond of doing, they
peep out unexpectedly from amid a bewildering tangle of bamboos, palms
of every known variety, and citrus-trees, for in that fierce heat they
can exist only by taking advantage of the shade. Winding through the
wilderness of verdure go broad white walks, stamped and rolled until
they are as smooth as asphalt and then sprinkled with a thin layer of
sand. Everywhere bare-legged Arab gardeners are at work preserving the
immaculate tidiness of the gardens. So conscientious are they that a
footprint on the sanded walks is instantly erased, not a dead leaf is to
be seen.
Entering the cool green tunnels from the intolerable glare and heat of
the sun, hearing the pleasant splash and gurgle of water coursing through
the network of leafy channels, lounging beneath pergolas smothered in
jasmine and bougainvillea, or from the outer promenade gazing across
the illimitable sea of sand whose yellow waves break impotently against
the retaining-walls of the garden, one marvels at the miracle which has
wrought such surpassing beauty from a region so discouraging. Nowhere
else have I seen such bold and successful defiance of the desert; here
“the wilderness becomes like Eden, and the desert like the garden of the
Lord.” The wonder and fascination of the place grow on the visitor hour
by hour.
Hidden away in the heart of the gardens is the owner’s villa, a rambling,
one-story building which lays no claim to architectural pretensions.
The interior is a curious _mélange_ of Moorish and mid-Victorian, the
Oriental rugs and hangings, the marbles and paintings, the ornate crystal
chandeliers, the broad divans piled high with embroidered cushions,
the Empire tables and over-stuffed chairs upholstered in brocaded
satin combining the unbridled opulence of the East with the dignity
and restraint of the West. Not far away is a charming little pavilion,
furnished in the Oriental style, where Count Landon takes his guests
after dinner for coffee and cigarettes.
Reclining on a grassy bank before the pavilion was an Arab in a
plum-colored burnous, a scarlet hibiscus-blossom thrust behind his ear,
pensively engaged in the extraction of mournful music from a flute. We
did not need to be told that this was the Larbi described by Hichens. He
is a born actor and, if the stories one hears are to be believed, he has
been highly successful in capitalizing the fame brought him by the book,
for every English and American visitor to the gardens asks to see him and
for the plaintive love-airs which he draws from his little reed rewards
him generously.
In a charming glade beside a vine-clad kiosk we found another Arab, who
offered, for a small consideration, to tell our fortunes in the sand.
Ordinarily I should have passed him by, but the atmosphere of the Jardin
Landon encourages such tomfoolery, and, at my daughter’s insistence, I
told him to try his hand at prophecy. Drawing the hood of his burnous
over his head, he spread white sand evenly upon the ground, traced
cabalistic designs in it with a pointed stick, blew upon it, and, after
a few moments spent in scrutinizing the result, informed me that I was
about to undertake a long journey—a safe prophecy under the circumstances
and, as it happened, a correct one. He did not prove such a good guesser
in my daughter’s case, however, for, after the customary shibboleth, he
announced that she was being pursued by a tall dark man who came from
out of the South. This had the effect of shaking our confidence in the
infallibility of the sand-diviner, for the youth who had pursued her
across half North Africa in his big Minerva was a Belgian nobleman,
short, fair-haired, and blond!
The gardens of the Villa Landon are intensely theatrical and one always
has the feeling that he has inadvertently wandered upon a stage set for a
play, which, to my way of thinking, adds enormously to their charm. They
evidently did not make the same appeal to all my country-people that they
did to me, however, for, while seated beneath a pergola, I heard a voice,
with the unmistakable accent of the Middle West, coming from beyond the
screen of shrubbery.
“This ain’t half bad,” the unseen speaker remarked condescendingly, “but
saay, you just oughta see our back yard in Topeka when the sunflowers and
the hollyhocks are out.”
[Illustration: DESERT DAMSELS, OLD AND YOUNG
In the mountains of southernmost Algeria dwell the Ouled-Naïl, a tribe
which supplies the dancing-girls for half North Africa. When in their
early teens they are charming, with soft brown skins and sparkling eyes,
but the life soon coarsens and hardens them, and by the time they have
reached their twenties the merry eyes are cold and calculating and the
smiling lips are tight and grim]
In the desert, a dozen miles southeast of Biskra, is the town of Sidi
Okba, the religious center, as Biskra is the commercial capital, of the
Ziban. It owes its sanctity, which draws pilgrims from all parts of
Moslem Africa, to the fact that its great mosque contains the tomb of
Okba ibn Nefi, the soldier-saint of Islam, who, in the first century of
the Hegira, conquered Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and fell in
battle with the Berbers near this place in A.D. 682.
It took the Atlantic Ocean to check Okba’s furious onsweep to the
West. When he reached its shores he is said to have spurred his horse
girth-deep into its waters and, raising his simitar to heaven, exclaimed,
“Great God, if my course were not stopped by that sea I would still go on
to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name
and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other
god than Thee!” He was a mighty soldier, and, had it not been for the
providential interposition of the Atlantic, America might be Mohammedan
to-day.
The last chapter of Okba’s stormy life was marked by one of those
chivalrous episodes so common in Arab chronicles. While he was meditating
on some plan for circumventing the Atlantic, the Berber tribes he had
conquered on his westward march were rising in his rear. Finding his
position hopeless, he sent for one of his chiefs, a man whom he had
imprisoned for attempting to incite a mutiny in the army. Okba released
him and advised him to fly while there was yet time. But the mutineer
replied that he preferred to die by his leader’s side. So, embracing as
friends, they drew their simitars, broke the scabbards, and turned to
face the onslaught of the foe, falling at last, back to back, amid a ring
of the Berbers they had slain.
To-day the great conqueror lies buried, not far from where he made his
gallant final stand, beneath a splendid shrine within the precincts of
the imposing mosque which bears his name. Carved on the sepulcher in
Cufic characters is the simple but pregnant inscription: “This is the
tomb of Okba, son of Nefi. May God have mercy upon him.” No older Arabic
structure is known to exist in Africa.
* * * * *
In the minds of the tourist, Biskra is always associated with the women
of the Ouled-Naïl, those dusky damsels of easy virtue who perform their
strange sensual dances and ply their age-old trade in the cafés and
brothels which line the narrow, dim-lit thoroughfare named, perhaps with
a touch of sarcasm, the Rue Sainte. They are the daughters of a tribe
which inhabits the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, a wild, inaccessible,
almost unexplored range which stretches from the western end of the Ziban
to the vicinity of Djelfa.
From earliest childhood they are trained for a life of immorality very
much as a promising colt is trained for the race-course. A girl is
scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother,
who has herself been a _danseuse_ in her time, she begins the arduous
course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their
suggestive _danses du ventre_. Morning, noon, and night, day after
day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, her
thighs, her abdomen are developed and suppled and trained until they will
respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers.
Her lustrous blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed
again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and
to sing the haunting love-songs of the desert people; to make the thick
black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By
the time she has entered her teens she is ready to make her début in the
dance-hall of some Algerian town, a mistress of all the peculiar arts and
accomplishments which make the successful courtezan.
After half a dozen years or so of a life which knows no moral scruples,
during which she carefully hoards the money bestowed on her by her
admirers, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces and jewelry, to the
mud-walled mountain village from which she came, to marry some well-to-do
man of the tribe and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will
perhaps don the scarlet burnous and white turban of the spahis and
serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the
life of their mother all over again. The profession is, in fact, a
hereditary one, which a very large proportion of the women of the tribe
pursue without the slightest blemish to their reputations. It is an
extraordinary custom, and one to which no other country, so far as I am
aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches
of India, and the _ghawazi_ of Egypt are but classes, the Ouled-Naïl are
a race, as distinct in features and characteristics as the Touareg, the
Kabyles, or the Riffi.[3]
European writers have been prone to envelop these demi-mondaines of the
desert in a rosy veil of romance, which is, however, not wholly justified
by the facts. Many of them, as I have just said, after earning their
dowries in the dance-halls, return to their people in the mountains,
marry a respectable young man of the tribe, and ever after lead strictly
moral lives; but others, judging from their appearances, have been in no
great hurry to reform and settle down.
The Ouled-Naïl, be it understood, are not common to Biskra alone, for
they frequently make their way to Constantine and to Algiers, yes, and
to Tunis in the east and to Tangier in the west, for they appear to be
as popular with the Berbers and the Moors as with the Arabs. Though some
of the younger ones are really pretty in a dark, barbaric fashion, with
slim, supple bodies, hands and feet that are small and perfectly molded,
piquant features, and eyes as large and lustrous as those of a gazelle,
their beauty is evanescent, and by the time they have reached their
early twenties they have become painted, leering harridans with mouths
like steel traps and steely, calculating eyes. Yet, even after their
youthful bloom has vanished, their dances continue to arouse the ardor of
their native admirers, they are sometimes the objects of extraordinary
munificence, and they often provoke furious jealousies which flare up in
violent quarrels and not infrequently terminate in bloodshed and death.
That is why the Rue Sainte echoes throughout the night to the measured
tramp of _tirailleur_ patrols.
The _cafés maures_ which are the scene of the Ouled-Naïl dances are for
the most part resorts of the most unsavory description, low-ceilinged,
dimly lighted, and foul with smoke. The dancers give their performance
on a small raised platform to the shrill of reeds, the clash of cymbals,
and the incessant throb of drums played by Arab or negro musicians who
squat in a semicircle on the earthen floor. There is no fixed charge for
admission, but during the frequent intermissions one of the music-makers,
or, perhaps, a dancing-girl herself, will pass among the spectators
soliciting contributions.
In their dress, if in little else, the Ouled-Naïl have nothing in
common with the Jewish and Moresque courtezans who on the stages of
certain extremely disreputable dance-halls in the _kasbah_ quarter of
Algiers prance in a state of almost complete nudity for the delectation
of visitors from the tourist steamers. Their costumes would, on the
contrary, be considered actually prudish by the patrons of the Winter
Garden and the Vanities, for, barring the exposure of a narrow band
of flesh around the waist, they are so completely enveloped in loose
flowing garments that virtually nothing of their figures can be seen.
Past mistresses in the art of seduction, they have learned that sexual
passion is aroused by suggestion rather than by revelation. The excessive
modesty of their costumes is more than counterbalanced, however, by the
licentiousness of their dances, which are the very essence of Oriental
depravity, an unrestrained appeal to sexual desire. Yet every night the
dance-halls of the Rue Sainte are crowded to the doors with European
tourists—sober, self-respecting business men, staid matrons, yes,
and young, carefully reared girls who view the scene in embarrassed
fascination, only half comprehending what the dances mean.
* * * * *
In a narrow street at the back of the Rue Sainte is a _zaouia_ where
those visitors whose curiosity is strong enough to overcome their
feelings of horror and repulsion may witness the terrible rites of the
Aïssaoua sect. This fanatical order of dervishes takes its name from the
Marabout Aïssa, a native of Morocco. Lost in the desert, he would have
perished from starvation, so the tradition goes, had not the miraculous
powers with which he was endowed enabled him to sustain himself on such
unusual forms of food as fire, snakes, scorpions, and the spiny leaves
of the prickly pear. The members of the sect imitate him, or pretend to
imitate him to this day, even improving upon the traditional performances
of their founder by eating broken glass, driving knives and skewers
through their flesh, and undergoing other self-inflicted tortures.
Whether the alleged “holy men” who stage their revolting performance
nightly in the back street of Biskra are actually members of the Aïssaoua
order is open to some question; certainly their exhibition is mere
child’s play to some that I have seen in Inner Asia. Yet they are hideous
and disgusting enough, heaven knows, and one wonders how Europeans,
particularly European women, can sit through them. Numbers do, however,
and become so fascinated that they forget to be horrified or to feel sick
until they get home.
The performance takes place in a long, low room, its atmosphere heavy
with tobacco-smoke, the fumes of incense, the reek of lamps, and the
odor of human perspiration. Ranged against the walls are wooden benches
for the accommodation of the European spectators, most of whom appear
distinctly ill at ease and rather white about the gills, while the native
onlookers seat themselves cross-legged on the floor. At the far end of
the room are gathered the performers: some hollow-eyed, lean-framed,
wild-looking fanatics of the true dervish stamp; others unbalanced,
half-crazy individuals such as are to be found about the mosques and
bazaars of every Moslem city; the rest perfectly normal men—butchers,
porters, scavengers, and the like—who are always willing to endure a
little pain for the sake of profit. These last are indubitably impostors;
but of the others it is hard to determine just where religious frenzy
ends and simulation begins. Music, if such it can be called, is provided
by a trio of negro drummers, who thump their barbaric instruments—_roum,
roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum_—until the fetid air
of the place pulses with the sound.
The performance is in charge of a marabout, a dignified,
patriarchal-looking Arab in a high thimble-shaped turban and a burnous
of brown camel’s-hair, who acts as a sort of stage-director. Calling
up the performers, one by one, he enfolds each in his arms and makes a
few passes about him, whereupon the dervishes and the demented proceed
to work themselves into an authentic frenzy of religious exaltation,
rolling their eyeballs in their sockets, foaming at the lips, twitching
their limbs, and shaking as though afflicted with palsy, while their
confederates, employed for the occasion, imitate them with an attempt at
realism which is not wholly convincing. Faster and faster the frenzied
figures reel about the room, louder and faster throb the drums, while the
“_Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!_” of the native spectators, who rock themselves
backward and forward in time with the chant, adds to the infernal din.
A few minutes of this and, at a signal from the marabout, the racket
ceases as abruptly as it began. A word from the leader, and there
staggers into the center of the circle a wild-looking, long-haired figure
clad only in a breech-clout; his eyes are glazed, and he is thin to
the point of emaciation. From a brazier he lifts between his thumb and
forefinger a glowing coal the size of a large marble, places it upon his
tongue, swallows it as though it were a bon-bon. In the air is the horrid
odor of burning flesh; an American spectator gives an exclamation of
disgust; a woman utters a faint scream; the natives emit a long-drawn
“_Ah-h-h_” of gratification.
The next number on the program was even more revolting. A pseudo-dervish,
who by day is a street-sweeper in the Rue Berthe, so I was informed,
plunged his hand into a basket and withdrew a live green snake, perhaps
eighteen inches long. The silence in the room was so intense that we
could hear the serpent hissing. Holding the wriggling thing firmly, he
inserted its head into his mouth ... his throat worked convulsively for
a moment ... and it was gone! The florid American beside me mopped his
forehead with a handkerchief. There was a little commotion among the
spectators gathered near the door; the woman who had screamed was going
out.
Now came the apogee of the evening’s entertainment. This time the actor
was no neophyte but a real dyed-in-the-wool fanatic such as I had seen
in the dervish monasteries of Anatolia and Persia. Him I recognized
as the real thing. His eyes glowed with the fires of fanaticism, his
nostrils quivered like a race-horse’s, little streams of saliva trickled
from the outer corners of his lips. It was plain that he was at the very
height of religious frenzy; a man in that condition might do anything
to himself—or to others. But when the marabout made a few passes about
him and whispered in his ear he quieted like an excited dog which hears
its master’s voice. From the folds of his garments the marabout produced
a number of steel skewers, about the length of hat-pins. Opening his
mouth, the dervish drove one of the steels through the fleshy part of his
cheek until a good four inches of it protruded from his face. A second
skewer he forced through the muscles of his upper arm; a third through
his thigh; two more through his breasts. In scarcely more time than it
takes to tell about it the man was a human pin-cushion. Little rivulets
of blood, welling from the wounds, coursed down his naked body to form a
crimson pool upon the floor. By now the other performers and the native
spectators had worked themselves up to a very high pitch of excitement.
“_Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!_” they howled, rocking like automatons and
beating themselves upon the breast. The drums boomed and thundered until
it seemed as though the wave of sound would lift the roof.
[Illustration: WHAT THE PIOUS MOSLEM EXPECTS TO FIND IN PARADISE
Some of the maidens, particularly in the South, are very lovely, with
slim, supple, full-breasted figures, and skins of brown satin shot
with rose, and blue-black hair, and lustrous, seductive eyes. But the
Moors prefer them fat, and unless nature provides them with the desired
embonpoint they are systematically stuffed like Strasbourg geese until
they are waddling mountains of flesh]
The dervish wrenched out the skewers and dropped, panting, on a mat.
Two superbly developed negroes, all but naked, took his place. Beneath
the light from the guttering lamps their brown-black skins gleamed like
bronzes in a museum. They approached each other on all fours, crouching,
circling, snarling, purring. This was the panther dance, an all too
realistic representation of the amorous relations of two great jungle
cats. Now the religious ecstasy which had provided a pretext for the
preceding performances was at an end; this was sheer animalism, frankly
obscene and wholly unashamed.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I said to my companion. “I think that I’ll go
back to the hotel and take a bath and try to feel clean again.”
We went out into the soft African night. As we strode northward through
the Rue Berthe toward the European quarter we could hear behind us
the clash of cymbals and the wail of reeds from the cafés where the
Ouled-Naïl were dancing, the throbbing of the negro drums. But from the
desert a clean and gentle wind was blowing, and the stars shone very
bright.
CHAPTER XIV
FRONTIERS OF ROME
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.
[Illustration: A SAHARAN MARKET-PLACE
The _souks_ of the towns along the desert’s fringe are cross-sections
of North African life, for to them come buyers of horses, camels, wool,
and leather from the cities of the littoral, and caravans laden with the
strange products of the Sudan and the Congo, of Lake Tchad and Timbuktu]
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.
[Illustration: THE GLORY THAT WAS ROME
When men who had witnessed the Crucifixion were still living, there arose
on the northern slopes of the Aurés, in southern Algeria, a splendid
city, an outpost of the empire of Rome. Thamugas its builders called it;
Timgad it is called to-day. For the most part it lies in ruins, but the
great triumphal arch still stands, but little changed since it was raised
by order of Trajan nearly nineteen centuries ago]
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:
VENARI LAVARI
LUDERE RIDERE
OCCEST VIVERE
TO HUNT TO BATHE
TO PLAY TO LAUGH
THAT IS TO LIVE
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.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF THE PRECIPICES
Constantine is said to have withstood eighty sieges, and no wonder, for
it stands on a rocky plateau, cut off from the surrounding country on
all sides save one by the tremendous ravine in places a thousand feet in
depth, cut by the Rummel in the limestone rock]
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.
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in short thick pants was breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced....
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.
CHAPTER XV
THE GRAND KABYLIA
“Travel,” Madame de Pompadour once remarked petulantly to her friend
Louis XV, “is the saddest of all pleasures.” And, with two thousand miles
of African desert and upland behind you, it will not be surprising if you
are of the great courtezan’s way of thinking by the time you have arrived
at Setif, a busy but colorless and uninteresting town some hours to the
west of Constantine. If by now you have reached that stage of physical
weariness and mental boredom which led a companion of mine to observe
upon gaining the summit of the Grand St. Bernard, “Why, my dear fellow,
there’s nothing to see here but scenery,” then I should strongly advise
you to continue westward by the _route nationale_ which leads across the
Chaine-des-Bibans to Algiers; and on the evening of the second day after
leaving Constantine you will be seated in evening dress at a perfectly
appointed table in one of the great tourist hostelries which crown the
heights of Mustapha Supérieur, with the lights of the Algerian capital
twinkling at your feet and the boulevards of Paris only eight-and-forty
hours away.
But, if you can stand a few additional days of traveling, I hope for
your own sake that at Setif you will turn your car north instead of west,
taking the wonderful road which runs through the Chabet Pass to the
shores of the Mediterranean and Bougie and thence into the highlands of
the Grand Kabylia. Unless you do this you will miss some of the grandest
scenery the world has to offer, your friends in Algiers will listen to
your explanations with ill-concealed astonishment, and you will regret it
all your life. I am not urging you to make this detour, you understand; I
am merely suggesting it. What? You are willing to follow my advice? Good!
Let’s go!
For the first thirty miles after leaving Setif you will be disappointed,
for the road runs between endless fields of grain. But upon crossing
a chain of hills, from which we obtain a splendid view of the mighty
range we are about to penetrate, the road drops rapidly to Kherrata and
the little river which has worn for itself a narrow passage—the gorge
of Chabet-el-Akhira—through the Djurjuras, which rear themselves in a
tremendous rampart, in places seven thousand feet in height, between us
and the coast.
Immediately after leaving Kherrata the road plunges suddenly into the
mouth of the gorge, which is about four miles in length. The valley
contracts until it becomes so narrow that one can toss a stone across it;
the river, pent in between its walls of rock, rushes like a mill-race;
the road alternately creeps along a narrow shelf cut in the face of the
overhanging cliff, is borne by lofty arches above the rushing torrent, or
by means of tunnels pierces the obstructing masses of rock. In places the
precipice drops a thousand feet sheer to the river; at others one looks
up between the narrow walls to peaks which tower nearly a mile and a half
into the blue. Tributary streams come roaring down through leafy glens
to hurl themselves over the edge of the abyss into the river below amid
a smother of spray and spume. Yawning in the mountain-side are mouths of
black, mysterious caverns. Troops of Barbary apes leap from crag to crag,
or, looking down like gargoyles from the heights, chatter excitedly at
the passer-by. Even this road has echoed to the tramp of the legions. Mr.
Hilaire Belloc tells of a French general who, during the campaign against
the Kabyles, succeeded in leading his column through the defile, which
up to that time had been considered impassable even for an Arab on foot.
Justifiably proud of the achievement, he sent a detail to inscribe a
record of it on the face of the cliff. A few hours later the men returned
to report that there appeared to be lettering on the cliff already. Upon
examination the time-worn inscription read, “Legio III Augusta.”
After about four miles the gorge begins to widen, its walls become
less abrupt, the mountains give way to hills covered with forests of
oak and cork trees, and we emerge from the gloom of the defile into a
lovely mountain valley drenched in the spring sunshine. So on down the
ever-broadening valley, with occasional glimpses of the azure sea ahead,
until, at a point about twenty-five miles east of Bougie, we reach the
Mediterranean. For a time the road stays inland, traversing the rich
coastal plains which lie between the mountains and the sea; but as we
approach Bougie the increasingly mountainous nature of the country forces
it to the very edge of the lofty cliffs which line the shore, along which
it runs in an endless succession of curves and zigzags, contorting itself
into S’s, U’s, and Z’s. In places, where the spurs of the mountains
run down to the sea in precipitous headlands, the French engineers
have jeered at Nature’s attempt to obstruct the road by carrying it
on a narrow shelf blasted in the face of the sheer rock, so that the
motorist has the somewhat alarming sensation of driving along a slender
ribbon slung between sea and sky. Up and down it winds, round capes,
promontories, bays, and inlets; it is flung across gorges on bridges as
massively constructed as Roman aqueducts; sometimes it is tunneled, and
one emerges from the semi-darkness upon views of bright blue sea and
bright green mountain-slopes which are dreams of loveliness.
The African Corniche, as that portion of the coastal highway between
Djidjelli and Bougie is called, fully equals, if it does not surpass,
the famous road of the same name along the Riviera. I believe, indeed,
that the day is not far distant when this strip of the Algerian littoral
will rival the Côte d’Azur as a resort for winter tourists. It has a
better winter climate than the Riviera; it is almost immune from the
cold winds which at times set Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo a-shiver; it
is surrounded, east, south, and west, by scenery incomparably grander
than any in the Maritime Alps; its vegetation is richer and more varied,
with more suggestion of the tropical, than that on the other side of the
Mediterranean; hundreds of miles of splendid highway are open to the
motorist—east to Tunisia, west to Morocco, south to the Sahara; it is no
further from Bougie to Algiers than it is from Nice to Marseilles; and
Algiers, thanks to the _rapides_ of the P. L. M. and the swift steamers
of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, has become only a step from
Paris. Dredge the spacious harbor of Bougie to a depth which would permit
the entrance of the great tourist steamers; erect a casino and a good
hotel or two; line the sandy beach below the town with bathing-cabins,
and the Kabyle Coast would ere many years, if I am not mistaken, put the
Blue Coast out of business. For, apart from its innumerable natural
attractions, it offers to the tourist a romantic and irresistible appeal,
the lure of Africa.
Bougie, which is the natural seaport of Kabylia, is superbly situated
on the slopes of Mount Guraya, which are so steep that the red-roofed,
white-walled buildings of the town seem in imminent danger of sliding
into the sea. Many of its streets, in fact, are too precipitous for
vehicular traffic, being ascended, as in the case of certain Italian
towns, by long flights of stairs. There is a theatrical air about the
place, roofed with rose-red tiles and smothered in crimson bougainvillea,
as it rises, tier on tier, above a U-shaped harbor on whose ultramarine
waters ride at anchor vessels which bear beneath their sterns the
names of half the ports along the Mediterranean, fishing-craft with
hibiscus-colored lateen-sails, a French destroyer, slim and gray.
Frowning on the heights above the town is an ancient Spanish fortress
whose crumbling, mellow-tinted walls might have been built from
papier-mâché by a designer of stage-scenery. At its back rises the
great rock of Guraya, topped by a shrine which is a place of pilgrimage
for pious Moslems; while behind that in turn tower skyward the mighty
peaks of Babor and Tababort, dominating and dwarfing all else. As I
breakfasted on the lofty, rose-embowered balcony of my hotel, the ruined
corsair castle clinging to the hillside just above me, the red-and-white
town sprawling at my feet, and the sun-flecked, bright blue sea as a
back-drop, I always had the feeling that I was in a box at the theater,
and that shortly the orchestra would strike up and a chorus of pirates
and peasant maidens would come prancing out upon the stage.
Skirting the edge of the precipitous headland on which Bougie stands,
or hewn from its face, is the finest cliff walk I have ever seen; a
narrow foot-path, nearly four miles long and in places barely a yard
in width, every turn of which reveals a view of sea or mountains which
causes one to gasp with admiration and awe. The Strandweg at Abbazia, the
pergola-covered walk of the Cappuccini-Convento above Amalfi, the path
which borders the cliffs of Anacapri, all these are very lovely in their
way; but I, who have seen most of the sights this world has to offer,
assure you that none of them can compare in grandeur and beauty with
Bougie’s promenade.
Bougie—which, because of its trade in wax, is said to have given the
French their word for candle—is a place of great antiquity, probably
owing its origin to the Carthaginians. Phenicians, Romans, Vandals,
Byzantines, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, and French—it has been
occupied by them all in turn, and all have left their impress on its
architecture, its customs, or the faces of its inhabitants. Upon the
collapse of the Carthaginian power it became a Roman stronghold, and
extensive remains of Roman masonry are still to be seen amid the
olive-trees. During the reign of En-Nasr, the most powerful of the Berber
dynasty of Hammad, it attained a high degree of civilization, being
the greatest commercial center on the North African coast. As early as
1068 the heliograph was here in common use: by means of special towers,
provided with mirrors, messages were flashed for great distances along
the coast. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rich Genoese and
Venetian merchants erected numerous fine buildings in the city, leaving
so deep an impress that the place is more Italian than French to-day.
Toward the close of the fifteenth century Bougie passed under the
dominion of the Hafsides, whose empire extended from Tripolitania to the
borders of Morocco, but in the fifteenth century it was seized by the
Barbary corsairs, who used it as a base from which to harry the commerce
of the Mediterranean. So heavy were the losses inflicted by the corsairs
on the sea-trade of Spain that in 1510 Ferdinand V sent a squadron under
Don Pedro Navarro to capture Bougie, and Spanish it remained for nearly
two score years. The Spaniards built the great citadel that still looks
down upon the town, which they succeeded in holding against two attacks
by the Barbarossa brothers, only to have it wrested from them in 1555 by
Salah Reis, the pirate-pasha of Algiers. Thenceforth until the landing of
the French in 1833 the Turkish standard flew over the heights of Bougie,
the town, which once boasted one hundred thousand inhabitants, rapidly
falling into decay under the blight of Ottoman rule.
Forming the background of the rich coastal plain which stretches westward
from Bougie is the great Djurjura range, its lofty peaks, some of them
nearly a mile and a half in height, inclosing the highland regions
known as the Lesser and the Grand Kabylia, with which for grandeur of
scenery no other part of Algeria can compare. It is a wild and rugged
country, a land of towering, snow-capped mountains and secluded valleys,
of overhanging crags and leafy glens, of black forests and bright-blue
rivers, of yawning chasms and dizzy precipices and sparkling waterfalls,
a bright red village perched on the top of every peak and hill. “If
all the artists in the world came to Kabylia,” writes one enthusiastic
traveler, “there would be enough subjects to keep them busy for a year.”
A branch of that fierce and rugged Berber race which has occupied North
Africa since history began, the Kabyles, despite a history of foreign
conquest—Phenician, Greek, Roman, Vandal, Arab, and French—have preserved
to an astonishing degree the physical characteristics of their race,
its language and its customs. The Arabization of the Kabyles is limited
to little beyond their conversion to Islam, for, instead of amalgamating
with the Arab invaders, they retreated to their mountain strongholds,
where they maintained their independence until taught by the French
that undisciplined men armed with swords and flintlocks, no matter how
courageous individually, cannot stand for long against repeating-rifles
and field-guns.
Though the Kabyles, like the Arabs, are a “white” race, centuries of
exposure to sun and wind have darkened their skins to the color of a
much-used saddle. As a rule, however, they have brown hair and eyes, but
blue-eyed blonds are sometimes found among those of purer stock and red
or tawny beards are not infrequent. While most Kabyles are able to speak
Arabic, those who dwell in the remote fastnesses of the Djurjuras cling
tenaciously to various local forms of the ancient Berber tongue; it is a
singular fact that in spite of the thousands of years during which these
people have dwelt in isolation—or, perhaps, by reason of that fact—their
dialects vary but slightly from the long-extinct Hamitic language from
which they are all derived. As in the case of the Mozabites, the Kabyles
have no alphabet, their legends, sagas, verses, and folk-songs being
handed down by word of mouth, usually by priests or by the professional
story-tellers who are found in every village. Of the numerous Berber
dialects spoken in Kabylia, the most widely used is the Zouave; whence
the term “zouaves,” at one time applied to Kabyles who enlisted in the
French army, but now used to designate four infantry regiments, wearing
the tasseled cap and baggy trousers of the mountaineers, which, though
stationed in Africa, are composed entirely of Europeans.
The Kabyles profess to be Mohammedans of the Sunnite branch of Islam,
but they are a source of scandalization to their Arab coreligionists by
reason of their laxity in religious matters, their failure to obey the
precepts of the Koran. They observe Sunday instead of Friday as their day
of prayer; they eat the meat of the wild boar and drink a highly potent
brandy made from figs, though the use of pork and alcohol is strictly
forbidden to all True Believers; they honor the fast of Ramadan in the
breach rather than in the observance and seldom take the trouble to
perform the ablutions required of good Mohammedans; and, though tattooing
is prohibited by Koranic laws, all the women have a cross tattooed in
dark blue on the forehead between the eyebrows, and most of the men
bear the same symbol on the arm or the palm of the hand—a survival, it
is asserted by some, of the days when North Africa was Christian and
the cross was a token which exempted its wearer from certain forms of
taxation.
Alert, energetic, and enterprising, the Kabyle is immensely superior to
the Arab in industry, as he is in honesty, reliability, and intelligence.
He gives the impression, in short, of being, as he is, the descendant of
men who have lived in sturdy independence, self-respecting, self-reliant,
and self-governing. That he makes one of the finest soldiers in the
world the French discovered to their cost during the great Kabylian
revolt in 1871; indeed, he has never been fully subjugated, regarding
with contemptuous indifference the grim French fort which now frowns
down upon his villages from the mountains. The Kabyle is frequently
found far afield—serving in the armies of France (on the battle-fields
of the World War the Kabyle battalions covered themselves with German
blood and glory), as a workman in the cities along the littoral, as a
field-laborer in the Tell, as an itinerant trader or peddler laboriously
earning the wherewithal to buy a bit of land and build himself a home in
his native village. In their social tendencies the Kabyles are distinctly
communistic; property is often owned by the family in common, and a
man can call upon his fellow-villagers for assistance under certain
circumstances, such as tilling a field or building a house. The Kabyle’s
village is his state, the government being vested in an assembly composed
of all adult males, the poorest inhabitants having as great a voice in
village affairs as the richest. Kabylia consists, in short, of a great
number of town democracies, each absolutely independent so far as its
internal affairs are concerned, loosely bound together in a sort of
confederation.
The Kabyle woman enjoys a vastly better social position than her
Arab sister, being permitted far more power and treated with more
consideration. True, her husband buys her as he would a cow and can
dismiss her whenever it so pleases him; she performs most of the heavy
work about the house and farm; and when she is old, particularly if she
has not borne a male child, she is frequently abandoned. But she has
a voice in public affairs; she manages the household; she has a right
to the money she earns; she goes unveiled; and in time of war she has
frequently fought in battle beside her husband. The Kabyle pays his
wife the compliment of remaining monogamous, and female saints are held
in the highest veneration. When young the Kabyle women are usually
strikingly pretty and graceful, and when they are old they rarely become
the mountains of flesh one sees waddling through the streets of Arab
communities, perhaps because hard work keeps them thin, perhaps because
fat women are not popular in Kabylia.
[Illustration: “UL-L-L-L-L-ALL-AH!”
The spahis do not charge in line, like European cavalry, but every man
for himself, as fast as his horse can put hoof to ground, the riders
firing from the saddle]
It is a half-day’s motor run, shortened by fine roads and enchanting
scenery, from Bougie to Tizi-Ouzou—a fascinating name, isn’t it?—the
capital of Kabylia, where begins the wonderful military highway, built by
the French engineers, which leads to Fort National and to Michelet, the
latter a charming little mountain village in the heart of the Djurjuras.
Up and ever upward winds the road, now taking the steep ascent in a
series of long zigzags, sometimes circumventing a particularly steep
mountain by climbing it in endless spirals, again doubling back upon
itself in perfect hair-pin turns, each of which discloses a panorama of
breath-taking beauty and grandeur. Honesty compels me to admit, however,
that it is not a road which a timid passenger or an inexperienced driver
will thoroughly enjoy, for it is very steep, in places none too wide, and
bordered by numerous giddy precipices, so that to negotiate it without
disaster requires a cool head, good brakes, and a skilful hand on the
wheel. Under Harvey’s experienced guidance, however, the big Cadillac
skimmed up it like a swallow, though he had the paralyzing habit,
acquired during the war, of charging the V-shaped corners at full speed
and, when disaster seemed inevitable, suddenly jamming on the brakes,
thus permitting the rear end of the car to skid around. This method
doubtless saved time, but it was trying on the nerves and the tires.
Three hours of steady climbing from Tizi-Ouzou brought us to Fort
National, a French stronghold, grim and formidable, erected after
the revolt of ’71 as “a sword in the heart of Kabylia.” Perched on a
mountain-top, from which it dominates a vast area of mountain and valley,
it serves as a silent reminder to the warlike Kabyles of the power of
France. Barring a quaint walled village, entered through a medieval
gateway, there is little of interest there, however, and, pausing only
long enough to view the superb panorama commanded by the ramparts of the
citadel, we continued onward and upward to Michelet—an Alpine hamlet set
down in Africa. Here the Transatlantique people have built a delightful
little hotel—just the sort of place you dream of after a long, cold drive
but seldom find—with great open fires and capacious leathern chairs and
cozy, well-heated, chintz-hung bedrooms. Though it was late in April
when we were there, the ground was white from a light fall of snow, and
the chill mountain air pierced to the bone, but such minor discomforts
were instantly forgotten at sight of logs crackling on an open hearth
and, standing, on a table, a brown pinch-bottle whose label bore a
once-familiar name.
When we awoke in the morning the mountains were covered by so dense a
mist that it was impossible to discern an object a hundred feet away,
but before we had finished our _café au lait_ the mist had lifted like
the curtain of a theater to reveal a scene which fairly took the breath
away. The terrace on which we stood fell sharply away in a series of
steep, sometimes precipitous, hill-slopes, and, dotted with red-roofed
Kabyle villages, broken here and there by groves of olive, fig, and pine,
to a long and narrow valley, lush with grass, through which meandered a
lovely bright-blue stream. Beyond the little river the slopes again rose
skyward until the grass was lost in a bank of stunted pines and the pines
ran out in bare blue rock. For a time the ultimate heights were veiled in
clouds of pale gray chiffon, but as the mist slowly rose peak upon peak
was revealed—one of them, Lalla Kedija, upward of seventy-five hundred
feet in height—each with a little village perched on its summit like a
small red bonnet. Beyond the nearer mountains the higher peaks of the
Djurjuras reared themselves against the cloudless sky in lonely majesty,
wrapped in robes of green and crowned with snow.
From a distance the Kabyle villages are as fascinating as those imaginary
fantastic hill-towns which Maxfield Parrish was wont to paint, but if
you object to filth, squalor, and unmentionable stenches you should view
them from afar. Seen close at hand their fascination quickly vanishes,
and they prove to be but clusters of wretched hovels, one side of each
dwelling—usually the better—devoted to the stabling of sheep and cattle,
the other occupied by their owners. As the winters are bitterly cold in
Kabylia, and as the houses are quite unheated, the close proximity of
the live stock has certain advantages, however, for the heat from the
crowded stables keeps the temperature in the rest of the house slightly
above freezing, and, should the cold become unbearable, the family can
always go in and sleep amid the animals! In some villages, I was told,
the natives spend the winter nights in vaults beneath their houses,
taking the sheep down with them to serve as living comforters. Most of
the houses are of rough, flat stones, the crevices filled with mortar
made from clay and cow-dung; they are usually chimneyless—for the cooking
is done over primitive ovens in the open air—and sometimes windowless
as well, for of what use are windows to an illiterate household save to
admit undesired fresh air?
It was noticeable, however, that even the poorest villages were
surrounded by well-cultivated fields and thriving orchards, for the
Kabyles are highly successful agriculturists in spite of the discouraging
nature of their country and the fact that they are handicapped by
implements of the most primitive description. In arts and crafts they are
not proficient, though an exception should be made in the case of the
Kabyle jewelry, of which I saw some beautiful specimens, fashioned from
silver and set with brightly colored native stones and colored enamels.
The really fine pieces are becoming extremely scarce, however, the best
examples, as is the case with Venetian glass, Turkish carpets, and
Persian shawls, being found in the smart shops of the larger cities more
readily than in the remote villages where they are made.
The lives led by the Kabyles of the mountains are but little different
from those led by their remote ancestors, the original inhabitants of
North Africa, untold centuries ago. They till their fields with plows
identical with those depicted in the drawings of ancient Egypt. Grain
is trodden out by oxen to be stored in osier baskets or in curiously
shaped granaries of clay. The wheat is ground, as in Old-Testament times,
between an upper and a nether millstone, turned by blindfolded donkeys
plodding patiently round and round. The mountaineers extract the oil from
their olives by means of clumsy presses of a model which was old when
Moses was a boy. Fires are kindled by the aid of flint and steel. Their
foot-gear is made from home-tanned cowhide. The cloth from which their
garments are made is woven by hand, the manufacture of woolen stuffs
being one of the chief occupations of the women when they are not milking
the cows and goats, hoeing the gardens, cooking the meals, bringing water
on their heads from the nearest stream, or helping to cultivate the rocky
hillsides while yoked with a donkey or an ox to the plow. As might be
expected, the life these people lead has set its imprint on their faces;
there is something in the isolation, the loneliness, the drudgery, the
unending struggle for existence, that makes them grave and melancholy
and taciturn. In Kabylia one has the feeling that somehow he is very far
from modern civilization, not merely in miles but in years—that he has
dropped back through the ages to the very Dawn of Time.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CAPITAL OF THE CORSAIRS
If you are of an imaginative and romantic turn of mind, if you have
thought of Algiers as the Pirate City, the haunt of the Barbary rovers
and the capital of the deys, rather than as a pleasant winter-resort, an
African edition of Nice or Cannes, then you should by all means approach
it for the first time from the sea, preferably at dawn, when the sun
comes up like thunder from behind the purple mountains beyond the bright
blue bay, gilding the spires and minarets and turning to mellowed ivory
the crowded whitewashed buildings which rise, tier on tier, from the
water’s edge to the citadel which crowns the lofty hill on which the city
stands. Seen thus, the Algerine capital is but little changed from those
distant days when the red-bearded sea-rover whom we call Barbarossa came
sailing out of the east to make it the seat of pirate power; when its
harbor sheltered the swift galleys of the corsair fleet; when thousands
of Christian slaves labored in chains within its walls; and when its very
name spelled terror to the seamen of every country in Christendom.
But on coming down from the heights of the Grand Kabylia, as we did, the
approach to Algiers is extremely disappointing, for the road, which is of
rough _pavé_, crossed and recrossed by tracks on which clatter hooting
electric trams, leads through the sordid and unlovely suburb of Mustapha
Inférieur, a noisy industrial district teeming with foundries, factories,
belching chimneys, and monotonous rows of workmen’s dwellings. It is the
difference between approaching New York by sea or entering it through
Harlem.
Viewed from the deck of a steamer some distance out from shore, Algiers
seems to be a great triangle of dazzling white framed in vivid green,
the quays forming the base of the triangle and the _kasbah_ its apex,
with the verdure-clad hill-slopes of the Sahel for a background. For
sheer loveliness its only rival among the seaports of the Nearer East
is Constantinople, which is in a class by itself. But, as in the case
of all Oriental cities, distance lends enchantment, for, as the steamer
draws nearer, what had appeared from a distance to be wholly picturesque
becomes in part prosaic, the modern French town, built on the level
ground beside the sea-shore, masking to a considerable extent the ancient
city of the deys, which climbs the steep hill behind the European quarter
to the _kasbah_, or citadel, four hundred feet above the waters of the
harbor.
Upon disembarking one has the uneasy feeling that somehow he has made
a mistake, that he is not in Africa after all, for the streets and
buildings which confront him are all aggressively modern, without a
trace of that colorful Orientalism which the posters and pamphlets
of the tourist companies had led him to expect. On the quays are the
landing-stages, the custom-house, and the railway station, while, lined
up outside, are taxicabs, private motor-cars, and luxurious motor-buses
belonging to the various hotels. We are in Africa, at the gateway to the
Magic East, yet a camel would be as much out of the picture here as
at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Forty feet above the quays,
supported by a series of massive arches of masonry and reached by means
of ramps, is the imposing Boulevard de la République, bordered on the
landward side by rows of arcaded office-buildings and on the seaward side
by a fine promenade, which forms a great balcony as it were, nearly three
quarters of a mile in length, overhanging the Mediterranean.
A block or so back from the sea-front are the principal business streets
of the city—broad, tree-shaded thoroughfares, crowded with tram-cars,
motors, and carriages and lined with department-stores which are
branches of the great establishments in Paris, specialty shops of every
description, steamship agencies, consulates, news-stands (Sunday’s Paris
newspapers are sold on Monday afternoon in Algiers), restaurants, cafés,
and cinemas advertising the latest films of Douglas Fairbanks, William
S. Hart, and Charlie Chaplin. Barring the red tarbooshes of the Arabs,
almost the only Oriental note is provided by the post-office, a new and
imposing structure in neo-Moorish style, for throughout Africa the French
have had the good taste to use a modified native style in the erection of
public buildings instead of reproducing the monotonous ugliness of the
Second Empire.
[Illustration: ALGIERS, THE CAPITAL OF THE CORSAIRS
In the harbor behind the Penon, where fishing-craft and merchant vessels
now swing at their anchors, the pirate galleys lay
The Kasbah, at the top of the town, has not greatly changed since it was
the palace of Barbarossa and resounded to the groans of Christian slaves]
But behind the screen formed by the modern buildings of the French city,
where the hillside begins its steep ascent, lies the picturesque Arab
quarter, a labyrinth of narrow, tortuous lanes, alleys, and culs-de-sac,
turning and twisting like so many snakes. These thoroughfares are made to
appear even narrower than they are by the peculiar architecture of the
houses, whose second floors, supported on cedar poles, extend over the
street until they almost touch, the space between being so narrow that
it would seem as though a householder, by leaning from his second-story
window, could shake hands with his opposite neighbor. A visit to the
_quartier arabe_ leaves one breathless—breathless because you hold your
breath in order to avoid inhaling the stenches which rise to heaven;
breathless because all the streets are in effect staircases, the longest,
the Rue de la Kasbah, which leads from the harbor to the citadel, having
497 uneven stone steps. I know, because I counted them. The streets being
so steep and narrow, there are, of course, no carts, carriages, cars, nor
camels; all burdens are transported by porters or donkeys, and he who
desires to explore the native town must walk, or rather, climb, which is
good for the figure but hard on the lungs. Up and down these narrow ways
moves an endless procession of colorful and interesting figures—Arabs in
turbans and tarbooshes, brawny, big-muscled stevedores with bare legs and
arms, spahis in crimson cloaks, gabardined Jews with patriarchal beards,
shifty-eyed Levantines, French soldiers, caps cocked rakishly and about
their middles broad red sashes, priests of the missionary orders in white
cassocks and shovel-hats, veiled Moslem women, slipping along between the
high walls like sheeted ghosts, and swarms of dirty, noisy, half-naked
youngsters who thrive amid the filth of the gutters and importune the
visitor for “_Un sou, m’sieu.... Donnez-moi un sou!_” It is not so easy
for a stranger to lose his way in this maze of narrow streets as one
might suppose, for he has only to keep ascending and he will eventually
reach the _kasbah_, the old Turkish fortress which commands the town,
while, descending, he will sooner or later find himself in the European
quarter and civilization again.
The houses, built of stone and whitewashed and re-whitewashed
continually, are square, flat-topped buildings, windowless save for
a few narrow slits protected by iron bars or gratings. Occasionally a
fine gateway breaks the surface of the walls, and, should the door be
ajar, one may catch a fleeting glimpse of a marble-paved and colonnaded
patio filled with sunlight, flowers, and palms. Thus encloistered,
the Arab women spend their eventless days, the monotony of existence
broken only by occasional shopping expeditions or the weekly visit to
the cemetery. What takes place behind those mysterious green doors is a
popular subject for speculation, but I imagine that the life within is
not greatly different from that of Occidental households. Now and then
one hears strange tales of European women, wandering alone through the
dim and narrow streets, who have been seized and dragged within, to be
heard from never more. Most of these stories are pure inventions, told by
a dragoman or guide to whet the curiosity of the tourist; but that does
not mean that it is wholly safe for foreign women to visit the native
quarter unaccompanied, particularly toward nightfall, for the streets are
none too well policed, and, even should a European woman disappear, it is
extremely doubtful whether the French authorities would dare to institute
a house-to-house search for her, for an Arab’s harem is sacred, and to
invade it for any reason whatsoever might well entail consequences of the
gravest character.
But the Oriental life is slowly dying out; the quaint charm of the East
is giving way to the hurly-burly of Western civilization. The tide of
modernization is gradually but inexorably engulfing the hill on which
what is left of the old pirate city stands. The ancient walls are gone,
the gates also; most of the old minarets have disappeared. The palace of
the deys has become barracks for French soldiers, and the last time I
was there the newly washed uniforms of the troops were flapping on a line
within sight of the pavilion where the last of the corsair rulers slapped
the face of a French consul with his fan. Of the numerous mosques, none
of which may be entered by non-Moslems, perhaps the most picturesque is
that of Sidi Abd er Rahman, whose venerated tomb is within its precincts.
Facing on the Rue de la Marine is the Great Mosque, the Djamaa el Kebir,
distinguished by its magnificent colonnade. It is said to be the oldest
in Algiers, an inscription on the pulpit showing that it existed in 1018.
In the Place du Gouvernement is the new Mosque, which was built in 1660
in the form of a Greek cross according to designs drawn by a European
architect who had been captured by the corsairs and enslaved.
Though the almost total absence of any really fine examples of native
art and architecture is due in part to centuries of warfare and the
destruction caused by successive bombardments, it should be remembered
that, even during the great days of Islam, Algiers was never, culturally
speaking, of much importance. Such love of beauty as the Algerines
possessed was fully satisfied by a beautiful woman; the building of a
galley was far more important to them than the building of a mosque; the
Christian captives who received the most consideration were not artists
and architects but gunsmiths, ship-carpenters, and stone-masons; they
carved their history with the sword rather than with the chisel.
Unlike most cities of Barbary, Algiers is lacking in historic background.
In Roman times, it is true, there stood on what is now the city’s
waterfront a small town called Icosium, but it was presumably a place of
little consequence, for it is seldom mentioned in history. The present
city was founded by the Arabs about the middle of the tenth century, but
it remained comparatively unimportant until the expulsion of the Moors
from Spain in 1492, when large numbers of them settled here and adopted
the profession of piracy with the double motive of profit and revenge.
From that period dates Algiers’s importance as the chief stronghold of
the Barbary pirates. Thenceforward, for nearly three hundred and fifty
years, its harbor afforded shelter to the corsair fleets that terrorized
both shores of the Mediterranean, ravaged the Atlantic coast of Spain,
sacked Baltimore in Ireland, and even carried their depredations as far
westward as the Canaries and as far northward as Iceland.
The amazing rise to power of the Algerine pirates may be said to have
commenced with the struggle for the possession of the Penon, a small
island, connected with the mainland by a mole, which provided a place
of refuge for the corsair fleet and to-day forms the inner harbor of
the great modern port. After their occupation of Oran and other towns
on the coast of Africa, the Spaniards seized and fortified this island
and held it for nearly twenty years, its position athwart the entrance
to the roadstead enabling them to hamper, if not actually to control,
the movements of the Algerine fleets. But in 1516 the emir of Algiers,
Selim bin Teumi, growing weary of Spanish interference with the pleasant
and profitable game of piracy, sought the aid of the celebrated Turkish
sea-rovers, Arouj and Khair-ed-Din, better known as the Barbarossa
brothers. They accepted the invitation promptly, and it was a sad day for
Selim bin Teumi when they did, for scarcely had Arouj set foot in Algiers
before he caused the emir to be assassinated and himself took possession
of the city. After the death of Arouj in an obscure fight near Oujda,
his brother Khair-ed-Din took up the reins of power at Algiers, and, in
order to bolster up his position, offered the city to Selim I, sultan
of Turkey, who accepted the offer and named Khair-ed-Din his viceroy,
or capitan-pasha. Thus began the Turkish domination of Algeria, which
lasted for upward of three hundred years and brought worries and woes
innumerable to Europe.
Now that he had the might of the Ottoman Empire behind him, Khair-ed-Din
turned his attention to the Spanish garrison on the Penon. Bringing up
heavy artillery, he subjected the fortress to fifteen days of intensive
bombardment, and, when all save a handful of the garrison had been
killed, carried it by storm. The Spanish commander Martin Vagas, taken
prisoner, was offered his choice between death or conversion to Islam.
Being a stout son of the church as well as a gallant soldier, he chose
the former, whereupon he was sentenced to die by flogging, and his dead
body was dragged through the streets, cut into pieces, and thrown into
the sea.
With the double-barreled idea of preventing any repetition of the Spanish
occupation and of providing a securer harbor for his fleet, Khair-ed-Din
conceived the idea of connecting the Penon with the city by means of
a huge mole. For those days it was a herculean undertaking, but an
ample supply of forced labor was at hand in the corsairs’ Christian
captives, thirty thousand of whom were employed at the task, while an
inexhaustible mine of building-materials was provided by the ruins of
the old Roman city of Rusgania. The work was completed in three years,
and thenceforward for more than three centuries the corsair fleets found
refuge within, safe from the storms of the Mediterranean and the attacks
of the enemies; for Khair-ed-Din mounted heavy batteries on the Penon and
in 1544 erected a lofty lighthouse to guide his home-bound rovers. The
present great harbor, covering 222 acres, was commenced by the French in
1836—the first time blocks of concrete were used in such an operation.
From about 1518 until 1587, Algiers was the capital of the beylerbeys,
the Turkish viceroys of North Africa, whose rule extended over
Tripolitania, Tunisia, and Algeria. From 1587 until 1659 the Barbary
states were governed by Turkish pashas, sent from Constantinople for
terms of three years; but in 1659 a military revolt in Algiers put an
end to this system of government, reduced the pashas to nonentities,
and greatly weakened the Turkish power in Africa. From 1659 onward the
Barbary states, though still nominally parts of the Ottoman Empire,
were in fact anarchical pirate republics which chose their own rulers,
supported themselves by plunder, and made their own treaties—which they
rarely observed.
During the first of these three periods, as David Hannay has pointed out,
the beylerbeys were admirals of the sultan commanding great fleets and
conducting serious naval operations for political ends, for at that time,
it should be remembered, under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent,
the Ottoman Empire was at the zenith of its power and glory, Turkish
rule extending from Germany to Zanzibar, from Persia to the borders
of Morocco. The beylerbeys were slave-hunters, and their methods were
ferocious, but the reader should be reminded that their Christian enemies
were neither more chivalrous nor more humane. Plunder, however, was the
sole object of the pashas who succeeded them after 1587—plunder of all
who went upon the sea and of the native tribes on land. The maritime
side of this wholesale and systematic brigandage was conducted by the
captains, or _reises_, who formed a sort of guild, a veritable pirates’
union. Cruisers were fitted out by capitalists, just as privateers were
fitted out by private parties, both in the North and the South, during
the Civil War, each being commanded by a _reis_. Most of the ships were
built at Bougie, the timber being obtained from the forests of the
adjacent hinterland. Ten per cent of the value of the prizes was paid
to the Turkish ruler—variously known as pasha, agha, bey, or dey—of the
Barbary state from which they came.
Until the seventeenth century the corsairs used galleys, long
single-decked vessels propelled by fifty or more oars, the rowers being
prisoners of war who were chained to the sweeps, sometimes even when
their vessel was in harbor. The Algerines were eventually taught the
superiority of sailing-ships, however, by a Flemish renegade named Simon
Danser, and among them for a time was an English gentleman adventurer of
the distinguished Buckinghamshire family of Verney—the original, perhaps,
of Rafael Sabatini’s “Sea Hawk.” Though the fleets put into commission
at Algiers were so much the most formidable that the name of Algerine
became a synonym for Barbary pirate; the same lucrative trade was
carried on, though on a smaller scale, from Tripoli and Tunis, as well
as from various Moroccan seaports, the most notorious being Salé, which
gave its name to the Sallee rovers. The introduction of sailing-vessels
enabled the pirates greatly to extend the theater of their operations.
The galleys, being unfit for the high seas, were confined to the
Mediterranean coasts, but the sailing-ships passed through the Straits
of Gibraltar and ranged far into the Atlantic, burning seaports in the
Canaries, harrying the western seaboard of Spain; and in 1631 two private
crews under the command of Murad Reis, a native of Flanders, landed at
Baltimore in Ireland and carried off its inhabitants, who were sold into
slavery in Algiers.
The first half of the seventeenth century was the heyday of the Barbary
pirates. More than twenty thousand captives were said to be imprisoned
in Algiers alone. Those possessed of property could redeem themselves,
but the poor were sold at auction like cattle, though occasionally
their masters would give them their freedom upon their professing
Mohammedanism. But thousands died from fever, from exhaustion, or under
the lash. The women were less fortunate: they were taken into the harems
and became concubines of their masters. A long list might be compiled of
persons—not only Italians, French, and Spaniards, but English, Dutch, and
German travelers in the South—who were captives for a time in Barbary.
Don Miguel de Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” and his brother
Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs in 1575 off Marseilles and
taken as prisoners to Algiers. As the letters found upon the former were
taken to prove that he was a man of importance and in a position to
pay a high ransom, he was put under special surveillance. Their father
made every effort to effect their release, but the money which he sent
to Algiers by two priests of the Order of Mercy was sufficient only
to ransom Rodrigo. Miguel and his companions in misery made several
daring efforts to escape, which were, however, invariably discovered or
betrayed, whereupon he always chivalrously took the blame upon himself,
being sentenced on one of these occasions to two thousand strokes of the
lash; but the Turkish viceroy remitted the sentence, which was tantamount
to death, and thereby rendered an inestimable service to literature. In
1580, just as Cervantes was being sent to Constantinople, two Trinitarian
monks arrived in Algiers and effected his release by paying a ransom
of two hundred gold ducats—equivalent to about a thousand dollars—not a
high price, it would seem, for one of the greatest writers of all time.
Speaking of authors, it will be recalled that Defoe’s immortal hero,
Robinson Crusoe, before setting out on his voyage to the South Seas, was
captured by a Sallee rover and worked as a slave in Barbary—an incident
which was probably founded on one of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk.
[Illustration: VEILED WOMEN SLIP LIKE SHEETED GHOSTS
Through the dim and narrow streets, flanked by high, blank walls, of the
corsair capital]
When a prize was brought into Algiers the captives were required to
declare their quality and condition, and a flagging memory was revived
by a taste of the bastinado. The dey selected one prisoner in ten for
himself, his preference being generally for skilled workmen and, of
course, for young and beautiful women. The others were sold by public
auction in the slave-market for the benefit of the owners of the galleys
and their crews. Incredible as it may seem, the European powers tacitly
accepted this piracy and slave-hunting by maintaining consuls at Algiers,
through whose agency those of the captives whose friends could find the
ransoms demanded were, after much delay, released, though it is said that
they had to pay for the water they drank at the public fountains during
their incarceration. Perhaps the most successful agency for the release
of Christian captives, however, was the religious order of Trinitarians,
or Redemptionists, as they are now called, who collected vast sums of
money for the purpose, and, when other means failed, offered themselves
in exchange for Christian captives.
Though for three hundred years and more the most powerful states of
Europe paid tribute to the corsairs and tolerated their insults, they
had only themselves to blame, for the continuance of African piracy was
wholly due to European jealousies. France openly encouraged them during
her long, fierce rivalry with Spain; and when she had no further need
of them they were supported against her by England and Holland. Indeed,
British statesmen of the eighteenth century saw no shame in asserting
that Barbary piracy was deserving of British encouragement because it
served to check the competition of Britain’s Mediterranean rivals in
the carrying trade. (Which serves to remind us that even to-day British
public men are supporting the opium trade with China for equally sordid
reasons.) Yet, in view of the weakness of their fleets as compared
with those of the European powers, it remains a matter for profound
astonishment that the corsairs succeeded in playing their great game
of bluff so long. When William Eaton, the American consul at Tunis,
who himself in later years smashed the power of the Tripolitan pirates
by his amazing desert march on Derna,[5] was sent in 1799 to negotiate
a treaty with the dey of Algiers, he wrote, “Can any man believe that
this elevated brute has seven kings of Europe, two Republics, and a
Continent tributary to him, when his whole naval force is not equal to
two line-of-battle ships?”
But, though the various powers were ready enough to tolerate piracy when
it affected their rivals, their complaisance quickly disappeared when
it affected themselves. In 1655, as a result of repeated attacks on
British shipping, Admiral Robert Blake was ordered to teach the corsairs
respect for the British flag, which he did by administering a sound
thrashing to the Tunisians. During the reign of Charles II a long series
of expeditions against the pirates was undertaken by the British fleet,
sometimes single-handed, sometimes in coöperation with the Dutch. In
1682 and again in 1683 the French fleet bombarded Algiers, and on the
second occasion the Algerines repaid the little pleasantry by blowing
the French consul from the mouth of a gun. In 1804 the United States
took a hand in the game by sending a squadron under Commodore Preble
to the Mediterranean. During a naval demonstration against Tripoli the
frigate _Philadelphia_ went aground in the harbor and was captured by
the corsairs, but was burned a few days later, under the very guns of
the city, by a daring expedition led by gallant young Stephen Decatur,
who subsequently commanded with marked success all the American naval
operations against the cities of the Pirate Coast.
When the dove of peace settled upon European soil after Waterloo, it was
generally agreed that the time had arrived to bring the activities of
the corsairs to an end. Accordingly, at the Congress of Vienna, Great
Britain was delegated by the other powers to clean up the Barbary Coast,
and in 1816 Lord Exmouth was ordered to exact promises of good behavior
from the bey of Tunis and the dey of Algiers at the mouths of his guns.
The negotiations proceeded amicably enough, but scarcely had they been
concluded before a number of British subjects were attacked and brutally
ill-treated by the pirates of Bône, whereupon the British government
sent Exmouth back to exact reparation, and, acting in conjunction with a
Dutch squadron under Admiral Van de Capellen, he administered a smashing
bombardment to Algiers.
This recalls the romantic attempt at escape of Ida M’Donnell, the
sixteen-year-old daughter of Admiral Ulric, consul-general of Denmark,
and wife of the British consul at Algiers. When the bombardment was about
to begin, M’Donnell was loaded with chains by order of the bey and
thrown into a dungeon. Mrs. M’Donnell, cutting off her hair, attempted to
reach the British fleet disguised as a midshipman, carrying on her arm a
basket of vegetables in which her baby was hidden. She was detected and
detained, but the child was sent out to the flag-ship under a flag of
truce with the dey’s compliments.
Though the salutary lesson taught them by Lord Exmouth’s guns terrified
the pirates both of Algiers and of Tunis into surrendering upward of
three thousand captives, they were not reformed nor were they capable of
reformation. The leopard cannot change its spots. Ere many months had
passed the Algerines were again at their work of plundering, burning, and
slave-hunting, though on a smaller scale; and in 1824 another British
squadron under Sir Harry Neal had again to bombard Algiers, but the great
pirate city was not thoroughly tamed until its occupation by the French
in 1830.
Through one of those curious anomalies with which the musty pages of
history are enlivened, the result which the European powers in concert
had been unable to accomplish in spite of three hundred years of outrage
and insult was brought about by the stroke of a fan. The incident which
was destined to have such important consequences for North Africa and
for civilization arose—as modern international incidents have frequently
arisen—from a financial controversy. During the period of the Directory
two Algerine Jews, Bacri and Burnach, had supplied the French government
with large quantities of grain, but their claims were repudiated by
the succeeding governments of Bonaparte and the Bourbons. The question
of the debt would not in itself have been sufficient to produce a
rupture, but the dey, Hussein—to whom the Jews had probably promised
a substantial rake-off—pressed the claim as his own. Exasperated by
the numerous delays, he sent for the French consul, M. Deval, whom he
received at the _kasbah_ in a sort of pavilion. The interview, which was
exceedingly acrimonious, was abruptly terminated when, giving rein to
his passion, the pirate chieftain struck the French envoy in the face
with his fly-flap. France’s retaliation for this affront was more prompt
than vigorous; it took the form of an ineffectual blockade of the port
of Algiers by a squadron of war-ships. Though this action inconvenienced
it did not particularly worry the dey, who showed his contempt by firing
on _La Provence_, a vessel which entered the harbor of Algiers under a
flag of truce in August, 1829. This ended the patience of the French
government, which determined to terminate the intolerable situation by a
punitive expedition, the minister of war, Marshal de Bourmont, himself
taking the command. On June 14, 1830, the red-trousered battalions
disembarked under cover of the war-ships at Sidi-Ferruch. Five days later
they smashed the enemy at Staoueli. On July 4 the Fort de l’Empereur
was blown up. On the following day Algiers capitulated, and the pirate
standard which had flaunted so long above the _kasbah_ was replaced by
the tricolor. After terrorizing the Mediterranean and defying Christendom
since the Middle Ages, the Barbary pirates had come to the end of the
road.
Meanwhile the revolution of July, 1830, had broken out in France.
The new government found itself greatly embarrassed by the situation
bequeathed it by the preceding régime. Parliament, as a whole, was
strongly opposed to the nation’s embarking on an African adventure; but
French troops were, on the other hand, in possession of Algiers, and
popular sentiment—which in France can never safely be disregarded—was
opposed to their withdrawal. The situation was, in fact, not unlike that
which confronted the American government in 1898, when Admiral Dewey had
captured Manila. The administration at Paris did not want Algeria, any
more than the administration at Washington wanted the Philippines, but
neither of them was in a position to withdraw its forces. Fearing to
arouse the jealousies of the other powers by following up its conquest,
its freedom of action hampered by its treaty engagements with England,
yet realizing that evacuation would mean a prompt resumption of piratical
activities, the Paris government determined to pursue a middle course,
called restricted occupation, which consisted merely in occupying the
principal ports and waiting to see what would happen. The diplomats
of the Quai d’Orsay were extricated from their embarrassing position,
however, by the Algerines themselves, who attacked the French troops and
gained some small successes. This was all that was needed. It now became
necessary to avenge the honor of the flag. Reinforcements were rushed to
Africa, columns were pushed east, south, and west, and the hinterland
was gradually occupied and pacified. Thus was brought about the French
conquest of Algeria, and, as time went on, of all North Africa.
* * * * *
Having proceeded thus far with my sketch of the conquest of Algeria,
I might as well round it out here as to resume it later on. The five
years, then, which followed the capitulation of Algiers were a period
of anxiety and uncertainty for the French, who, undetermined whether to
evacuate or retain the country, remained on the defensive, their dominion
extending over only six coast towns. In Algiers, Bougie, and Bône their
position was tolerably secure, but along the western littoral, at
Mostaganem, Arzeu, and Oran, they found themselves menaced by a most
formidable adversary in the person of the young Abd-el-Kader, who had
been proclaimed emir at Mascara in 1832, when only four-and-twenty years
of age.
Abd-el-Kader’s family were _sherifs_, or descendants of the Prophet, and
his father was celebrated throughout North Africa for his piety and his
charity. As a youth he received the best education attainable by a Moslem
of princely rank, especially in theology and philosophy, in horsemanship
and in other manly exercises. A born leader, a man of exceptional
intelligence, a great soldier, an able administrator, a brilliant and
persuasive orator, a chivalrous opponent, a skilled swordsman and a
fearless horseman, Abd-el-Kader was one of the most remarkable figures
which Africa, or, indeed, the whole Arab world, has ever produced. Of
him, as of Bayard, it might be said with entire truth that he was _sans
peur et sans reproche_.
For fifteen years he held in check all the forces which France, the
greatest military power of the time, could bring against him, treating
on terms of equality with the French government, which maintained
representatives at his court. Undisputed master of the great province of
Oran, he crossed the Shelif in response to the appeal of the natives of
Middle Algeria, who flocked to greet him as though he were an emperor. He
defeated the French on the banks of the Macta in June, 1835, and then all
western Algeria belonged to him, his possession of it being confirmed by
the Treaty of Tafna, by the terms of which the French surrendered several
important cities in the west while Abd-el-Kader on his part vaguely
recognized French sovereignty in North Africa.
This was a political as well as a military triumph for the young
leader, who regarded the peace as but a truce which would give him
a breathing-space in which to gain strength to renew the struggle
under more favorable conditions. The capture of Constantine by the
French in 1837, which, he claimed, was an infraction of the treaty,
provided him with a pretext for reopening hostilities, and two years
later he turned loose his hordes once more. Meanwhile his power had
been steadily increasing. He was amply provided with materials of war,
having magazines and arsenals scattered through the heart of the Tell.
He had a regular army of ten thousand men, both horse and foot, to say
nothing of the fifty thousand _goums_—irregular native cavalry—which
the great chieftains brought to his standard. He was obeyed by a whole
hierarchy of khalifas, aghas, and caïds. And the people, seeing in him
not only a champion of their liberties but a man of transcendent piety, a
soldier-saint, worshiped the ground beneath his charger’s hoofs.
Marshal Valée, who first opposed him, relied on defensive tactics, but in
1840 the conqueror of Constantine was replaced by General Bugeaud, who
was destined to become Duke of Isly and a marshal of France. Bugeaud, who
was first, last, and all the time a fighter, lost no time in adopting
the offensive. Increasing the mobility of his troops by lightening
their equipment—which they repaid by affectionately calling him “Père
Bugeaud”—and forming a number of flying columns, he proceeded to carry
the war into the province of Oran, from which Abd-el-Kader drew his
principal resources. One after another all the strongholds of the emir
were captured and destroyed. In the spring of 1843 the Duc d’Aumale made
a successful surprise attack upon his camp at Tanguin, whereupon the emir
retreated into Morocco and persuaded the Shereefian emperor to become his
ally and declare war on France. Upon Bugeaud’s great victory at Isly in
August, 1844, however, the Moroccan monarch lost no time in signing a
treaty of peace at Tangier.
But the struggle was not yet at an end. Islam made a supreme effort
in Algeria. The warlike tribes of the hinterland rose at the voice of
a fanatic called Bu-Maza, “the goat man.” Abd-el-Kader reappeared in
Algeria, which he overran with a rapidity which paralyzed resistance
and baffled pursuit. He smashed the French at Sidi-Brahim, punished the
tribes of the Tell Oranais which had deserted him, pushed as far eastward
as the borders of the Metija, and even penetrated the Djurjura, where
he sought to arouse the Kabyles. It was the refusal of these Berber
mountaineers to make common cause with the Arabs against the French
which led to his downfall. His eloquence offended rather than stirred
these little democratic communities; his appeals fell on ears deaf to
the sentiment of the common good. From that time Abd-el-Kader played a
losing game. He again retired into Morocco, but the sultan, jealous of
his popularity with the people and having no desire to again embroil
himself with the French, drove him out. This was the end. Two days before
the Christmas of 1847, the great Arab leader surrendered to General
Lamoricière on the plains of Sidi-Brahim. His capitulation marked the
end of the period of the conquest. It is true that the Grand Kabylia
had to be subdued only ten years later, and that terrible insurrections
still had to be quelled. But at the end of the reign of Louis Philippe
the work of laying the foundations of France’s African empire had been
accomplished. All that was needed was to complete and secure it.
In violation of the solemn pledge that he would be permitted to take up
his residence in Syria or Egypt, on the strength of which he laid down
his arms, Abd-el-Kader and his family were detained in France for five
years, but in 1852 he was released by Napoleon III on taking an oath
never again to disturb Algeria. For a time he made his home in Brusa,
the quaint old town which was once the capital of Turkey, but later
he removed to Damascus. In July, 1860, when the Moslems of that city,
taking advantage of the Druse revolt, attacked the Christian quarter and
slaughtered more than three thousand Christians, Abd-el-Kader helped to
suppress the outbreak and saved hundreds of Christian lives. For this
the French government, which had granted the emir a pension of twenty
thousand dollars a year, bestowed on him the grand cross of the Legion of
Honor—the highest distinction in the gift of France. He visited Paris and
London and attended the Paris Exposition of 1867, where he was acclaimed
as a national hero; when, in 1871, the Algerians again rose in revolt,
he wrote them urging them to accept the rule of France. In the spring of
1883 he passed from Damascus to the Moslem Paradise—a gallant soldier, a
chivalrous enemy, and a great gentleman.
Having shown in this rather lengthy historical interlude how Algiers
came to be French, let us return to the city itself, or rather, to its
environs. It is with a distinct sense of relief that one leaves _la ville
européene_, with its crowded streets, its garish shops, the clatter
and bustle of traffic over stone-paved thoroughfares, the honking of
motors and the clang of tram-cars, and takes the road which ascends in
long, steep zigzags to the lovely heights of Mustapha Supérieur and El
Biar, where are situated the great tourist hotels and the enchanting,
flower-smothered villas of the European residents.
It has been said that no one can know how beautiful a sunset can be
unless he has lived in a villa at El Biar with a terrace facing toward
the west. That the view is superb there can be no denying; it is one
of the grandest in the world, I should say. Rising above the exquisite
curve of the crescent-shaped bay is a long line of mountains, their peaks
usually dim in a mulberry haze or purple and sullen when shadowed by
storm-clouds, but in clear weather standing out against the soft cerulean
sky like cameos. But the scene, enchanting as it is, attains true majesty
only on those rare occasions when the clouds lift sufficiently to reveal,
behind and beyond the shore range, the mighty snow-peaks of the Grand
Kabylia towering thousands of feet into the African blue.
The walled gardens of Mustapha Supérieur are places of sheer delight,
heavy with fragrance and aglow with color. They are crowded with plants
and trees of every variety and clime—palms from the South Seas and
Malaysia; Japanese bamboos, eucalyptus and blue-gums from Australia;
Spanish oranges and lemons; dragon-trees from China; stately rows of
dark Italian cypress; fruit-trees from the south of France. Splashes
of vivid color are provided by great masses of crimson or magenta
bougainvillea, by clusters of arum-lily, iris, and narcissus. As for
roses, they are everywhere, clambering over the walls, festooning arbors
and summer-houses, forming hedges of pink, yellow, red, or white. And the
ground is covered with a purple carpet of long-stemmed Algerian violets
whose perfume fills the air.
The suburb of Mustapha takes its name from one of the deys, who erected
the palace now used as the official residence of the governor-general of
Algeria. Few if any of the world’s rulers can boast such a residence, for
it is built in the colorful Moorish style, rich in marbles, faiences,
and mosaics, and stands amid gardens of fairy-like loveliness which look
down upon the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean. It did not prove a
good investment for its luxury-loving builder, however, for the vast sums
he squandered on it so angered the Janizaries, whose pay was perpetually
in arrears, as to bring about his disgrace and death. The ideal time to
see the gardens of the palace is during an evening fête—one of those
scented, languorous African nights when the moon throws a white beam
athwart the darkened waters of the Mediterranean, when the fragrance of
flowers intoxicates the senses, and the air is as soft as the cheek of
a lovely woman. The trees are festooned with myriads of little colored
lights, red, blue, and white; across the velvet lawns or along the marble
terraces stroll men in brilliant uniforms, and bare-shouldered, bejeweled
women; beneath a clump of palms the red-jacketed spahi band is softly
playing....
If you are interested in seeing what the soil and climate of Algeria
are capable of producing in the way of vernal loveliness, you should
not fail to visit the Jardin d’Essai, an extremely successful attempt
at acclimatization on a large scale, which was established by the
government nearly a century ago on the flats of Mustapha Inférieur. If
you expect something unusual in landscape gardening, however, you will
be disappointed, for there is nothing here to compare with the superb
effects which have been achieved at Peradeniya in Ceylon or in those most
wonderful of all tropical gardens at Buitenzorg in Java. But the Jardin
d’Essai has one feature which in itself well repays the trouble of a
visit: a magnificent avenue of India-rubber trees which have attained
gigantic size, in some cases twenty feet around and three times that in
height.
When you have concluded your visit to the Jardin d’Essai, I hope that
you will cross the road to one of the little open-air native cafés which
are set amid groves of trees above the Mediterranean. You can have tea,
or an ice, or the thick, sweet Arab coffee, but the chief thing is the
view, particularly toward sunset, when from the tables, as from nowhere
else, you can obtain a glimpse of the old Algiers, the city of the
corsairs, the white terraces of the town glowing like ivory in the soft
afternoon light, the masts of the shipping in the harbor mirrored in the
calm opalescent waters.
On the slopes of Mustapha Supérieur, a few minutes’ walk from the Jardin
d’Essai, is the Algerian Museum, which contains an admirably arranged
collection of objects illustrative of the country’s varied history,
including the flint instruments of primitive man, an assortment of Punic
earthenware from Gouraya, Roman mosaics and sculptures, and numerous
examples of Berber and Arab handicraft. It is laudably confined, as Mr.
Thomas-Stanford remarks, to Algerian antiquities and native art; unlike
so many American museums, it contains no irrelevant South Sea Island
curios; it has not been used as a receptacle for the rubbish of the local
collector, a dumping-ground for the perplexed widow and the embarrassed
executor.
By far the most interesting object in the museum, though a very gruesome
one, is the plaster cast of a young man, lying face downward, his hands
and feet bound with cords, his torso arched, his muscles strained in
agony. It is not a cheap replica of some celebrated statue, as most
casual visitors assume, but a life-mask which depicts with ghastly
veracity the agonizing death-struggles of a man who was buried alive!
Were it that and nothing more it would merely be revolting, but it is in
some measure redeemed from the horrible by its amazing history.
The cast is of the body of San Gerónimo, the discovery of whose remains
in 1853 afforded striking confirmation of an incident recorded by a
Spanish Benedictine monk named Haedo in an account of Algiers which he
had written nearly two and a half centuries before. According to the
priestly chronicler, a young Arab who had been captured by the Spaniards
about the middle of the sixteenth century, had embraced Christianity,
and had been baptized with the name of Gerónimo, was recaptured in 1569
by Algerine pirates and taken to Algiers. That one of their breed and
creed should have become an apostate was an unforgivable offense in Arab
eyes. When threats and pleadings failed to move him from his adopted
faith, Gerónimo was condemned to death. Bound hand and foot he was thrown
alive into a mold in which a block of concrete was about to be made and
the liquid concrete poured in upon him. The block containing his body
was built into an angle of the Fort of the Twenty-four Hours, then in
process of construction. Nearly three centuries later, in 1853 to be
exact, the fort was demolished by French military engineers, and in the
angle specified by Haedo the block containing the skeleton of Gerónimo
was found. Into the mold left by the saint’s body liquid plaster of Paris
was run, and a perfect model obtained, showing the agonized features of
the youth, the cords which bound him, and even the texture of his single
garment. This model is now in the museum. But the block itself, that
“noble sepulcher,” as the old chronicler calls it, has found a fitting
shrine in the cathedral of St. Philippe, where the bones of the Arab
youth who died a Christian martyr and was canonized a saint rest beneath
a marble sarcophagus which bears the inscription, “Ossa venerabilis servi
Dei Geronimo.”
High on the slopes behind Algiers, set on a shoulder of the Bou Zarea
Hills, above a sea of almond-blossoms, is the church of Notre Dame
d’Afrique, to which you should not fail to make a little pilgrimage,
if from no more pious motive than to enjoy the sublime view. At our
feet the white houses of Algiers run down steeply, like the seats in
the gallery of a theater, to meet the blue waters of the bay; turning
inland we look down upon the beautiful Valley of the Consuls, the
favorite place of residence of the European representatives at the
corsair court and but little changed since the time of the deys. Perhaps
the most interesting time to visit Notre Dame d’Afrique is on a Sunday
afternoon, when thousands of the pious and the curious make their way
up the steep hill to witness the poetic ceremony of the blessing of the
sea. Amid a reverent hush a procession of priests and choristers moves
slowly across the terrace to the edge of the cliff, where, overlooking
the Mediterranean, a cross has been raised to the memory of all those
who have been buried in deep waters. Boyish voices rise in a sweet,
shrill chant, and, after a brief prayer for those who go down to the sea
in ships, the officiating priest sprinkles holy water out toward the
Mediterranean, whose sun-kissed surface sparkles as though strewn with
diamonds.
Within the church, above the high altar, is a statue of a _black_ Virgin,
and over it is the unusual inscription: “_Notre Dame d’Afrique, priez
pour nous et pour les Musulmans._”
It gratified me, that inscription; it bespeaks a tolerance, a freedom
from bigotry, which one likes to associate with the faith founded by the
gentle Man of Nazareth. Why, the words might have been spoken by Jesus
himself!
“Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Mohammedans.”
CHAPTER XVII
FOLLOWING THE PIRATE COAST
Bad news greeted us at Algiers. We were to change cars and drivers, so
the officials of the company which had charge of our transportation
informed us. Harvey, the young New Englander and veteran of the A. E.
F., for whom we had formed a sincere affection, was to return with the
Cadillac to Tunis, and we were to continue our journey Morocco-ward in
a huge black Renault under the guidance of a youthful French colonial
named Tomine, whose home town was Casablanca. Tomine—whose name we soon
corrupted to Ptomaine—was an easy-going, devil-may-care lad without the
slightest sense of responsibility. A safe and skilful driver, he was
utterly regardless of sign-posts, which were of no more significance to
him than trees or telegraph-poles. And he had, moreover, an incurable
aversion to making inquiries as to direction and road conditions. Upon
leaving Tlemcen, for example, he took the wrong roads three times
running, following each of them a dozen miles or more before he was
willing to admit that he might possibly be mistaken. Had I not interfered
we would have ended up in the desert instead of at Oujda, and as it was
we arrived long after midnight, just as the military authorities were
about to send out a searching expedition on the assumption that we had
met with an accident or had been waylaid by bandits.
[Illustration: THE RESTING-PLACE OF CLEOPATRA’S DAUGHTER
Near Kolea, in northern Algeria, is the Kubr-er-Rumia, the imposing
mausoleum of King Juba II of Mauretania and of his wife Selene, the
daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra]
There used to be a current saying in the East that the first thing the
British build upon occupying a country is a custom-house, the first thing
that the Germans build is a fort, and the first thing the French build is
a road. And nowhere have the French been more painstaking or successful
in their road-building than in Algeria. When they occupied the country
in 1830 the interior could not boast a single road. The splendid Roman
highways had long since disappeared. Wheeled vehicles were unknown among
the Arabs, whose rough and narrow trails permitted only the passage of
horsemen. In the Tell transport was by mules, in the desert regions by
camels.
The French were quick to realize, however, that in a savage and hostile
country, utterly destitute of roads, the heavily accoutred European
troops, accompanied by artillery and baggage trains, could not hope to
approach the mobility of the Arab light-horsemen. No sooner had the army
landed, therefore, than the military engineers set about the construction
of a great strategic highway system, which at first only linked the
more important coast cities but was gradually expanded until it now
consists of a main east-and-west artery running right across the country
from Tunisia to Morocco with numerous branches which stretch southward
to the towns along the edge of the Sahara. These highways, which now
have a total length of nearly thirty-five hundred miles, comprise the
_routes nationales_, the great state trunk roads, built and maintained
by the government primarily for strategic purposes. In recent years the
government has lent its aid in the construction of a number of other
roads, partly of a strategic nature but for the most part built with
a view to opening up new regions to commerce and colonization. These,
with the ordinary country roads, make up a total of something over ten
thousand miles, so that to-day there is not a single town of importance
in Algeria which cannot be reached by motor over hard-surfaced highways.
The _routes nationales_ of Algeria are like those of France as the latter
were before they were ruined by the heavy traffic of the war: the curves
and gradients scientifically worked out, planted wherever possible with
shade-trees, the distances plainly indicated by kilometer-stones, and
maintained in admirable condition. The Algerian highways are not so well
posted as they might be, though the motorist rarely has any difficulty
in finding his way; but in Morocco the French have erected the finest
road-signs I have ever seen—great walls of whitewashed concrete, ten
feet in height, with the route-numbers, the names of the towns, and the
distances painted on them in staring black characters which can be seen a
quarter of a mile away. In this respect, Morocco is far ahead of America.
As a result of the general excellence of the Algerian roads the shipping
of goods by motor-truck has been highly developed, transportation by
roads being in most cases fully as rapid as by railway and considerably
less expensive.
Algeria has, however, an excellent railway system of twenty-five hundred
miles, its well equipped trains provided with sleeping and dining cars,
on which one can travel in comfort all the way from Tunisia to Morocco,
or from the Algerian coast towns southward to the edges of the desert;
but I should strongly advise the prospective visitor to North Africa to
do most of his traveling by motor-car, for which the roads, by reason of
their open character and long straight stretches, are admirably adapted,
and which, particularly where the cost is shared among several persons,
is considerably less expensive than the railway, to say nothing of being
infinitely more enjoyable and interesting.
The surface of the main roads is usually excellent, though not
comparable, of course, to the wonderful concrete boulevards which now
cover with a network the United States. Garages and repair-shops are to
be found in all the larger towns, and the French mechanics are the equal
of any in the world. Gasoline—or _pétrol_, as the French call it—is
available almost everywhere and is no more expensive than in France.
Algeria is the speedster’s paradise. It is true that Article 14 of the
_Règlements_ contains the provision that _en aucun cas, la vitesse
n’excédera celle de 30 kilomètres à l’heure en rase campagne et celle
de 20 kilomètres à l’heure dans les agglomérations_, but I have never
heard of this or any other speed-limit being enforced, and in Algeria
such joy-killers as speed-traps and traffic-cops are as yet unknown. I
should advise those who are fond of stepping on the gas to proceed with
extreme caution through the native villages, however, for the passions of
the Arabs are easily aroused, particularly against Europeans, and, were
a native child to be killed or injured, it might go hard with those who
were responsible for the accident.
Beautifully appointed cars of all the better known American and European
makes, with European drivers, may be hired very reasonably at Tunis,
Algiers, or Oran; while for those who wish to avoid the expense of a
private car, I can recommend the luxurious motor-buses operated by
the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. In these great vehicles every
passenger is provided with an arm-chair as roomy and comfortable as
those in Pullman parlor-cars, nor is he encumbered by luggage, which is
carried in a trailer. While in North Africa I met several Americans who
had brought their own cars from the United States and were driving them
themselves—not so costly a matter as might be assumed, by the way, for
a touring-car of medium size can be shipped from New York to Algiers and
back again to New York for something under four hundred dollars. One of
my compatriots, a former ambassador and a gentleman of enormous wealth,
was so delighted with the car and chauffeur he had hired in Algiers
that he insisted on taking both across the Mediterranean for the sole
purpose of motoring the hundred miles from Marseilles to Monte Carlo!
Another American motorist, whom I met in Fez, was from Kansas City—a real
Middle-Western hustler. He arrived late in the evening, driving his own
car, and departed the following day immediately after luncheon.
“But aren’t you cutting your stay here rather short?” I protested. “Fez
is a very interesting city.”
“Hell, no!” he exclaimed, tossing his bags into the tonneau. “I’ve been
here all night and half of a day, haven’t I? I reckon to see the rest
of Morocco in about four days and then spend a fortnight doing western
Europe.”
Two days later we heard that he had been arrested for speeding on the
road to Marrákesh. And I was glad of it. But he certainly must have been
burning up the road to have been arrested in Morocco!
* * * * *
A score of miles or so beyond Algiers, near the little village of Kolea,
the west-bound traveler comes within sight of one of the most remarkable
sepulchral monuments in North Africa—the Kubr-er-Rumia, “the grave
of the Roman lady,” as the Arabs call it, though better known by its
French name, Tombeau de la Chrétienne. A huge circular stone building,
surmounted by a pyramid and supported by sixty Ionic columns, it stands
on the summit of a hill, some little distance from the highway and seven
hundred and fifty feet above the sea. To visit it one must do a little
climbing, but, if you have any imagination in your soul, it is well worth
the trouble, for it is the tomb of Juba II, who ruled in Mauretania
during the latter part of the first century B.C., and—what is far more
important to most of us—of his wife, the beautiful Selene, daughter
of Mark Antony and of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. It is an interesting
circumstance that in 1555, when Salah Reis, the pirate-pasha of Algiers,
having use for the stones which form the mighty sepulcher, set men to
tear it down, big black wasps came swarming from the burial-chambers
within the tomb and stung the vandals to death. How that must have
delighted the imperious and relentless spirit of Cleopatra!
The Princess Selene presented an embarrassing problem to the government
at Rome, for in her veins flowed the blood of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars,
and possibly of the Pharaohs, and there were those who would have claimed
for her the succession to the thrones of two great empires. So, in order
to get rid of this potentially troublesome young person, the Emperor
Augustus married her off to Juba II, a descendant of that Masinissa,
king of Numidia, mentioned in an earlier chapter, who had been a stanch
ally of the Romans in their conflict with Carthage. Crossing to Africa,
the royal pair set about the creation of a capital on the site of the
ancient Punic town of Jol, which they renamed Julia Cæsarea and which is
to-day called Cherchel, seventy-five miles west of Algiers. Here, where
the wooded hills come down to meet the curving bay, they raised a noble
city, a seat of art and learning and a center of the best culture of the
time. A theater, a hippodrome, palaces, temples, baths, and villas rose
in gleaming marble upon the hill-slopes above the Mediterranean; and
here, surrounded by artists, scientists, and philosophers, the daughter
of Cleopatra lived with her student husband to a ripe old age, the two of
them being buried, as I have already remarked, in the Kubr-er-Rumia, the
splendid mausoleum near Kolea. The Arab invaders, the Algerine pirates,
the French army engineers and archæologists, and the earthquakes have
between them left little of the ancient city standing; but the museum at
Cherchel contains some of the finest statues found in Africa, including
the lower half of an Egyptian god in black basalt, bearing the cartouche
of Thotmes I, which, according to some authorities, is an indication that
there was an Egyptian settlement here as early as 1500 B.C. Cherchel
makes a good midday stopping-place for west-bound travelers, who may have
their _déjeuner_ on the terrace of the small local hotel, but let me
warn you in advance that the banal modern town contains no architectural
reminders of the great days when it was the seat of the court of
Cleopatra’s daughter.
It is a matter of only about three hours by motor from Cherchel to Tenes,
a charming little seaside community on the site of the Roman colony
of Cartenna. Here the ubiquitous Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
has built the most enchanting traveler’s rest that I have ever seen in
any country. On the thickly wooded slopes which rise abruptly from the
crescent bay, the company has erected a score or more of white-walled,
red-roofed, deep-verandaed kiosks, most of them containing two rooms and
a bath and charmingly decorated, inside and out, with vivid tiles and
gaily tinted Arab plaster-work, so that they gleam like jewels amid the
foliage. The rooms are as comfortably furnished as those of the finest
American summer hotels, and meals are served in a central bungalow. There
is sea-bathing on the sandy beach, a few yards away, and delightful
excursions may be made into the wooded hills behind the town, or to some
ruined Roman tombs in the neighborhood, but I preferred to lie at ease
in a chaise longue beneath the whispering pines, idly watching the blue
sea at my feet and the hibiscus-colored sails of the fishing-craft which
dotted it. We remained at Tenes only over the week-end, but I could have
spent a fortnight there most contentedly.
As it is a long day’s run from Tenes to Oran, with nothing of particular
interest to be seen en route, let me suggest that I beguile the tedium of
the journey by telling you something of this Algerian land across which
we have been motoring for so many days.
To begin with, Algeria is not a colony, strictly speaking, being
regarded, rather, as a part of France. Unlike the protectorates of
Morocco and Tunisia, which are respectively under the control of the
Ministry of War and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and both of
which have been permitted to retain their native rulers and at least
a semblance of native government, Algerian affairs are controlled by
the Ministry of the Interior through a governor-general, and in the
administration of the country the natives have very little voice. For
administrative purposes the country has been organized in two great
divisions—Northern and Southern Algeria. The Northern Territory,
which, loosely speaking, comprises the coastal plain and the fertile
highland region known as the Tell, is divided into three departments,
Algiers, Oran, and Constantine, each under a prefect and each sending
one senator and two deputies to the national Parliament in Paris. The
Southern Territory, which comprises the more thinly populated and less
civilized Algerian Sahara, consists of four military territories, Ain
Sefra, Ghardaia, Touggourt, and the Saharan Oases (Tuat, Gurara, and
Tidikelt), each under a _commandant militaire_ who is usually a general
of brigade or a colonel. The total population of Algeria is now probably
not far from six millions, of whom nearly ten per cent are Europeans. The
franchise is confined to “citizens,” in which classification are included
all Jews and those natives above the age of twenty-five and monogamous
who served in the Great War, who are landed proprietors or farmers, who
can read and write, or who hold a French decoration. The balance of the
natives, who form nine tenths of the population, are not “citizens,”
however, but “subjects,” and consequently do not possess the right to
vote.
That this disproportionate system, which grants suffrage to ten per cent
of the population and leaves ninety per cent of the inhabitants without a
voice in governmental affairs, should be provocative of deep discontent
among the natives is hardly surprising. Far from unifying the population,
it has but served to encourage racial hatred and political prejudice, for
the “citizens,” native and naturalized, consider themselves immensely
superior to the unfranchised, who bitterly resent the subordinate
position that has been allotted them in the land which their fathers
ruled for twelve hundred years. Looking eastward, the Algerians see
their fellow-Moslems in Tunisia enjoying a considerable measure of
autonomy, somewhat vague and limited, it is true, but an autonomy of
sorts nevertheless. On the west they see the Moroccans, with whom they
are closely allied racially, religiously, and historically, under a
French protectorate, but a protectorate so mild and beneficent as to be
scarcely felt. The bey of Tunis still sits on the throne of his fathers
in the Palace of the Bardo; the sultan of Morocco is still the titular
head of the Shereefian Empire; but in Algeria all power is vested in the
governor-general, an alien and a non-Moslem, and the flag which flies
over the country from Lalla Maghnia to the Mjerda is the flag of France.
The cause of this discrimination must be sought in history. The French
came into Algeria as avenging conquerors during an age when European
nations recognized only three methods of dealing with native populations:
extinction, expulsion, and repression. At the time of the conquest
France was still swayed by Napoleonic ideals, her military men were in
the saddle, and the numerous native uprisings, particularly that led by
Abd-el-Kader, had convinced her that she was standing on the crust of
a volcano. Hence, in formulating her Algerian policy, she decided on
repression; she determined to use the mailed fist without the velvet
glove. Everywhere, even on the plains, where resistance was slight and
conquest was easy, the natives were dispossessed. The land was allotted
to Frenchmen or to those natives, comparatively few in number, who were
able to qualify as French “citizens” and consented to take the oath of
allegiance to France. Those who had fought for their fatherland, who had
resisted the invaders, were deprived of their property, the villages were
depopulated, broad areas of the country were laid waste. In the cities
the mosques were in many cases desecrated or handed over to the religious
orders to be used for what the Moslems considered idolatrous worship.
Some of them have never been restored to their owners. The country was
administered—and still is to a large extent—primarily for the benefit
of Frenchmen. Those Algerians only have prospered who have entered the
French army or government service, and formed affiliations which all but
cut them off from their fellow-countrymen. Though in the ninety-odd
years of her occupation France has gradually modified her initial policy
in Algeria, though she has done away with many of the injustices to which
it inevitably gave rise, nevertheless there exists among the natives much
lurking resentment, the more dangerous because it is skilfully concealed.
The cases of Tunisia and Morocco are totally different. France wore
hobnailed boots when she invaded Algeria; she changed to street shoes,
however, ere she set foot on the soil of Tunisia; but she tiptoed into
Morocco in soft-soled slippers. Tunisia, remember, was not conquered
by force of arms. It was occupied under the terms of a solemn treaty,
without any determined resistance on the part of the natives; indeed,
almost without a blow. Despite specious assurances to the contrary,
however, the French proceeded to undermine and destroy the power of the
beys, rehabilitating them in name only as their puppets, a procedure
which met with scarcely more opposition than the British encountered
when they dethroned the Burmese kings. The result is a nominally native
administration upon which is shouldered the blame for failures, and a
masked French direction which assumes the credit for success. In Tunisia
all that was best in Algeria has been repeated; moreover, native rights
and prejudices have been, on the whole, scrupulously respected, and their
mosques and shrines left unmolested save only in the case of Kairouan.
The immense superiority of the Tunisian policy over that employed in
Algeria is readily apparent to any one who takes the trouble to examine
and compare the two.
The lesson earned in Algeria, and emphasized in Tunisia, was not
forgotten when the French decided to declare a protectorate over Morocco.
Here was a vast empire, with a large, virile, fanatical, and highly
warlike population, and the French realized from the outset that unless
they trod very cautiously indeed they would find themselves with a
first-class war on their hands. So, though the tribes which opposed the
protectorate had to be subdued by force of arms, Morocco is subjected to
a minimum of dictatorial control, the French policy in that country being
the last word in “pacific penetration,” as I shall show further on. In
short, France’s policy in North Africa might be summed up by saying that
in Algeria she has employed repression, in Tunisia conciliation, and in
Morocco persuasion.
The truth of the matter is that, had Algeria been occupied yesterday,
instead of nearly a hundred years ago, the Algerians would unquestionably
enjoy a far greater measure of liberty than is their present lot.
But forms of government, once established, are not readily changed,
particularly where subject races are involved; and that of Algeria, as it
happens, is a somewhat unfortunate inheritance from a harsher and less
enlightened past.
Most visitors seem to be under the impression that Algeria is mainly
peopled by Arabs, whereas, as a matter of fact, they form only a small
minority of the inhabitants, seventy-five per cent of whom are Berbers,
descendants of that rugged warlike race who had lived in North Africa
for untold centuries before the Arabs came. As to the remainder of the
population, the so-called Moors, generally of mixed blood, inhabit the
towns and villages along the sea-coast. Negroes, originally brought from
the south and sold as slaves, are now found chiefly in the larger cities,
where they are employed as laborers and domestic servants. The Kabyles of
the eastern highlands, like the Touareg of the Sahara, are both branches
of the old Berber stock. The Turks, though for a considerable period the
dominant race, were never very numerous in Algeria, and most of them were
repatriated by the French after the conquest. The Jews, of whom there are
more than seventy thousand, are in the main descended from those who were
expelled from Cyrenaica in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, who fled
from the Spanish persecutions, or who were banished from Italy in 1342.
The purely “African” Jew is now found only in the oases of the M’zab.
Mohammedanism is the nominal religion of all the native races save, of
course, the Jews, but the faith of the Prophet is strictly observed only
by the Arabs.
Ever since the days when what is now Algeria was regarded as the granary
of Rome it has been noted for the fertility of its soil, so that it
is not surprising that more than two thirds of its inhabitants are
engaged in agricultural pursuits. It should be understood, however, that
the greater part of the country is of limited value for agricultural
purposes, the really profitable farming regions being confined to a
comparatively small area of highly fertile plains and valleys in the
neighborhood of the coast, which is cultivated scientifically, mainly by
Europeans, and yields good returns in grain-fields and vineyards. The
mountainous northern portion is on the whole better adapted to grazing
and forestry than to agriculture, particularly as, in spite of the
numerous excellent roads built by the state, large areas of it are still
without adequate means of communication and very difficult of access.
Most of the native inhabitants are, moreover, miserably poor, eking
out a scanty existence by cultivating small olive-groves and fields of
barley or raising herds of sheep and goats. Under French rule, however,
the productiveness of the country has been enormously increased by the
sinking of artesian wells in districts which required only water to
make them fertile, and by the introduction of scientific methods and
modern machinery, though the employment of these is largely confined to
European settlers, the natives regarding such innovations with a mixture
of curiosity, skepticism, and sullen apathy.
I have no intention of going into agricultural statistics, but for the
information of those visitors whose curiosity is not confined to the
more exotic aspects of African life, I might mention that the chief
cereal products of Algeria are wheat, barley, oats, and corn. Flax,
silk, and tobacco are also grown, the cultivation of tobacco being
highly remunerative, though it must be confessed that American smokers
are not likely to find much pleasure in the Algerian weed. It has been
asserted by some enthusiastic writers that Algeria was the Garden of the
Hesperides; certainly it produces an amazing variety of fruits, including
the pear, apple, peach, apricot, plum, nectarine, pomegranate, orange,
lemon, mandarin, almond, fig, olive, banana, and date, the _deglat-nour_
of the Algerian Sahara being admittedly the finest date in the world. The
production of olive-oil is an important industry. A considerable amount
of cotton was grown during the American Civil War, and small fields are
still cultivated in the southern oases, but, in spite of government
encouragement, the industry has not met with much success. The soil of
Algeria is particularly adapted to the cultivation of the vine. The
country, in the words of an expert sent to report on the subject by the
French government, “can produce an infinite variety of wines suitable to
every constitution and to every caprice of taste.” Doubtless because of a
certain harshness, a barely perceptible resinous tang, native wines have
never become popular abroad, practically their only foreign market being
found in France. One of the best brands of Algerian wine is that produced
by the Trappist monks on the battle-field of Staoueli, perhaps because
the soil was enriched by the blood of those who fell there in 1830, as is
declared to be the case with the famous Swiss wine, Schweitzerblut, which
is grown on the battle-field of Morat.
In minerals Algeria is undoubtedly very rich, though they have not
yet received the attention which they deserve. They are found chiefly
in the Department of Constantine, where iron, lead and zinc, copper,
antimony, and mercury mines are worked with profit. Immense phosphate
beds have been found in several parts of the country, and petroleum is
being produced in small quantities in the Department of Oran. Algeria
has been famous for its onyx and marbles since the dawn of history, the
old mines, which are found everywhere, having provided the materials
for the beautiful buildings erected by the Romans. It is believed that
the beautifully translucent onyx marble, delicately clouded with yellow
and brown, a quarry of which was discovered some years ago near Oued
Abdallah, is identical with the “lost” Numidian marble which was so
highly prized by the architects of Carthage and Rome.
Agriculturally and mineralogically, Algeria, despite a century of French
occupation, is still a land of promise rather than of fulfilment, but
the promise is great and the achievement already remarkable when it is
remembered that the history of the French occupation has been the history
of a struggle against renascent barbarism.
But it is time that I brought this somewhat pedantic sketch of the
country and its people to an end, for over there, topping yonder line of
hills, are the forts which guard Oran.
Oran, the second city of Algeria, the capital of a department, the
headquarters of an army division, an important naval station, and the
center of a busy trade, is built on the steep slopes of the Djebel
Murjojo, which rises to a height of nineteen hundred feet above the
pearl-blue waters of the gulf. The town was originally cut in half by a
deep ravine, or _wahran_, from which it takes its name, but this is now
largely covered by ramps, boulevards, promenades, and modern buildings.
Oran is frankly modern and European, the most Oriental building in
the city being the railway-station. Though the city is picturesquely
situated, with some beautiful parks and lovely views, it is wholly
lacking in the color and quaintness which are the charms of Tunis and
Algeria. Perhaps this is due to the preponderance of Europeans, who,
unlike the natives, dwell in the bustling matter-of-fact present rather
than in the sleepy romantic past. Be this as it may, Oran has the air of
a very busy and highly prosperous boom town, and the people whom we saw
in its restaurants and hotels were more suggestive of the oil regions of
Texas than of a former pirate stronghold on the coast of Barbary.
In its European population Oran is more than half Spanish (Cartagena
in Spain is only 130 miles away); in its history it is almost wholly
Spanish. Though attempts have been made to identify it with the Quiza of
the Romans, no Roman remains have been found here, and its foundation
is more properly ascribed to the Andalusian Arabs who settled here
at the beginning of the tenth century and gave the place its name.
Rapidly rising into importance as a seaport, Oran was taken and retaken,
pillaged, destroyed, and rebuilt by the various conquerors of northern
Africa. In the course of a half-century it changed hands nine times,
attaining its highest prosperity at about the time Columbus was setting
out to discover the Western World, when it became subject to the sultans
of Tlemcen. The extent of its trade, the magnificence of its mosques,
and the number of its institutions of learning spread the city’s fame;
but wealth and luxury began to sap the energy of the Oronais, though the
rapid decline of the city was primarily due to the piratical activities
of the Moors expelled from Spain, who from Mers-el-Kebir, a strongly
protected harbor four miles to the west of Oran, waged a relentless
sea-war for booty and revenge against the Dons.
For a number of years the Moors harried the commerce, ravaged the coasts,
and carried off the subjects of King Ferdinand, but their activities were
brought to an abrupt end by the daring and determination of a churchman,
Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo and inquisitor-general
of Spain, who at his own expense equipped an expedition which in 1505
captured Mers-el-Kebir, and who four years later himself led a second
expedition which took Oran by storm. This zealous priest, soldier, and
statesman, for he was all three combined, introduced Africa to the
terrors of the Inquisition—its palace may still be seen in the Place de
l’Hôpital of Oran—and also restored and extended the fortifications,
building on the heights above the town the massive Castle of the Saints,
now replaced by Fort St. Philippe. Oran became the penal settlement
of Spain, but neither the convicts nor the noblemen in disgrace who
were banished thither seem to have been very rigorously treated, if
contemporary accounts are to be believed.
[Illustration: NO, IT IS NOT ALWAYS HOT IN AFRICA
As is shown by this picture, which was taken in Algeria shortly before
Easter]
Meanwhile the Turks under the Barbarossas had made themselves masters
of Algeria, having ousted the Spaniards from all their possessions in
Barbary save Oran, which was now besieged by a formidable force under
the powerful bey of Mascara. The terrible earthquake of 1760, which
killed hundreds of citizens and all but destroyed the town, provided the
Spaniards with an excuse for withdrawing from a position which had become
untenable, and a few months later the regiments of his Most Catholic
Majesty marched out and the squadrons of Mascara came riding in. Oran
remained the capital of the beys of Mascara for 140 years; but upon the
capture of Algiers by France the ruling bey sent in his submission, and
in 1831 the ancient city was treated to another military triumph and
witnessed another change of masters, as France’s red-trousered soldiery
entered its gates to the blare of bugles and the roll of drums. That it
has prospered mightily under French rule is shown by the fact that a
census taken in 1832 showed that it had but 388 inhabitants, two thirds
of whom were Jews, whereas its present population is not far from one
hundred and fifty thousand.
Despite its hectic history, there is not much in Oran to detain the
traveler long, for one can visit the _kasbah_, the Château Neuf, the
Grand Mosque (built with money paid as ransom for Christian slaves), and
such other sights as the city has to offer, quite easily in a single day.
Toward nightfall I would suggest that you sit for an hour or so before
one of the numerous cafés and over an _apéritif_ watch the unfolding of
the human panorama. Though few interesting native types are to be seen,
the place is filled with troops—spahis, Turcos, zouaves, _tirailleurs
légionnaires_, colonial infantry, _chasseurs d’Afrique_—whose brilliant
uniforms lend pleasing notes of color to the drab and dusty streets.
Though Oran is doubtless well policed, it has certain districts in which
I should not care to linger after dark, for it struck me that there was
an unusually large rough element in evidence: soldiers who, judging by
the unsteadiness of their gait, had imbibed too freely in the numerous
grog-shops; half-naked negro stevedores; coal-heavers from the tramp
steamers in the harbor; Spanish speculators in wines and esparto grass;
greasy Jewish traders who supply the wants, legitimate and otherwise,
of the seafaring population; furtive Levantines with no visible means
of support, who looked as though they would commit any crime for a few
dollars; impudent and precocious Arab newsboys selling the “Echo d’Oran”;
sullen, mysterious Moors in flowing garments; grimy oil-drillers;
boisterous colonials in from their farms in the back-country for a
periodic spree; hard-eyed, highly painted women of many nationalities
but of one profession, their virtue as easy as an old shoe; some figures
straight from the Bible, others straight from the boulevards.
The hotel, though not a Ritz, was comfortable enough, and the cuisine
excellent, as is always the case when there is a Frenchman in the
kitchen, but the noise which rose from the cobbled streets put sleep
out of the question. I was glad when morning brought to our windows the
sound of Tomine’s horn, and, after a breakfast of rock-hard rolls and the
execrable mud-colored beverage which the French insist on calling coffee,
we took to the road again.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FOREIGN LEGION
Half a hundred miles southwestward from Oran, set in the middle of a
fertile plain which is traversed by the Mekerra and overshadowed by the
escarpments of Mount Tessala, is Sidi-bel-Abbès. You will pronounce it as
though it were spelled Sidi-_bella_-bess, with the accent on the second
part, if you please. This fortified garrison town is France’s watch-dog,
which guards the west, for it occupies a strategic position of great
importance on the railway from Oran to Colomb-Béchar and within striking
distance both of Morocco and of the desert. The town is surrounded by
a moat and by a tremendous bastioned and crenelated wall pierced by
four gates, named after Oran, Daia, Mascara, and Tlemcen respectively.
Starting from the gates, two broad streets, shaded by plane-trees,
traverse the town from east to west and from north to south, the latter
thoroughfare forming a dividing line between the civil and the military
quarters.
When we arrived, late in the afternoon, an excellent military band
was playing in the Place Sadi Carnot, and just beyond, through the
bars of great iron gates, we could see a huge three-story building
of ocher-tinted plaster rising from beyond a vast parade-ground. At
first glance it seemed as though the population of the place was
wholly military, so crowded were the streets and squares with loitering
soldiery—some in the dust-brown khaki of the _tirailleurs_, others
swaggering along in the scarlet cloaks and enormous trousers of the spahi
cavalry, but by far the greater number wearing quaint-looking képis with
broad flat leather vizors, and rather slovenly-fitting but immaculately
neat white uniforms with scarlet _fourragères_ festooned from their
left shoulders and broad blue sashes bound about their middles. Then I
suddenly remembered that I had seen this uniform before—in Morocco and
Madagascar, in the Sudan and Syria and far-off Indo-China. Yes, and on
a score of European battle-fields, all the way from the North Sea to
the Dardanelles, during the Great War. How could I have forgotten that
Sidi-bel-Abbès is the headquarters and recruit depot of the _Ier régiment
étranger_, one of the four regiments of that celebrated corps, composed
of adventurous spirits of many nationalities, known as the Foreign
Legion, perhaps the most famous military body, as it is certainly the
most romantic and picturesque, in the world?
_La Légion Etrangère!_ The very name is a trumpet-call which stirs the
hearts and makes the feet of the young men restless. Ouida, in “Under
Two Flags,” has drawn an imaginative but somewhat exaggerated picture of
the experiences of a gentleman adventurer in the Legion during the early
days of the occupation, but it has remained for Percival Christopher
Wren, in “Beau Geste,” to portray the life of a _légionnaire_ with a pen
equally facile and colorful and far more convincing. Nor have most of
us forgotten the gusto with which, as boys at school, we were wont to
declaim the opening lines of “Bingen on the Rhine”:
A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears;
But a comrade stood beside him, while his life-blood ebbed away,
And bent, with pitying glances, to hear what he might say.
The Foreign Legion is popularly believed to be made up of broken men who,
impelled by misfortune, misdeeds, unrequited love, or any of the other
mishaps of life, have left their own countries—sometimes quite suddenly,
between two days, and for their countries’ good—and who have enlisted
in the Legion in order to find forgetfulness in action, or to place
themselves beyond the reach of the law, or because they did not know what
else to do with their lives. They come from all the European nations,
from the Levant, and even representatives of the two Americas may be
found within their ranks, and there are among them men of gentle birth,
upbringing, and education; but I imagine that a very large proportion of
them are simply penniless and friendless men who see in the Legion an
opportunity of keeping body and soul together and a possibility, however
slim, of rising to a commission by some desperate deed of derring-do.
The _Légion Etrangère_ is the most rigidly disciplined, the hardest
worked, and the most miserably paid body of soldiery in the world. Upon
enlistment a recruit can give whatever name he chooses and no questions
will be asked, for the Legion is not interested in the antecedents
of its _bleus_ and makes no effort to ascertain their history or to
penetrate such _noms-de-guerre_ as they may choose to assume. The term
of enlistment is for five years, for service in Algeria or in any other
of the French possessions, and the pay is a sou a day, which, when the
franc stood at par, meant that a _légionnaire_ received the princely
remuneration of eighteen dollars a year for his services to a grateful
country. A _légionnaire_ can reënlist at the end of five years, and again
at the end of ten, while those who have spent fifteen years with the
colors are eligible for a pension, which varies according to rank, though
there are not many who live to receive it. A foreigner, on completion of
five years’ service, is entitled to naturalization as a French citizen.
But, once the _engagement volontaire_ has been signed, the recruit
belongs to the Legion, body and soul, until his term of enlistment is
completed. For a condemned murderer to escape from the death-house at
Sing-Sing were scarcely more difficult than for a legionary to make good
his escape. Neither wealth, nor political pull, nor social influence, not
the pleadings of his relatives nor the intercession of his ambassador
can effect his discharge. Homesickness, the deadly monotony of life in
garrison towns and desert outposts, the systematic brutality of the
non-commissioned officers—all these have led _légionnaires_ to make
desperate attempts to escape, but those who have succeeded in evading
the long arm of French military law are pitifully few. Sometimes the
emaciated fugitives are dragged back at the end of a rope tied to the
saddle-bow of an Arab police _goumier_ to face a term of servitude in the
_bataillons d’Afrique_, the terrible convict corps of the French army;
but more often their mutilated bodies are found in the desert, where they
have perished from starvation, sunstroke, or Touareg spear.
Though the officers of the Legion are as fine as any in the French
service, the non-coms, who enjoy a measure of despotic authority
inconceivable in the American and British armies, are nearly always harsh
and tyrannical and in some cases brutal beyond belief. The _légionnaires_
have little time for idling. They are worked like galley-slaves from
five in the morning until five in the afternoon, and though they are
permitted a few hours of relaxation at nightfall, their evenings are
usually occupied in cleaning their kit and accoutrements in preparation
for the morrow. The route-marches to which they are subjected, under
an African sun and over burning sands, loaded with the excessively
heavy equipment of a legionary, which includes half of a shelter-tent,
fire-wood, a blanket, an overcoat, a spare uniform, emergency rations,
and in the pouches a hundred rounds of ammunition, are of appalling
length, frequently averaging thirty miles a day. Small wonder that
throughout the French army the Legion is known as the _cavalerie à pied_!
The mess of the Legion is the most cosmopolitan gathering on earth. At
the long bare boards are seated men who between them speak half the
languages of the world and represent every grade of society; men who have
spent their lives amid the slums of great cities and others who have
been accustomed to all that goes with evening-dress; men who have worn
the shoulder-straps of the Prussian Guard and of the Household Cavalry,
who have raised their glasses to the toasts of “Hoch der Kaiser!” and
“The King, God bless him!” Here are men who have plunged on the wrong
horse, who have been short in their mess-accounts, have been jilted
by the girl they loved, have signed to a check a name that was not
their own, or have held one ace too many. Some of them have known the
inside of Schönbrunn and the Winter Palace, some the inside of Moabit
and Dartmoor. Families and friends are waiting and watching for some
of them; detectives are waiting and watching for others. Here too are
professional soldiers—Germans, Poles, Russians, Belgians, Italians,
Greeks, even Turks—to whom the end of the Great War meant the loss of
their livelihoods.
In all those distant corners of the world where France is engaged in
“little wars,” the Legion holds the place of honor—and of death!—on the
line of battle. The tunics of its veterans bear ribbons showing that
they have fought all the way from Tongking to Timbuktu, from the Niger
to the Yser. During the Great War the legionaries, having no votes, were
time after time sacrificed in last stands and forlorn hopes in order to
save their enfranchised and, therefore, politically influential fellows
of the home army. The appalling sacrifices which they thus made on the
altar of their adopted country were rewarded by authorization to wear
the scarlet _fourragère_ of the Legion of Honor, the Legion being one of
the very few units of the French Army to win this coveted distinction.
Yet, despite its hardships and perils, or perhaps because of them, it is
a real military school and offers the good soldier frequent chances of
promotion, decoration, and glory. Some of the most famous soldiers of
France have found their marshals’ batons in the knapsacks of the Legion,
and most of the officers of the Legion have begun their careers in its
ranks. I have in mind the case of one _légionnaire_, an undergraduate at
Harvard, who enlisted in the Legion at the outbreak of the Great War and
rose to a lieutenancy. After the Armistice the French government sent
him back to Harvard to complete his education at its expense, with the
promise that upon his graduation he could choose between retiring with a
pension or accepting a captain’s commission.
[Illustration: THE MOROCCAN IS NOT AFRAID OF MEPHITIC MALADIES
The lemonade-seller knows nothing of sanitary drinking-cups and rarely
washes the single bowl which he uses for all his customers
It would never occur to the barber, who plies his trade in the open
street, to sterilize his tools; to do so would be to thwart the will of
Allah]
The story of the French occupation of North Africa is largely the
story of the Legion. During the last hundred years the legionaries
have not only fought the Turks, the Arabs, the Kabyles, and the
Moors, the Touaregs of the Sahara and the Berbers of the Riff, but
throughout Algeria and Morocco they have built roads and railways,
strung telegraph-wires, helped in the construction of towns, established
outposts, sunk wells in the oases, drained, tilled, and planted
agricultural districts, and policed a region twice the size of France. To
the legionary might aptly be applied the lines of Kipling:
For there isn’t a thing on the face o’ the earth
The beggar don’t know—nor do ...
You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead
To paddle his own canoe.
When history grants it the justice of perspective, France’s reclamation
of North Africa will be recognized as one of the most remarkable
achievements of our time, and that achievement has been very largely due
to the patience, energy, and courage displayed by the soldiers of the
Foreign Legion. So, as I stood on the parade-ground at Sidi-bel-Abbès and
watched the bronzed battalions swing past at a quick-step to the lilting
music of the Legion’s splendid band, I thought what a commentary it was
on civilization that so large a share of the great task of redeeming the
Dark Continent from blood, bondage, and barbarism—a task to which saints
and martyrs, cardinals and emperors, great statesmen and great captains
have devoted their lives—should have been borne by these friendless men,
these soldiers of misfortune, for whom society has no use and whom it has
abandoned to their fate.
* * * * *
Far to the west, beyond Sidi-bel-Abbès and barely two score miles from
the frontier of Morocco, the holy city of Tlemcen looks down from the
slopes of the Lella Setta Hills toward the shimmering Mediterranean,
twenty-five hundred feet below and thirty miles away. Once a seat of
empire and of learning, a place of such sanctity that it drew pilgrims
from the uttermost corners of the Moslem world, it has sunk to the status
of a third-rate provincial town, its inhabitants more concerned with
cereals than ideals, more engrossed in the exportation of esparto grass
and olive-oil than in the dissemination of religion and knowledge.
Pomaria, the Roman town which once occupied a site near the present city,
was so named from the profusion of fruit-orchards in the neighborhood,
and these still exist, the whole country-side being in the spring a sea
of snowy blossoms. But here, as elsewhere, the invading Vandals justified
the modern implication of their name by ruining the Roman town, and the
Arabs destroyed what little the Vandals left. For the next six or seven
hundred years the history of Tlemcen is little more than a recital of the
various Berber dynasties by whom it was ruled and who gave to the city
which they rebuilt its present name.
Tlemcen reached the peak of its fame and prosperity in the thirteenth
century under the Abd-el-Wahid sultans, a dynasty of Zenata Berbers which
ruled the greater part of what is now Algeria and claimed descent from
Goliath, king of the Philistines. At this period the city boasted 125,000
inhabitants, a thriving trade, a brilliant court, and a powerful army.
The Berber rulers encouraged the settlement of Christians and Jews, as
many as five thousand of the former dwelling peacefully in the city, and
the sultan Yarmorasen had a Christian body-guard. Here died, in 1494,
Boabdil, the last king of Granada, while fighting for his kinsman, the
sultan of Fez. But the roaring trade which the Tlemcenites carried on
with Pisa, Genoa, Catalonia, and Provence was wrested from them upon
the Spanish conquest of Oran, to which Tlemcen became tributary for a
time. Early in the sixteenth century the town was held for a few months
by the corsair chieftain Arouj Barbarossa, who, with his usual ferocity,
sought to wipe out the ruling dynasty by causing twenty-two of the Zenata
princes to be drowned in the _sahrij_, or pool, which was built by the
Moors for naval exhibitions. But Arouj met his end in a skirmish with
the Spaniards near Oujda and a few years later the town was captured by
Salah Reis, pasha of Algiers, and under Turkish rule it rapidly declined
in importance. In 1835 the Algerian leader, Abd-el-Kader, sought to
reëstablish the ancient empire of Tlemcen, and, though he was forced to
evacuate it upon the advance of General Clausel, it was restored to him
by the Treaty of Tafna in 1837. Upon the renewal of the war in 1842,
however, it was reoccupied by the French, and there they have remained
ever since. Under their rule the Meshuar, or citadel, formerly the palace
of the sultans of Tlemcen, was turned into barracks for the troops; the
glorious mosque of Abul Hassan became a museum; the inevitable system of
boulevards was constructed; and the city was encircled by a wall, for the
three ancient lines of fortification had been in great part destroyed.
On a little knoll, a short distance to the west of the town, the Transat
has built a small but charming hotel in the Indian bungalow style, where,
particularly in the spring, when the fruit-trees are in blossom, one can
spend a few days most delightfully.
Though not so extensive, the Moorish monuments of Tlemcen rank in
architectural merit with those of Granada, both having been built, it
should be remembered, by the Almoravide and the Almohade sultans. Of the
sixty-four mosques which existed in the city at the time of the French
conquest, a number have disappeared or fallen into decay. Of those that
remain the most important is the Great Mosque, the Djamaa-el-Kebir, which
was not the creation of a single person, but grew, like so many of the
Gothic cathedrals, during the reigns of several rulers. The greater part
of the present structure, including the magnificent minaret, was erected
by Yarmorasen, the great Berber monarch who reigned in Tlemcen in the
sixth century after the Hegira, which, as every one knows, took place in
the year 622 of the Christian era. The minaret, upward of a hundred feet
in height, is adorned with marble columns and incased in superb mosaics;
in the center of the alabaster-paved inner court stands a fountain of
Algerian onyx, where the pious perform their ablutions before going in to
prayer; and the arches of the interior, which is richly decorated in the
arabesque style, is supported by a forest of columns—seventy-two in all,
to save you counting them. The beautiful proportions of the arches and
columns, the mellow colorings of the ancient tiles, and the dim religious
light make the Djamaa-el-Kebir one of the most impressive places of
worship in the world.
Close by is the mosque of Abul Hassan, built in 1298 and now transformed
into a museum. The exterior has been materially altered by the French,
who have so covered it with modern tiles as to suggest a hotel bath-room;
but the interior, which has two series of arches resting on alabaster
columns and a ceiling which bears traces of polychromatic paintings, is
charming. The building’s greatest glory, however, is the _mihrab_, the
holy of holies, the recessed shrine which indicates the direction of
Mecca, and toward which, consequently, the worshipers turn in prayer.
Floored with glazed and lustrous tiles of great antiquity, gloriously
rich colorings and its walls decorated in stucco-work of arabesque
designs as delicate as the finest lace, and roofed with a painted and
gilt stalactite vault of amazing intricacy, it has been described as the
finest example of Mohammedan art in existence, and it very probably is.
The surpassing beauty and endless variety of the conventional patterns
which are employed in the decoration of Mohammedan places of worship is
due, it should be remembered, to the fact that the representation of
nature in any form is absolutely forbidden by the Koran, a restriction
which applies not only to depictions of the human figure, and to
animals or birds, but even to plants and foliage of all kinds. The only
exceptions to this rule are the highly conventionalized representations
of lions in the courts of the Alhambra and over the gateways of Cairo and
Jerusalem. I might add, parenthetically, that the _mihrab_, in a more
or less conventionalized form, appears in the patterns of nearly all
Oriental prayer-rugs, which are spread upon the ground so that the apex
of the design points meticulously toward Mecca.
The status of Tlemcen as a holy city, which still draws pilgrims not only
from North Africa but from all parts of the Moslem world, is due to its
association with the highly venerated Moorish saint, Sidi Bou Medine, who
was born at Seville in 1126, wandered through the Mediterranean lands
effecting cures and performing reputed miracles, was summoned to Tlemcen
to stand trial on a charge of heresy, and died within sight of its gates,
expressing with his last breath the wish that he be buried there. So his
faithful followers laid him to rest on a lovely hillside near the little
hamlet of El Eubbad, a mile outside the city, and beside the _koubba_
which covers his grave they raised a mosque of incomparable beauty, one
of the finest specimens of Moorish architecture in the whole world of
Islam. Its columns are of many-colored marbles, and stucco lace-work so
delicate that it might have been made under a magnifying-glass covers
the arches which spring upward to the roof. The lofty portals are incased
with ancient Moorish tiles of the lost luster, and the cedar-wood doors,
covered with an intricately interlaced pattern in bronze, are said to
rival those designed by Ghiberti for the Baptistery in Florence.
A mile and a half to the west of Tlemcen, without the gate which looks
toward Fez, are the extremely picturesque ruins of Mansoura, a mushroom
city of amazing beauty, solidity, and grandeur, which was built almost
overnight by the Emir Abou Yakoub, sultan of Fez, while engaged in the
siege of Tlemcen. The siege lasted eight years, and the sultan, who
was of a luxury-loving disposition, turned his camp into a walled city
covering two hundred and fifty acres, complete with the palaces, mosques,
baths, barracks, and other buildings of an imperial residence. He named
it El Mansoura, “the victorious,” but in this he was somewhat premature,
for he was eventually compelled to raise the siege, though Tlemcen
was taken some years later by his successor, Ali V, the Black Sultan,
whereupon Mansoura was abandoned for good and all. Besides the forty-foot
walls, and the massive towers, and the minaret, which is more than six
score feet in height and one of the finest in existence, but little
remains of this all-of-a-sudden city which was born on a monarch’s whim.
But such portions as are still standing are very beautiful. Mellowed
by time and weather to a glorious shade of pinkish brown, they rise in
lonely grandeur above the almond-orchards, which, in the springtime, turn
the hill-slopes on which Mansoura sits into a sea of blossomed snow.
* * * * *
Before taking our departure from Tlemcen, courtesy and etiquette required
me to pay a call on the military governor. I found his residence with
some little difficulty—a modest, red brick villa with a Senegalese
_tirailleur_ pacing up and down before the gate. My ring was answered by
a soldier servant, and I was shown into a comfortable reception-hall,
from whose walls hung, to my astonishment, an enormous Harvard banner and
the Stars and Stripes. As I was staring at them curiously, wondering how
these familiar emblems happened to be so prominently displayed in the
quarters of a French officer in this remote Algerian town, the commandant
himself entered the room—a trim, alert, slenderly built man, the breast
of his sky-blue uniform ablaze with ribbons and in his hand a copy of
the “Literary Digest”! Then I recognized him as Colonel Paul Azan, the
distinguished French officer, wounded at Verdun, who during the closing
years of the World War served as instructor in military science at
Harvard.
He pressed me into a great leather chair, offered me an excellent cigar,
and proceeded to bombard me with questions, phrased in Back-Bay English,
as to conditions and happenings in the United States. Here we were,
gossiping like two friends of long standing of things four thousand
miles away, our conversation constantly interspersed with allusions to
Commonwealth Avenue, Copley Plaza, or College Yard, while the bayonet of
the Senegalese sentry’s rifle constantly passed and repassed the window,
and, beyond the olive-groves and almond-orchards of Mansoura, the distant
Moroccan mountains rose in purple majesty against the African sky.
Azan, it developed, was at the moment occupied with the equipment and
despatch of troops to reinforce the French armies mobilized along the
borders of the Riff, where, if the reports of the French Intelligence
Service were to be believed, the _harkas_ of Abd-el-Krim were preparing
for war. In fact, a column was leaving for the west by road that
very day. It was composed, so Azan informed me, of complements of
_tirailleurs_, spahis, _chasseurs d’Afrique_, _infanterie coloniale_, and
a battalion of the Foreign Legion.
“Are there any Americans in the _régiment étranger_ at present?” I
inquired.
“Just now,” replied the commandant, “we have only one of your countrymen.
But his is a most interesting case. Let me tell you about him. He comes
from somewhere in your Middle West, and I gather that his parents are
absurdly rich. In any event, they spoiled him by giving him far more
money than was good for him. Shortly after graduation—he attended one of
the big Eastern universities—he married a girl of excellent family and
they went to Paris on their wedding trip.
“A few days after their arrival in _la ville lumière_ he ran across a
party of college friends. They decided that they must celebrate their
reunion by making a night of it. They went to Montmartre. Having come
from America, which is very dry, they decided to make Paris very wet.
They succeeded so well that day was breaking when our young friend
returned to his hotel completely—what do you call it?—soused. His bride
of a week was waiting up for him. She was a young woman of strong
character and not afraid to speak her mind.
“‘If that’s what you think about me,’ the husband said when her
reproaches ceased for want of breath, ‘I won’t inflict myself on you any
longer.’
“He was very proud and haughty, being still quite drunk, you see. So he
marched out of the room and out of the hotel. And she was too proud and
hurt to call him back; perhaps she didn’t take his threat very seriously.
In the street he accosted the first _agent de police_ he met and
demanded the way to the nearest recruiting station. The gendarme, being
a patriotic fellow and seeing in our husky young American fine material
for the French army, bundled him into a taxi and told the chauffeur to
drive him to the _Bureau de Recrutement_ of the _Légion Etrangère_ in
the Rue St. Dominique. Our recruiting officers, particularly in Paris,
are accustomed to strange applicants, and, as our young friend had no
difficulty in passing the physical examination, he was promptly enlisted.
“A week later he arrived at the recruit depot of the Legion at
Sidi-bel-Abbès, not far from here. He was still wearing his
evening-clothes, though the shirt-front that had once been so immaculate
was rumpled and grimy, and his clothes appeared to have been slept in,
as they had. In short, he looked considerably the worse for wear. But a
bath, a shave, a close hair-cut, a baggy white uniform with a broad blue
sash ... and, behold, he was a full-fledged _légionnaire_!
“That was nearly a year ago,” continued the colonel. “Our gay young
romantic still has a trifle over four years to serve. Regularly, the
first of every month, he receives a letter from his wife, assuring him
that she will be waiting for him when his term of service is completed,
and inclosing a small sum for wine, tobacco, and similar luxuries. It is
a hard life in the Legion, particularly for a man who has been spoiled
by luxury, but his officers tell me that he is standing up well under
it—‘making good,’ as you say in the States. When we are through with him
I think it is safe to say that he will be a better man, a better citizen,
and a better husband.”
Two days later, near Oujda, we overtook the _régiment étranger_ on its
way to the fighting in the Riff—a dusty column of iron-hard, sun-bronzed
men, loaded like beasts of burden, their long overcoats buttoned
back from their knees, their forage-caps pulled low over their eyes
against the blinding sun-glare. As we passed they were roaring out the
marching-song which the Legion sings only when it is bound for battle. I
wondered if my young compatriot, of whom Azan had spoken, was among these
adopted sons of Madame de la République.
Soldats de la Légion,
De la Légion Etrangère,
N’ayant pas de nation,
La France est votre mère.
CHAPTER XIX
THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN “THE FARTHEST WEST”
Those who are bored by history might do well to skip this chapter,
for, though I shall do my best to brush away the accumulated dust of
ages, so that the glittering romance of Morocco’s story may be seen, it
is nevertheless a chronicle of past events rather than an account of
present-day happenings and conditions. But a meal, to have any nutritive
value, cannot consist wholly of sweetmeats; one must take a certain
amount of meat and potato in addition to the dessert. And precisely the
same holds true in the case of Morocco, for without the background of
Moorish achievement, glory, and misrule, and of the French occupation, it
is utterly impossible to understand the anomalous situation which exists
in Maghreb-el-Aska, the Farthest West, as the Moroccans themselves call
their country, where the descendant of five-and-thirty emperors still
sits in state beneath the Shereefian umbrella, surrounded by visitors and
eunuchs and concubines and all the pomp and luxury of an Arabian Nights
court, while a quiet Frenchman, in a modest residency not a stone’s throw
from the imperial palace, speaks with the voice of a ventriloquist and
pulls the strings.
In order that you may have a clear understanding of the highly involved
Moroccan situation, it would be well, it seems to me, were I to begin by
clearing up several popular misapprehensions.
First of all, then, be it understood that the vast majority of the people
of Morocco are not Moors at all, as most foreigners carelessly assume,
nor are they Arabs. The very name “Moor” is a European invention, unknown
in Morocco, whose inhabitants should properly be called Maghribin—that
is, the people of Maghreb-el-Aska. The name that we apply to the country
is but a corruption of that of the southern capital, Marrákesh, through
the Spanish version, Marueccos.
Of the three races which inhabit the empire the most numerous and
important are the aboriginal Berbers, who were already in possession of
the land when the Carthaginians and the Romans came, and whose blood to a
greater or less extent permeates the whole population. It was the sturdy
Berber soldiery of Carthage which enabled the queen city of the South to
hold at bay for upward of five centuries her great northern rival; it was
an army of Berbers which, led by Hannibal, conquered Spain, devastated
southern Gaul, crossed the Alps, and swept the whole length of Italy. It
was the Berbers who thrice conquered Spain—once from the Visigoths and
twice from their less stalwart coreligionists, the Arabs. Again, it was
the Berbers, not the Arabs, who built those two immortal monuments—the
Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville. The popular description
of the Moslem rulers of Spain as Arabs or Saracens (“Easterners”), is
quite erroneous. The people who made themselves masters of the peninsula
were Berbers, although their leaders often adopted Arabic names along
with the religion of the Arabs. That Morocco, alone among the Barbary
nations, should have succeeded in maintaining its independence for
upward of eleven hundred years, and that in spite of piracy, brigandage,
ferocious cruelty, misrule, and a defiance of all international
obligations, was due in part, it is true, to the immense strategic
importance of its position at the entrance to the Middle Sea, and to the
jealousies among the European powers which sought its possession; but far
more to its reinforcement by the virile and rugged Berber stock.
In spite of a history of foreign conquest, the Berber physical type and
the Berber temperament and nationality have persisted since the Age of
Stone. A common mistake is to regard them, or, indeed, any of the peoples
of Morocco, as a black race, a very common misconception which owes its
origin in part, perhaps, to the old English phrase, blackamoor; that
is, black as a Moor. Racially they are not black, nor even brown. They
are distinctively a white race, usually with brown and sometimes with
blue eyes and not infrequently with tawny hair and beards, though their
skins have been bronzed by generations of exposure to the fierce African
sun. Their children and those who have lived in cities might, if clad in
European costume, pass anywhere as Europeans.
It is commonly believed that Morocco was invaded by a great Arab horde
which carried all before it, and that the Modern Moroccans are descended
from these invaders. This is quite erroneous. It is true that in 682 the
country was invaded by the great Arab conqueror, Sidi Okba, who gave it
its name of Maghreb-el-Aska because it was to him the Farthest West.
Though Sidi Okba’s stay in Morocco was of brief duration, it was long
enough to have a profound effect on the country’s Berber inhabitants. Yet
the Arabs and the Berbers, with a common religion, a common government,
and with the same tribal groups, have failed to amalgamate to any great
extent, the Arabizing of the Berbers being limited to little beyond
their conversion to Islam. The Arab, transported to a soil which does
not always suit him, and always a nomad at heart, so far from thriving,
tends to disappear, whereas the Berber becomes more and more aggressive
and yearly increases in numbers, at present forming at least four fifths
of the population of Morocco. When Arabic is mentioned as the language
of Morocco it is seldom realized how small a proportion of the country’s
inhabitants use it as their mother-tongue. Berber is the real language of
the empire, Arabic that of its creed and court.
The third race which may be considered native is the Jewish, consisting
of two different branches: those settled among the Berbers from time
immemorial, speaking their language and in addition Arabic in a hideously
corrupted form; and those expelled from Spain and other European
countries during the Middle Ages, most of whom have got little farther
than the ports. These latter, who usually speak Spanish and Arabic
with equal fluency, are the most progressive and prosperous of all the
inhabitants of Morocco; they own banks and shops, they lend money at
usurious rates of interest to the less thrifty Berbers and Arabs, and in
their hands is most of the empire’s foreign trade.
To these white races—Berber, Arab, and Jew—constant additions of a negro
element have been made as a result of the slave-trade which Morocco
until very recently carried on with the western Sudan. The introduction
of negro slave-girls into Berber and Arab harems has produced a certain
proportion of mulattos, whose dark skins and negroid features tend to
confirm the European visitor in his misconception that the people of
Morocco belong to a non-Caucasian race.
“But,” you ask, and with good reason, “are there then no such people as
the Moors?” Whether the term Moor can properly be applied to any _race_
is open to grave question, for those Moroccans whom the word is used to
designate are ethnically hybrids, with the blood of Berbers, Arabs, and
Spaniards coursing in their veins. Morocco, as I have already explained,
was overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century, but the subsequent
conquest of Spain was effected chiefly by Berber tribes, which, however,
always had a strong admixture of Arab blood and in most respects became
Arabized. These Arabized Berbers, settling in the peninsula which they
had conquered, became known to the European nations as Moors. The
race was also influenced considerably by marriage with the natives of
Spain—even to-day the haughtiest of the Spanish grandees proudly boast
of their Moorish blood, just as many of the great English nobles trace
their descent from the Normans who accompanied William the Conqueror—and
when the Moors were finally expelled from Spain they had become almost
entirely distinct from their Berber kinsfolk, to whom they were known as
Andalusians. While the mountainous regions of Morocco continued to be
occupied almost exclusively by people of pure Berber stock, their refugee
coreligionists from Spain, the “Moors,” flocked to the coast towns and
the plains of Morocco and Algeria, where their descendants, usually
referred to as Moresques, are readily distinguishable from the Berbers
and the Arabs by their Spanish features.
Though the sultans never saw fit to order an enumeration of their
subjects, and though, under the French administration, the occupation
of a census-taker would not be a healthy one in certain districts,
the total population of the empire is estimated at about six millions,
including one hundred thousand Europeans, the majority of whom are French
and Spanish. By way of offering a familiar comparison, it might be said
that Morocco is slightly larger than Texas in area and slightly less than
our six New England States in point of population.
* * * * *
On those of my readers who have stayed with me thus far, but who are
doubtless impatient to get on to Fez and Marrákesh, I shall inflict
the merest modicum of Moroccan history—two thousand years of conquest,
cruelty, and corruption compressed into a tabloid, as it were.
We know from ancient records that when the Carthaginians, those
indefatigable sea-traders, first planted their trading-posts and
colonies along this coast, they were opposed by savage and inhospitable
tribesmen, some of whom dwelt in caves; but the dolmens discovered on
Cape Spartel and the curious megalithic monuments at M’zorah point to a
still earlier race—the men of the Stone Age, perhaps. At the beginning of
the Christian era, and for some centuries thereafter, the country which
we know as Morocco was the Roman province of Mauretania, its northern
portion crisscrossed by Roman roads and dotted with Roman cities, the
most important of which, perhaps, was Volubilis, the ruins of which,
not far from Mequinez, are now in process of excavation. In the fifth
century Mauretania became subject to the Vandals, and in the seventh to
the Goths, both of whom, judging by the scarcity of Roman remains, fully
justified their reputations.
The coming of the Arabs under Okba in 682 was of far greater moment,
and instilled in the natives the greed for conquest, and laid the
foundations for their conversion to Islam. The force of ten thousand
Arabs and Egyptians with whom Tarik, the Berber general who commanded
the Arab armies in North Africa, held the Moroccan side of the Straits
of Gibraltar in 710 was trebled by the recruiting of Berber mercenaries,
his augmented force being large enough by the following year to permit
him to cross the straits and invade Spain, burning his boats behind him.
By 714 Tarik had pushed as far northward as the foot of the Pyrenees. In
718 the Moslem invaders, having subjugated Spain, crossed the mountains
into Gaul, but their triumphal onsweep was arrested by the solid power of
the Franks under Charles Martel, the Hammer of God, at Poitiers, which
might be called the high-water mark of Islam. While the invasion of Gaul
was still in progress, the Berbers who had settled in northwestern Spain
revolted against their Arab rulers, and in 739 the Berbers of Morocco
followed suit with equal success, throwing off the Arab yoke and setting
up one of their own chieftains, Maisara, as an independent ruler.
The recorded history of the Moorish Empire does not really commence,
however, until half a century later, when an Arab missionary, Mulai
Idris ben Abdallah, a direct descendant of the Prophet, a fugitive who
had fled from Arabia during the bloody struggles between the rival
claimants to the caliphate, settled in northern Morocco and founded a
city on a hill within sight of the Roman ruins of Volubilis. Islam had
already been established in these parts for eighty years, and so Idris,
by virtue of the sanctity attaching to him as a relative of the Prophet,
experienced no great difficulty in uniting the Berbers of the region
into a confederation which was greatly extended by his son, Idris II,
the builder of Fez, which became the capital of the Idrisi kingdom.
Meanwhile there was being founded in southern Morocco what later grew to
be the kingdom of Marrákesh. Toward the close of the thirteenth century
the kingdoms of Fez and Marrákesh became united under one ruler, whose
successor, after numerous dynastic changes, Arab and Berber, is the
present sultan of Morocco.
The sixteen rulers of the Idrisi line, an Arab dynasty, controlled
northern Morocco for nearly two hundred years, though they were in
part supplanted by the Berber family of Miknasa in 922 and ousted
altogether by another Berber dynasty, the Maghrawa, in 988. These
last were exterminated in turn by a third Berber dynasty, the Murabti
(or Almoravides, as they are better known), who added the remainder
of Morocco, most of Spain and Portugal, and the sultanate of Tlemcen
to their dominions. Their principal existing monument is the city of
Marrákesh. In 1149 the Almoravide power was overthrown by the Muwahhadi
(Almohades), another Berber horde. Under them the Moorish Empire reached
its zenith at the close of the twelfth century, when it included, in
addition to Morocco and the Iberian peninsula, what are now Algeria,
Tunisia, and Tripolitania, its borders extending to the frontiers of
Egypt, which the Moors were prevented from occupying only by the rise of
Saladin. To them we owe the Alcázar, the Giralda, and the Torre del Oro
in Seville, the Hasan tower at Rabat, the Kutubiya tower at Marrákesh,
the castle of Gibraltar, and a portion at least of the Alhambra at
Granada. Yet before the thirteenth century had reached the half-way mark
the Almohades had been driven out of Spain and had lost all of their vast
empire save what is now known as Morocco, whence they were finally ousted
by the Marinides—a Spanish corruption of Beni Marin. The Marinides,
Berbers like their predecessors, ruled in Morocco for something over
three hundred years, yet they have scarcely left a mark upon the
country. They were succeeded by the short-lived dynasty of the Wattasi,
the chief episode of their reign being the expulsion of the Moors from
Spain by the Catholic princes, Boabdil, the last king of Granada, and
his followers taking refuge in Morocco, where they built themselves the
city of Tetuan. The Wattasi was the last Berber line to reign in Morocco,
being succeeded by the house of Sa’adi, whose members were Sherifs, or
“nobles”—that is, descendants of the Prophet—and came originally from
Arabia. This change of dynasties took place about the middle of the
sixteenth century, and Morocco, though four fifths of its population is
Berber, has been known as the Shereefian Empire and has been ruled by
Arab sultans ever since.
Under the sway of the Sa’adi the Moorish dominions were pushed southward
to Timbuktu, but the line ran out in drunkards and degenerates; another
Shereefian family, the Filali of Tafilalt, was then invited to undertake
the task of government and by 1649 they were masters of Fez. The reign
of the Filali, more generally known as the Alides, who still hold the
Shereefian umbrella, the present sultan being the twentieth of the
line, has been, with very few exceptions, a record of cruelty, tyranny,
debauchery, corruption, and revolution. The most beneficent of them,
Mahomet XVI, had an Englishwoman in his harem, so that his successor, the
wretched Yazid, whose reign was mercifully of short duration, was English
on his mother’s side—a curious circumstance for an Oriental country.
During the reign of Abd-er-Rahman II occurred the war with France,
brought on by Morocco’s espousal of the cause of Abd-el-Kader, and as a
result of this conflict the Moors renounced their claims to Tlemcen and
France consolidated her Algerian possessions.
Upon the death of Sultan Hasan in 1894 there came to the Shereefian
throne his son by a Circassian slave-girl: Abd-el-Aziz IV, then a lad
in his teens. The young ruler showed himself sincerely desirous of
bettering the condition of his distracted country by introducing foreign
reforms, but lack of experience made him an easy prey for schemers and
speculators, who pandered to his worst traits and squandered his fortune.
This aroused the resentment of his people, and in 1902 the Berber tribes
of the Algerian frontier rose in rebellion under the leadership of a
fanatic named Jelali Zarhoni, popularly known as Bou Hamara, who claimed
to be fighting on behalf of the imprisoned brother of the sultan. Finding
himself powerless to subdue the rebellion, Abd-el-Aziz borrowed money
from France to reorganize his army, thereby providing the French with
an excuse which they used later on for intervention. To complete the
demoralization of the empire, a local chieftain, Mulai Ahmed er-Raisuli,
made himself master of the district round Tangier, terrorizing the
country-side and holding even foreigners to ransom. His kidnapping
from Tangier itself of a Greek named Ion Perdicaris, an American by
naturalization, brought from President Roosevelt the brusque demand for
“Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” a demand which was backed up by an
American naval demonstration in Moroccan waters.
By 1904 the situation in Morocco had become so chaotic and intolerable
that it seemed as though nothing could prevent intervention by the great
powers. Now it should be kept in mind that the European situation had
become peculiarly delicate at this time as the result of the outbreak
of war between Russia, the ally of France, and Japan, the ally of Great
Britain. But for some time there had been a movement on both sides of
the Channel to reduce to a minimum the possible causes of conflict
between the two countries, and, largely by reason of the efforts of
King Edward VII, there was signed in London in April, 1904, a series of
agreements between the two countries which marked the opening of the
era of _entente cordiale_. Here we are concerned only with the joint
declaration respecting Egypt and Morocco. With regard to Egypt the French
government declared that “they will not obstruct the action of Great
Britain in that country by asking that a limit of time be fixed for the
British occupation or in any other manner.” The British government, on
its part, announced that “it appertains to France, more particularly, as
a power whose dominions are conterminous for a great distance with those
of Morocco, to preserve order in that country, and to provide assistance
for the purpose of all administrative, economic, financial, and military
reforms.” It was further agreed that by virtue of her geographical
position, and from her territorial possessions on the Moorish coast, the
interests of Spain in Morocco should be taken into special consideration,
the government at Paris pledging itself to effect an understanding with
the government at Madrid. By May day of 1904, therefore, everything
was harmoniously arranged. England was free to continue in occupation
of the Nile country as long as it suited her to do so. France was free
to consolidate her position in North Africa by making French influence
supreme throughout the Shereefian Empire; an operation which, so the
Quai d’Orsay announced, was to be effected by “pacific penetration,” but
which, as every chancellery in Europe knew full well, would in fact be
effected by penetration with the bayonet. Spain, which was just beginning
to recover from the effects of her disastrous war with the United States,
was to be appeased with a few all but worthless _enclaves_ along the
Moorish seaboard. Though the Declaration of London affected six hundred
thousand square miles of territory and twenty millions of human beings,
the cynical diplomatists of Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay in
perfecting the arrangements for this colossal land-grab deemed it quite
unnecessary to consult the opinions of the peoples whom it directly
affected, the Egyptians and the Moroccans themselves.
The wheels of the chariot of empire were greased and it was ready to
start on its course of conquest when, early in 1905, a monkey-wrench
was suddenly tossed into the machinery by a gentleman now known as Mr.
William Hohenzollern. Germany had viewed with jealous eyes the growing
influence of France in Europe, had seen herself threatened with political
isolation by the _rapprochement_ between France and England, but she
had bided her time until the disasters suffered on the battle-fields
of Manchuria by France’s Russian ally had, by removing the threat of a
Muscovite attack from the rear, led the statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse
to believe that the hour had struck for Germany to proclaim herself the
arbiter of European affairs. The Moroccan situation provided them with
the pretext that they needed. Here was Germany’s opportunity to gain “a
place in the sun.” A firm of German bankers, the Mannesmann Brothers,
had obtained from the sultan mining concessions in the Sus, and to
“protect” them a German gunboat, the _Panther_, was rushed to Agadir.
Shortly before this the imperial yacht _Hohenzollern_ had dropped anchor
in the roadstead of Tangier, and the German emperor—“Hadji Guillaume,”
as his Turkish friends flatteringly called him—had gone ashore for a
conference with the representatives of the sultan, assuring them that
Germany would insist on the maintenance of Morocco’s integrity and on
the equality of European economic and commercial interests in that
empire. Germany’s solicitude for Morocco was, of course, only a pretext
to embarrass France, but it served its purpose, for Abd-el-Aziz, who had
all along protested the right of France to interfere in Moroccan affairs,
was emboldened to reject the scheme of reforms suggested by the French
government and at the suggestion of the kaiser invited all the powers to
advise him as to the needed improvements in his administration. To this
the French foreign minister, M. Delcassé, strenuously objected, but the
German chancellor, Prince von Bülow, used such threatening language that
Delcassé resigned from office in order not to plunge his country into war.
So far German diplomacy had triumphed. Or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say German bluff. The conference asked for the sultan
and instigated by Germany met in January, 1906, at Algeciras, a
little Spanish coast town across the bay from Gibraltar, where the
representatives of the powers spent the remainder of the winter in the
delicate task of reconciling French claims for predominance in Morocco
with the German demands for equality for all. The British delegates gave
firm support to their French colleagues, while Germany was stanchly
backed by Austria. The deciding voice was really that of the United
States, which on this occasion took a part in European affairs for the
first time. (It is an interesting fact that the chief American delegate,
Mr. Henry White, was again one of the representatives of his country at
Versailles, just thirteen years later.) President Roosevelt once told me
that, in his opinion, it was largely the moderating influence exercised
by the United States at Algeciras which prevented war between Germany
and France over the question of Morocco.
With great difficulty a scheme of reforms was finally elaborated, but
not until France had agreed to a rectification of the German frontiers
in the Cameroons and Togoland at her expense in return for a free hand
in Morocco. It was eventually agreed that a Moorish gendarmerie under a
Swiss inspector-general should be instituted, that a state bank should
be established for the protection of foreign loans, that the acquisition
of land around the ports by foreigners should be permitted, that the
authority of the state over the public works and public services should
be recognized, and that the customs administration should be more
efficiently controlled. The pact containing these provisions, whereby
the Moroccans ceased to be masters in their own house, was signed by the
representatives of the powers in April, 1906, and reluctantly accepted by
the sultan in June.
While the diplomats were wrangling at Algeciras, Morocco, only thirty
miles away, was in a state of chaos. The weakness of the sultan’s rule
was illustrated by Raisuli’s capture of the British soldier of fortune,
Caïd Sir Harry Maclean, instructor-general of the Moorish army, who,
after seven months in captivity, was ransomed by the British government
for twenty thousand pounds. The activities of the bandit chieftain, who
had long subjected the northern districts of the empire to a reign of
terror, were brought to an end in 1906, however, by a Franco-Spanish
naval demonstration off Tangier. The murder of a French physician at
Marrákesh in 1907 provoked prompt retaliation by the French, who occupied
the frontier town of Oujda. In July of the same year the Shawia tribesmen
attacked the European laborers who were employed in improving the
harbor-works of Casablanca and killed nine of them, whereupon French
gunboats bombarded the town, and it was occupied by French troops, though
thousands of townspeople were killed or wounded before order could be
restored. The vigorous action of France at Casablanca fanned into flame
the smoldering fanaticism and resentment of the tribes, and for the next
year or so the French were engaged in constant fighting along the border.
While thus engaged on the eastern frontier and the Atlantic seaboard,
France had been giving financial and moral support to Abd-el-Aziz, whose
grasp on the Shereefian umbrella was threatened by his brother, Mulai
Hafid, who had escaped from prison. Because of his acquiescence to the
French demands and his failure to offer armed resistance to the foreign
invaders, Abd-el-Aziz’s influence with his people had been steadily
waning, and shortly after the bombardment of Casablanca the _ulema_ of
Marrákesh declared him deposed and Mulai Hafid sultan. There ensued a
year of desultory fighting between the armies of the two brothers, but in
August, 1908, while marching on Marrákesh, which was the hotbed of the
rebellion, Abd-el-Aziz was defeated and fled for his life, taking refuge
within the French lines. He talked vaguely of renewing the struggle, but
ended by accepting a pension from his brother and comfortable exile in
Tangier, Mulai Hafid being generally accepted by the Moroccans as their
new ruler.
His rule was scarcely stronger than that of his brother, however, as was
shown by his inability to control the Berber tribesmen of the Riff, who
in July, 1909, killed a number of European laborers in the vicinity of
the Spanish fortress of Melilla, on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.
To vindicate her authority Spain sent across the straits an army of
fifty thousand men, thereby embarking on a war which has cost her
thousands of lives and millions of pesetas, has wrecked such military
prestige as she possessed, and continues in sporadic fashion to this day.
Though powerless to enforce his will in the Riff, whose fierce Berber
tribesmen have always regarded the Arab sultans of Morocco as interlopers
and usurpers, Mulai Hafid did succeed in defeating the forces of his
former partizan, Bou Hamara, who was now seeking the throne for himself,
and in capturing that pretender, otherwise known as El Roghi. Atop of a
camel, in an iron cage constructed for the purpose, so small that he was
forced to assume a cramped position, Bou Hamara was exhibited in city
after city like a wild beast—I was in Morocco at the time—and finally
taken to Fez, where the fiendish tortures inflicted upon him and his
fellow-rebels horrified even the natives and elicited vigorous protests
from the representatives of the European powers.
By this time it had become obvious to every one that the intolerable
conditions which existed in Morocco could not long continue. The country
was in a state of anarchy. No European’s life was safe a dozen miles in
from the seaboard. The sultan’s feeble authority was mocked north, south,
east, and west, and a large force of rebellious tribesmen was mustering
in the hills to sweep down upon the capital city. France’s ambiguous
position in Morocco had by now become unendurable. French citizens were
being attacked and murdered; the Algerian frontier was constantly being
threatened; and a final outburst of affronts and outrages brought the
republic’s patience to an end. In Morocco France was confronted by much
the same problem which we were called upon to solve four years later in
Mexico, and to restore order she invaded the one just as we invaded
the other. But with this difference: France coveted the country beyond
the Mulwiya and intended to keep it; we did not covet and had not the
slightest intention of retaining a foot of soil below the Rio Grande.
A French force under General Lyautey, who was destined to become
resident-general in Morocco and a marshal of France, advanced on Fez;
and on March 30, 1912, in the throne-room of the imperial palace of Bou
Djeloud, surrounded by his white-robed, white-hooded ministers of state
and faced by a little group of French officials and army officers in
brilliant uniforms ablaze with decorations, Mulai Hafid, with sorrow
and reluctance, wrote his sprawling Arabic signature from right to left
across the bottom of the parchment which the French minister tendered him.
“_Inshallah!_ It is God’s will,” the sultan sighed resignedly as he laid
down the pen.
By signing that treaty Mulai Hafid brought to an end the independence
which Morocco had misused for eleven hundred years and gave to France an
empire.
(A curious circumstance, is it not, that republican France, whose
motto is _Liberté, égalité, fraternité_, should have become the most
imperialistic of European nations? In a space of little more than ninety
years she has extinguished the independence, and in some cases exiled
the rulers, of Algeria, Cambodia, Tunisia, Annam, Dahomey, Madagascar,
and Morocco. In every case, it is true, French rule has brought
material benefits to the natives, but as an English statesman—I think
it was Campbell-Bannerman—pithily remarked, “Most peoples prefer to be
self-governed rather than well governed.”)
The ink on the Treaty of Fez was scarcely dry when the besieging
tribesmen burst into the city and precipitated a massacre which cost
three hundred lives, the murdered including more than three score
Europeans. The fighting was fiercest in the narrow streets of the old
city, where the French military mission and a company of Senegalese
_tirailleurs_ were beleaguered for some days by the tribesmen. After a
desperate resistance—which is commemorated by a marble plaque set in
the wall of the building—and after half of the _tirailleurs_ were dead,
the survivors were relieved by a force under Colonel Gouraud, now a
general of division and military governor of Paris, who commanded the
advance-guard of General Lyautey’s column. While Fez was being subdued
another French force under General Alix crossed the Mulwiya and prepared
to attack Taza, the stronghold commanding the pass which forms the
gateway to eastern Morocco.
By this time the authority of Mulai Hafid had reached the
vanishing-point, for his acceptance of the French protectorate had
convinced his subjects that he had sold his country to the foreigners.
The only course open to him was abdication, and he took it, being
consoled for the loss of his throne with a lump sum of four hundred
thousand francs and an annual pension of nearly as much more. In August,
1912, he stepped from the pages of Moorish history to disappear into the
limbo to which so many other native rulers who had flouted the power of
France had succeeded him, being succeeded by his brother, Mulai Yusef,
the present sultan, an amiable and indolent gentleman of middle age who
takes care to conduct himself as a well trained puppet should. From
his mouth issue the suave words put into it by the resident-general of
France, and he makes the proper gestures of friendship when the latter
pulls the strings; but what he is thinking deep down in his Moorish heart
is quite another question.
[Illustration: THE RIFF
A grim land, a savage land, with no means of communication save narrow
mountain trails, its gorse-covered slopes and rocky defiles invite
ambushes and sudden onfalls; small wonder that in such a country the
embattled mountaineers of Abd-el-Krim were able to defy the military
might of France and Spain so long]
Under the direction of General Lyautey the systematic pacification of
Morocco was vigorously undertaken. In the autumn of 1912 the _harkas_ of
El Hiba were smashed by the French, and the sultan’s standard—a green
triangle on a scarlet ground—was raised over Marrákesh, the southern
capital. Eighteen months later two French columns, one advancing
eastward from Fez, the other westward from Oujda, effected a junction
at Taza, thereby rendering secure for road and railway traffic the only
practicable gateway between Algeria and northeastern Morocco. But the
outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914, abruptly halted the ambitious
plans of Lyautey, who was summoned post-haste to Paris to take the
portfolio of minister of war. At the same time he received orders from
the home government virtually to strip Morocco of European troops, every
bayonet that could be mustered being desperately needed to protect the
motherland.
To most observers it appeared inevitable that the protectorate must
collapse in ruin, and that Morocco, evacuated by the French garrisons,
would relapse into anarchy and barbarism. But, before he left for Paris,
Lyautey summoned the Grand Caïds—the great native chieftains who are
still all-powerful in the south—to Rabat. The precise terms of the
bargain which he struck with them may only be surmised, but certain
it is that he did not wave the tricolor and appeal to them on grounds
of sentiment and patriotism, for most of them detested the French as
invaders of their country and dogs of unbelievers. The shrewd old
soldier-statesman, who understood the complex Moorish character as have
few Europeans, realized that the way to reach the hearts of these men
was through an appeal to their cupidity, by promise of power and wealth,
for your Moroccan always has an eye out for the main chance. I imagine
that he laid all his cards upon the table, for he is that sort of a man,
admitting to his visitors quite frankly that the bulk of the French
troops were to be withdrawn from the country, leaving the door wide open
for a successful rising.
“If Germany should win this war,” I can picture him as saying, “nothing
is more certain than that the Germans will annex Morocco; and their form
of government will not be the benevolent protectorate which we French
have given you, either. _Ma foi, non!_ They will rule you with the iron
hand, as they have ruled the natives of Togoland and the Cameroons, of
East and Southwest Africa. They will enforce their ideas of discipline
by wholesale seizures of property, by fines and floggings and hangings,
as is the German fashion, until you, my brothers, will wish that Yazid
the Bloodthirsty was back on the throne again. The best way for you to
avert such a calamity, which could end only in your own loss of wealth
and power, is to aid France instead of opposing her. If, with your own
_harkas_, you will maintain law and order throughout the empire during
the continuance of the war in Europe, protecting foreigners and upholding
the authority of the sultan, I, speaking in the name of my government
will pledge you that the broad powers you have hitherto enjoyed in your
own territories shall not only be respected and increased, but that so
far as gratitude can be expressed in terms of gold, your loyalty to
France shall be lavishly rewarded. I have spoken.”
This proposal the great feudal chieftains accepted, and they faithfully
kept their pledges, for throughout the four years of the great conflict
beyond the Mediterranean law and order were maintained in Morocco by
the Moroccans themselves, and this despite repeated attempts of German
emissaries to instigate revolts and otherwise foment trouble. Not only
this, but two divisions of _tirailleurs_ were recruited in Morocco and
sent to the battle-fields of Europe, where they were brigaded with
American troops under General Daugan, and whence they returned covered
with glory and wearing two _fourragères_—the only troops to win such
distinction in the French army.
When, in the summer of 1917, Lyautey returned to Morocco bearing the
baton of a marshal, he found the country, generally speaking, at peace,
though the authority of France was still very shadowy in certain
remote and troublesome districts beyond the Atlas. That this state of
tranquillity was due to the lavish subsidizing of the native caïds and
pashas, rather than to any deep affection they had for France, or any
overpowering desire for a continuance of French rule, in no wise detracts
from the great credit due to Marshal Lyautey, who, by his statesmanship,
breadth of vision, sincerity, and knowledge of native character, held an
empire for his country.
* * * * *
In the old, bad days, before the white helmets came, the form of
government of the Empire of Morocco was an absolute despotism,
unrestricted by any laws, civil or religious, the sultan—who is known
to his subjects by the title of _Emir-el-Mumenin_, Prince of True
Believers—being chief of the state as well as head of the church. As
spiritual ruler, the sultan stands quite alone, his authority not being
limited, as in most other Moslem countries, by the _ulema_—that is,
the interpreters of the Koranic law—under a sheikh-ul-Islam. Since the
establishment of the French protectorate, however, the sultan is required
to follow in all matters the advice of the French resident-general,
whose seat is at Rabat. In deference to native susceptibilities, _le
gouvernement chérifien_ remains, in form at least, substantially
untouched, though the two most important portfolios are held by
Frenchmen, the French resident-general being also Moroccan minister
of foreign affairs, while the officer commanding the French troops in
Morocco is likewise the Shereefian minister of war. In addition to the
grand vizier, who also holds the portfolio of minister of the interior,
the native members of the government include the ministers of justice,
crown lands, instruction, religious foundations, and the president of
the Shereefian High Court. These deal with the resident-general through
the medium provided by the Bureau of Native Affairs, which consists of
a large number of under-secretaries and technical advisers—financial,
legal, agricultural, sanitary, and the like—all of whom are French. The
final appeal in all matters relating to Morocco is not to the Ministry
of the Colonies in Paris, as might be supposed, nor to the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, but to the Ministry of War, for the administration of
the protectorate remains wholly in the hands of the military. It is
generally assumed, however, that the coming of M. Théodore Steeg, who
became resident-general of Morocco in 1925 upon the retirement of Marshal
Lyautey, means that military control will be replaced as soon as possible
by civil control such as the former represented while governor-general of
Algeria, whose affairs he directed with conspicuous success.
To save the face of the Moroccans, who are a proud, high-spirited people,
the French have taken great pains to maintain the polite fiction that
Morocco is still a sovereign state by official reference to it on all
occasions as “the Shereefian Empire”; by requiring that all laws and
decrees shall receive the approval of the sultan, who is their own
passive instrument; by surrounding him with the pomp and circumstance
which Oriental peoples expect of their rulers; and by permitting him
to maintain a miniature, highly picturesque, and quite innocuous
military establishment in the form of the famous Black Guard, or, as
it is better known, the Garde Chérifienne. The solicitude displayed in
safeguarding the sultan’s prestige, the constant catering by the French,
in superficial matters at least, to native pride, serve to illustrate
France’s administrative policy in Morocco, which is one of control as
opposed to command, of direction instead of repression, of the velvet
glove rather than the iron hand. The truth of the matter is that France
occupies a highly delicate position in Morocco; she is seated on a
volcano which, though quiescent, is not extinct; and in order to avoid
stirring it into action she realizes that she must pick her steps with
the utmost care.
In view of the disturbed conditions which still exist in certain
districts, the country is at present divided into three administrative
zones. In the first, military control has ceased altogether and the civil
administration has been firmly established; in the second, which is in
a somewhat less advanced state, the civil and military authorities work
together; while in the third, which is closed to travelers and colonists,
active military operations are still in progress and the army is in full
control.
The purely domestic affairs of the country are under the Ministry of the
Interior, nominally headed by a vizier, whose orders are executed among
the tribes by caïds and in the cities by pashas. Criminal cases are now
adjudicated in the French courts, which have set the natives an example
of uprightness and justice undreamed of by them before; but civil actions
are tried by native tribunals, a pasha sitting in judgment when the cases
are of a secular nature, a cadi when religious questions are involved.
The Jews have their own rabbinical tribunals, immune from Moslem
interference; and the Berber hill tribes, with whose domestic affairs
the French and native authorities alike wisely refrain from meddling,
administer justice according to their own barbaric ideas and the customs
of their fathers.
Finally there is a corps of _controleurs civils_ whose duty it is to
report on the condition of the country as a whole, on the crops, the
roads, public health, and municipal administration, on the temper of the
natives, the character and conduct of native officials. But the duties of
the controllers go still further, for they are expected to educate and
guide the native functionaries, to take a lively interest in agriculture
and sanitation, to protect the peasantry from injustice and oppression,
and to propose needed improvements and reforms. These French controllers
are the eyes and ears of the Ministry of the Interior; they form what is
in effect a bureau of civil intelligence, which keeps the central Maghzen
constantly informed as to all that is being thought, said, and done in
the districts under civil control, just as the officers of the army
intelligence keep the general staff conversant with conditions in the
regions under military administration.
It should be clearly understood, however, that the control of the
southern districts of the empire remains almost exclusively in the
hands of the Grand Caïds, those great feudal chieftains who even in
the days of Morocco’s independence never gave to the sultans more than
a perfunctory allegiance and who continue to exercise over their own
half-savage peoples almost as harsh and tyrannical powers as they did in
the worst days of the _ancien régime_. Such are El Glaoui, the khalifa
of Marrákesh, and his two powerful colleagues, Mtouggui and Goundafi,
overlords of the High Atlas and the Sus. In theory they are the khalifas,
or viceroys, of the sultan, and are supposed to carry out his orders,
but in reality they are virtually independent rulers, who regard the
puppet-ruler at Rabat with a contempt which they take little pains to
conceal and who treat on terms of perfect equality with the French. Their
wealth is believed to be enormous; in their own territories their rule is
absolute, and their decrees are ruthlessly carried out, for they exercise
over their peoples the high justice, the middle, and the low. They have
splendid palaces in the cities, filled with concubines, slaves, and
guards; and in the inaccessible fastnesses of the High Atlas they have
enormous fortress-castles, called _kasbahs_, where they dwell in a rude
feudal grandeur reminiscent of medieval Europe. Undisputed lords of the
southern marches, they make and administer their own laws, collect their
own taxes, and maintain their own military establishments, it being said
that between them they can place in the field an army of fifty thousand
well armed fighting-men. Though on terms of amity with the French, who
have bought their friendship with enormous subsidies, the Grand Caïds
hold the whole Southland in their hands—and are perfectly aware of their
power.
The negotiations between France and Spain as to their respective rights
in Morocco came to an end in the Franco-Spanish Treaty of Madrid, signed
in November, 1912. In this France acknowledged the right of Spain to
certain spheres of influence in Morocco, the extent of which was clearly
defined. The north Spanish zone, which is the only one of any importance,
political or commercial, consists of a narrow strip of territory, about
two hundred miles in length, with an average breadth of sixty miles,
and having an area equivalent to that of the State of New Jersey. It
occupies virtually the entire Mediterranean coast of Morocco and a
portion of its Atlantic seaboard, stretching from the town of Alcázar (Al
Kasar) on the west almost to the Algerian border. Forming the backbone of
this peculiarly desolate and savage region, which is peopled by highly
warlike tribes of Berber mountaineers, is a range of lofty mountains
known as the Riff, which have been aptly described as Morocco’s balcony
overlooking the Mediterranean. The zone is under the control of a Spanish
high commissioner, being administered—mostly in theory, however—by a
khalifa, or shereefian viceroy, chosen by the sultan from a choice of two
candidates presented by the government at Madrid.
It was further agreed that, by reason of its immensely important
strategic position on the Straits of Gibraltar, the city of Tangier
and its immediate hinterland, consisting of 140 square miles, should
be internationalized and its permanent neutrality guaranteed by
Great Britain, France, and Spain. Its administration is carried on,
accordingly, by two bodies: a committee of control and an international
legislative assembly. The former consists of the eight consuls-general
representing the powers, including the United States, which signed the
Act of Algeciras; the latter of twenty-six members—four French, four
Spanish, three British, and fifteen natives. The convention forbids the
construction of fortifications of any sort, and the city is well policed
by an international gendarmerie, but foreigners are subject only to their
respective consuls-general, for the powers have refused to abandon their
ancient extraterritorial rights.
Far down the Atlantic coast of Morocco is another Spanish zone, the
little _enclave_ of Ifni, with a population of some twenty thousand
native farmers and fishermen and an area no larger than that of Rhode
Island. Though ceded to Spain by Morocco in 1860, its occupation has been
purely nominal, the small Spanish garrison having been exterminated in
1925 by tribesmen from the hinterland.
By the Franco-Spanish agreement of 1912 the frontiers of Ifni were
extended southward along the Moorish coast to the River Dra’a, where they
join up with those of the large Spanish territory of Rio de Oro, which
has an area of 109,000 square miles but whose utter worthlessness is
emphasized by the paucity of its population, which numbers less than five
hundred souls. Rio de Oro, which is under the governorship of the Canary
Islands but is administered by a sub-governor residing at Villa Cisneros,
consists of three zones: the colony proper; the protectorate; and the
occupied territory, whose northern boundary is the Dra’a, which likewise
forms the southern boundary of Morocco, so that Rio de Oro is not within
the confines of the Shereefian Empire.
[Illustration: THE PRICE OF EMPIRE
Riffi bringing their wounded down from the mountains on improvised
stretchers
Blood-stained blankets take the place of Red Cross ambulances in the
roadless Riff]
Though France’s active rôle in the Riff was brought to an end in the
spring of 1926 by the submission of the Riffian chieftain, Abd-el-Krim,
the events which have been occurring in that portion of Morocco during
recent years are of such deep political significance, and so thickly sown
with the seeds of future trouble, as to require more than perfunctory
mention.
Spain’s interests in northern Morocco are of long standing. Her first
foothold on the African mainland was secured at Melilla, seven score
miles to the east of Gibraltar, which she seized from the Moors two years
before Columbus set sail for the west. In 1580, upon the subjugation of
Portugal by Philip II, Spain obtained possession of Ceuta, the immensely
strong fortress city which crowns the rocky promontory marking the
eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar, the two great rocks being known
to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules. Larache, on the Atlantic
coast of Morocco, was held by the Spaniards throughout the greater
part of the seventeenth century. (Incidentally, tradition identifies
Larache—El Araish, the natives call it—with the Garden of the Hesperides,
’Arasi being the Arabic for “pleasure-gardens,” and the “golden apples”
being perhaps the oranges for which the place has long been famous.) In
1860, Spain seized Tetuan, an important town near the mouth of the Wadi
Martil, forty miles southeast of Tangier. Between Tetuan and Melilla a
Spanish fortress crowns one of the islands, occupied in 1673, in the fine
semicircular Bay of Alhucemas, which forms the seaward end of one of the
most beautiful valleys in the Riff, and within recent years the Spaniards
have also appropriated the group of dry and barren islands known as the
Zaffarines, or Saffron Islands, off the eastern extremity of the Spanish
zone, by the seizure of which the French were cleverly forestalled. Most
of these Spanish holdings are utterly worthless, Ceuta and Melilla alone
being worthy of consideration.
As the years passed considerable numbers of Spaniards, not of the best
sort, settled themselves along this littoral, where they have drifted
into a semi-Oriental habit of mind and body, living more like natives
than like Europeans. Yet they claim Spanish protection, either as
subjects or _protégés_, and it is the existence of this utterly worthless
element on Moroccan soil, plus certain mining concessions which Spaniards
have obtained from local chiefs, which have provided the government at
Madrid with a pretext for intervening in Morocco.
But, despite her alleged “interests,” despite the fact that she has
held Melilla for upward of four centuries, Spain has never succeeded in
pushing her effective rule more than a few miles in from the coast, for,
looming like a purple storm-cloud above the narrow strip of littoral,
rise the mighty mountains of the Riff. During the last century Spain made
repeated attempts to conquer this savage region, and to impose her rule
on its warlike and independence-loving inhabitants, but always without
success. In 1922, however, the Spaniards made a real effort to occupy
effectively the zone which had been allotted to them, an army of fifty
thousand men being sent to Morocco for the purpose.
To resist the invaders there now arose in the Riff a very remarkable man,
a tribal chieftain by the name of Abd-el-Krim. Incensed by the cruelty,
corruption, injustice, and glaring inefficiency which had characterized
Spanish rule along the coast, he raised the standard of revolt and called
upon the people of the Riff to drive the Spaniards out of the country
altogether. Though Spain replied by pouring troops across the Straits by
the tens of thousands, her military record in Morocco for the next three
years was one of almost uninterrupted defeat, retreat, disaster, and
shame. Not only did a mere handful of Riffi succeed in resisting all the
forces that the government at Madrid could bring against them, but they
steadily drove the invaders toward the sea, until, by the summer of 1925,
the Spaniards occupied only a few of the coast towns and fortresses,
clinging to these only with the aid of their fleet.
That Abd-el-Krim was more than justified in his revolt no fair-minded
person who is conversant with the facts can truthfully deny, for the
Spaniards had been guilty in Morocco of exactly the same cruelties and
excesses which had caused them to be driven out of South America at the
beginning of the nineteenth century and out of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the
Philippines at its close. Had Abd-el-Krim been content to confine his
operations to the Spanish zone, Spain might be without a foot of Moroccan
territory, and he might be sultan of the Riff to-day.
But, elated by his comparatively easy successes over the Spaniards, he
proceeded to turn his attention toward the south, where the French had
pushed their outposts into the fertile valley of the Ouergha, a region
on which the Riffian leader depended for his supplies. Whether the
French were responsible for precipitating the conflict which ensued by
entering the Riff, or whether the Riffi first invaded territory under
French protection, is open to some question. In any event, the spring of
1924 found the warriors of Abd-el-Krim formed in two lines of battle,
one facing the Spaniards on the north, the other confronting the French
on the south. For many months the tide of battle ran in favor of the
Riffi, for the Spaniards were discouraged by disasters at the front
and by political disorders at home; while the French, who had vastly
underestimated the strength of their enemy, were slow in bringing up
sufficient men and guns.
[Illustration: FROM OUT OF THE UNKNOWN
Strange masked mendicants drift into the Saharan border towns, their
progress marked by the throb of desert drums]
Although, by the summer of 1925, the French and Spaniards had in the
field between them a force which probably exceeded half a million men,
under forty generals, two marshals of France, Lyautey and Pétain, and
the Spanish dictator, Primo de Rivera, the outcome of the campaign,
which had all but bankrupted Spain and was said to be costing France a
million dollars a day, was by no means certain. In fact, so eager was
France for encouragement, if not for reinforcement, that she accepted
the services of a group of young American aviators who during the Great
War had served with distinction in the Lafayette Escadrille. As the laws
of France do not permit the enlistment of foreigners in any branch of
her army save the Foreign Legion, the difficulty was solved by forming
the American volunteers into a unit known as the Shereefian Air Guard
and having them take service under the sultan of Morocco, against whose
authority, as nominal sovereign of the whole empire, the Riffi were
technically in rebellion. That these young Americans, in their thirst for
excitement and adventure, should have seen fit to take service under an
African ruler is surprising enough, but that they should have bombed and
raked with machine-gun fire the defenseless villages of a people with
whom they had no quarrel, a people who were fighting for independence,
is incomprehensible to those who had been the first to applaud their
achievements in the air during the Great War. They claimed to be fighting
for France, yet France, with one of the most powerful air forces in
the world, did not need them. In effect, then, they were fighting to
perpetuate the rule in the Riff of Spain, a country whom the preceding
generation of Americans had driven from her last foothold in the New
World because her tyranny and cruelty stank in the nostrils of decent men.
By the late winter of 1926 France and Spain, by a lavish expenditure of
their resources, had enveloped the Riff in a wall of steel, employing
every device of scientific warfare against the embattled tribesmen. Even
the Riffi recognized that further resistance was futile; the tribal
chieftains, either bought up by French and Spanish gold or to save
their skins, began to fall away from Abd-el-Krim, and before spring had
turned to summer that gallant fighter came riding astride a mule into
the French lines. The authority of his Shereefian Majesty the Prince
of True Believers had been upheld; the tyranny of Spain in the Riff
had been perpetuated; and France had won what the newspapers of Paris
proclaimed _une victoire glorieuse_. But I imagine that those who viewed
it, as I did, at close range and through glasses unclouded by rancor or
propaganda, thought it a rather sorry triumph.
Could France acquire the Riff from Spain—as there is no question that
she would like to do—and extend over that region the just and beneficent
rule which she has given to her own protectorate in Morocco, there is
no doubt that it would be the best thing for every one concerned, the
Riffi themselves included. And there is good reason to believe that
at one period of the conflict, when the gloom of discouragement and
threatened bankruptcy hung like a cloud over Spain, some such solution
was under serious consideration by the Madrid government. But it was here
that England stepped in. To France’s present position in Morocco Great
Britain has no objection; indeed, she made it possible through the pacts
she signed in London and at Algeciras. But to a French Morocco which
came down to the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly to a French
Morocco which included the great fortress at Ceuta, the statesmen of
Downing Street have the most unalterable objections. Ceuta, as you will
see by glancing at the map, is vis-à-vis to Gibraltar. And Gibraltar,
because of recent developments in warfare—particularly the airplane, the
submarine, poison gas, and long-range guns—is no longer so impregnable as
the British War Office and the Prudential Insurance Company would like
the world to suppose. Situated on a peninsula, with Spain at its back,
it is cut off from reinforcements save by sea, and it lacks, moreover,
a suitable terrain for the effective use of airplanes. Ceuta, which is
naturally even stronger than the Rock, and which could be made absolutely
impregnable by military engineers, is on the mainland, with all of Africa
from which to draw supplies and reinforcements, and it possesses the
other military facilities which its great British rival lacks. In the
hands of Spain, a second-rate power with few colonial ambitions and no
navy worthy of the name, Ceuta is not the slightest menace to Britain.
But let it pass into the possession of France, let it be fortified and
armed by French engineers, let strategic railways be brought up to its
back door and its harbor converted into a hornets’ nest of submarines ...
well, as the English will tell you, that is quite a different matter.
England has no objection to French colonial schemes in Africa so long as
they do not conflict with her own. But her possession of Gibraltar and
the Canal has made her mistress of the Mediterranean—and mistress of the
Mediterranean she intends to remain.
The fall of Abd-el-Krim—now an exile in the island of Réunion—gave birth
to the hope, if not the belief, that Morocco would no longer remain a
potential menace to the peace of Europe; but during the summer of 1926
there thrust himself upon the stage of North African affairs a new
and highly disturbing figure in the person of the Italian dictator,
Benito Mussolini. Now the fact must not be lost sight of that Italy has
never forgiven France for forestalling her in Tunisia, with its eighty
thousand Italian inhabitants, nor for the fashion in which Italy has
been systematically ignored in the settlement of questions pertaining to
Northwest Africa. That Italy now purposes seriously to challenge French
dominance of the Mediterranean there can be but little doubt, for in the
air she is immensely stronger than her rival, she is very nearly as
strong upon the sea, and though she is weaker in land forces, she is in
better financial condition, and she has, moreover, recently strengthened
her position by effecting with Spain an understanding which, in the
opinion of competent observers, is not far removed from an offensive and
defensive alliance.
France could probably successfully defy Italy alone; Spain alone would
not be a very serious menace to her; but, with an unreconciled Germany on
her flank, it is to be doubted whether she is in a position to challenge
the two together, for their combined fleets could probably destroy her
lines of communication in the Mediterranean and cut her off from her
sources of man-power and food supply in North Africa. The government at
Paris is perfectly aware, moreover, that in the event of such a conflict
France could look for no aid from Great Britain, whose interests in the
Mediterranean are confined to insuring the security of her sea-road to
the East.
Just how Italy will set about realizing her African ambitions remains a
matter for anxious speculation, though she has inserted an entering wedge
by demanding a reopening of the highly delicate Tangier question, which,
as every one conversant with Mediterranean politics knows, is loaded with
high explosive. Whether Mussolini’s plans for colonial expansion, which
he has emphasized over and over again in his public addresses, will lead
to armed conflict with France is extremely doubtful; but he occupies a
very strong position, not dissimilar to that occupied by the kaiser at
the time of the Algeciras Conference, and he is a past master at the
game of bluff. Certain it is that Il Duce intends, by hook or crook, to
wring from France some sort of territorial concessions, to obtain for
his rejuvenated Italy a place in the African sun. So, though it has
been assumed by the more sanguine that the dove of peace has settled
permanently on the soil of Morocco, it may prove to be only a bird of
passage.
[Illustration: STRANGE FOLK FROM THE FAR PLACES
A negro clown from the Great Bend of the Niger
A half-demented holy man from the Atlas]
CHAPTER XX
FROM A FASI HOUSETOP
On passing from one country into another, one instinctively expects the
change in sovereignty to be signalized by some distinctive and dramatic
landmark, natural or artificial, such as the Statue of Liberty, the
International Bridge across the Rio Grande, the Iron Gates on the Danube,
the Simplon Tunnel, the Pass of Roncesvalles, or, at the very least,
the black and yellow posts bearing the sign of the double eagle which
marked the Muscovite frontiers in the days of the czars. But there is
nothing distinctive or dramatic about entering Morocco. A few miles after
leaving Lalla Maghnia we saw a red-white-and-blue striped sentry-box,
and, just beyond it, a small, low, whitewashed building over which flew
an unfamiliar flag, a green triangle on a scarlet ground. Tomine brought
the car to a halt; a native official wearing a voluminous cape and a fez
scrutinized our passports, glanced perfunctorily at our luggage, then
waved us on, and we shot across a surveyor’s line into the Shereefian
Empire.
Nine miles more brought us into Oujda, an important garrison town because
it guards Morocco’s eastern gate. Like most frontier cities it is clean,
drab, and quite uninteresting, architecturally at least, for those who
dwell in close proximity to international boundary lines seldom indulge
in buildings of much magnificence, on the theory, I suppose, that
boundaries can be moved by bayonets and that to-morrow they may find
themselves in another country and under another rule. As history shows,
this certainly holds true of Oujda, which, during the long series of
wars between the sultans of Fez and Tlemcen, changed hands many times.
Still, it is a well kept place, with broad, tree-planted thoroughfares
and substantial public buildings, which makes on the visitor a favorable
if not a very lasting impression. The Riffian campaign was in progress
when we were there, and the town was so packed with troops that my memory
harked back to the days of the Great War, the rumble of cannon-wheels and
the measured tramp of troops sounding beneath our windows all night long.
From Oujda onward to Taourirt, Taza, and Fez the road was chock-a-block
with soldiery—cloaked and turbaned spahis perched above their wiry
little ponies in high-peaked saddles of red leather; _tirailleurs_ in
dust-brown khaki (did you happen to know that _khaki_ is the Hindustani
word for dust?); _infanterie coloniale_, bearing on their collars the
anchor which is the distinguishing badge of the corps; tall, slim
riflemen from Senegal, with the thinnest legs in the world, their black
faces smiling cheerily under their high tarbooshes at the prospect of
fighting; a battalion of the _IIme Etranger_, swinging along beneath
their heavy packs at a steady three miles an hour, the sun-bronzed men
lustily roaring the chorus of “La Casquette du Père Bugeaud”; _chasseurs
d’Afrique_, their small, active horses laden with pretty much everything
save the kitchen stove; battery after battery of field-artillery, the
muzzles of the lean _soixante-quinze_ hooded with canvas against the
day when they should speak to the Riffi with the voice of France;
machine-gun companies, guns and ammunition neatly packed on sturdy little
mules; _génie_ with picks and shovels strapped to their knapsacks, ready
to build roads, to construct bridges, or to dig trenches; creaking
pontoon-wagons hauled each by a dozen horses; field-kitchens, steam
rising from the caldrons of soup and coffee; gray staff-cars filled with
officers in pale-blue uniforms and gold-laced képis; ambulances with
staring red crosses painted on their canvas sides—all these told us
that the torrential winter rains were over and that the big spring push
against the _harkas_ of Abd-el-Krim was about to begin. Though of this
war I was but a spectator, and an unofficial one at that, it was good to
see once more the slanting lines of steel, to sniff again the smell of
sweat-soaked leather, to hear the bugles go. For he who has once marched
with armies never fully recovers from their spell.
After Oujda the road was paralleled, a little way off, by the line of
narrow-gage railway which links the standard-gage Algerian system with
Fez. The miniature trains were jammed with troops, and it was noticeable
that the fortified stations were in a state of defense, with sentries
posted at their gates and the muzzles of machine-guns peering from the
loopholes in their walls. If one is willing to put up with delays and
discomforts, it is now feasible to travel by rail right across Morocco,
from the Algerian frontier to Fez and Casablanca and thence southward to
Marrákesh. But it is not a form of transportation which I should advise
at present. We met two Americans who were traveling in a Rolls-Royce
_en prince_, sending their maid and valet ahead by rail so that in each
town at which they stopped everything might be ready for them on their
arrival, their tea waiting, their baths prepared, and fresh clothes
laid out. For the employers it was a most comfortable, nay, luxurious
arrangement, but it was scarcely so enjoyable for the employed. I asked
the valet, an Englishman, how he had found railway travel in Morocco.
He said that, barring the slowness of the trains, which average about
twelve miles an hour; the crowded condition of the carriages, in which
Moroccans, Algerians, Arabs, Sudanese, Jews, and Europeans are packed
indiscriminately; and such minor discomforts as poor ventilation,
suffocating dust, clouds of cinders from the engine, and swarms of fleas,
it was no worse than the London tubes on a bank holiday.
Now that the trouble in the Riff is at an end, however, the French are
making rapid strides in the improvement of the Moroccan railway service,
and before this book is off the press most of the main lines probably
will have been broadened to standard gage, thus permitting the operation
of through trains between points in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The
distance by rail from the Algerian frontier to Marrákesh is 614 miles,
and at present the journey occupies about four days, as the trains do not
run at night. But during the summer of 1925 a service of well equipped
_rapides_ was established between Rabat, the seat of government, and
Casablanca, and steps were being taken to extend it to Marrákesh, the
southern capital. The pacification of the Spanish zone will also permit
the completion of the line to Tangier, which, while providing another
means of access to Morocco, will have the effect of decreasing very
materially the large number of visitors who now enter the country through
Casablanca.
The highway system of Morocco, which is due wholly to French initiative,
though not as extensive as that of Algeria, is on the whole admirable.
Great trunk roads connect Oujda with Fez, Mequinez, Rabat, Casablanca,
and Marrákesh; and from Marrákesh secondary roads radiate to the coast
towns of Mazagan, Safi, and Mogador, and across the Atlas to Agadir,
the seaport and _chef-lieu_ of the Sus. From Mequinez a comparatively
little used highway runs south through Azrou to Timhadit, on the Middle
Atlas plateau, where begins the ancient Imperial Road to Tafilalt, the
ancestral home of the shereefian sultans. There is also a road, none too
good, from Mequinez to Tangier, but that part of it lying within the
Spanish zone has hitherto been none too safe because of the danger of
attack by Riffian tribesmen. The trunk roads of Morocco are paved with
round-headed stones, known as _têtes-du-chat_, which, while somewhat
rough, obviate the danger of slipping in wet weather; but the _pistes
aménagées_, a network of which covers the country, are little better
than trails. I have spoken elsewhere, I believe, of the novel road-signs
in Morocco. These are really sections of whitewashed wall, nearly ten
feet in height and quite indestructible, the names of the towns, the
distances, and direction-signs being visible at a great distance.
Taza, seventy-five miles to the east of Fez, is a considerable
trading-center and a military post of vital importance, because it
commands the broad pass, through which run both road and railway, which
forms the only entrance from Algeria to the Land of the Farthest West.
It has been a bone of contention between rival dynasties and factions
for centuries. On the north side of the pass the terrain runs back in
steadily rising foot-hills which thirty miles away merge into the great
range of the Riff; on the south it rises more abruptly, in a series of
terraces which form the buttresses of the Ghiata mountain group, the home
of a warlike Berber tribe which has long been a source of trouble and
anxiety to the French. This explains why Taza bristles with guns and
bayonets, for once let the fierce Ghiatas swarm down from their mountain
fastnesses to join hands across the pass with their fellow-Berbers of the
Riff and Morocco’s doorway on the east would be closed.
Built on a series of terraces, which rise to a height of two thousand
feet or more, Taza occupies a peculiarly picturesque and romantic
situation. On a narrow shelf above the valley, through which run the
road, the railway, and the River Innaouene, is the fortified camp of the
French garrison, with numerous large barracks for the housing of the
troops. Two hundred and fifty feet above this first shelf rises another,
its edges bordered by sheer cliffs, on which is built the native town, a
dirty, ill kept place of narrow tortuous streets and mud-walled houses,
while high above all, dominating town, camp, and pass alike, is the great
citadel built in the sixteenth century by one of the Abbaside sultans.
Taza is one of the last places on earth where one would expect to find a
good hotel, so imagine our astonishment when Tomine swung the car sharply
between the gate-posts of a white-walled compound, swept up a winding
drive, and came to a halt before the door of one of the most charming
little hostelries that we found in all North Africa. Another example of
the Transatlantique’s enterprise, of course. Though the luncheon hour
was long since past, for we had been delayed by a stretch of atrociously
bad road near Taourirt, we were expected, it seemed, for word of our
impending arrival had been telephoned on from Oujda, and a delicious
_déjeuner_ was on the table. Curious, is it not, how one remembers a
good meal, particularly when it is unexpected, long after more important
things have been forgotten?
Like many other Oriental cities, Fez from a distance appears more
attractive than it really is. It is beautifully situated in a deep and
winding valley, through which meanders the little stream known as the
Wad Fas, dividing the city into two parts: El Bali, the old town, and
El Djadid, the new. Up and down the opposing hill-slopes, which form a
natural amphitheater, run massive, crumbling, pink-brown walls, hoary
with antiquity, broken at frequent intervals by lofty towers and pierced
by numerous imposing gates. Though the grandeur of certain other Eastern
cities is wholly lacking, there is something undeniably impressive in
the sight of that vast expanse of white-walled, flat-roofed habitations,
broken here and there by the tile-incrusted domes and graceful minarets
of the mosques and bordered by a broad fringe of vivid verdure. In fact,
the whole city is embowered in foliage—a diamond set in jade—for the
flanks of the hills which surround it on all sides save the south are
covered with the bright green foliage of orange-groves and the gray green
of the olive-gardens.
By reason of its peculiar situation, rather than of any attempt at
sanitation on the part of its inhabitants, Fez has a drainage system
superior to that of most Moroccan towns. When the accumulations of filth
become intolerable, when the stench of garbage grows overpowering, the
lids of the conduits are opened and the ordinary exits closed, so that
the overflowing waters sweep down the steep streets in a miniature flood
and cleanse the pavements. With that utter disregard of the principles
of hygiene so characteristic of Orientals, the Fasis drink the muddy and
contaminated water of the river in preference to that of the pure springs
which abound in certain quarters of the town. That they do not perish by
the thousands from epidemics is due, I suppose, to the fact that they
have become immune to zymotic diseases by having defied for generations
the elementary principles of hygiene. The town is by no means free from
malaria and typhoid, however, as is betokened by the unhealthy pallor of
its inhabitants, but sallowness is considered a mark of distinction by
the Fasis, as small moles are by Frenchwomen, a ruddy complexion being a
sign that its possessor is not of the ancient aristocracy of Fez.
[Illustration: THE PANORAMA OF THE EAST
Slips by in Fez as on a motion-picture screen. One of the busiest marts
in Barbary, and with one of the most fanatic populations, its steep and
narrow thoroughfares are a kaleidoscope of colors, a bedlam of confusion,
a chaos of sights, smells, and sounds]
The first stone of the city is supposed to have been laid in 808 by the
son of Mulai Idris, the founder of Moslem Morocco, whose sacred banners
are preserved in the Great Mosque, whence they are brought out and their
folds reverently kissed by the sultan on the occasion of great religious
festivals. Though the city has a turbulent and bloody history, having
been besieged no less than eight times in the first five centuries of its
existence, it only once knew foreign masters—when the Turks held it for
a short time in 1554—until the coming of the French. The population is
probably not greatly in excess of seventy-five thousand, of whom perhaps
five per cent are Europeans, though it appears much larger. It is one of
the four capitals of the empire—the others are Mequinez, Marrákesh, and
Rabat—and the sultan usually passes some months there each year.
Fez, or, more properly, Fas, which is the correct spelling and
pronunciation, means “hoe” in Arabic, but it has also given its name to
the round red cap worn by millions of Mohammedans, of whose manufacture
the city had, until quite recent years, a virtual monopoly; for it was
supposed that the dye which imparts to these head-coverings their dull
crimson color could be obtained nowhere else. The dye is obtained from
a berry which grows in profusion in the vicinity, and is also used in
coloring the red Moroccan leather for which the city is famous.
Tomine, as I have already remarked, had no head for direction, and we
circled the whole city three times before he succeeded in finding the
city gate nearest to the Palais Jamaï, the magnificent palace, formerly
the residence of a rich native dignitary, which the Transatlantique
people have transformed into a most picturesque and luxurious hotel.
The Palais Jamaï is superbly situated, its gorgeously painted and
tiled façade rising above a bewilderment of marble-paved terraces and
orange-planted courtyards from the steep hill-slope at the extreme
eastern end of the winding valley in which nestles the town. It is at
some distance from the _souks_ and other points of interest, however,
and somewhat difficult of access; and the other Transatlantique hotel,
situated in the very heart of the city, though far less attractive, would
perhaps be more convenient for those whose visit is limited to a few days.
Because of the narrow and tortuous character of the streets, it is
impossible to reach the Palais Jamaï by car, which must stop outside
the nearest city gate, nearly a quarter of a mile away, whence the
guest perforce makes his way to the hotel on foot through a bewildering
labyrinth of high-walled, roughly paved, foul-smelling lanes, courtyards,
and passages, followed by a throng of whining beggars and shrieking
children, while a small army of bare-legged porters descend upon the
traveler’s luggage, over which they wrangle like pirates over booty,
each man eventually bearing a single piece, no matter how small, off
to the hotel on his head. The hotel, while modernly furnished, is not
particularly comfortable as European hostelries go, for the interior
arrangements of a Moorish palace are not adapted to the requirements of
Americans, who demand an amplitude of bath-rooms, closet space, heat,
air, and light. We, however, being old travelers, gave scant heed
to such minor inconveniences particularly as we found that the rooms
reserved for us had been those formerly occupied by the pasha’s favorite
wife, the door opening upon a fascinating little walled garden, where
all day long the waters of a marble fountain splashed pleasantly amid
masses of pink and crimson roses and orange-trees heavy with their golden
fruit. In such surroundings, with a bevy of comely damsels in diaphanous
garments to help while away the hours and negro slaves to supply every
want, one could remain in Fez indefinitely, “the world forgetting and by
the world forgot.”
* * * * *
As this makes no pretensions to be a guide-book, I have no intention of
enumerating at any length the various sights of Fez, but there are two or
three which should on no account be overlooked. The city’s most important
building is, of course, the Karueein, celebrated as the largest mosque
in Africa, though it is by no means the most magnificent. As in the case
of all the mosques of Morocco, its sacred precincts may not be profaned
by the feet of unbelievers, even when slipper-shod, but, by refraining
from conspicuousness and by the judicious bestowal of bakshish, one may
obtain glimpses of portions of its interior from the roofs of adjoining
buildings. Because of the vast area which it covers, the roof, supported
by 366 stone pillars, appears very low. The enormous chandelier which
hangs above the central nave is said to weigh more than three quarters of
a ton and to have upward of half a thousand lights, though they are very
seldom lit, as they require a dozen gallons of oil for a single filling.
Attached to the Karueein mosque is a _mederseh_, or college, attended
by theological students who come hither from all parts of North Africa,
though in steadily decreasing numbers. They pay no tuition nor rent,
but buy the keys of the tiny rooms in which they sleep from the last
occupants, selling them again on leaving.
In the early days of Moslem rule in Morocco, Fez was the seat of
learning and the empire’s pride. Its schools of theology, philosophy,
and astronomy enjoyed an enviable reputation not only throughout the
world of Islam but in southern Europe as well, and were even attended
by Christians. On the expulsion of the Moors from Spain at the close of
the fifteenth century, thousands of refugees flocked to Fez, bringing
with them some knowledge of the arts, sciences, and industries which had
been developed in the peninsula, and thither also went large numbers of
students to make use of the extensive libraries, which were surpassed in
Africa only by those of Cairo. But its glories were not of long duration,
and though still “the university town” of Morocco, Fez retains but a
shadow of its one-time greatness.
The mosque of Mulai Idris, built by the founder of Fez about 810, is
considered so sacrosanct that before the coming of the French the streets
which approach its entrance were forbidden to Christians, Jews, or
four-footed beasts, all three being included in the same category. This
prohibition is no longer in force, but the sanctity of the shrine still
draws great crowds of the faithful, whose fanaticism makes it highly
inadvisable for an unbeliever to linger in the immediate vicinity over
long. Across the way is a home for friendless or impoverished _sherifas_,
as the female descendants of the Prophet are called.
[Illustration: FORBIDDEN TO ALL SAVE THE FAITHFUL
Built upward of eleven hundred years ago, and famous throughout North
Africa for the beauty of its tiles and carvings, the mosque of Mulai
Idris, in Fez, is considered so sacred that, until the French came,
Christians, Jews, and four-footed animals were not even permitted to use
the streets which approach its entrance]
Three minutes walk from the Hôtel Transatlantique—the one in the town,
I mean—is the museum, established by the French in a former palace. It
contains the usual collection of antiquities, wood-carvings, faiences,
plaster-work, illuminated manuscripts, embroideries, carpets, saddlery,
and arms, and in the courtyard a number of ancient cannon of all kinds
and calibers, Spanish, Portuguese, and corsair. But the most interesting
object in the museum, to my way of thinking at least, is a stoutly built
cage, about four feet square, of wood and iron. In this cage, scarcely
large enough to contain a good-sized dog, was confined for a year the
pretender, Bou Hamara—“the man on a she-ass”—or El Roghi, as he was
commonly known. Miss Sophie Denison, an English medical missionary who
has lived in Fez for more than a third of a century, told me that she
witnessed the entry into the city of the captive atop a swaying camel—a
miserable, long-haired, unkempt, half-starved creature clinging to
the bars of his cage. After being exhibited for weeks in the public
market-place, the wretched man was shot by order of Mulai Hafid and his
body thrown to the sultan’s lions, which, however, refused to touch it.
Of Bou Hamara’s followers, twenty-four had their hands and feet cut off
by butchers, the occasion being celebrated as a public holiday. Though
the stumps were plunged in boiling fat to check the bleeding, only one
of the victims gratified the cruelty of the sultan by surviving. You may
see him for yourself, almost any day—a miserable creature, half-man,
half-beast, shambling through the narrow streets or crouching beside the
door of a mosque pleading for alms. All this, you will bear in mind, was
not back in the Dark Ages, when such tortures were commonplaces, but only
a few years ago—in 1909, to be exact—when William H. Taft sat in the
White House and Andrew Carnegie was preaching the doctrine of universal
peace and brotherhood. That Bou Hamara’s cage should now be an object
of curiosity in a museum of the very city where it filled its dreadful
purpose less than two decades ago, in itself provides convincing proof
of what the French have done to bring justice and decency to Morocco.
The _souks_ of Fez, though not so extensive as those of Tunis or
Marrákesh, are places of endless variety, interest, and delight. Shopping
or sight-seeing in the native city is tiring work, however, for the
majority of the streets are much too narrow to permit the use of cars or
carriages and hence can be visited only afoot or astride a mule. As the
houses are high and in many cases all but meet above the narrow footways,
the latter are often not much more than damp and gloomy tunnels; but the
bazaar streets are usually shaded by awnings, canopies of palm-leaves,
or growing vines, through which the sunlight sifts to dapple with
ever-changing patterns the worn stone pavement and the walls of the old,
old houses. Most of the buildings in Fez are built of wooden beams, rough
stone, and plaster, so that the city as a whole does not present that
ruined, half-decayed appearance so common in other Moorish towns where a
sort of stucco made from mud is the material principally employed.
As is the case in all Oriental cities, the _souks_ of Fez consist of
a labyrinth of exceedingly narrow lanes and passageways, lined on
either side by hole-in-the-wall shops, most of which are so small that
there is no room for customers, who have to do their bargaining from
outside. Though improved means of communication have deprived the city
of the eminence it once held as the greatest center of the caravan
trade in western Barbary and as a market for Oriental goods of all
kinds, it is still noted for the manufacture of certain characteristic
wares, including _haiks_ of wool and silk, women’s embroidered sashes,
handkerchiefs of silk and cotton, silk cords and braids, curved knives
with hilts of gold or silver and beautifully damascened blades,
long-barreled Moorish rifles, their stocks inlaid with ivory or set with
semiprecious stones, native musical instruments, rude painted pottery,
hammered brassware, which, however, cannot compare with that produced in
Damascus, the glazed tiles so universally used in Moorish architecture,
and, of course, innumerable articles—slippers, book-covers, belts,
pouches, saddlery—made from the celebrated Moroccan leather. This leather
is dyed in every color, though the most satisfactory tints are yellow,
pomegranate, and a gorgeous vermilion, but in purchasing articles made
from it one should be careful to see that he gets the genuine goatskin
instead of split cowhide. During my stay in Morocco it amused me to buy
a leather cushion-cover in every city which I visited, all different in
color and each bearing in silk embroidery a design characteristic of the
town from which it came. Few visitors leave Fez without purchasing a pair
or more of the heelless Moorish slippers, but it should be remembered
that only the yellow ones are worn by men, those in other colors and
often gorgeously embroidered in gold or silver thread being intended for
women’s use. Perhaps the most attractive articles to buy in Fez, and
not to be found elsewhere in Morocco, are the exquisitely hand-tooled
portfolios and book-covers, which in richness of design and delicacy of
workmanship compare very favorably with the finest work of the Florentine
craftsman. Really fine examples are expensive, it is true, but they are
generally worth the prices demanded, which can, moreover, generally be
reduced if one has the patience and knows how to bargain. I remember with
regret one superb portfolio for which the maker demanded the equivalent
of twenty dollars. Some months later I saw the same portfolio, or one
identically like it, in Washington, where it was priced at exactly five
times the sum for which I could have bought it in Fez.
* * * * *
When we were in Fez in 1924, and again in 1925, we were made to feel very
much at home by the warm welcome which we received from the commander
of the French troops, General Vicomte de Chambrun, a grandson of the
Marquis de Lafayette, and from the general’s American wife, who is a
sister of Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House of Representatives.
They occupy a charming Moorish palace, surrounded by lovely gardens; and
some of my pleasantest recollections are of the luncheons and dinners
which we had there, the long table lined by beautifully gowned women and
by officers whose rows of campaign ribbons showed that they had lived
more stories than Kipling or Conrad could invent. After dinner we would
sit on the terrace beneath the stars, enveloped in the fragrance of the
soft African night, the momentary flare of a match as some one struck a
cigarette serving to light up the pale-blue uniforms of the men and the
white shoulders of the women. The conversation was more fascinating than
any book of fiction—narratives of adventure in the world’s dark corners,
of skirmishes with the masked Touareg of the Sahara, of the secret
plans of the great Senussi Brotherhood, of lion-hunts in Somaliland and
tiger-hunts in Cambodia, of life in the penal colonies of New Caledonia
and Devil’s Island, of encounters with slave-traders and gun-runners, of
the plots of German spies and Moorish rebels and Syrian malcontents and
Islamic emissaries, of broken noblemen who had found refuge in the Legion
and of erring women who had found their way into Mohammedan harems, of
little wars all over the world which had never found their way into the
history-books, story succeeding story, “Now I remember” following “That
reminds me of,” until the crescent moon swung low to the morn, and the
soldier servants brought our wraps, and we made our way to the hotel
through dark deserted ways which echoed noisily our footsteps.
[Illustration: IN THE CITY WHICH GAVE THE FEZ ITS NAME
In Fez, high on the wall of an old, old building, is a row of great
bronze gongs whose reverberating tones tell the hours to the people of
the ancient city. One of the most curious clocks in the world
The _souks_ of Fez are covered with strips of matting, or canopies of
palm-leaves, or trellises of vines, through which the sunlight, sifted
and softened, falls in patterns of lace-like delicacy upon the uneven
pavements]
Smoking a last cigar at night on the terrace of the Palais Jamaï, my
curiosity was aroused by the shrill, quavering cries, half-calls,
half-chants, which rose at regular intervals from the sleeping city.
At first I assumed that they came from night-watchmen, making their
lonely rounds, or from a muezzin summoning the faithful to some form of
midnight prayer, but I found on inquiry that they were the voices of the
Companions of the Sick, a most curious and interesting organization.
Long years ago, it seemed, a pious and wealthy resident of Fez left upon
his death an enormous diamond with a provision in his will that it be
disposed of and the income from the proceeds used to employ a number of
readers with good voices, who, it was specified, were to chant _suras_
from the Koran at half-hour intervals throughout the night from the
_mederseh_ so that the sick might have the consolation of religion.
Though I rather imagine that the income from the sale of the great
diamond has long since been exhausted, the custom has been continued for
many years, and all through the night the voices of the unseen readers
rise from the darkness to remind the ill and wakeful that they shall
attain paradise who believe in Allah and follow the teachings of his
Prophet.
The Companions of the Sick are in reality a Moorish version of the
radio-sets which our Western civilization has placed in so many hospitals
and sick-rooms. It is true that they refer to God as Allah, and that
instead of praising Christ they extol Mohammed, but the message of
consolation, whether it be chanted from Moroccan housetops or broadcast
from American pulpits, is much the same: “In the name of God the
compassionate! Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds, the Sovereign of
the day of judgment! Thee do we worship and of Thee do we beg assistance.
Direct us in the right way; in the way of those to whom Thou hast been
gracious, on whom there is no wrath, and who go not astray....”
The Palace of Bou Djeloud, in which Sultan Mulai Hafid signed the treaty
accepting a French protectorate over his country—the room is marked with
a tablet suitably inscribed—is now occupied by the resident-general on
his periodic visits to Fez. It is a low, rambling structure, not at all
imposing; but the carved and gilded ceilings and the polychrome Moorish
decorations of some of the apartments are very lovely, and the gardens,
filled with trees and flowers and dotted with marble fountains, are
places of walled delight. Like all Moorish dwellings, however, it is
inadequately heated and must be very cold and damp in winter, when the
streets of Fez are sometimes white with snow. Climatically, Fez is a city
of extremes, the mercury often dropping to far below freezing during the
winter months and in summer occasionally rising to one hundred or even
more. I remember one night in late May when the thermometer showed a
temperature of ninety-three degrees in our room.
In Fez, as in most Eastern cities, the houses have flat roofs, which,
when the heat of the day has passed, are favorite gathering-places for
the women, this being, indeed, the only hour of the twenty-four when they
are permitted to appear in the open air unveiled. In consequence of this
custom, the roof is virtually taboo to the male members of a household,
for the dwellings are so close together that a man could easily see the
face of his neighbor’s wife—a breach of Moslem etiquette not readily
forgiven. In the event that necessary repairs have to be made to a roof,
one of the female members of the family invariably ascends first and
warns her neighbors, whereupon they disappear from sight until the work
is completed and the man has taken his departure.
To this rule, however, the Palais Jamaï, whose lofty roofs command an
unrivaled view of the town, is for some reason an exception, presumably
on the ground that if its European guests take it into their heads to go
up on the roof they will probably do it anyway, and that there is no use
in making objections. We always made it a point, therefore, to ascend
to the top of the battlemented tower which forms a portion of the hotel
in order to enjoy the magnificent panorama to be viewed from there at
close of day, when the last rays of the westering sun turn the square,
dazzlingly white buildings into cubes of pearl gray faintly tinged with
rose. At this hour every housetop has its little group of women, all clad
in their best and gayest gowns, the splotches of inconceivably vivid
colors—pink, magenta, scarlet, crimson, bright purple, pomegranate, burnt
umber, pale yellow, apple green, turquoise blue, white and silver, black
and gold—when seen against the background of plastered walls and roofs,
looking like gorgeous nosegays tossed here and there upon a vast white
sheet.
From the shelter afforded by the battlements—for it did not seem wise
to defy Moslem prejudices by displaying myself in the open—I could see
the features of the women on the adjoining housetops with the aid of my
field-glasses quite distinctly, very much as though I were looking down
from the balcony of a theater at the chorus assembled on the stage.
Most of the women, it must be confessed, were quite unattractive, and
I approved of their wearing veils when on the street, but some of the
younger girls were really lovely, with peaches-and-cream complexions and
great languishing eyes. There was one in particular, I remember, a slim
and most alluring creature with a creamy skin and masses of blue-black
hair. With her I carried on a long-distance flirtation for several
evenings running, and there even came a time when she grew bold enough
to beckon to me, but her husband must have become suspicious, for I saw
a man suddenly appear upon the roof and, seizing her by the wrist, drag
her from my sight. I never caught another glimpse of her. Romance would
suggest that she died by poisoned coffee or the bowstring, but the truth
of the matter probably is that she got off with a sound spanking. For
most Moorish husbands would heartily applaud the sentiments expressed in
the ancient ditty:
A woman, a dog, and a hickory-tree—
The more you beat them the better they be.
Rising above the sea of housetops are scores of lofty square towers—the
minarets of the mosques—the ancient rose-brown brick of which they are
constructed being incrusted with lustrous tiles in the marvelous “lost”
shade of peacock blue. Five minutes before sunset a large white flag
is broken out from the flag-staff which rises like a gallows from the
summit of each of the minarets as a signal to the waiting faithful that
the mosque is open for worship, so that for a brief period it looks as
though the whole city were flying flags of truce. Just as the upper arc
of the sun disappears in crimson glory behind the western hills, there
reverberates across the city the sullen boom of the sunset-gun, whereupon
white-robed muezzins appear as though by magic on the balconies of the
minarets, like the carven figures which pop out of cuckoo-clocks, and
intone in a high, clear key the “_Haya alla Salat! Haya alla Falah!_”
which is the Moslems’ church-bell.
[Illustration: MOROCCAN VAUDEVILLE
One member of the team entertains his audience by swallowing living
serpents—
While his companion awes the credulous onlookers by setting tinder aflame
with his breath]
Adjoining the Palais Jamaï was the residence of a wealthy Moorish pasha,
whose numerous wives, daughters, and concubines always strolled amid
the flowers and orange-trees of the high-walled garden as evening drew
near. From the vantage-point afforded by the roof of the hotel we could
look directly down upon them. Upon sighting me, or any of the other male
guests, they would disappear into the shrubbery like startled fawns, but
when my daughter waved to them they timidly waved back, the wordless
acquaintance thus begun culminating by their beckoning her to come down
and join them. The following afternoon she disappeared and did not return
until just before the dinner-hour, when she burst into the room, her arms
filled with flowers, native sweetmeats, and embroideries.
“Where on earth have you been?” Mrs. Powell demanded.
“I’ve been to tea in a Moorish harem,” was the casual reply, “and I’ve
had a wonderful time. The pasha himself made green mint tea for me, and
his wives—at least, I suppose that they are his wives, for they seemed
very affectionate with him—gave me these embroideries which they had made
themselves, and the cutest little negro slave-girls passed some sort of
perfumed sherbet and all kinds of sticky candies on big brass trays, and
I’m invited to take tea with them again to-morrow, and to bring you with
me, mother.”
“What did they say about me?” I inquired. “Am I not invited to the party?”
“You are not,” my daughter replied firmly. “I couldn’t quite make out
what the pasha said about you, because his French isn’t very good, but he
pointed up to the roof of the hotel and then drew his finger across his
throat, which I interpreted as meaning that you had better keep out of
sight while his wives are walking in the garden.”
Nearly every one who has remained for any length of time in Fez will
doubtless recall having seen in the streets of the native city a slight,
sweet-faced European woman clad in the snowy _keffieh_ and burnous of a
high-caste Moslem woman. This is Miss Sophie Denison, an English medical
missionary who has lived in Fez for five-and-thirty years. In her little
home in the crowded districts of the old city she has a clinic and a
dispensary where she treats hundreds of the poor without charge, and, in
cases of serious illness, visits them in their homes. She is _persona
gratissima_ in every home, be it palace or hovel, in Fez, and she is
probably more closely in touch with native life than any other European,
not even excepting the agents of the French intelligence service; for,
being a woman, she is permitted to enter the harems, to which male
physicians are refused admittance save in cases of the very gravest
illness, and not always then.
One evening Miss Denison dined with us at the hotel, and so intensely
interesting was her conversation that midnight had come and gone before
we would permit her to take her departure. Naturally I insisted on
accompanying her home, but she would not hear of it.
“I am perfectly safe in the streets at night,” she explained, “because
every one knows me, but the native city is not a healthy place for a
stranger to be wandering about alone after nightfall. Besides, as you do
not speak Arabic, you could never find your way back alone through these
tangled alleyways.”
So I accompanied her only to the compound gate and watched her until her
white burnous had become a mere blur amid the purple shadows cast by the
high, mysterious walls. Such as she, and not the fighting-men, are the
real advance-guards of civilization.
* * * * *
A mile or so without the walls of the Moorish city the French, as is
their custom in all their African possessions, are building a modern
town, so that the two races may live apart, thus avoiding the unfortunate
incidents which are certain to arise when Europeans and natives live in
close proximity, as, for example, in Cairo. Here, in the _ville moderne_
as it is called, the civil government is engaged in laying out broad,
tree-planted boulevards, in erecting blocks of buildings for business
purposes and rows of pleasant little villas, and in installing systems of
drainage, light, and water. They do such things well, the French—not on
such a lavish scale, perhaps, as we have done them in the Philippines,
the Canal Zone, and elsewhere, but certainly better than anything I have
seen in the British colonies.
A short distance beyond the _ville moderne_ is the great French military
camp, and, beyond that in turn, the broad expanse of the aviation field,
which, when we were there the last time, was crowded with pursuit and
bombing planes assembled for the campaign in the Riff, Abd-el-Krim’s
advanced-posts being at that time barely twenty-five miles from the
city. Had the Riffian leader succeeded in reaching Fez—and he came much
nearer to doing so than the French like to admit—there is no telling
what would have happened, for a certain fanatic element, stirred up
by secret emissaries from the Riff, was ripe for trouble, and the wild
mountain tribes on the east were eagerly awaiting an opportunity to
sweep down upon the town, as they had done a dozen years before. We were
reminded daily of our proximity to the actual battle-line by the bombing
planes which were constantly flying over the city. Regularly, as we were
sitting down to _déjeuner_ on the terrace of the hotel, a squadron of
bombers, their noses pointed toward the north, their gray wings gleaming
like silver in the sunlight, would go booming overhead to drop the steel
calling-cards of France on Abd-el-Krim, and, before the salad had been
served, we would sight them again, black specks against the vault of
blue, hastening back for more.
* * * * *
It was our great good fortune to arrive at Fez in time to witness the
remarkable religious ceremony known as the Great Prayer, which marks the
close of the fasting month of Ramadan. It was held on a broad and grassy
plain a few miles without the walls of the town, which was crowded with
pious and picturesque pilgrims who had come hither for the occasion from
every part of Morocco. Day broke to reveal gathered on the plain such
an assemblage, at least in point of color, as I have seldom seen. Here
were men representative of every district within the empire, of every
class and condition: fierce-looking tribesmen who had come down from the
hills on horses and others who had come up from the desert astride of
camels; portly townsmen and horny-handed, sun-bronzed peasants; mullahs
in snowy turbans and hadjis with the green scarfs which show that their
wearers have made the pilgrimage to Mecca; pashas on curveting chargers,
nomad sheikhs on _méhari_ racing camels, wealthy merchants on richly
caparisoned mules, villagers on donkeys so diminutive that the riders’
feet all but touched the ground, closely veiled women and children in
screaming calicoes crowded into creaking carts drawn by plodding oxen;
and thousands upon thousands of the poor but pious plodding along on foot.
[Illustration: THE GREAT PRAYER OUTSIDE OF FEZ
Their faces turned toward Mecca, thousands of pious pilgrims prostrate
themselves in prayer
With Nubian slaves to hold his stirrup, the Khalifa mounts his horse]
In the center of the plain had been erected of whitewashed bricks a sort
of pulpit, its _mihrab_ carefully oriented toward Mecca. This was the
focus of the gathering, for from it the faithful were to be addressed
by the khalifa, the sultan’s brother, and toward it, as though drawn
by a magnet, the dusty thousands made their way, to seat themselves
cross-legged on the acres of grass matting which had been provided for
the purpose, and to await the opening of the ceremony with true Eastern
patience.
After an hour’s wait in the pleasant morning sunshine—a delay which
passed quickly because of the curious and colorful types to be seen on
every hand—there emerged from the nearest of the city gates a long and
glittering procession, its stately advance across the plain heralded by a
fanfare of trumpets and the boom of cannon. It was headed by a squadron
of _chasseurs d’Afrique_ resplendent in their sky-blue and scarlet
uniforms, for the French are past masters in the art of flattering their
Moslem subjects by showing their respect for the Mohammedan religion.
After these came a cavalcade of high religious dignitaries, grave-faced,
bearded, patriarchal men in snowy garments and turbans bound about with
green, astride splendid black mules of the Andalusian breed, which are
smoother of gait and far more costly than horses. Then a large group of
caïds, emirs, sheikhs, and other native chieftains, their restive, wiry
horses magnificently caparisoned, the bridles of scarlet leather heavy
with gold and silver, the velvet saddle-cloths in some cases sweeping
the ground. Each chieftain was accompanied by a retainer bearing aloft
a great religious banner, the folds of green or scarlet silk embroidered
in gold with _suras_ from the Koran. A little interval ensued, and
then, between double files of shereefian foot-guards in zouave uniforms
of blue, red, and yellow, came the khalifa himself, brother and
representative of the sultan—a sallow-skinned man with a thin fringe of
beard along the chin, muffled in a hooded burnous of pale-blue broadcloth
and mounted on a cream-colored Arab stallion. Negro slaves walked, or
trotted rather, at his stirrups, and behind rode a brilliant entourage of
religious and civil functionaries, caïds, pashas, emirs, sheikhs, cadis,
and courtiers, wearing costumes bewildering in their variety and color.
As the cortège debouched upon the plain, a great horde of tribal
horsemen, who had been massed upon the flanks of the encircling hills,
suddenly set spurs to their horses and came thundering down the slopes
in a torrent of barbaric color, standing in their stirrups, brandishing
naked simitars and long-barreled rifles, their standards flapping in
the breeze and their burnouses floating out behind them. As they rode
they shouted the resonant, deep-throated battle-cry of their faith,
“_Ul-ul-ul-ul-ul-ullah Akbar-r-r!_” which came to our ears like the
growing roar of an advancing sea. It was intended as a purely peaceful
demonstration, a greeting to the head of their church and state
as represented by his khalifa, but there was something peculiarly
significant and subtly menacing about it to our little group of
Europeans, a mere islet of unbelievers lost in a Moslem sea.
Arriving at the pulpit-shrine which had been erected in the center of
the plain, the khalifa, assisted by his negro slaves, dismounted, as
did the other chiefs and dignitaries, while the horsemen bearing the
standards ranged themselves in a vast semicircle in the rear, their
green and scarlet _bairags_, surmounted by the golden crescent, forming
a fitting background for the amazing scene. The services consisted of an
interminable and impassioned sermon by some high dignitary of the church,
corresponding, I presume, to the Turkish Sheikh-ul-Islam, and a rather
brief address by the khalifa. Then, at a given signal, the whole vast
assemblage—Berbers, Arabs, and Moors, men who had come from regions as
far apart as the Riff and the Sus, the shores of the Atlantic and the
edges of the Great Sahara, men of many tribes and speaking many tongues,
but all bound together by the ties of a common religion—rose as one,
and, with their faces turned toward the Holy City, intoned in chorus
the tremendously impressive _shehada_, the stanzas which constitute the
Moslem’s confession of his faith.... _Ash hadu illa illaha ill Allah!
Wa ash hadu inna Mohammed an rasool Allah!_ As the white-clad thousands
prostrated themselves in prayer, and rose, and knelt again, their voices
rising in deep-throated supplication, it seemed as though I were looking
down the tossing billows of a mighty sea. And, in fact, I was, for this
mighty concourse represented an arm of that Islamic ocean which has all
but overspread two great continents and broken upon the shores of a third.
CHAPTER XXI
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SHEREEFIAN UMBRELLA
Morocco is unique among the countries of the world in that it has four
capitals—Fez, Mequinez, Marrákesh, Rabat—and the names of all save the
last, which is the seat of the French administration as well as one of
the imperial residences, are spelled in various ways and have various
pronunciations. Take, for example, the case of the second city I have
mentioned. If you are English you will call it Meknes; if French,
Mekinez; if Spanish, Mequinez; but the Moroccans themselves speak of it
as Miknasa.
Seen from a distance, Mequinez—which is the orthography which I happen
to like best and to which I am accustomed—gives promise of being an
Arabian Nights sort of city, a place of mystery and enchantment; for
its crumbling walls, mellowed by years and weather to a lovely reddish
brown, broken at frequent intervals by massive, foursquare towers, and
pierced by nine imposing gates, rise abruptly on the east from the edge
of a broad ravine, which separates the ancient native city from the
modern town which has been erected by the French. Towering above the
flat-roofed houses, like fingers pointing toward heaven, are numerous
beautifully proportioned minarets, their faces inlaid with mosaics of
blue-green-and-yellow faience tiling; and in the outskirts white palaces
and villas peep coyly from amid the gray green of the olive-groves
and the more vivid foliage of the orange-gardens. Yet within the walls
disappointment awaits the visitor, for the buildings are, on the whole,
quite unimpressive; there are no mosques which can compare with those
of Tunis, Kairouan, and Tlemcen; and the place is wholly lacking in the
picturesque and colorful street scenes which constitute the chief charm
of Fez. The sights of Mequinez may, indeed, be numbered on the fingers
of a single hand, the finest of them, perhaps, being the panorama of the
city as viewed from the terrace of the Hôtel Transatlantique, on the
eastern bank of the ravine, in the early morning or at sunset.
[Illustration: THE HARKAS COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS
_Real_ sheikhs; not the Hollywood kind
The _bairaq_, or standard, of a Berber tribe]
Most of the nine gateways which give access to the city are quite
mediocre; but one, the Bab Bardain, has some fine old tilings, and the
decorations of another, the Mansour Gate, are superb. The latter, one of
the most imposing city entrances in all Morocco, consists of a colossal
ogive arch flanked by huge square towers into the bases of which are set
marble columns appropriated by the Moorish builders from the Roman ruins
at Volubilis. The façades of both gate and towers are set with lustrous
jade-green tiles overlaid with amazingly intricate arabesque designs in
blue and yellow, so that the structure, when the sun strikes upon it,
seems to be incrusted with enamel. On a sort of frieze above the arch a
pious Arabic inscription stands forth in bold black characters. It is
just the sort of a gate from which, to complete the picture, should come
riding Harun al Rashid or Suleiman the Magnificent; but the first time I
set eyes upon it an enormous yellow autobus, crowded with frowzy-looking
native passengers and piled high with their heterogeneous possessions,
was _en panne_ beneath the arch, defiling the air with the noxious fumes
from its exhaust and completely blocking traffic.
Five minutes of brisk walking through the narrow, abominably rough
streets of the inner city bring one to the weed-grown cemetery which
contains the venerated tomb of Mohammed ben Aïssa, patron saint of
Mequinez and founder of that strange mystic fraternity known as the
Aïssaoua, whose members, scattered throughout North Africa, emphasize
their piety by eating broken glass, swallowing live serpents, gashing
themselves with knives, and indulging in other such-like pleasantries.
From the cemetery the _controleur civil_, who had constituted himself
our cicerone and guide, conducted us to a salesroom which has been
established by the French for the encouragement of native handicrafts,
where we purchased a few specimens of Miknasa embroidery and leather-work
which were superior to anything we saw in the extremely mediocre _souks_.
He also promised to introduce us to a very holy man, a “living saint,”
who has won a great local reputation by refusing to accept alms, but the
saint was not at home. This was very disappointing, as my acquaintance
with saints is confined to those who have been planted for some centuries
under several feet of earth and marble, and I certainly had never had the
privilege of meeting a Moslem holy man who not only did not ask for money
but actually declined it when it was offered to him. No wonder that this
unique character enjoyed the honor of canonization while still living!
The one outstanding feature of Mequinez, however, is the enormous ruined
palace commenced in 1634 by Sultan Mulai Ismail and never completed,
and the adjoining mosque, which serves as the royal builder’s tomb.
Ismail the Bloodthirsty, as he was dubbed by his terrorized subjects,
was one of the most remarkable figures which the shereefian dynasties
have produced. A man of wonderful vitality, as was proved by the many
hundreds of sons and countless daughters who were born to him in a harem
surpassing that of Solomon, his reign lasted for five-and-fifty years,
during which his fierce grasp on the empire never relaxed and his lust
for blood and women never slackened. Having, as he supposed, driven the
English from Tangier, he besieged the Spanish stronghold of Ceuta for
more than a quarter of a century in the hope of driving the last infidel
from the soil of Morocco; but otherwise his military operations were
confined to the extermination of internal enemies, which he accomplished
effectively and bloodily with the aid of his negro household troops, the
Bokharis—a Moorish version of the Turkish Janizaries—and of a foreign
legion composed of renegade soldiers of fortune and adventurers from many
countries. With his negro guards and foreign mercenaries ready to execute
unhesitatingly his every behest, Ismail ruled with an iron and bloody
hand an empire which stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to
Timbuktu and from the coast of the Atlantic to the frontiers of Egypt.
Perhaps the most picturesque incident in a life which was filled with
wars, intrigues, and amours was Ismail’s infatuation for the Duchesse de
Montpensier, niece of Louis XIII and cousin of Le Roi Soleil—La Grande
Mademoiselle, as she was called—then at the height of her fame and
loveliness and the greatest catch in Europe. His interest in the princess
was aroused when the French ambassador at the shereefian court showed
him a miniature of her. Charmed by her delicate and patrician beauty,
the sultan, whose slightest wish was law within his own vast domains,
determined to add her to his matrimonial establishment, which was at the
time somewhat short of blondes. Even Louis XIV hesitated to antagonize
a monarch so powerful as Ismail by bluntly refusing his request for his
cousin’s hand, while the princess herself, though amused and doubtless
intrigued by the imperial proposal, had no intention of exchanging the
luxuries of the Louvre and Versailles for the uncertainties of a harem in
Barbary.
“Tell your princess,” the sultan instructed the French ambassador when
informed of her misgivings, “that here in Mequinez I will build her a
palace compared with which your boasted Versailles shall be a pigsty.”
The Prince of True Believers lost no time in making good his word.
Thousands of Christian slaves, captured by the Sallee rovers, provided
the labor; rare marbles were ready to hand in the ruins of Volubilis
a few miles away; the richly tiled walls and exquisite carvings were
executed by the most skilful Moorish craftsmen. Before the work was
completed, however, Ismail passed to the Moslem paradise, but the ruins
which remain testify to the stupendous size of the palace which he
was erecting for the Roumi princess who would not have him. The outer
walls of the building, which are twenty-five feet thick and four miles
in circumference, inclose a bewildering congeries of palaces, kiosks,
offices, barracks, passages, courtyards, arcades, and gardens. Hard by
stood the imperial stables, with accommodations for eleven thousand
horses, which surely would have put the _écuries_ of the king of France
to shame. As for the Grande Mademoiselle, she eventually married an
impecunious young Gascon named de Lazun, whom she left, however, when,
upon his return from the hunt, he threw himself into a chair and shouted
at her, “Pull off my boots, Louise d’Orléans!”
A mile or so beyond the ruins of Ismail’s palace is a military school
established by the French for native princes, a sort of miniature
West Point, where the sons of caïds, pashas, emirs, and sheikhs are
fitted for commissions in the army. It is a small but beautifully kept
establishment, though I imagine that those who have slept on the narrow
iron beds allotted to cadets at the great military university on the
Hudson would be somewhat astonished at the pillow-heaped divans on which
the young nobles rest from their arduous exercises; but the discipline
is very rigid, and those who successfully complete the course are
fully qualified to take their place at the head of squadrons of spahi
cavalry. Connected with the school is a _haras_ and remount depot, where
horses imported from France, Ireland, and Hungary are crossed with that
hot-blooded desert breed, the Barb, to which Barbary gave its name. It
is interesting to note, by the way, that a very large proportion of the
horses now on the English turf trace their descent from the Godolphin
Barb, the famous sire which was brought into England from Morocco during
the reign of George II.
Less than an hour by motor-car to the north of Mequinez, by a steep
and winding road which can be perilously slippery in wet weather, is
the ancient and curious town of Mulai Idris en Zarhon, which might be
described as the Mount Vernon of Morocco in that it is the burial-place
of Mulai Idris ben Abdallah, founder of the Moorish Empire and first
ruler of the shereefian line, around whose highly venerated shrine
the place has grown. Because of its extreme sanctity, which annually
draws thousands of pilgrims from all corners of the Islamic world,
it was forbidden to unbelievers until the French occupation; and the
only European who is known to have entered its gates before 1912 was
an English traveler, James Jackson, who managed to pay it a hurried
visit in disguise in 1801. It is one of the most picturesquely situated
communities in all North Africa, its square white buildings, crowded
together and dominated by the shrine of the sultan-saint, clinging to
the precipitous slopes of a spur of the Zarhon Range, which here runs
down into a wild and romantic glen. The town is walled, and access to it
is through an extremely narrow gate, the last few hundred yards of road
being so extremely steep that I questioned whether even our powerful
Renault would be able to make the grade. There is little of interest
in the place save the shrine itself, which is considered so sacrosanct
that non-Moslems may not even approach, much less enter it. There are no
Europeans in Mulai Idris, and we did not remain there very long, for the
inhabitants are extremely fanatical, and the atmosphere was anything but
friendly. This attitude of intolerance was unpleasantly illustrated when,
at a bend in the road, half a mile outside the gate, I ordered Tomine
to stop the car in order that I might obtain a photograph of the city,
which, perched on its lofty crag, with the purple masses of the Middle
Atlas for a background, looked very lovely in the golden glow of late
afternoon. But a group of natives, who had hurried up when I unslung my
camera, became so menacing that in order to avert an unpleasant episode I
continued on my way—not, however, until I had surreptitiously snapped a
picture.
Twice yearly, in the spring and in the fall, Mulai Idris is the scene of
great religious festivals, when the town is thronged with eager pilgrims,
many of whom come from as far away as Turkey and the Red Sea countries.
On these occasions take place the revolting performances of the
Hamadchas, an African order of dervishes, who, after working themselves
into a state of religious frenzy during which they are supposed to be
unconscious of their actions and insensible to pain, bite off the heads
of living serpents, handle red-hot iron, gash themselves horribly with
knives, and hold glowing coals on their tongues. I have witnessed similar
exhibitions many times during the course of my wanderings in Western and
Middle Asia, but I remember most distinctly one which I saw a good many
years ago in a small town near Tetuan. After the usual program had been
completed, one of the fanatics, a half-demented creature with sunken eyes
and a great shock of long hair, whose finger-nails had been permitted to
grow until they were as long and sharp as knife-blades, took his place
in the center of a circle formed by his rocking, moaning colleagues, and
proceeded to pluck the flesh from his lower legs in chunks until the
muscles and ligaments were laid bare and the bones themselves showed
white and ghastly through the welter of blood and mangled flesh. At
length, weakened by loss of blood, he sank senseless amid the widening
pool of crimson.... It was not a pleasant sight.
If you visit Mulai Idris you will, of course, keep on to the ruins of
Volubilis, which are barely a mile away, on the lower slopes of the
Djebel Zarhon. Personally—I might as well confess it frankly—I am rather
bored by ruins, unless, of course, they are on the grand scale, like
those of Carthage or Timgad, where enough remains to give one an adequate
idea of what the living city was like. But Volubilis, which was the
westernmost outpost of the Roman Empire, demands more of a strain on
the imagination, for here all that remains above ground is a score or
so of shattered marble columns, some stones which are said to mark the
site of the forum, and a massively constructed triumphal arch, in a
fair state of preservation, which was erected about two centuries after
the Crucifixion in honor of Caracalla, who, you will recall, built a
bathing establishment of imposing size in Rome. The only work of art of
importance thus far unearthed at Volubilis is a very fine bronze figure
of a dog, now kept in the little museum at the entrance to the ruins.
* * * * *
Mequinez is separated from Rabat, the third of the great imperial cities,
by just a hundred miles of smooth, hard highway, and Tomine, who was fond
of stepping on the gas whenever I would permit him, covered those hundred
miles in just two hours. One of the pleasant features of motoring in
Morocco is that, once outside the cities, you can travel as fast as you
please, for the great trunk-roads are nearly straight, there are little
traffic and no traffic cops, and the villages are few and far between.
Long ere the buildings of Rabat came in view we could see the red-brown
bulk of the Borj-el-Hassan, the splendid but uncompleted tower erected
by Sultan Yakub, or El Mansur, as he is better known, rising from beyond
the intervening plain, its red-brown bulk—for it is a little too heavy to
be truly graceful—silhouetted against the Atlantic’s shimmering expanse.
There it has stood, majestic and aloof, for upward of seven hundred
years, a fitting monument to the creative genius of those fierce Berber
kings, the Almohades, who, in the Alcázar, the Giralda, and the Alhambra,
left such glorious reminders of their rule in Spain.
[Illustration: A PLACE OF WALLED DELIGHT
The Blue Garden, at Rabat, whose ancient crenelated ramparts look across
the Bou Ragrag to Salé, the stronghold of the Sallee rovers. But you
should see the garden by moonlight, when the air is heavy with the
fragrance of orange-blossoms and throbs to the music of zither, flute,
and viol]
When, in 1184, Yakub el Mansur founded Rabat at that point on the
western seaboard of Morocco where the waters of the Bou Ragrag enter the
Atlantic, Salé, on the opposite bank of the little river, was already an
ancient city and one of evil repute, notorious throughout the length and
breadth of Christendom as the stronghold of the dreaded Sallee rovers.
Until very recent years Salé was a far larger town than Rabat, but since
Rabat became the seat of administration of the French protectorate the
situation has been completely reversed, Salé having only about half as
many inhabitants as its younger sister. The combined populations of the
two towns now probably number not far from seventy-five thousand, ten
per cent of whom are Europeans. Though the French are dredging the bar
which obstructs the mouth of the river and are making other efforts to
improve “the port of the two banks,” it can never be anything save a
third-rate harbor; yet in pirate days it must have afforded a much safer
haven for shipping than it does at present, or, as is more likely, the
bar permitted the passage of the shallow-draft galleys employed by the
corsairs while proving an insuperable obstacle to the larger war-vessels
which pursued them.
Rabat consists of two parts: the old walled town beside the sea, whose
dilapidated ramparts, now used as promenades, inclose the _kasbah_,
the _souks_, and most of the mosques; and the mushroom modern city
which has sprung up under the ægis of the French on the slopes of the
low hills to the east. By no means rich in historical monuments, and
possessing few really fine examples of Moorish architecture save the
Hassan tower just mentioned, Rabat nevertheless has a fascination all
its own. Of the palace of Sultan Yakub only the foundations remain, but
its spacious walls inclose an admirably arranged if small museum and a
school of native art, where, under French supervision, instruction is
given in dyeing with vegetable colors, wood-carving and painting, and
illuminating on vellum—arts for which Rabat was once famous, but which
are now almost lost. Perhaps the most beautiful feature of the city is
the famous Blue Gardens, within the precincts of the former palace, where
flowers in every shade of blue, from deepest indigo to palest cerulean,
form rectangles of glorious color against the rose-brown _tapia_ of the
ancient walls. Forming a pleasing relief to the prevailing blue of the
blossoms are the broad pathways of rolled red sand, the effect thus
produced being equaled by few formal gardens in the world and surpassed
by none.
A few paces from the Hôtel Transatlantique, by a narrow lane which
winds down between high blank walls to a mysterious green door, is a
little Moorish café, tucked away on a narrow terrace formed by an angle
of the ancient fortifications, whose ramparts here fall sheer away to
the waters of the Bou Ragrag. It is much frequented after sunset by
natives of the upper class and by Europeans of discrimination, for its
mint tea, thick black coffee, and meringue-like pastries are the most
delicious in all Morocco; native musicians draw soft, haunting melodies
from instruments of reed and string; and even on the sultriest nights
it is swept by cooling breezes from the broad Atlantic. Here Romance
walks o’ nights, for the tea-tables are set in bastions from whose
embrasures the culverins of a Moorish despot once defied the sea-power
of England, France, and Spain; across the river, not a pistol-shot away,
is Salé, long the seat of pirate power; the lean black galleys of the
rovers swung at anchor in the harbor in between; and a few score rods
to the west, where the river broadens out to meet the sea, the great
combers come sweeping in from the Atlantic to break in foam and thunder
on the bar. Scattered here and there about the gardens, cross-legged on
the cushioned benches, are wealthy Moors, their white garments showing
ghostly in the purple velvet darkness, the dull glow of their cigarettes
lighting up the grave aristocratic faces framed by the snowy hoods. When
the full moon casts a broad bar of silver athwart the darkened waters,
when the palm-fronds whisper softly in the gentle night breeze, when the
scents of jasmine and orange-blossom rise in waves of fragrance from
the gardens just below, when the African night throbs to the strains,
half plaintive, half barbaric, of zither, flute, and viol, then this
Moorish pleasure-garden is quite the most enchanting spot I know. Were I
a bridegroom I should take Her there, of all the Lovely Places, on the
honeymoon.
The _souks_ of Rabat, though by no means so extensive or picturesque
as those of Fez and Marrákesh, contain certain characteristic articles
which are not to be found elsewhere, at least in any variety. Such, for
example, are the Rabat scarfs and curtains—lengths of white and filmy
muslin heavily embroidered at the ends in barbarically hued silks. Here,
too, and nowhere else, is to be had the carved and painted woodwork for
which the city is noted—low tables, bookcases, wall-shelves, gun-racks,
decorated with elaborate arabesque designs in the mellowed reds, blues,
greens, and yellows employed in the adornment of Moorish mosques.
The carpets of Rabat likewise enjoy a wide reputation because of the
thickness of their pile, the softness of their colors—usually browns or
grays—and the fact that they are colored with the ancient vegetable dyes.
On the slopes which rise gently from the landward side of the native
city to the summit of a low range of hills, in an environ which might
be designated for the sake of convenience as New Rabat, the French have
established the seat of government of the protectorate. Here is the
administrative center of all Morocco, and here the various branches of
government, including the treasury-general and the ministries of war,
agriculture, and public instruction, as well as the Shereefian Scientific
Institute and the Institute of Higher Moroccan Studies, are housed in
brand-new, commodious, and stately buildings. All these are grouped about
the imposing palace of the French resident-general, while set on a little
knoll, a quarter of a mile away, are the great white buildings of the
imperial palace, one wing of which contains the offices of the ministry
of the interior.
New Rabat is a made-to-order capital, and in building it the French
followed the example of the South Africans at Pretoria and of the
Australians at Yass-Canberra by starting with the bare site and building
from the ground up. Hence there are none of the ugly and incongruous
buildings which mar the beauty of so many capitals, including our own.
Instead, everything is fresh, harmonious, and strictly up to date. The
dull and depressing style of architecture which characterizes so many
public structures in France, the rococo ornateness of others, and those
fantastic and atrocious vagaries in which French architects have indulged
along the Riviera are all happily absent from New Rabat, whose buildings
are all in a modified Moorish style, of reinforced concrete, with white
or tinted walls and tiled roofs. The first impression is that it is all a
trifle too theatrical—a Florida land development and the Oriental section
of a world’s fair combined—but this is doubtless due to the newness of
the place, for it was not commenced until after the Armistice. With
due allowance made for this, however, the general effect is singularly
pleasing, for the situation, with the Atlantic and the old walled city in
the foreground and with the mulberry masses of the Middle Atlas looming
in the western distance, is superb; the architecture, though exotic to
Western eyes, is on the whole restrained; the Moorish note which has been
introduced suits the setting and provides the needed color; and in a
few years crudeness will be relieved by masses of foliage, for the soil
responds quickly to hose and hoe.
Dotting the pleasant slopes beyond the administrative buildings
are numerous charming villas, embowered in flowers and strongly
reminiscent of southern California, in which the officials of the
French administration and the officers of the garrison dwell. Running
through the town in every direction are broad avenues planted with young
trees which will eventually provide an abundance of shade; thanks to
the lavish use of water and unremitting care the broad stretches of
greensward are able to defy the fiery African sun; and masses of scarlet
geraniums and purple bougainvillea provide splashes of vivid color. With
its white-walled, red-roofed houses set amid blazing gardens, with its
cypress and eucalyptus trees, with the sparkling sea in front and the
bare brown hills behind, the residential district of the new city bears a
striking resemblance to Santa Barbara.
Set high on the hillside, dominating all else, is the French residency,
flanked on either side by low, rambling office buildings, with which
it is connected by pergolas smothered in flowers. It is an enormous
structure, somewhat too suggestive of an exposition building, perhaps, or
of a Florida hotel, but quite imposing and, on the whole, in excellent
taste. The state reception and dining rooms have some effective mural
paintings depicting various phases of Moroccan scenery and life, as well
as a magnificent collection of Moorish weapons presented by various caïds
and chieftains to the former resident-general, Marshal Lyautey; the cozy
and homelike private apartments, occupying the upper floors, command
entrancing views of mountain, plain, river, and sea. The residency wholly
lacks the dignity of Malacañan, the palace of the governor-general of
the Philippines in Manila, but it fulfils its purpose admirably, though
I doubt if it impresses very deeply the descendants of the men who built
the Alcázar and the Alhambra.
Though Sultan Mulai Yusef has palaces in Fez, Mequinez, and Marrákesh,
not to mention numerous _kasbahs_ in the Atlas, at all of which he stays
for longer or shorter periods each year, his favorite residence is at
Rabat, doubtless because it is there that he receives the flattery so
dear to his Oriental soul, and also, perhaps, at the suggestion of the
French resident-general, who likes to have his imperial protégé where he
can keep a paternal eye on him. While the sultan, as I have explained
in an earlier chapter, is head of both church and state, his temporal
power is merely nominal under the restrictions imposed by the French
protectorate, whereas his influence as the spiritual leader of his
people, who venerate him as a descendant and successor of the Prophet,
has to be reckoned with. Thus, while certain of the Berber tribes,
including those of the Riff, steadfastly refuse to recognize his claims
to the sultanate on the ground that he is an Arab and a usurper, they
nevertheless bow to the spiritual authority which he possesses by virtue
of his position as khalif. It is easy to understand how the spiritual
influence exercised by the sultan-khalif makes him a highly useful
instrument of government in the hands of the French as long as the
protectorate is conducted as it is at present. This explains why they
surround him with all the pomp and ceremony traditionally associated with
the shereefian throne, and see to it that his prestige, which is vitally
essential to the success of their policy, is scrupulously respected and
safeguarded.
When Mulai Yusef moves, as he does frequently, from one of the imperial
residences to another, he travels in truly Oriental state, accompanied
by a vast entourage of ministers, officials of the court, religious
functionaries, guards, slaves, and concubines. Of the latter he is
said to have upward of half-a-thousand, but he naturally does not take
the whole of his enormous harem establishment with him—only a favored
few. He and his glittering court are transported in a great number of
high-powered, luxuriously fitted cars, the imperial procession tearing
along at terrific speed between rows of salaaming subjects while the
traffic looks out for itself.
Foreigners can always obtain at least a passing glimpse of the sultan on
the occasions of the three great religious festivals of the Mohammedan
calendar—the birthday of the Prophet, the Grand and the Lesser Bairam—as
well as every Friday, which is the Moslem day of worship, when he goes
to mosque in state, the one which he usually attends while in residence
at Rabat being only a few hundred yards from the palace. The ceremony of
going to mosque corresponds to the _selamlik_ of the Turkish sultans,
though it is a tawdry and insignificant affair as compared with the
impressive military spectacle which was staged weekly at Yildiz Kiosk
when Abdul Hamid sat on the Ottoman throne and Turkey was still Turkey.
Nevertheless it is a picturesque and colorful show, an interesting
survival of the splendor which once surrounded Oriental rulers but which
has now almost disappeared; for King Fuad of Egypt goes to the weekly
prayer in a limousine, and Mustapha Kemal, the president of Turkey, wears
a bowler-hat and swings a Malacca cane when he attends mosque, if he
attends at all.
But in Morocco the French, in order to enhance the dignity of their
puppet in the eyes of his subjects, signalize Mulai Yusef’s hebdomadary
devotions by a display which is a cross between a circus procession, a
parade of Shriners, and the Lord Mayor’s Show. The cortège is headed
by a battalion of the famous Black Guard, with its field music, the
gigantic negroes who compose this corps of household infantry wearing
the fantastic uniforms associated with the zouaves, but with certain
embellishments of their own, including a waistcoat of canary yellow and
a small, tightly rolled turban which looks like something between a
piece of striped peppermint candy and a doughnut. By way of according
equal respect to the two branches of the dual government, the band plays
French and Moorish airs alternately. Immediately behind the foot-guards,
on gray horses perfectly matched, comes a squadron of spahis, beturbaned
and becloaked, riding beneath a forest of lances from whose steel-shod
tips flutters a cloud of green and scarlet pennons. Next a string of
magnificent Barb chargers, riderless and richly caparisoned in trappings
of red and gold, each led by a groom in the livery of the imperial
household. Another squadron of spahis, this time on gleaming bays, and
at last, guarded by slaves and eunuchs, the khalif himself, seated in
a miniature brougham which was presented to one of his predecessors by
Queen Victoria. At the carriage door walks the imperial almoner, whose
business it is to increase the popularity of his master by distributing
alms in the form of small pieces of silver to the poor who line the
route. Bringing up the rear of the procession is a whole cavalcade
of ministers of state, officials of the household, and religious
dignitaries, some on horses and some astride of beautiful Andalusian
mules, with negro slaves trotting at their stirrups.
[Illustration: THE PEACE OF ALLAH
Tucked away in a quiet back-water of Rabat, beyond the turmoil of the
bustling city which is the seat of Morocco’s government, a quaint old
mosque, with crumbling, lichen-covered walls and an ancient olive-tree
above its gate, dozes in the sun]
After the services in the mosque, which are usually of brief duration,
the sultan makes his selection from the led horses, whereupon a quartet
of brawny Nubians fairly boost him into the high-peaked scarlet saddle.
An attendant raises above his head the great green umbrella which is the
symbol of the shereefian power, the drummers beat the prescribed number
of ruffles and the long roll, the buglers sound a fanfare, the native
onlookers salaam until their turbans touch the ground, and his Imperial
Majesty Mulai Yusef, Emperor of Morocco, Prince of True Believers,
Vice-Regent of God on Earth, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Grand
Cross of St. Michael and St. George, thirty-sixth lineal descendant of
Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, rides slowly back to his great
white palace to amuse himself with his wives and his concubines until
another Friday rolls around. And at a desk in the residency, a quarter of
a mile away, a quiet-mannered Frenchman, who detests ceremony and never
puts on a uniform if he can help it, is directing the affairs of the
empire.
* * * * *
Though there is nothing of particular interest to see there, one should
pay a brief visit to Salé, the ancient corsair city on the north bank
of the Bou Ragrag, directly opposite Rabat, with which it is connected
by a bridge a mile or so up-river. Its renown is due to its association
with the Sallee rovers (Sallee is the medieval spelling; the English
call the place Salli and the French Salé), who were even fiercer and
more daring than their colleagues of the Mediterranean. It is well to
keep in mind that while, from the European point of view, the pirates
of the Barbary coast were a set of bloodthirsty robbers, from the
standpoint of the Moors they were pious warriors battling for the faith,
who had volunteered to punish the Nazarenes for their rejection of the
teachings of the Prophet, and, incidentally, for having ejected their
coreligionists from Spain. The honor in which their memory is held may
be better realized by comparison with that of the Crusaders, in which
the positions were exactly reversed. Nor, despite the glamour in which
we have enveloped the Crusaders as champions of Christendom, were they
appreciably more chivalrous than the rovers or more humane. Unlike the
buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who fought only for themselves, the
rovers approached as nearly to an organized navy as anything Morocco ever
possessed, and their vessels were at times fitted out at the expense
of the state, to whom their prizes therefore belonged. Whereas the
corsairs of Algiers and Tunis confined their operations mainly to the
Mediterranean, the sea-adventurers of Sallee harried the Atlantic coasts
of Spain and France and even ventured as far north as Devon and Cornwall,
carrying off the populations of whole villages.
The rovers attained the zenith of their power in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, during which period hundreds of
thousands of Christians suffered captivity, unspeakable tortures, and
death in Morocco rather than abjure their faith, the sole condition on
which a measure of freedom within the empire was offered to them. All
Christendom was horrified by the tales of cruelty and outrage brought
back by captives who had been ransomed or had managed to escape, and
collections were made at church doors throughout Europe for the purpose
of purchasing the freedom of Christian slaves in Barbary. Frequent
missions for that purpose were undertaken by devoted members of
religious brotherhoods, not a few of whom themselves became martyrs to
the cause. It must be remembered that the lot of the Christian slave in
Morocco was infinitely worse than that of the negro, who indifferently
embraced Islam, and was at once admitted to equality in all matters save
that of freedom; for the Christians were generally employed under the
lash of the taskmaster in the construction of fortifications and public
buildings—it might be said that the mortar used in some of the grandest
structures in Morocco was mixed with Christian blood—or as rowers
shackled to the benches of the galleys, thousands of them dying in their
chains. But for those European women, often of gentle birth, who fell
into the hands of the Moors, was reserved the most awful fate of all.
* * * * *
If, by this time, you have had enough of Barbary, you may leave us at
Rabat and motor northward—a long day’s journey—to Tangier, whence there
is a triweekly service of small and abominably dirty Spanish steamers to
Algeciras. At present, on account of the somewhat disturbed condition of
the Spanish zone, Tangier is isolated from the rest of Morocco, but when
the Riff has been pacified for good and all, and when the railway from
Tangier to Rabat is in regular operation, the former city will become one
of the principal gateways to Barbary, being particularly convenient for
those who disembark from the transatlantic steamers at Gibraltar or who
come down from Spain.
As the seaport nearest to Europe, Tangier was the town in the empire
in which, until the coming of the French, the effects of progress were
most marked; and it is still the place of residence of the ministers
and consuls-general accredited to the shereefian court by the foreign
powers, these forming the nucleus of a highly cosmopolitan society
which has expanded into an influential community enjoying privileges
and immunities unknown to natives who do not enjoy foreign protection.
Here, by virtue of the rights conferred by early treaties, foreigners
continue to enjoy an extraterritorial status, as they still do in China
and as they did until very recently in Turkey and Siam. Thus, foreigners
in Tangier who are accused of crimes are tried by their own ministers or
consuls-general; and, if convicted, they are either confined in consular
prisons, or in the case of serious crimes, sent home to serve out their
sentences.
As might be expected, this arrangement has resulted in some curious
situations. They still tell the story over Tangier dinner-tables of a
certain foreign minister—for obvious reasons I shall not disclose his
nationality or name—who became infatuated with a very beautiful woman,
whose snowy purity, however, was slightly tinged with lavender. One
night the wife of the minister died in great agony—the result of poison
in her coffee, it was said. It was common knowledge that she had been
poisoned by her husband and his paramour—but who was going to prove it?
And, even if it could be proved, who, pray, was empowered to try the
case? The Moorish courts had no jurisdiction over foreigners, and the
foreign ministers had no jurisdiction over one another. And the minister
in question could hardly be expected to sit as judge upon himself! So
nothing ever came of the matter, for Tangerine morals are as easy as an
old shoe. Having inherited his wife’s fortune, the minister promptly
married the other woman and retired from the diplomatic service. The last
I heard of the pair, they were living, outwardly quite happy, somewhere
on the Riviera.
[Illustration: THE SHADOW OF GOD ON EARTH
Surrounded by the Garde Noire, his Shereefian Majesty drives to mosque in
a carriage presented to one of his predecessors by Queen Victoria
Astride a white charger, beneath the green umbrella which is the symbol
of Moorish majesty, the sultan reviews his household troops]
Tangier, which has a population of about fifty thousand, more than half
of whom are Christians or Jews, nestles between two eminences at the
head of a spacious bay, which forms the best harbor in Morocco, though
vessels of any size have to anchor a mile or so offshore and disembark
their passengers in small boats, which in rough weather is an extremely
unpleasant, not to say hazardous, proceeding. Viewed from the sea, the
town presents a very picturesque appearance, its white houses rising
from the harbor’s edge like linen-covered seats in a theater, with the
citadel, the remains of the mole built by the British during their
occupation in the seventeenth century, and York Castle to the right,
the commercial quarter in the central valley formed by the two hills,
and at the left the road which runs along the shore to Tetuan, with the
European hotels above and a crescent of sandy beach below. As in all
Eastern towns, the streets are exceedingly narrow and crooked, lined by
cupboards in lieu of shops, and with cafés, wine-shops, and drinking-dens
at almost every corner, for the foreign population of Tangier has an
unquenchable thirst. Formerly the city was intolerably filthy, poorly
lighted, and none too safe at night; but since the establishment of an
international control, modern sanitary, water, and lighting systems have
been introduced, and its narrow ways are vigilantly patrolled by an
efficient gendarmarie under French and British officers.
Like the gateways to all barbaric countries—Djibouti, the port for
Abyssinia, is another case in point—Tangier is a hotbed of plot,
conspiracy, intrigue, and gossip, much frequented by those engaged in
shady international transactions or who otherwise sail close to the
wind. In the old days, when the extradition laws were not recognized
by Morocco, it was a favorite refuge for fugitives from justice from
Europe and the two Americas, the terrace of the Hotel Cecil being
dotted at the tea-hour with beautifully groomed men and women of the
most engaging manners who had left their own countries under a cloud
and quite abruptly because they had been too quick on the trigger,
because they had signed to checks names that were not their own, had
departed with other people’s money or other people’s husbands or wives.
Here they dwelt in comfortable if not contented exile, dining at the
legations if they were not too notorious—for a hostess cannot be unduly
exclusive in a place where society is as limited as in Tangier—playing
poker in the cool seclusion of the Cecil’s card-room, or riding into
the back-country on picnics or pig-sticking expeditions, but ever and
anon turning longing, homesick eyes toward Gibraltar, where liners from
America and England swing at their moorings beneath the shadow of the
Rock. Until very recently, at least, life in Tangier was seldom dull,
being punctuated by such episodes as the theatrical visit of the kaiser,
Raisuli’s abduction of Ion Perdicaris, numerous naval demonstrations, and
the unofficial negotiations with the envoys of Abd-el-Krim, while the
presence of gun-runners, smugglers, rebel emissaries, war correspondents,
and concession-hunters lent a pleasant atmosphere of romance and
adventure to the town. But, now that the war in the Riff has ended and
the international status of the town has been definitely fixed, it is to
be presumed that Tangier will settle down to an uneventful and prosaic
existence, dwelling contentedly enough in the memories of its stirring
past.
* * * * *
If, as I have already remarked, you are weary of African travel, if you
are surfeited with Moors, and mosques, and minarets, and marabouts,
and mosaics, and places whose names begin with M, then you can board a
steamer at Tangier which will land you a few hours later at Algeciras,
whence the Sud Express will bear you in some six-and-thirty hours to the
boulevards of Paris. But I trust that you will see fit to stay in my
company a little longer, for I would take you south to Casablanca, the
amazing city into which the French have transformed a squalid Spanish
settlement in less than a decade; to Mazagan and Mogador and other
coast-towns with magic names; to red Marrákesh; to the country where the
Grand Caïds rule in feudal splendor; to medieval castles tucked away in
the fastnesses of the High Atlas; and over the ranges to the forbidden
Sus.
CHAPTER XXII
SOUTH TO THE FORBIDDEN SUS
We Americans pride ourselves on being an exceptionally well informed
people, yet it is curious how erroneous are the opinions which we hold
on many subjects, and how tenaciously we cling to our misconceptions.
The great majority of our people believe, for example, that the foreign
missionary is a sanctimonious, psalm-singing, hypocritical individual,
with a sun-umbrella under one arm and a Bible under the other, who seeks
to force on the heathen clothing and Christianity, neither of which they
want, and who is regarded as a meddler and a nuisance by the officials of
the country in which he is stationed. Another case in point is that of
the French colonial, whom we picture as an unkempt, miserable being his
bare feet thrust into slippers, his soiled white suit several sizes too
large for him, who passes his time sipping absinthe in a café, perusing
“La Vie Parisienne,” and counting the days until he can return to _la
belle France_. These are not merely misconceptions; they are caricatures,
as unjust as they are untruthful.
Whenever I hear some one remark, “Well, we must admit that the British
are the only really successful colonizers,” I feel that I should like
to show him Casablanca. When the French bombarded and occupied it in
1907, Casablanca was a filthy, backward, and ill governed Moorish coast
town with a population of barely twenty thousand. Yet in less than two
decades of French rule its population has increased more than six hundred
per cent, and it is to-day one of the cleanest, best governed, and most
progressive cities in all Africa.
[Illustration: A REFUGE OF THE ROVERS
The river-mouth at Azemour, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, where the
corsair galleys lay]
Indeed, there are few cities of its size in the United States which
can surpass Casablanca in point of municipal improvements, for it has
miles of broad, paved, tree-planted streets; thoroughly modern lighting,
water, and sanitary systems; an excellent telephone service; stores
which are counterparts in miniature of the great _magasins_ in Paris;
several luxurious hotels; restaurants whose cuisine is vastly superior to
anything found in most American cities; a state opera-house; a municipal
theater; numerous beautiful parks; and a whole series of imposing public
buildings in the neo-Moorish style, which is harmonious, colorful, and
pleasing to the eye, if nothing more. In short, Casablanca epitomizes
the great work which the French have accomplished in Morocco, where
they have hauled the native out of the slough of ignorance, indolence,
and superstition, in which he has been wallowing for centuries, set him
upon his feet, and are teaching him to become a decent, law-abiding,
progressive citizen. What was formerly an open roadstead, dangerously
exposed to northwest winds, has been transformed by the construction of a
huge breakwater into a safe and spacious harbor which provides anchorage
for vessels of all save the largest size. There is still noticeable, of
course, an air of crudity and incompleteness, such as is characteristic
of all communities of rapid and sensational growth, notably those in
Florida and along the Pacific coast, for steam-shovels, road-scrapers,
and scaffoldings are much in evidence; streets are being broadened,
straightened, and surfaced; hundreds of crowded and insanitary native
hovels, hotbeds of disease, have been torn down and the sites not yet
reoccupied; ramshackle Oriental structures still stand cheek by jowl with
steel and concrete office-buildings.
The commercial life of the city focuses in the spacious square known
as the Place de France, from the center of which rises a lofty
Oriental clock-tower. Starting at the clock-tower, an extremely
broad thoroughfare, lined by banks, steamship agencies, curio shops,
restaurants, cafés, and consulates, runs down to the _débarcadère_,
where passengers land who arrive by sea. This east and west thoroughfare
divides the commercial city into two sections. To the north lies the
European business quarter, with its banks, stores, office-buildings, and
hotels, nearly all of modern construction. Immediately to the south,
surrounded by an ancient crenelated wall, are the _souks_, which here
consist not of covered passageways, as is the case in most Moroccan
cities, but of a tangle of narrow, crooked, cobble-paved streets, just
wide enough for two carriages to pass, the trash-filled shops being kept
for the most part by Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Indians. Though here
are to be found none of the charming examples of Moorish art which make
bazaar-shopping in Fez and Marrákesh so delightful, the curio dealers,
who appear to have imported their stocks from Japan and Germany, drive a
roaring trade, particularly when war-ships and tourist-steamers are in
the harbor.
At the back of the business quarter is the new town, devoted in the
main to public buildings and apartment-houses, with numerous pleasant
parks and fine, broad streets. Conspicuous on a busy corner is the new
post-office, an enormous mosque-like building which looks more like a
Moorish place of prayer than a place for handling letters. On the steps
are native letter-writers, ready to serve the illiterate by writing
epistles of love, sympathy, business, or abuse for a small consideration;
while at a desk just within the door sits a youth speaking a dozen
languages who is supposed to be a human postal-guide, supplying any
information which may be demanded of him—usually incorrectly. The various
bureaus of the local French administration are pleasantly housed in a
long, low building of white plaster which might have been transported
bodily from southern California; and in the park close by is a really
fine equestrian group, depicting a French cavalryman grasping the hand of
a Moroccan spahi, which commemorates the aid given to France by Morocco
during the Great War. It is good art, and, what is more important, it is
good diplomacy.
Perhaps the most striking and significant of the reforms which the
French have effected in Casablanca are illustrated by the lengths to
which they have gone in safeguarding the health of the native in matters
concerned with food and women. The great public market is the largest,
best arranged, and cleanest I have ever seen; for the noise, odors,
dirt, and general confusion which are such unpleasant features of many
of our American market-places, and of nearly all European, are here
wholly absent. The whole place is as immaculate as the operating-room of
a hospital, and the public health is further safeguarded by a vigilant
corps of sanitary inspectors, who ruthlessly order into the garbage-pails
any tainted meats or over-ripe fruits and vegetables.
In the northern outskirts of the city is the abattoir, its tiled
decorations giving it a Moorish atmosphere hardly to be looked for in
such a building, which has been constructed on the most approved lines
under the supervision of slaughter-house experts from Chicago and Kansas
City. I didn’t visit the upper floors, where the killing is carried on,
because in my life I have witnessed more than a sufficiency of bloody
scenes; but the lower floors were so scrupulously clean, even though it
was a busy day, as the decks of a war-ship. What with the thoroughly
scrubbed concrete floors, and the white tiled walls, and the neat white
smocks of the butchers and their assistants, it is a place where a
beast of any discrimination should positively enjoy being slaughtered.
The animals which are here transformed with neatness and despatch into
steaks, chops, and cutlets consist of cattle, sheep, and a few mules
and horses. Such few pigs as there are in Morocco die of disease or old
age, never by the knife of the butcher, for pork is anathema to all
Moslems. In the words of Mr. Armour—or was it Mr. Swift?—every portion of
an animal which enters the Casablanca slaughter-house is utilized save
the squeal; and it would not be surprising were the French, with their
well known reputation for thrift, to conserve even that in the form of
phonograph records!
[Illustration: THE RED CITY
All the buildings of Marrákesh are of a red-brown adobe called _tabiya_,
so that the city looks like a great pool of coagulated blood spread upon
the russet plain. But beyond the ramparts the orange-gardens form a broad
band of vivid green, and beyond them, a dozen miles to the southward, the
snow-capped peaks of the High Atlas “stand up like the thrones of kings”]
Somewhat further to the east, and more convenient of access from the
town, is a community dedicated to the practice of the oldest profession
in the world. It is what would be known in America as a “red-light
district”—the quarter of the prostitutes. Instead of attempting to stamp
out vice, which would be utterly impossible in an Oriental country
like Morocco—there is a native proverb to the effect that the Moorish
temperament consists of five parts, and that four of them are passion—the
French have wisely decided to isolate it and, by official supervision,
keep venereal maladies down to a minimum. Like the Yoshiwara of Yokohama,
the prostitute quarter of Casablanca is a self-contained community,
with its own bazaars for the sale of food and merchandise, the whole
encircled by a wall with police _goumiers_ at the gate. The “daughters
of pleasure” are of every Mediterranean nationality—Berber, Arab,
Moresque, Ouled-Naïl, Senegalese, Egyptian, Greek, Spanish, Syrian, even
Circassian. You pay your money and you take your choice, or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that you make your choice first and pay the
lady afterward. The range is amazing. Every sensual whim, every national
taste, is catered to. Here you can find mountains of female flesh from
the Jewish quarter of Tunis and visions of slim brown loveliness from
the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl; hard-faced hussies from Tangier and
lustrous-eyed houris from Marrákesh; strapping, coal-black negresses
from the Niger country and dainty damsels from Mogador and Saffi, their
Spanish blood betraying itself in their pink and olive skins and their
bewitching eyes. It should be understood, of course, that this quarter
is patronized almost wholly by Europeans and natives of the lower
class, particularly by the soldiery, the more well-to-do finding their
lady-loves among the hordes of French, Spanish, and Italian _filles de
joie_ who carry on their trade within the city. The regulations governing
the quarter are very strict. Each girl is examined at frequent intervals
by a government physician, and, if she is found to have contracted a
venereal disease, her “ticket”—that is, her license—is taken away from
her until she is cured. The whole town is new from the ground up, the
narrow lanes, whose cobbles are scrubbed until they shine, being lined
with quaint, charmingly decorated little houses, which might be the
studios of artists, with tiled roofs, blue or bright-green doors, and
softly tinted walls of rough-cast plaster. The French architect whose
creation it is evidently put his heart into the task.
Because of its excellent communications by sea, land, and air,
Casablanca is the commercial, just as Rabat is the political, capital of
Morocco. It is four days from Bordeaux by the steamers of the Compagnie
Générale Transatlantique; overnight from Tangier and about two and a
half days from Marseilles by the vessels of the Paquet Line; and it is
a port of call for the Belgian mail-boats which ply between Antwerp
and Matadi, in the Congo. (When Mrs. Powell and I came up from Central
Africa and Senegal in 1925 we disembarked at Casablanca, that being my
third visit to Morocco.) A service of fast trains is now in operation
between Casablanca and Rabat, fifty miles away; and the narrow-gage
line to Marrákesh is shortly to be standardized, if it has not been
done already. Excellent motor roads run northeast to Rabat, Mequinez,
and Fez; southeast along the coast to Mazagan, Safi, and Mogador; and
south to Marrákesh, which can also be reached by a longer and poorer but
very interesting road via Kasbah Tadla, which cannot be taken, however,
without special permission from the military authorities. Telephonic
communications with the other cities of Morocco, and the cable service
with France, are good and remarkably inexpensive. There is also a daily
airplane service between Casablanca and Paris via Málaga and Toulouse,
letters bearing an air-post stamp which are dropped into the box at the
general post-office in Casablanca in the morning being delivered in Paris
on the afternoon of the next day. I forget the price of an airplane
ticket from Casablanca to the French capital, but, if I remember rightly,
it is no more expensive than first-class travel by train and boat.
* * * * *
Should your stay in Morocco be limited, you had best take the great
trunk highway which runs from Casablanca almost due south to Marrákesh,
a distance of 160 miles; but, if time is no particular object, and you
can spend a night or so en route, I should advise you to follow the coast
road through Azemour, Mazagan, Safi, and Mogador, glimpses of these
picturesque and interesting cities amply compensating the traveler for
the additional distance and fatigue.
Azemour, in turn a Carthaginian colony, a Roman outpost, and a Portuguese
trading-station, and containing remains of all three occupations, lies
half a hundred miles to the southwest of Casablanca and a mile and a
half inland, where the Um-er-Rabi’a, here wide, deep, red, and rapid,
comes swirling down from its birthplace in the High Atlas to meet its
mother, the ocean. The impetuous Um-er-Rabi’a—the name means Mother of
Grass—the second most important river of Morocco, is as long and wide as
the Thames, but quite unnavigable because of the bar at its mouth and
its numerous waterfalls. Azemour, the Arabic for “wild olives,” which
stands on its southern bank, once marked the southernmost outpost of
the sultanate of Fez, but in 1513 it was captured by the Portuguese;
Ferdinand Magellan, the first circumnavigator of the globe, who was an
officer of the expedition, was wounded during the assault on the town and
lamed for life.
Just beyond, set on the edge of a curving bay, unusual on this coast,
is Mazagan, the port of Marrákesh and the outlet for the products of
the rich region known as the Dukála. It was built at the beginning of
the sixteenth century by the Portuguese, then at the height of their
sea-power, but they abandoned it to the Moors in 1769, the settlers
moving to Brazil, where they established another colony, New Mazagan, on
the banks of the Pará. The massive ramparts and crenelated battlements
raised by the Portuguese give to Mazagan a very un-Moorish atmosphere,
which is accentuated during the hot season by the thousands of Europeans
who flock there for the sea bathing, its splendid _plage_ of pearl-white
sand being dotted with hotels, casinos, bathing-cabins, and gaily colored
umbrellas. Incidentally, Mazagan is noted throughout Morocco for its
oysters, crabs, and lobsters, so those who are fond of seafood would do
well to stop for lunch at one of the restaurants perched on stilts above
the sands.
Next, as we push down the coast, comes Safi, the principal outlet
for central Morocco’s wool and grain. It has no harbor worthy of the
name, vessels being compelled to anchor in the open roadstead, whence
communication with the shore is very difficult and dangerous when a
northwest gale is blowing. The most conspicuous building in the town, and
the only one worth visiting, is an old palace built by one of the Filali
sultans—I think it was Mohammed XVII—whose beautifully tiled courtyards
justify a brief inspection.
By far the most beautiful and interesting of the Moroccan coast towns,
however, is Mogador, capital of the province of Háhá. Its dazzlingly
white houses, encircled by an ancient wall, crown a little rocky
peninsula jutting into the sea, which, when the wind comes from certain
quarters, almost turns the place into an island, as in the case of
Mont-Saint-Michel. On the landward side is a broad belt of gray-white
sand-dunes—a miniature Sahara were it not studded with frequent patches
of fragrant broom—and beyond, far as the eye can see, stretches the
green mass of the Great Argan Forest, a densely wooded area one hundred
and fifty miles long by thirty wide. Approached from this side, Mogador
bursts on the view like a magic city hovering between sea and sky, which
has led the Arabs, with their addiction for romantic nomenclature, to
name it Es-Sueira—the Picture City. The name by which it is known to
Europeans is a contraction of Sidi M’godol, a local saint who won a wide
reputation by his ascetic piety. It is one of the cleanest towns in the
empire and has one of the best harbors, driving a profitable trade in
almonds, gums, olive-oil, and goatskins with England, France, and the
Canary Islands. Mogador, in fact, provides a novel and most interesting
gateway to southern Morocco, and one of which those in quest of the
picturesque and unusual might profitably take advantage, for it has a
weekly service of British cargo steamers, clean and comfortable, coming
direct from London by way of the other Moorish ports.
[Illustration: THE MINARETS OF MARRÁKESH—
Which we were taught in our school-days to call “Morocco City”—are built
for the most part of sun-dried, red-brown bricks and faced with glorious
old tiles. When bathed in the rosy radiance of the westering sun they
look like towers of bright pink coral inlaid with enamels in the colors
of a peacock’s tail]
From Sidi M’godol’s city we turned sharply inland, the hood of the
Renault now headed toward Marrákesh, due east and, as the road runs,
something over a hundred miles away. For the first half-dozen miles our
way wound amid a wilderness of sand-hills, their wind-smoothed surfaces
casting an intolerable glare beneath the African sun; and our minds
harked back to when, long weeks before, we had pitched our tents amid
just such dunes in the Grand Erg Oriental of the Sahara. Here, however,
the dunes were of but brief duration, and then our road plunged abruptly
into the cool green depths of the Great Argan Forest. The argan, which is
found nowhere else in the world, belongs to the _Sapotaceæ_ family and
is a distant cousin of the gutta-percha tree. Its fruit, which ripens
between May and August, is a nut somewhat resembling an olive and is a
favorite food of camels, mules, goats, sheep, and cattle; from its kernel
the natives extract an oil much used in the cookery of southern Morocco.
But horses, like Europeans, refuse to touch the fruit in any form because
of its nauseous flavor. Horses are highly intelligent animals.
And so, after a few delightful hours in the forest, and many hot and
tiresome ones upon a dusty plain, dotted with clusters of conical
thatched huts, called _nuállas_, like those of Central Africa, each
village encircled by a _zariba_ of thorn-bush to keep off marauders, we
topped a little rise just as the sun was dropping out of sight beyond
the horizon’s rim, and looked down upon red Marrákesh. There are certain
cities which cannot be approached for the first time by a traveler who
has any imagination in his soul without a feeling of solemnity and
deep anticipation. Such are Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Damascus, Baghdad, Samarkand, Delhi, Peking; and to that list Marrákesh
may fittingly be added. The Morocco City of our childhood, as the school
geographies of those days erroneously called it; built nine hundred years
ago by Yusuf ibn Tashfin and until very recent times all but inaccessible
to unbelievers; the seat of monarchs whose splendors rivaled those
of Harun al Rashid; associated since its beginning with cruelty and
oppression; long notorious as a center of the slave-trade; its hectic
history written with sword-points dipped in blood; it has ever been a
city of mystery and high romance, beckoning alluringly to the adventurous
traveler.
It lies in the center of a spacious plain—Bled el Hamra, “the Red”—barely
a dozen miles from the underfalls of the High Atlas, whose mighty
ranges sweep round it to the south and southeast in a tremendous arc,
purple-flanked and topped with snow. As befits an imperial city—for it
is one of the four capitals of the empire—Marrákesh is surrounded by
a lofty wall, broken at regular intervals by huge square towers, wall
and towers alike now crumbling into ruin. The city is encompassed and
interspersed by luxuriant orange-groves and gorgeous gardens, and both
within and without the walls are numerous broad open spaces of sun-baked
earth, like Indian _maidans_. Rearing itself majestically above the
expanse of crowded, flat-roofed houses, few of which are more than two
stories in height, forming a landmark which can be seen from afar, is
the Kutubia tower, a striking memorial of the architectural genius of
the early Moors and one of the most famous monuments of its kind in the
world. Without the town, forming a broad band of vivid green between it
and the encircling plain, are acres of date-palm groves; hidden amid
the greenery are low-walled gardens from which rises the fragrance of
apricot, pomegranate, and orange blossoms; little rivulets, grandchildren
of the Tensift, meander amid the stately trees; and from their nests atop
the roofs and walls and towers white storks gaze benevolently down upon
the passer-by.
It is fitting that Marrákesh should be called “the Red,” for, with the
exception of the Kutubia mosque and a certain gate brought in pieces from
Spain, there is not, it is asserted, a single stone building in the city,
and even bricks are sparingly employed. The almost universal building
material is a rammed concrete of red earth and stone called _tabiya_, and
consequently everything in the city and its immediate vicinity—houses,
walls, mosques, towers, ramparts, even the soil itself—is of a deep
red-brown hue which changes beneath the afterglow to a gloriously rich
and rosy shade of coral.
In Marrákesh, as in Fez, the Transatlantique has two hotels; one in the
heart of the city, the other in the southern outskirts. The former, made
over from an old Moorish palace, leaves much to be desired in the way
of comfort, at least so far as the rooms are concerned; but the latter,
known as the Mamounia Palace, recently completed and open only during the
“high season,” is a really magnificent establishment, in fact the best
application of the Moorish style to modern purposes that I have seen,
which in beauty of decoration and completeness of equipment is the equal
of any of the great tourist caravansaries of Florida or California.
The most conspicuous object in the city, dominating and dwarfing all
else, is the splendid minaret of the Kutubia mosque already mentioned,
both it and the similar but inferior Tower of Hassan at Rabat being of
the same type as the contemporary Giralda at Seville; and, if tradition
may be trusted, the same architect, Jabir, was responsible for all three.
Its massive walls are of hand-hewn stone, mellowed by time and weather
to a lovely shade of terra-cotta; inlaid in the upper portions of the
four façades are enameled tiles of the “lost” shade of Persian blue, the
equal of which for loveliness of color I have never seen save only in the
Ulug-beg at Samarkand. Its cupola is thatched with very ancient glazed
tiles of a beautiful jade green; and impaled on the slender spire itself
are three glittering balls that, according to the Moors, are of solid
gold, though the French _controleur civil_ assured me that they are but
gilded copper. The mosque to which the Kutubia belongs is a large brick
structure, the interior a forest of marble columns, which was built by
Abd-el-Mumin, the first of the Almohade rulers, under whom the Moorish
Empire reached the zenith of its fame and glory at the close of the
twelfth century.
The life of Marrákesh, which has not far from one hundred and fifty
thousand inhabitants, focuses in the great central market-place, still
called the Sinners’ Concourse, because there, within the memory of men
still young, were held the wholesale executions by which the sultans
punished revolt and put fear into the hearts of their subjects. It
is the scene of that well known painting entitled “The Justice of the
Khalif”—I think it is by Gérôme, but I am not certain—in which a Moorish
ruler is depicted seated on his white horse, beneath the green umbrella,
surrounded by his viziers, chieftains, and slaves, while stretched in
long rows on the bloodied ground are the headless corpses of those who
dared oppose his will.
[Illustration: WHERE THE HEADS OF REBELS
Provided grisly ornaments for the Aguenaou Gate of Marrákesh in the not
far distant past]
To my way of thinking, the _souks_ of Marrákesh, which comprise the
district known as the Kaisariyeh, are the most interesting in all North
Africa, and this despite the fact that the city, unlike Fez, has only
one manufacture of importance, that of Morocco leather, which is here
dyed in every color of the spectrum and made up into articles of every
conceivable kind. The workmanship is generally inferior, however, and
I should strongly advise any one in quest of leather goods—pillows,
portfolios, and the like—to visit the studio of a well known French
artist and his charming wife (I forget their names, but every one knows
them) in the little house they have built just outside the western
gate of the town. The house itself is a gem of modern Moorish domestic
architecture; and the garden, with its masses of brilliant flowers, its
pool, and its kiosks, is a place of sheer delight.
Hard by the street of the leather-merchants, just beyond the _souk_
where are manufactured the vividly colored cords of silk or wool used
to support the leathern pouches which all Moors wear slung over their
shoulders in lieu of pockets, is the armorers’ bazaar. Here weapons
of every sort—rifles, pistols, simitars, and daggers—are displayed in
bewildering variety. During a preceding visit to Marrákesh I had invested
somewhat heavily in the short curved knives, with damascened blades,
ivory or jeweled hilts, and sheaths of embossed silver, which are the
favorite weapons of the Southland. Being a collector of blade weapons,
I am not particularly interested in fire-arms, however, or was not
until a Syrian acquaintance showed me a pair of long-barreled Moorish
rifles which had been offered for sale that day by a tribal chieftain
from the Sus. The barrels were nearly eight feet in length, bound with
countless bands of hand-wrought silver, each of which was exquisitely
arabesqued or bore an Arabic inscription. The stock of one was of some
rare old wood, incrusted with silver and inlaid with ivory; the other
was even richer, being set with colored enamels and semiprecious stones.
Such pieces seldom come upon the market, for they were family heirlooms
which had been handed down through many generations. The asking price
was exorbitant, but I was determined to become their owner even if it
necessitated my returning to America second-class. The negotiations,
conducted by my obliging friend the Syrian, consumed the better part of
a week, but the night before our departure he brought them to me at our
hotel, having succeeded in beating down their owner to the limit I had
fixed. To-day they repose in a glass case in an American museum, but of
the hundreds who view them daily I suppose there are few indeed who pause
to think of the desperate affrays in which they spoke with tongues of
flame, of the unbelievers against whom they were leveled, of the turbaned
sheikhs who once bore them on their red saddle-bows as they rode on their
raids across the desert. To the unimaginative they are, I suppose, but
queer old guns.
By reason of its situation at the mouths of the passes which lead through
the Atlas to the Sahara, Marrákesh was for centuries an important center
of the slave-trade, in fact the greatest market in northwest Africa for
the “black ivory” brought across the desert by caravan from the Niger
country and the Sudan. This accounts, of course, for the great number of
coal-black faces seen in the city’s streets and for the negroid features
of so many of the southern Moors. With the coming of the French the open
traffic in human beings was perforce abandoned, but that should not
be taken as meaning that slavery in Morocco no longer exists, for the
institution still survives, though in a restricted and less ostentatious
form. Most of the wealthy Moors own slaves, as do all the great caïds
and pashas, a fact of which the French are perfectly aware, though for
reasons of policy they close their eyes to it. They have, however,
succeeded in effectually breaking up the trans-Saharan slave-trade, and,
with the sealing of this great source of supply, slaves are becoming
increasingly difficult to secure and have advanced enormously in price.
There are several dealers in Marrákesh—and the same is true of Fez—who
are always in a position to supply trusted customers with negro slaves,
both male and female, at a price, though I was told that the Circassian
slave-girls, always at a premium because of their beauty, can no longer
be obtained. The prospective purchaser tells the slave dealer what he
wants, and the latter goes about the business of supplying his customer’s
requirements just as an employment agency supplies its patrons with
domestics. When I was in Marrákesh in 1925 a French official of the
Bureau Arabe told me that the market price for a young girl of good
physique was about three thousand francs, which was equivalent to about
one hundred and fifty dollars at the rate of exchange then prevailing.
Many American men, it might be remarked, spend as much as that on one of
their lady-friends in the course of a single evening—and usually get less
value for their money.
Let me make it amply clear, however, that the conditions described in
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” do not now exist in Morocco, whatever may once have
been the case. A slave who is dissatisfied with the treatment she (or
he) is receiving can always demand to be sold, and, furthermore, can
refuse to be sold to a prospective purchaser of whom he does not approve.
All this is, of course, very exasperating to the old-fashioned Moors,
who were brought up to believe, like the planters of the pre-war South,
that their slaves were as much their property as their horses and their
dogs, and that they were at liberty to treat them as they pleased and to
dispose of them as they chose.
“Allah only knows what the world is coming to,” they complain bitterly,
“when a slave-girl begins talking about her ‘rights’! In our fathers’
time, when a girl talked thus, she got a touch of the bastinado. Why,
if this sort of thing keeps on, Morocco will soon become as impossible
a country to live in as the country of the Frangi, where, it is said, a
cook actually has the insolence to demand that she be permitted to go out
on Sunday afternoons. By the beard of the Prophet, we Moors are coming to
a pretty pass when we permit such a state of things!”
[Illustration: THE PUPPET AND THE MAN WHO PULLED THE STRINGS
Marshal Lyautey, formerly French resident-general in Morocco, entertains
Sultan Mulai Yusef at _déjeuner_]
[Illustration: THE EMPIRE BUILDER
Marshal Lyautey, the maker of modern Morocco, and one of the greatest pro
consuls of our time, issues orders to his chief of staff]
This seems as good a place as another to speak of the position occupied
by Moorish women. To begin with, it should be explained that polygamy
is by no means as universal in Morocco, or, for that matter, in any
other Oriental country, as is commonly assumed, for, though a man may
legally have four wives and as many concubines as he pleases, the size
of his harem must of necessity conform to his financial condition. And,
even if a man can afford to maintain the full quota of wives permitted
him by Koranic law, he generally prefers to spend his substance on
concubines, for these do the work of the house, and, if they bear their
master no children, they may be sold like any other chattels. Polygamy,
generally speaking, is confined to the rich, or at least the comfortably
well-to-do, for the facility of divorce makes it much cheaper for a
man to change wives frequently than to keep several at the same time.
An American, by way of illustration, finds it more economical to keep
only one motor-car, and turn it in every year or so for a new one, than
to keep his garage filled with machines which stand idle a large share
of the time. The age-old question of feminine jealousy also proves a
deterrent to the maintenance of large matrimonial establishments, for
a man who does not treat all of his wives with equal generosity is not
likely to lead a very tranquil domestic life. The sultan, who is said to
have upward of five hundred women in his harem, must have his troubles!
In Morocco girls frequently marry at ten or twelve, and a man is looked
upon as a confirmed bachelor if he has not entered the state of matrimony
before he is out of his teens. Old maids are virtually unknown, for a
woman, be she ever so unattractive, is useful for doing the household
chores, though a girl of slender figure stands a far slimmer chance—if
I may be permitted the pun—of making a good match than does a fat one.
For flesh is considered a prerequisite of feminine beauty in Morocco,
and, writers of fiction to the contrary, a Moor wants no slim and dainty
damsels lying around his harem. To obviate so unfortunate a physical
defect, a young girl, upon approaching the marriageable age, is, like a
Strasbourg goose, subjected to a systematic course of stuffing. After
each meal an ambitious Moorish mother compels her daughter to swallow
a dozen or so of sausage-shaped boluses compounded of flour, honey,
eggs, and butter, thus producing the corpulency which the Moors consider
essential to a truly lovely woman. Because of this process of fattening,
and of total lack of exercise, a woman’s avoirdupois increases with her
years, so that by the time she has reached her middle twenties she is,
if Allah has been kind to her, a series of fleshy billows, waddling and
rolling along like a four-master under full sail.
When a man marries he gives the bride’s father a money present, but
this does not amount to a purchase of the girl, as some have asserted,
for she always brings to her new home furniture and household utensils
worth considerably more than the bridegroom’s gift, and, in case
of divorce, she retains possession of them. Until a woman becomes
a grandmother—usually at about thirty—and loses her beauty, she is
forbidden to so much as speak to any of the opposite sex save only her
husband, sons, father, and brothers; even an uncle or a cousin would
not dare to salute her on the street should he be able to recognize her
beneath her swathing of _burkha_, _haik_, and _barracan_. And the husband
who, upon returning home, finds a pair of women’s slippers outside the
_anderun_, may under no consideration enter, because he knows that some
one else’s wife or daughter is within.
Thus encloistered, with no outside interests whatsoever to occupy their
minds, it is not surprising that the thoughts of these prisoners of the
harem should turn to sensual things. Nor should it be assumed that, by
reason of the constant surveillance to which they are subjected, Moorish
women are invariably chaste, for husbands sometimes are called away,
slaves may be bribed or cajoled, windows may be reached by ladders, and
every door has its key. Where there is a will there is usually a way. The
truth of the matter is, as Mr. Budgett Meakin has remarked, that nothing
short of the unexpurgated edition of the “Thousand and One Nights” can
convey an adequate idea of what goes on within those whited sepulchers,
the high, blank walls of Moorish homes.
All women save the wives of the rich possess sufficient skill in sewing
or embroidery to be able to support themselves in case of need, for,
strictly speaking, a husband is required to supply his wife only with a
head-kerchief and slippers. As a rule, Moorish wives have very little
money, and it is a common thing for wives to steal from their husbands
in order to purchase clothes and even food. Candor compels me to admit,
however, that such incidents are not unheard of in more highly civilized
countries.
In Morocco divorce is a very simple matter—at least for the husband. When
he tires of a wife all he has to say is, “Woman, I divorce thee! Get thou
hence!” whereupon she has no option but to return to her own family. In
theory, it is true, she may get a divorce from him, but this is extremely
difficult in practice. All women, divorced or otherwise, are regarded
as widows, and may remarry six months after the death of a husband or
three months after a divorce. The husband may repent and take his wife
back a first and a second time, but after she has been divorced three
times he may not marry her again until she has been wedded to some one
else and divorced. The Moors, who are an impulsive, hot-tempered race,
frequently divorce their wives on the flimsiest grounds. For example,
when a man swears by the _haram_—that is, by the forbidden—and does not
fulfil his oath, he has to divorce his wife. Miss Sophie Denison, the
English medical missionary in Fez of whom I have already spoken, told me
of a young Moor of her acquaintance, newly wedded and genuinely in love
with his wife, who, while strolling with a friend one day, took his oath
over some trifling matter. Unable to keep his vow, he returned home and
divorced his bride of a few weeks. The story does not end tragically,
however, for when the prescribed interval had elapsed he remarried her.
* * * * *
A short distance without the splendid Aguenaou Gate of Marrákesh, one
of the finest in all Morocco, are the gardens of the Aguedal, the
pleasure-place of the Moorish sultans. It is in reality an enormous
orchard, two and a quarter miles long and a mile and a half wide,
surrounded by a lofty, bastioned wall, its fruit-trees—oranges, lemons,
figs, and olives—set out in ordered rows. In the center is a reservoir,
or tank, as it would be called in Persia, about six hundred feet square
and edged with a marble coping. Toward one end of the inclosure is a
second pool, somewhat larger than the central one. On the edge of the
smaller of the two pools is a Moorish pavilion with a spacious marble
terrace, where, on hot summer evenings, the women of the imperial harem
sometimes come to bathe and to enjoy the comparative coolness, for during
the summer Marrákesh becomes unendurably hot, the mercury frequently
rising to 110° in the shade. Personally, I think that the Aguedal is
vastly overrated, for, when we were there, the buildings were in a state
of disrepair, the roads leading through the gardens were deep in dust,
and the lake reflected the scorching rays of the African sun like a
sheet of burnished copper. Toward nightfall, however, when the heat of
the day has passed and the pavilions and the trees are mirrored in the
peacock-tinted waters, it must be very lovely.
[Illustration: OVERLORDS OF THE SOUTHLAND
In the hot season, when the sand scorches the feet and the sky is a
brazen dome, they wear atop their turbans enormous hats of straw, their
flopping brims reinforced with strips of colored leather
The Grand Caïds are modern counterparts of the feudal barons of the
Middle Ages, riding abroad on splendidly caparisoned horses with hordes
of armed retainers at their heels]
Journeying south from Casablanca the observant traveler can hardly fail
to note the steady decrease in the numbers of French soldiers, until,
by the time Marrákesh is reached, the European fighting-man has almost
disappeared. For, as has been remarked, the whole of the Southland is
under the rule of the Grand Caïds, and its towns are garrisoned by their
own soldiery—ruffianly looking nondescripts, for the most part, though
the well drilled household troops of El Glaoui, the most powerful of the
native chieftains, wear uniforms which vie in gorgeousness with those of
the Shereefian Guard.
The military forces in Morocco consist normally of twenty-two regiments
of infantry, six regiments of cavalry, and twelve battalions of
artillery, which, with the special service organizations, give a total
of 22,000 French troops and 47,000 Moroccans. To these must be added
a force of native auxiliary troops, including the Shereefian Guard,
having a strength of approximately 24,000 men, so that it will be seen
that even in peace-time some 93,000 soldiers are employed to garrison
the country, though this number was trebled, if not quadrupled, during
the fighting in the Riff. Two divisions recruited from native Moroccans
served with marked distinction in the Great War and are now quartered on
the Rhine, where they have been a cause of much dissension, the Germans
claiming that they are colored troops, to which the French retort that
the Moroccans are Berbers and, therefore, Caucasians. That France has
found in Morocco a valuable source of man-power goes without saying, and
this the French intend to exploit to the fullest degree; but to assert,
as has one American writer, that “the population of Morocco could furnish
her [France] possibly a million of glad and willing defenders in case of
need” is, of course, absurd. The total population of French Morocco, as
estimated by the French themselves, is something under five and a half
millions, yet Belgium, with a population nearly half again as large, even
when fighting for her very existence, was never able to place anything
like a million men in the field. Though such statements are doubtless
good propaganda they are grossly misleading.
Though in Marrákesh there is a French garrison—composed almost wholly
of spahis and Senegalese—and a considerable staff of army officers
and civil officials, pains are taken to see that the military are in
evidence as little as possible. This is due, no doubt, to a desire to
conciliate El Glaoui, the great overlord of the Southland, who wields a
power which is almost despotic. If a native jeweler has a gem which he
covets, he takes it, and pays for it or not as he pleases; if he hears of
a beautiful girl, he sends his slaves to her home and without so much as
a by-your-leave has her brought to his harem, and her family do not dare
to voice a protest; if a man defies him he has him bastinadoed or thrown
into the terrible dungeons of the prison called Hib Misbah; if the tribes
under his jurisdiction revolt, as occasionally happens, he drowns the
rebellion in a sea of blood. Like all great Moorish gentlemen, El Glaoui
is a charming host, gracious, generous to a fault, and thoughtful of his
guests’ comfort, but there is that in his smoldering eyes and relentless
mouth which warns one that it would not be safe to cross him.
It may be asked, in this connection, whether the people of Morocco, as
a whole, are really contented under French rule and desire to see it
continued. I do not think so, though in saying this I realize that I
am taking issue with the opinions so loudly expressed by the members
of several self-styled “American missions,” who have been invited to
Morocco by the French government for purposes of propaganda and who have
been flattered with free motor trips, reviews, dinners, and decorations.
It is true that the agricultural population of the country is awakening
to a realization that French rule means for them strict justice and
freedom from oppression; the merchant class views the protectorate with
favor because it spells peace and increased prosperity; the Grand Caïds
will remain loyal to France just so long as they find it profitable to
do so. Yet among the mass of the people, particularly in the hinterland,
there exists, if not actual discontent, at least a feeling of sullen
resentment that the land of their fathers should be ruled by foreigners
and unbelievers. That the people of Morocco are vastly better off under
the rule of France than they were under their own sultans, no fair-minded
person can deny, but the same may be said with equal truth of Egypt and
the Philippines, where England and the United States respectively have
conferred enormous benefits on the native populations. Yet both the
Egyptians and the Filipinos want to rule themselves, and the Moroccans,
unless I am very much mistaken, want the same. For colonial powers have
found, over and over again, that to impose their rule on native peoples,
no matter how just and kindly and beneficial that rule may be, is to
incur, as Kipling puts it,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
Sultan Mulai Yusef was in residence in Marrákesh during my last
visit save one to that city, and through the courtesy of the French
authorities it was arranged that I should meet him. The audience was to
take place in the imperial palace, a huge, wall-encircled congeries of
buildings near the Aguenaou Gate, at ten o’clock in the morning. I was
accompanied by the Vicomte de Trémaudan, an official of the French civil
administration who had volunteered to act as interpreter, and by an
American friend.
“The etiquette of the Shereefian court is very strict,” explained de
Trémaudan, “and must be punctiliously observed. Upon entering his
Majesty’s presence we are expected to stop and bow, to advance a little
way and bow again, and then to move forward a few more paces and bow a
third time.”
“I’ve met quite a number of kings and emperors in my time,” I remarked,
“not to mention a whole raft of shahs and sultans, and with all of
them one bow was quite sufficient; but if the sultan insists on his
guests performing the Daily Dozen as they approach him, why, I have no
objection.”
Alighting from our car at the entrance to the palace, where a detachment
of the Garde Noire presented arms, we were conducted by chamberlains
through an interminable series of courtyards, corridors, and anterooms,
between rows of saluting soldiers and salaaming slaves, emerging at
length into a vast marble-paved courtyard bathed in the hot African
sunshine. Assembled on a terrace at the farther end of the court, and
evidently awaiting us, was a group of white-clad figures, one of them,
apparently a person of importance, standing somewhat in front of the rest.
[Illustration: MOST PEOPLE THINK OF MOROCCO AS A SEMI-ARID COUNTRY
Yet this cork forest at Ain Leuh is only one of many such within the
empire. Nearly the whole of Morocco is mountainous—one of the Atlas peaks
is higher than any mountain in the United States outside of Alaska—and
many regions are rich in woodlands and streams]
“That is the sultan,” whispered de Trémaudan. “Now don’t forget what I
told you about bowing.”
“All right,” I responded. “As citizens of a true democracy we’ll do our
best to make an impression on royalty. Here goes.... One ... two ...
three....”
We stepped out with the precision of Prussian guardsmen. When half-way
down the court de Trémaudan whispered a word of command, at which we came
to a sudden halt, clicked our heels together, and bowed as a single man.
Ten yards on we repeated the performance. And, arriving opposite the
waiting figure, we did it all over again. Whereupon a French officer,
who had been watching us with considerable amusement, called out to de
Trémaudan:
“But this isn’t the sultan, _mon vieux_. This is the master of
ceremonies, who is waiting to conduct you to his Majesty.”
De Trémaudan’s face turned to the color of the ribbon which he wore
upon his breast, and I felt as once I did when, taking part in amateur
theatricals, I got too far down-stage and found myself outside the
descending curtain. But I had made all the obeisances I intended to; I
had no more flummeries left in my system; so, when we were shown into
an inner court and from a small pavilion Mulai Yusef himself advanced
to greet us, I bowed with the respect which is due to the head of any
government, be it Moroccan or American, whereupon the Prince of True
Believers shook me most democratically by the hand and pressed me into a
chair beside him.
I don’t know how old Mulai Yusef is, but I should guess that he is
somewhere in the middle forties, though it is difficult to tell the age
of an Oriental. As might be expected, he has none of the characteristic
features of the Moor, for he is not a Berber but an Arab. He is a man of
medium height, his portliness emphasized by his voluminous garments,
with a full, almost bloated face, sleepy-looking, kindly eyes which have
a glint of humor in them, full red lips, a wonderfully clear olive skin,
and, like all Moors of the upper class, a scraggly fringe of beard along
the line of the chin. He wore a _djellaba_ of some finely woven creamy
white material, the hood of which was drawn up so as to cover his head
and partly shield his features; beneath the hem of his garment showed
slippers of soft yellow leather. About his dress, in fact, there was
nothing whatsoever to distinguish him from any other Moorish gentleman.
The little kiosk, or pavilion, in which the sultan received us was
exquisitely decorated in the Moorish style, his Majesty sitting on
a broad divan in the native fashion, though we were provided with
incongruous-looking French chairs upholstered in yellow satin. During
the audience, which lasted perhaps three quarters of an hour, the
conversation touched on many things—the sultan’s hope of some day
visiting the United States (which, I have found, is a stock remark of
monarchs in talking to Americans), the beneficence of French rule in
Morocco, what I had seen in the empire, and where I was going. All
mention of political questions was noticeably avoided. So innocuous
was the conversation that I had the feeling that I was talking to a
puppet and that I could almost see the French official who stood in the
background dexterously manipulating the strings. Negro slaves served us
with tiny cups of thick black Arab coffee and Turkish cigarettes; the
sultan placed his hand upon my shoulder in a sort of benediction and
expressed the pious wish that Allah watch over us on our journey; and
we sidled from the presence in what strove to be a dignified compromise
between American informality and Eastern etiquette.
It was one of those glorious days of blue and gold, so rarely found
anywhere outside of Morocco and southern California, when we set out from
Marrákesh on the last lap of our long journey, our final objective the
forbidden Sus. The sky was an inverted bowl of bluest Chinese porcelain,
and before us a burnt-umber plain, flat as the top of a table, stretched
away, away, to where the Atlas Mountains “stand up like the thrones of
kings.” As we left the Red City behind us and took the ancient road by
which conquerors and caravans have come up from the Sahara since ever
time began, I found myself humming those lines of John McGroarty’s:
All in the golden weather
Forth let us fare to-day;
You and I together
Upon the King’s Highway....
It was late spring, the ideal season in which to see any country, and
the land was as gay with flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Nowhere
else have I seen flowers grow as they do in Morocco; for, instead of
being interspersed, the various species hold aloof from one another, each
confining itself to certain ground, which gives to the landscape the
appearance of a vast, old-fashioned coverlet. Dark blue, purple, yellow,
white, and scarlet—iris, bugloss, marigold, lily, and poppy—occurred
in patches of several acres; as we approached the lower slopes of the
mountains whole hills and valleys were blue with borage and convolvulus.
At times the road wound across a carpet of green and yellow mignonette;
at others it was banked by drifts of asphodel, white lilies, daisies,
lavender, thyme, and broom. On one occasion, while Tomine was repairing
a puncture, Mrs. Powell and my daughter picked thirty varieties of
wild flowers in half as many minutes. After seeing this amazing floral
splendor one understands whence the Moors obtained the inspiration for
their chromatic art; but, like most really beautiful things, it is of
brief duration, and under the scorching sun of Africa it soon sinks into
the russet monotony of withered herbage.
It is said that when Sidi Okba made his great march from the Nile to
the Atlantic he and his warriors rode in the shade of trees all the
way. But even if this statement once were true—and the Arabs are fond
of exaggeration—it is true no longer. Nevertheless, Morocco is by no
means destitute of arboreal beauty. The cork-tree, which once provided
the country with an important industry, has lost ground enormously,
the Moroccans being unable to keep pace with Portuguese and Spanish
competition; but it is still found in great numbers in the Ma’mora
forest, twenty miles in length, which lies between the Sebu and the
Bou Ragrag, and there is a similar and even larger forest not far from
Mequinez. I have already spoken of the vast argan forest, nearly five
thousand square miles in extent, to the east of Mogador; while on the
lower slopes of the mountains the mimosa, the aloe, and the prickly pear
are abundant, and higher up evergreens, pines, and junipers, cypresses
and cedars, clothe the mountain valleys in mantles of vivid green. Of the
individual trees, none is more remarkable than the arar, a cypress-like
tree which is found both in the Moroccan and the Algerian Atlas. From its
beautiful and enduring timber was built the roof of the famous cathedral
at Cordova; it has been identified with the citrus-wood of the ancient
Romans; and it furnishes a valuable variety of gum.
[Illustration: THE STRONGHOLD OF THE CAÏD GOUNDAFI, OVERLORD OF THE
FORBIDDEN SUS
The _kasbahs_ of the Grand Caïds, like the castles of the old robber
barons, invariably occupy positions of great natural strength, usually
commanding mountain passes. The massive rose-red walls of the Kasbah
Goundafi tower above the narrow defile in the High Atlas through which
runs the trade-route between Marrákesh and the Sus]
For some reason most people think of Morocco as an extremely hot country,
yet, save in the far south, it is not even a subtropical one, having,
in fact, much the same climate as the lands on the opposite side of the
Mediterranean, to which its flora and its general physical character bear
a striking resemblance. It has been described as a cold country with a
hot sun, and this is true on the whole, though it is manifestly unsafe
to generalize regarding a region so extensive in area and so varied in
altitude. The coast, shielded by the maritime ranges from the hot winds
of the Sahara and fanned by cool breezes from the sea, has a climate akin
to that of the Riviera, but without the chilling mistrals and the sudden
changes in temperature which make life on the Côte d’Azur so trying at
times. Inland Morocco becomes extremely disagreeable, however, during the
summer heat and winter rains, the best times for visiting the interior
being from late September to early December and from the end of April
to mid-June. Like California, it is a country of extremes, for, looking
across the orange-groves from the windows of my room in Marrákesh, when
the thermometer stood at nearly 100 in the shade, I have seen snow
gleaming on the Atlas, less than a score of miles away.
The Atlas, which forms the backbone of the country, is known to the Moors
as Idráren Dráren—Mountains of Mountains. And it is appropriately named,
for as I have remarked elsewhere, it has a greater average height than
the Alps, its series of tremendous peaks culminating in Mount Tinzar,
which has an estimated height of fifteen thousand feet, being higher,
therefore, than any peak in the United States outside of Alaska. The
Moroccan Atlas consists of five distinct ranges varying in length and
height but running more or less parallel to one another. Southernmost
of the five is Djebel Saghru, or Anti-Atlas, which forms Morocco’s
first line of natural defense against the Sahara. Since the dawn of
history caravans of slaves, spices, ostrich-feathers, ivory, and gold
from Central Africa and the Niger countries have entered Morocco by the
passes of the Anti-Atlas, one of them being a gap barely five paces in
width, the strata of variegated marbles which form its walls having been
polished to a gleaming brilliancy by the camels and bales of merchandise
which have rubbed against them through countless centuries.
The main range, known as the High Atlas, which we were now approaching,
is by far the longest and loftiest of the five chains. Its southern
flanks, being exposed to the hot, dry winds of the Sahara, are almost
totally destitute of vegetation; but the slopes facing toward the north
are covered with splendid forests of oak, cedar, cork, and pine and
inclose numerous well watered valleys of great fertility, in which
half-savage Berber tribes, their miserable villages clinging precariously
to the hillsides, cultivate tiny irrigated fields with the implements
used in the days of Abraham.
For a distance of a hundred miles or more that portion of the High Atlas
lying to the south of Marrákesh is a huge blank wall, unpierced by any
passes practicable for motor-cars or even caravans; but further to the
west a road of sorts crosses the Bibawan Pass at a height of 4150 feet
and drops down into the valley of the upper Sus; while beyond it the
Goundafi Pass, considerably lower but more rugged and difficult, gives
access to the Susi capital of Tarundant.
Perhaps I have not made it sufficiently clear that our destination
was the valley between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas traversed by
the River Sus, from which it takes its name and whose ever-flowing
stream is sufficient to turn the whole district into a garden. Once an
independent kingdom, peopled by a race of warlike and highly fanatical
Berber mountaineers, believed to be immensely rich in mines of gold and
copper, long closed to trade by imperial decree, and still too unruly
to be opened to Europeans, the Sus is one of the most inaccessible,
picturesque, and interesting regions in the empire. Caravans laden
with copper-ware, olive-oil, butter, saffron, wax, goatskins,
dates, dried roses, gold-dust—how their mere enumeration stirs the
imagination!—regularly make the four days’ journey over the rugged
Goundafi Pass from Tarundant to Marrákesh; and a handful of French
officials are now scattered through the district, which is gradually
becoming pacified, but it is still regarded as unsafe for foreigners and
is officially forbidden to colonists or travelers, permission to visit
it being obtainable only from the French resident-general at Rabat, who
passes the request on to the Grand Caïds who are the real masters of the
country.
It is a region of savagery and grandeur; the soaring, snow-capped
peaks, the ramparts of purple rock, the narrow roads bordered by dizzy
precipices, the dark and gloomy forests of cypress, pine, and cedar, the
leafy glens, the tumbling streams and sparkling waterfalls, the stone
villages perched each on its mountain-top, all reminded us of the Grand
Kabylia, which the Sus resembles, though on a vastly greater and more
impressive scale. The Susi, who speak a Berber dialect called Shillah,
are a hard-bitten, wiry race, distinguished in dress by their short
cloaks of a brown and white striped homespun and by the fact that they
do not as a rule wear turbans. Fierce fighters, shrewd traders, skilled
workers in the copper mined from their native mountains, they lead hard,
squalid, and frugal lives, being prodigal only in powder and human life.
Now we were in the dominions of the Caïd Goundafi, the great feudal
chieftain who is overlord of the Sus; and it was thanks to him that,
at the request of General Daugan, the French commander at Marrákesh,
our journey was made not only safe but reasonably comfortable. For
there are no hotels in the Sus, and, unless Gandoufi makes arrangements
for the traveler to be put up at his _kasbahs_, one is faced with the
alternatives of passing a sleepless night in a vermin-infested hovel or
of making himself as comfortable as he can in the open.
These _kasbahs_, which are to be found not only in the fastnesses of the
High Atlas but throughout central and southern Morocco, are in reality
feudal strongholds, half-palace and half-fortress. They are usually
situated far from the beaten paths of travel, occupying positions of
great natural strength; for, like the French and English castles of the
Middle Ages, they were originally designed with a view to defense against
the incursions of the border tribes. With their crenelated ramparts and
keeps and bastions, their drawbridges and courtyards, their loopholed
walls and massive towers, they are immensely imposing and frequently
of astounding size, one of those which we visited bearing a striking
resemblance to Windsor Castle. To emerge from a gloomy defile, whose
rocky walls rise sheer on either hand, and be confronted by one of these
stupendous strongholds frowning down from its lofty site upon the valley
below, produces an impression not far removed from awe. The traveler has
the feeling that he has been magically transported back into the dim and
distant past, “when knights were bold and barons held their sway,” the
impression of an earlier age being heightened when he sees a cavalcade of
brilliantly garbed horsemen issuing from the bastioned gate and catches
on the battlements the glint of steel.
[Illustration: A SEAT OF FEUDAL POWER
Hidden away in the remote fastnesses of the High Atlas are the _kasbahs_
of the Grand Caïds—African counterparts of the baronial castles of the
Middle Ages]
And so, following the winding Sus, we swung down through the green
and ever-broadening valley to where, set on a lofty eminence above
the river’s mouth, the white battlements of Agadir—the Santa Cruz de
Berbería of the Spaniards, the Gate of the Sudan—look out upon the broad
Atlantic. Barbary lay behind us; our long journey was at an end. As I
stood upon the hill-slopes looking down upon the cluster of square white
houses which form the little town, it struck me that Agadir, remote as
it is, was in a way symbolic of all North Africa. Its Berber inhabitants
converted by the Arabs to Islam, it has been occupied in turn by
Portuguese, by Spaniards, and by French, yet the Arabs alone have left
any lasting impression. Coveted by the Germans because of its mineral
wealth, it almost precipitated a great European war. Whether it will
remain isolated, barbarous, and forbidden, or whether it will be opened
up to civilization, only the future can determine. But I was too tired to
speculate on African problems, so I left the Dark Continent to settle its
own troubles and turned my attention to the evening meal. When darkness
had fallen we climbed to the ancient fort atop the hill, my wife and I,
and, ensconcing ourselves in an angle of the seaward ramparts, gazed out
across the silent, star-lit ocean to where, four thousand miles away, lay
America—and home. At our backs the ghostly bulk of the High Atlas reared
itself skyward in a mighty and mysterious wall. From somewhere amid the
shadows of the sleeping town below came the throb of desert drums.
So we sat, just she and I, on the fort,
That crumbling shell of transient power,
While o’erhead the vast armadas of all time went wheeling by
And we watched their flashing signals hour on hour.
A SHORT GLOSSARY OF ARABIC WORDS AND PHRASES COMMONLY USED IN BARBARY
_Adar-ya-yan!_ Command used to bring a camel to its knees.
_Afrit_ Spirit, ghost.
_Agal_ The cord, commonly of wool but sometimes of gold, for binding the
head-cloth in place.
_Ahl Kitab_ The People of the Book; that is, Christians or Jews.
_Allah_ God.
_Allahu Akbar!_ God is great!
_Andak!_ Stop! Halt!
_Anderun_ That portion of a house or tent occupied by the women.
_’Arasi_ Pleasure-gardens.
_Aselamu aleikum_ Greeting to you!
_Asha_ The evening prayer.
_Asr_ The afternoon prayer.
_’Atara_ Sweet-smelling.
_Bab_ Gate.
_Barek balek!_ Look out! Make way!
_Bairaq_ A tribal flag or banner, an ensign of rank.
_Barracan_ Woman’s outer garment.
_Barrak_ To form animals into line or square.
_Bassourab_ The striped, hooped camel-tent, shaped somewhat like a
balloon, in which women travel.
_Basha_ The Arab’s pronunciation of “Pasha,” as there is no _p_ in the
Arabic alphabet.
_Bey_ The hereditary title of the rulers of Tunisia; the governor of a
Turkish province.
_Berkouks_ Pellets of sweetened rice.
_Bilhana!_ Wishing you joy!
_Bilshifa!_ Wishing you health!
_Bismillah!_ In the name of Allah!
_Bled_ Plain.
_Bokra_ To-morrow.
_Borj_ Tower.
_Burghal_ A dish of mince-meat and porridge.
_Burkha_ An outer garment, with slits for the eyes, which envelops a
woman from head to foot.
_Burnous_ A cloak-like garment with a hood attached.
_Cadi_, or _Kadi_ A judge; a magistrate who tries cases involving the
Koranic law.
_Caïd_ or _Kaïd_ A prince, a governor, a tribal ruler.
_Caftan_ A long gown with sleeves, usually of silk.
_Chéchia_ Tunisian fez.
_Cherchem_ Beans.
_Cous-cous_ A lamb stuffed with almonds and raisins and roasted whole.
_Dahir_ Decree.
_Dar_ Palace.
_Dhuhr_ The midday prayer.
_Diffa_ A meal, banquet, feast.
_Djamaa_ Mosque.
_Djebel_ A mountain, or range of mountains.
_Djemel_ A baggage camel.
_Djerid_ Palm-frond; also applied to a region in southern Tunisia.
_Djinn_ An evil spirit.
_Douar_ A large encampment.
_Eblis_ The Moslem infernal regions; hell.
_Ekhwan_ The elders of a tribe.
_El_ The.
_Emir_ A prince, an independent chieftain, a title given to certain
descendants of Mohammed.
_Emshi!_ Go away! Clear out!
_Emshi besselema!_ A farewell salutation, equivalent to “Good night.”
_Erg_ Sand-dune.
_Faddhl_ To converse, gossip.
_Fakous_ Cucumber.
_Fantasia_ An exhibition of horsemanship and “powder play,” similar to
the Spanish _rodeo_.
_Fatha_ The opening verse of the Koran.
_Fatta_ A dish of eggs and carrots.
_Fedjr_ The morning prayer.
_Feisha_ An amulet or charm.
_Fesquia_ Reservoir.
_Fil-fil_ The soft boots worn in the desert.
_Fondouk_ or _Fondak_ A cheap inn, a lodging-place for caravan-men.
_Foum_ Mouth.
_Franzawi_ French, a Frenchman.
_Gandoura_ A long garment, usually of cotton, resembling a night-gown.
_Ghar_ A subterranean dwelling in the Matmata country.
_Giaour_ An infidel, an unbeliever.
_Gibli_ A sand-laden desert wind.
_Girba_ A water-skin, four usually being carried on each camel of a
caravan.
_Goumier_ or _Goum_ A native policeman, a light horseman; in Barbary the
_goumiers_ form a force of mounted constabulary.
_Hadj_ A pilgrimage, as to Mecca.
_Hadji_ A pilgrim, distinguished by a green scarf about his turban when
he has made the Mecca pilgrimage.
_Haik_ The combined head-cloth and veil worn by the desert tribes; also
the veil worn by women in the towns.
_Hakim_ A physician.
_Hamad_ A stony plain, a steppe.
_Hamdullilah!_ It shall be so!
_Hamla_ Baggage camels.
_Hamman_ A bath, a bathing establishment.
_Hamra_ Red.
_Haram_ The forbidden. Synonymous with _harem_.
_Harem_ The wives and concubines of a Moslem or the apartments allotted
to them. Pronounced _ha-réem_.
_Harka_ A band of fighting-men, varying in number.
_Haya alla Salat! Haya alla Falah!_ The Moslem call to prayer.
_Hejin_ A racing-camel.
_Hejira_ Flight; specifically, the flight of Mohammed from Mecca,
September 13, A.D. 622.
_Henna_, or _Hinna_ A thorn-shrub and the reddish stain made from it.
_Hezaam_ A woman’s veil.
_Houri_ A nymph of the Mohammedan paradise, a beautiful and seductive
woman.
_Imam_ A priest; also a descendant of Mohammed who exercises both
princely and priestly powers.
_Inshallah!_ The will of God!
_Islam_ The Mohammedan religion; the whole body of Mohammedans, or the
countries which they occupy.
_Jalib_ A well.
_Jehad_ A holy war.
_Jellabia_ A smock-like garment, worn under the burnous.
_Ka’aba_ The great sanctuary at Mecca, the Moslem holy of holies.
_Kadi_ or _Cadi_ A judge; a magistrate who tries cases involving the
Koranic law.
_Kaibabs_ Bits of mutton roasted on a skewer.
_Kaïd_ or _Caïd_ A prince, a governor, a tribal ruler.
_Kantara_ Bridge.
_Kasbah_ A fortress or castle.
_Kasr_ A castle.
_Kahena_ Priestess.
_Keffieh_ A head-cloth.
_Kebir_ Strong.
_Khalif_, or _Caliph_ A title of the successors of Mohammed both as
temporal and spiritual rulers; now used by the sultans of Morocco.
_Khalifa_ A representative or viceroy of the Khalif.
_Khallas!_ It is finished!
_Khalouk_ Rouge.
_Khams_ A charm, usually taking the form of the hand of Fatima.
_Khamsin_ Fifty; also a sand-laden desert wind which, it is claimed,
blows intermittently for fifty days.
_Khoorg_ A sack or basket used for carrying dates and fodder on the march.
_Khouan_ A holy man.
_Kief halak!_ How do you do? How are you?
_Kohl_ A preparation of soot used by women to darken the eyelids.
_Koran_ The Mohammedan Scriptures, containing the professed revelations
to Mohammed.
_Koubba_ A tomb, usually of a holy man; a shrine.
_Kubla_, or _Kibla_ The point at Mecca toward which Mohammedans turn in
prayer.
_Leben_ Curdled sheep’s, goat’s, or camel’s milk.
_Litham_ The face-cloth, usually blue, worn by Touareg warriors.
_Madresseh_ or _Mederseh_ Theological school or college, usually
connected with a mosque.
_Maghreb_, or _Moghreb_ The West.
_Magzhen_ Government, administration.
_Mansour_ Victor, conqueror.
_Mansoura_ The victorious.
_Marabout_ A holy man, a saint. The name is also applied to a shrine,
usually built over a saint’s tomb.
_Masjid_ A mosque, a place of worship.
_Mehara_ A highly bred racing-camel.
_Mehari_ Plural of _mehara_.
_Mehariste_ A rider of a mehara; that is, a soldier of the Camel Corps.
_Mellah_ The name applied to the quarter occupied by the Jews in certain
towns.
_Mejless_ A tribal council.
_Mektub!_ It is written!
_Meskoutine_ Accursed.
_Mihrab_ The niche in a mosque indicating the direction of Mecca.
_Mimbar_ Pulpit.
_Mirabit_ A militant monk; the genesis of _marabout_.
_Mish’ab_ A camel-stick.
_Mogh’reb_ or _Magh’reb_ The West; also the sunset prayer.
_Mou’abbir_ A pious and learned man.
_Muezzin_ A caller to prayer.
_Mullah_ or _Mollah_ A priest.
_Nargileh_ A pipe, in which the smoke is drawn through water.
_Nasria_ A bottle-shaped reservoir.
_Nazrani_ A Christian.
_Nuálla_ The conical thatched hut of central Morocco.
_Nuksh hadida_ Moorish sculptured plaster-work.
_Nullah_ A dried up watercourse.
_N’zala_ The square empty place in the center of a village.
_Pasha_ A Turkish title of rank, still used in Algeria and Morocco.
_Quaita_ A reed instrument, a cross between a whistle and a flute.
_Rabit_ A monastery fortress.
_Rahmat ullahi Allahim!_ The peace of God be upon him!
_Ramadan_ The ninth month of the Mohammedan calendar; the great annual
fast of the Moslems.
_Rezel_ Gazelle.
_Rhorfa_ A house in Medenine, in southern Tunisia.
_Roumi_ A European, a Christian.
_Sahab_ Companion, particularly of the Prophet.
_Sahrij_ A pool, an artificial lagoon.
_Salaam_ An obeisance; a low bow with the hand on the forehead.
_Salaam aleikum!_ Greeting to you!
_Salaam aleikum was Rahmat Allah!_ Greeting to you and the peace of Allah!
_Serai_ A place for keeping wives and concubines; usually a portion of a
palace.
_Shaduf_ The sweep and bucket used to draw water from a well.
_Sharaqua_ To rise, as the sun; whence _Sirocco_, a wind from the east,
the desert.
_Sharq_ The East.
_Shat_ or _Chott_ A canal, estuary, salt lake.
_Shehada_ The Moslem profession of faith: _Ash hadu illa illaha ill
Allah, wa ash hadu inna Mohammed an rasool Allah_.
_Sheikh_ The chief of a tribe or clan; also the chief magistrate of a
village. Pronounced “_shake_.”
_Sheikh-ul-Islam_ The highest ecclesiastical authority in Islam.
_Sheitan_ The Evil One.
_Shereef_ A member of an Arab princely family descended from Mohammed
through his daughter Fatima. It is one of the titles of the sultan of
Morocco, and the term “shereefian” is applied to his government.
_Sherifa_ A female descendant of Mohammed.
_Sidi_ A lord, a prince.
_Sitt_ A lady.
_Sokhab_ A tiara of small coins worn by desert women, as the Ouled-Naïl.
_Souk_ A bazaar, a market-place.
_Spahi_ A native cavalryman (Tunisian, Algerian, or Moroccan) in the
French service.
_Sura_ A verse of the Koran.
_Taiyib!_ Well! Good!
_Tarboosh_ A cylindrical cap of red or brown felt, higher and straighter
than the Turkish fez.
_Tel_ A hill.
_Tell_ The name applied to that portion of Barbary lying between the
coastal plains and the high mountains.
_Tobh_ The single garment worn by Arab women of the poorer classes.
_Ulema_ The official interpreters of the Koranic law.
_Vizir_, or _Wazir_ A councilor of state; a cabinet minister.
_Wadi_, or _Wad_ River or small stream. The French spell it _oued_.
_Wahran_ A ravine.
_Wakf_ A religious or benevolent foundation.
_Wakil_ A councilor.
_Wazir_ The same as _vizir_.
_Ya_ Yes.
_Zariba_ A thorny hedge, natural or artificial.
_Zawia_, or _Zaouia_ A monastery; originally the house of a
religio-military brotherhood.
_Zemzimayah_ A water-bottle.
_Zouave_ A French infantryman wearing a uniform modeled on the dress of
the Zouaoua, a tribe living in the mountains of the Grand Kabylia.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The historical sketch of Carthage and its people in this chapter is
largely drawn from “African Shores of the Mediterranean,” by C. F. and L.
S. Grant.
[2] See “In the Desert,” by L. March Phillips.
[3] See Colonel Powell’s “The Last Frontier.”
[4] See “In the Desert” by L. March Phillips.
[5] For a full account of Eaton’s remarkable exploit the reader is
referred to Colonel Powell’s “Gentlemen Rovers.”
INDEX
Abd-el-Aziz, Sultan, 348, 353
Abd-el-Kader, 159, 295 _et seq._, 331
Abd-el-Krim, 367 _et seq._
Abd-el-Mumin, Sultan, 436
Abd-er-Rahman, Sultan, 347
Abdallah-ibn-Abad, 212
Abou Bekr, Arab conqueror, 106
Abul Hassan, Sultan, 331-332
Adjim (Djerba), 142
Adrar, of the Iforas, 163, 174
Ægusa, Battle of, 63
Æsculapius, 59
Africa, Roman province of, 79
Agadir (Morocco), 350, 457-458
Agrigentum, Battle of, 62
Ahaggar Plateau (Sahara), 173
Ahmed Pasha, bey of Constantine, 252-253
Air, hills of (Sahara), 174, 218
Aïssa, Marabout, 234, 402
Aïssaoua, sect, rites of, Biskra, 233 _et seq._
Mequinez, 402
Alaoui Museum, near Tunis, 47 _et seq._
Alaric the Goth, 79
Alcázar, or Al Kasar (Morocco), 364
Algeciras (Spain), 8, 423
Algeciras Conference, 351 _et seq._
Algeria, 215 _et seq._
agriculture, 316 _et seq._
conquest, 159, 313 _et seq._
government, 311 _et seq._
inhabitants, 314
minerals, 318
motoring, 307 _et seq._
railways, 306
roads, 305 _et seq._
Tell, 311
Algiers (Algeria), 278 _et seq._
Arab city, 281
El Biar, suburb of, 298-9
French city, 280
gardens, 299
Great Mosque, 283
Jardin d’Essai, 300
mosque of Sidi er Rahman, 283
museum, 301
Mustapha Supérieur, 298 _et seq._
New Mosque, 283
Notre Dame d’Afrique, Church of, 303
occupation of, French, 293 _et seq._
palace of deys, 282
palace of governor-general, 299
Alhucemas (Spanish Morocco), 366
Ali V, Sultan, 334
Alides, dynasty of, 347
Alix, General, 356
Almohades, dynasty of, 331, 346, 408, 436
Almoravides, dynasty of, 337, 346
Americans in the Foreign Legion, 336 _et seq._
Americans in the Riff, 368-369
Amor Abbada, Moslem saint, 109
Amr ibn al Asi, Arab conqueror, 106
Andalusians, 16, 34
Anti-Atlas Mountains, 454-455
Arab invasion of North Africa, 80, 106 _et seq._, 114, 243, 341 _et
seq._
Argan Forest, Great (Morocco), 432-433
_Argo_, 151
Argonauts, 136, 150-151
Army in Morocco, French, 445-456
Arouj, corsair chief, 284, 331
Atlas Mountains, 10, 239, 451 _et seq._
Augustus, Emperor, 78, 121, 309
Aurés Mountains, 150, 189, 240, 253
Azan, Colonel Paul, 335
Azemour (Morocco), 431
Azrou (Morocco), 378
Babor, Mount, 267
Balearic Islands, 69
Bamaku (French Sudan), 184
Barb horses, 405
Barbarossa, corsair chief, 20, 252, 269, 284 _et seq._, 320, 331
Barbary, climate, 9, 10
topography, 10, 238-239
Barbers of Tunis, 41
Bardo, palace of, near Tunis, 46 _et seq._
_Bataillons d’Afrique_, 326
Batna (Algeria), 241
Bekri, Arab geographer, 155
Belisarius, 80, 114
Beni-Abbés (Morocco), 168
Beni-Isguen (Algerian Sahara), 217
Beni-M’zab, 212 _et seq._
Berbers, 57, 61, 101, 117, 125, 139, 340 _et seq._
Bey of Tunis, 45
Beylerbeys, Turkish, 286
Bibawan Pass (Morocco), 454
Biskra (Algeria), 10, 152, 216 _et seq._
Aïssaoua, performances of, 233 _et seq._
climate, 224
“Garden of Allah,” 226 _et seq._
Ouled-Naïl, dancing-girls of, 230 _et seq._
Villa Landon, 226 _et seq._
Bizerta (Tunisia), 14 _et seq._
Blake, Admiral Robert, 290
Bled el Hamra (Morocco), 434
Bled Kebira (Tunisia), 122, 124 _et seq._
Blue Gardens at Rabat, 410
Boabdil, king of Granada, 330, 347
Bokharis, 402
Bône (Algeria), 291, 294
Bonnier, Colonel, French explorer, 167
Bordeaux, routes from, 7
Borku (French Equatorial Africa), 174
Bou-Hamara, 348, 354
Bou-Kornein, peaks of (Tunisia), 44, 60, 65
Bou-Ragrag, river (Morocco), 409
Bou-Zarea Hills (Algeria), 303
Bougie (Algeria), 264 _et seq._
British policy in Morocco, 349 _et seq._, 370 _et seq._, 385
Bugeaud, Marshal, 296
Bu-Maza, “goat-man,” 297
Byrsa, 57 _et seq._, 84
Byzacium, 115
Byzantines in Africa, 79, 106, 114, 243
Cæsar, Julius, 78
Cæsarea (Algeria), 108
Caïds, Grand, 357 _et seq._, 362, 445, 455
Caius Gracchus, 78
Calcius Herculis, 240
Cambē, 56
Camels, 208 _et seq._, 218
Cameroons, 164, 352
Canaanites, 57
Cannæ, Battle of, 67
Cape Spartel, 344
Caracalla, Emperor, 408
Caravans, 208
Carpets, Tunisian, 36
Carthage, 17-18, 24, 32, 56 _et seq._
agora, 85
Admiralty Palace, 84, 86, 89
amphitheater, 89-90
aqueduct, 87, 105
area, 82
Byrsa, 57 _et seq._, 84
Cathedral of St. Louis, 94
cemeteries, 93
circus, 89 _et seq._
Cothon, 84 _et seq._, 88-89
Eschmoun, Temple of, 59, 88
forum, 85
harbors, 84 _et seq._, 88-89
Megara, suburb of, 84
Museum, Lavigerie, 86, 95-96
Odéon, 89
population of Punic City, 82
Punic remains, 86
racing, 91 _et seq._
Roman remains, 86 _et seq._, 89 _et seq._
sarcophagi, Punic, 96
Scorpianus, house of, 92
_tabulæ execrationis_, 92-93
Casablanca (Morocco), 353, 424 _et seq._
abattoir, 427-8
communications with Europe, 430
markets, 427
new town, 426-427
Place de France, 426
prostitutes’ quarter, 428-429
_souks_, 426
Cato, Marcus, 72, 78
Cervantes, Miguel de, 288
Ceuta (Spanish Morocco), 365 _et seq._, 370-371, 403
Chabet Pass (Algeria), 264 _et seq._
Charles II, king of England, 290
Charles V, king of Spain, 20, 42
Cherchel (Algeria), 309-310
Chergui, island of (Tunisia), 121
Chotts; see Shats, 149 _et seq._
Christian slaves, Tunisia, 42-43
Algiers, 288 _et seq._
Christians persecuted, Carthage, 79, 85, 89
El Djem, 116
Cirta, 250 _et seq._
Cisneros, Cardinal Ximenes de, 320
Citroen, André, 181
Citroen tractor expeditions, 181 _et seq._
Clausel, Marshal, 253, 331
Cleopatra, 309
Colomb-Béchar (Algeria), 184, 223, 323
Color line in French North Africa, 166
Compagnie Générale Transatlantique services to North Africa, 7, 266,
430
hotel at Constantine, 259
hotel at El Hamma, 144, 148
hotel at El Oued, 194
hotel at Fez, 382
hotel at Marrákesh, 435-436
hotel at Mequinez, 401
hotel at Michelet, 274
hotel at Taza, 379
hotel at Tenes, 310
hotel at Tlemcen, 331
hotel at Tozeur, 156
Congo, French, 160
Constantine (Algeria), 247 _et seq._
Arab town, 257
cathedral, 257
Corniche Road, 249
Djamaa-el-Kebir, 256
gorges of the Rummel, 248 _et seq._
history, 250 _et seq._
Hôtel Transatlantique, 259
Jews of, 258-9
_kasbah_, 256
museum, 257
palace of Ahmed Pasha, 255-256
Place de la Brèche, 258
_souks_, 258
Coppolani, French explorer, 166
Cork industry, 452
Corsairs, Algerine, 255, 269, 284 _et seq._
Moorish, 417 _et seq._
Tunisian, 42-43
Cucumbers, 119
Daia (Algeria), 323
Dakar (Senegal), 184
Damrémont, General, 253
Darfur (Sudan), 174
Dates, 155-156
Daugan, General, 359
d’Aumale, Duc, 296
de Brazza, Savargnan, 160, 166
Decatur, Stephen, 291
de Chambrun, General Vicomte, 388
Defoe, Daniel, 289
de Foucauld, Vicomte Charles, 167 _et seq._
Delattre, Father, 95
de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 152
de l’Isle, Brière, 166
Denison, Miss Sophie, 385, 394, 443
de Trémaudan, Vicomte Louis, 448
Dido, 17, 24, 56
Divorce in Morocco, 443-444
Djebel Amur, 215
Djebel Saghru, 454
Djebel Zaghouan, 102, 104
Djelfa (Algeria), 219
Djerba, island of, 122, 135 _et seq._
character of, 137 _et seq._
costumes, 139
Hara Srira, 139-140
Houmt-Souk, 140 _et seq._
inhabitants, 138
Jews in, 139-140
Skull Fort, 141
synagogue, 139-140
wild flowers, 138
Djerid, Tunisian, 149, 154
Djidjelli (Algeria), 266
Djorf (Tunisia), 142
Djurjura Mountains, 249, 264, 269, 273
Dodds, General, 166
Donatists, 243, 251
Douls, Camille, 166
Dourneaux Duperré, 166
Dra’a, river, 365
Dragut, corsair chief, 114, 141
Dunes, sand, 174 _et seq._, 186 _et seq._
Dutch bombard Algiers, 291
Duveyrier, Henri, 166
Eaton, William, 290
Edward VII, King, 349
El Araish (Morocco), 366
El Bahira, lake of, 19, 44, 83
El Beloui, “the Barber,” 110-111
El Biar (Algeria), 298-299
El Djem (Tunisia), 115 _et seq._, 126
El Eubbad (Algeria), 333
El Glaoui, khalifa of Marrákesh, 362, 446
El Golea, oasis of, 160, 174
El Hamma (Tunisia), 144 _et seq._
El Hiba, Moorish pretender, 357
El Juf, oasis of, 163
El Kahena, Berber chieftainess, 117, 125
El Kantara (Algeria), 222, 240-241
El Kantara (Tunisia), 136
El Oued (Tunisia), 194
El Roghi, Moorish pretender, 385
En-Nasr, Berber ruler, 268
Ennedi Mountains, 174
Entente Cordiale, 349
Eschmoun, god of the Carthaginians, 59
Es Sueira (Morocco), 432
Exmouth, Lord, 291
Faidherbe, General, 166
Falconry, 200
Fan, dey of Algiers slaps French consul with, 293
Fatimite wars, 155
Felicitas, St., martyrdom of, 79, 90
Ferdinand V, king of Spain, 269
Ferryville (Tunisia), 15
Fez (Morocco), 380 _et seq._
climate, 390
Companions of the Sick, 389-390
drainage system, 380
Great Prayer, 396 _et seq._
history, 381
hotels, 382
Karueein Mosque, 383
leather-work, 387
massacre of, 355
mederseh, 383
military camp, 395
Mulai Idris, mosque of, 384
museum, 384-385
palace of Bou Djeloud, 390
Palais Jamaï, 382
population, 381
situation, 380
_souks_, 386 _et seq._
Treaty of, 355
Ville Moderne, 395
women, 390 _et seq._
Fezzes, manufacture of, 381
Filali dynasty, 347
Flaminius, Roman consul, 67
Flatters, Colonel, 166
Foreign Legion, 162, 323 _et seq._, 336 _et seq._
Fort National (Algeria), 273-274
Foum-es-Sahara; see El Kantara (Algeria)
Foureau, Fernand, 161-162, 166
French policy, Algeria, 311 _et seq._
Morocco, 349 _et seq._
Tunisia, 26-7, 49, 312 _et seq._
Gabés (Tunisia), 117, 122, 136, 152
Gabés, gulf of, 112, 119, 121, 151
Gafsa (Tunisia), 156
Galleys, Carthaginian, 61 _et seq._
corsair, 287
Gallifet, General, 160
Gambetta, French statesman, 94
“Garden of Allah,” 222
Garden of the Hesperides, 366
Gazelle hunting in the Sahara, 200
Gelaa Matmata (Tunisia), 125-126
Genseric, 79, 215
German colonies in Africa mandated to France, 164
German policy in Morocco, 349 _et seq._
Ghadames (Sahara), 166
Gharbi, island of (Tunisia), 121
Ghardaia (Algeria), 156, 212 _et seq._
_Ghars_ of Matmata, 127 _et seq._
Ghiata Mountains (Morocco), 378
Gibraltar, 370-371
Goletta; see La Goulette
Gordian, Emperor, 116
Goths in North Africa, 79
Goundafi, Grand Caïd of the Sus, 363, 456
Goundafi, pass of (Morocco), 454
Gouraud, General, 356
Grand Caïds, 445
Grand Erg Occidental, 173-174
Grand Erg Oriental, 173-174, 179 _et seq._
Grande Mademoiselle, 403 _et seq._
Great Prayer near Fez, 396 _et seq._
Greeks in North Africa, 80
Guemar, oasis of (Algerian Sahara), 197
Guinea, French, 160
Guraya, Mount (Algeria), 267
Hadrian, Emperor, 87, 105, 316
Hadrumetum, 56, 113
Haedo, Spanish historian, 302
Hafsides, dynasty of, 268
Háhá, province of (Morocco), 432
Hamadchas, sect of, 406
Hamilcar, 61, 63, 65 _et seq._
Hammamet, gulf of, 112
Hamman Meskoutine (Algeria), 260 _et seq._
Hammon, god of Carthaginians, 59-60
Hannibal, 63 _et seq._, 121
Hanno, 63-64
Hara Srira (Djerba), 139-140
Hasdrubal, 65, 77
Hasdrubal Giscon, 68
Hassan, Arab conqueror, 80, 85
Hassan, Sultan, 348
Hassan Tower at Rabat, 408
Hatchet, defile of the (Tunisia), 65
Hercules, Pillars of, 18
Herodotus, 123
Hesperides, Gardens of the, 56
Hichens, Robert, 226
Hippo Zarytus, 56
Hoggar Plateau (Sahara), 173
Hohenzollern, William, 350
Homer’s description of Djerba, 137, 142
Horace, 103
Horses, Barb, 405
Houmt-Souk (Djerba), 136, 140 _et seq._
Hounds, Saluki, 200
Hussein Pasha, dey of Algiers, 292 _et seq._
Iarbas, King, 56
Icosium, 283
Idráren Dráren Mountains, 453
Idris, Mulai, 345, 381
Idris II, Mulai, 345
Idrisi dynasty, 346 _et seq._
Ifni, Spanish colony of, 364-365
Igidi (Sahara), 173-174
Imperial Road to Tafilalt, 378
Innaouene, river, 379
In Salah, oasis of, 168
Isly, Battle of, 297
Isly, Duke of, 296
Italian interests in Tunisia, 14
Italian policy in Morocco, 371 _et seq._
Ivory Coast, 160, 184
Jabir, Moorish architect, 436
Jackson, James, English traveler, 405
Jarabub (Tripolitania), 198
Jason and the Argonauts, 136, 150-151
Jewelry, Kabyle, 276
Jews, Algeria, 258-259, 316
Morocco, 342
Tunisia, 53
Jol, 309
Joubert, French explorer, 166
Juba I, king of Mauretania, 103
Juba II, king of Mauretania, 309
Jugurtha, 251
Julia Cæsarea, 309
Jusserand, Jean Jules, 27
Justinian, Emperor, 80
Kabyles, 270 _et seq._
Kabylia, Grand, 11, 263 _et seq._
Kabylia, Lesser, 269
Kabylia, rebellion, 297
Kairouan (Tunisia), 49, 80, 100 _et seq._
carpets, 36, 111
Djamaa Amor Abbada (Mosque of the Saber), 109
Djamaa Sidi Okba, 105, 107
Djamaa Sidi Sahab (Mosque of the Barber), 110
El Beloui, tomb of, 111
history of, 106 _et seq._
hotel, 107
Kasbah Tadla (Morocco), 430
_Kasbahs_ in the High Atlas, 456-457
Kayes (Senegal), 184
Kedija, Mount, 274
Kef (Tunisia), 103
Key of David, 132
Khair-ed-Din, corsair chief, 252, 284 _et seq._
Kherrata (Algeria), 264
Koceila, Berber chief, 117
Kolea (Algeria), 308
Ksar-er-Rabit in Sousse, 115
Kubr-er-Rumia (Tomb of the Christian Woman), 308
Laghouat (Algeria), 159, 219
La Goulette (Tunisia), 19 _et seq._, 44, 80
Lalla Maghnia (Algeria), 313, 374
La Marsa (Tunisia), 44
Lambessa (Algeria), 241
Lamoricière, General, 297
Lamy, Lieutenant, French explorer, 166
Larache (Morocco), 366
Largeau, Victor, French explorer, 166
Laroussi, Si Sayah, Grand Marabout of the Tidjania, 199
Lavigerie, Cardinal, 94-95, 220-221
Leather-work, Fez, 387
Marrákesh, 437
Tunis, 38-39
Légion Etrangère, 323 _et seq._, 336 _et seq._
Lella Setta Hills (Algeria), 329
Leptis (Tripolitania), 70
Libya, 58, 133, 151
Libyan Desert, 175
Lipara, Battle of, 62
London, Declaration of, 349-350
_Lotophagi_ (Lotus-Eaters), 141
Lotus, quest of, 141 _et seq._
Louis IX, king of France, 80, 94
Louis XIII, king of France, 403
Louis XIV, king of France, 404
Lyautey, Marshal, 168, 355, 357
Maclean, Caïd Sir Harry, English soldier of fortune, 352
Macta, Battle of the, 295
Madrid, Treaty of, 363
Magellan, Ferdinand, 431
Maghreb-el-Aska, 339
Mahomet XVI, Sultan, 347
Ma’mora, forest of (Morocco), 452
Mansoura, ruins of, 334
Marabouts, 115, 147, 197 _et seq._
Marchand, Major, French explorer, 178
Marinides, dynasty of, 346
Mark Antony, 369
Marrákesh (Morocco), 434 _et seq._
Aguedal, 444
Aguenaou Gate, 444
architecture, 435
Bled el Hamra, 434
climate, 444
hotels, 435-436
Kutubia Tower, 435-436
leather-work, 437
mosque of Abd-el-Mumin, 436
Sinners’ Concourse, 436
_souks_, 437
visit to sultan, 447 _et seq._
Marseilles, 7, 11 _et seq._
Martel, Charles, “Hammer of God,” 345
Mascara (Algeria), 323
Masinissa, king of Numidia, 65, 69, 248, 251, 309
Matmata Plateau (Tunisia), 121, 123 _et seq._
Mauretania, 163, 167, 173, 344
Mazagan (Morocco), 431-432
M’Donnell, Ida, escape, 291
Medenine (Tunisia), 121, 130 _et seq._
Medjerda, river, 117
Medrassen (Algeria), 245
Megara, 78, 84
Meggarine, Battle of, 159
_Méharistes_, 154, 201
Mekinez; see Mequinez
Melilla (Spanish Morocco), 365
Meninx, 137
Mequinez (Morocco), 400 _et seq._
Aïssa, tomb of, 402
Bab Bardain, 401
hotel, 401
Mansour Gate, 401
palace of Mulai Ismail, 402 _et seq._
school for princes, military, 405
school of native arts, 402
stables of Mulai Ismail, 404
Mercenaries, War of, 64, 103
Mers-el-Kebir (Algeria), 320
Metabia, Arab tribe, 215
Metaloui (Tunisia), 156
Metameur (Tunisia), 134
Michelet (Algeria), 274
Michigan, University of, excavations at Carthage, 99
Micipisa, 251
Miknasa, dynasty of the, 346
Mjerda River, 313
Mogador (Morocco), 432
Montpensier, Duchesse de, 403 _et seq._
Morocco
Abd-el-Krim, 367 _et seq._
airplane services, 430
British policy, 348 _et seq._, 370 _et seq._
capitals, 400
climate, 9, 453
conquest by the French, 163-164, 314
divorce, 443-444
forests, 452
French policy, 349 _et seq._, 414, 416, 446-447
German policy, 349, 358
government, 312, 359 _et seq._
Grand Caïds, 357 _et seq._, 362
history, 339 _et seq._
inhabitants, 340 _et seq._
Italian policy, 371 _et seq._
Jews, 342
military forces, French, 445
Moors, 343 _et seq._
Moroccan troops in Great War, 359
polygamy, 441
population, 343-344, 446
protectorate declared by France, 355
railways, 376-377, 430
Riff, 353, 355 _et seq._, 364
roads, 306, 377-378
slavery, 437 _et seq._
Spanish policy, 349 _et seq._
Spanish zone, 363 _et seq._
steamer communication, 430
Sultan Mulai Yusef, 356, 361, 414 _et seq._
Tangier, 364 _et seq._
topography, 453-454
wild flowers, 451-452
women, position, 440 _et seq._
Motoring, Algeria, 307 _et seq._
Morocco, 306, 377-378
Sahara, 156 _et seq._
Tunisia, 117, 124
Mozabites, 212 _et seq._
Mtouggui, khalifa of High Atlas, 300
Mulai Hafid, Sultan, 353
Mulai Idris (Morocco), 405
Mulai Ismail, Sultan, 402 _et seq._
Mulai Yusef, Sultan, 163, 356, 414 _et seq._, 447 _et seq._
Murabti, dynasty of, 346
Mussolini, Benito, 371
Mustapha Inférieur, 274
Mustapha Supérieur, 298
Neal, Admiral Sir Harry, 292
Nefta, oasis of, 193-194
New Carthage (Cartagena), 66
Oases, Saharan, 154
Okba ibn Nafi, Sidi, 106 _et seq._, 229-230
Omar, Arab khalif, 106
Oran (Algeria), 318 _et seq._
Othman ibn Affan, 106
Oued Biskra, 222
Oued Rir, revolt, 159, 204
Ouergha, valley of (Morocco), 368
Oujda (Morocco), 352, 374
Ouled-Naïl, dancing-girls of, 230 _et seq._
Ouled-Naïl Mountains, 219
Ourgla (or Wargla), oasis of, 156, 159, 213
Outih, 56
Ovid, 91
Palet, Lieutenant, French explorer, 166
Payne, John Howard, author of “Home, Sweet Home,” 55
Penon, at Algiers, 285-286
Perdicaris, Ion, kidnapping, 348
_Pères Blancs_, 221
Perfume-sellers of Tunis, 33 _et seq._
Perpetua, St., martyrdom, 79, 90
Perrégaux, General, 253
Pétain, Marshal, 368
Phenicians, 56 _et seq._
_Philadelphia_, U.S.S., in war with Barbary corsairs, 291
Philip II, king of Spain, 365
Philippeville (Algeria), 260
Piali Pasha, 141
Pillars of Hercules, 366
Polygamy in Morocco, 441
Pomaria, 330
Portuguese in Morocco, 431, 457
Preble, Commodore, 291
Ptolemy, 155
Punic Wars, 61 _et seq._
Quintus Fabius Maximus, 67
Quiza, 319
Rabat (Morocco), 408 _et seq._
Blue Gardens, 410
Borj-el-Hassan (Hassan Tower), 408
modern city, 412
museum, 409
palace of Sultan Yakoub, 409
school of native arts, 409
_souks_, 411
Railways, Algeria, 306
Morocco, 376-377, 430
Sahara, 184-185
Tunisia, 155-156
Raisuli, Moroccan bandit, 348, 352
Ramadan, observance, 44-45, 206
Redemptionists, order of, 289
Regulus, Marcus Attilius, 17, 63
Renault, Louis, automobile manufacturer, 183
Renault twelve-wheel cars in Sahara, 156, 179 _et seq._
Rhodes, Cecil, 221
_Rhorfa_ of Medenine, 131 _et seq._
Riff (Morocco), 353, 364 _et seq._
Rio de Oro, Spanish colony, 365
Roads, Algeria, 305 _et seq._
Morocco, 377-378
Tunisia, 117-118
Romans, Algeria, 241 _et seq._, 265, 268
Tunisia, 60 _et seq._, 115 _et seq._, 144, 155
Roosevelt, Theodore, 348, 351
Roudaire, Colonel François, 152
Routes to North Africa, 7-8
Rovers, Sallee, 409, 417 _et seq._
Rummel, gorges of, at Constantine, 249-250
Saddlery of Tunis, 38-39
Saffron Islands, or Zaffarines (Morocco), 366
Safi (Morocco), 432
Sahara, 195 _et seq._
agriculture, 196-197
Algerian, 311-312
area, 171
climate, 9, 195-196
color, 190
conquest, 158 _et seq._
date cultivation, 155-156
oases, 154, 176 _et seq._
railways proposed, 184-185
scheme for flooding, 152
topography, 172
trade routes, 193
Tunisian, 149
wells, 176 _et seq._
Sahel, Algerian, 279
Tunisian, 113, 115, 117
St. Gerónimo, buried alive, 301 _et seq._
St. Louis, death on last Crusade, 17
St. Vincent de Paul, captured by corsairs, 43
Salah Reis, corsair chief, 269, 309
“Salammbô,” Flaubert’s, 64, 103
Salé (Morocco), 409, 417
Salisbury, Lord, 161
Sallee Rovers, 409
Saluki gazelle-hounds, 200
Sand-storms, 191 _et seq._
Santa Cruz de Berbería (Morocco), 457
Say (French Sudan), 161
Say, Louis, French explorer, 166
Sbeitla, Battle of, 110
Scipio Africanus, 17, 68 _et seq._, 74 _et seq._
Sebkha-en-Rouan, 83
Sebkhet-es-Sedjoumi, 19, 44
Selene, Princess, daughter of Cleopatra, 309
Selim, Sultan, 252, 285
Selkirk, Alexander, 289
Sempronius Gracchus, 121
Senegambia (French West Africa), 160
Senussi, 198
Septimius Severus, 247
Setif (Algeria), 264
Shat-el-Djerid, 152, 155
Shat-el-Fejej, 152
Shat Gharsa, 152, 155
Shat Melrir, 152, 222
Shats, 149 _et seq._, 153 _et seq._
Sidi Abdallah (Tunisia), 15
Sidi-bel-Abbès (Algeria), 323 _et seq._
Sidi Bou Medine, 333
Sidi-Brahim, Battle of, 297
Sidi-Ferruch (Algeria), 293
Sidi M’godol, 433
Sidi Okba (Algeria), 229
Sidi Okba; see Okba ibn Nafi
Sidi Salah (Tunisia), 120
Skull Fort in Djerba, 141
Slave-trade, 214, 437-438
Slaves in Barbary, Christian, 288 _et seq._
Solomon, Byzantine, general, 243
Somaliland, French, 164
Sophonisba, 68
Sousse (Tunisia), 56, 107, 113 _et seq._
Spain invaded by Carthaginians, 65 _et seq._
Spanish policy in Morocco, 349 _et seq._
Spanish rule in North Africa, 140, 252, 269, 284 _et seq._, 320-321,
343, 353, 363 _et seq._
Staoueli, Battle of, 293
Staoueli wine made by Trappist monks, 318
Steeg, Théodore, French resident-general in Morocco, 360
Stone Age, relics, in Morocco, 344
Sudan, French, 161
Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan, 286
Sus (Morocco), 451 _et seq._, 455 _et seq._
Susi, characteristics, 455-456
Syphax, king of the Massæsylians, 68-69, 251
Syracuse to Tripoli, route, 8
Syrtes, 123, 150-151
Tababort, Mount, 267
Tabarca (Tunisia), 79
Tacape, 122
Tafilalt (Morocco), 378
Tafna, Treaty of, 295, 331
Tamanrasset (Sahara), 168
Tangier (Morocco), 364 _et seq._, 372, 419 _et seq._
Tanguin, Battle of, 296
Tanith, Carthaginian, goddess, 18, 59-60, 89
Taourirt (Morocco), 379
Taparura, 119
Tarik, Berber general, 345
Tarundant (Morocco), 454-455
Tasili Plateau, 173
Taza (Morocco), 378-379
Tchad, Lake, 166, 178, 184, 193
Tebessa, 241
Tell, Algerian, 238
Tell, Tunisian, 112
Temacin (Algeria), 207
Tenes (Algeria), 310-311
Tensift River (Morocco), 435
Tertullian, 90
Tetuan (Spanish-Morocco), 366
Thamugas, 242 _et seq._
Thapsus, Battle of, 78, 103
Thines, 24
Thysdrus, 115 _et seq._
Tibesti Plateau (Sahara), 174
Tidikelt, oasis of, 154, 166
Tidjania (Algerian Sahara), 199
Timbuktu (French Sudan), 154, 161, 167, 169, 178, 184, 193, 208
Timgad, 241 _et seq._
arch of Trajan, 245
baths, 245
forum, 244
library, 244-245
Timhadit (Morocco), 378
Tinzar, Mount (Morocco), 453
Tisouros, 155
Tizi-Ouzou (Algeria), 273
Tlemcen (Algeria), 329 _et seq._
Togoland (West Africa), 164, 352
Tomb of Christian Woman, 308
Touareg, 161 _et seq._, 168 _et seq._, 177, 201
Trade routes across Sahara, 207-208
Trajan, Emperor, 114
Transat; see Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
Trinitarians, order of, 289
Tripoli, American naval demonstration, 291
Tripolitania, 8, 106
Triton, sea-god, 150
Tritonis, Lake, 150
Troglodytes of Southern Tunisia, 123 _et seq._
Tuat, oasis of, 154
Tummo Mountains, 174
Tunis, 20 _et seq._
Alaoui Museum, 47 _et seq._
aqueduct, Roman, 44, 87
arrival at, 20 _et seq._
Bab Cartagena, 55
Bab-el-Bahar, 28
Bab Souika, 40, 52
barbers, 40-41
Bardo, palace of, 45 _et seq._
Belvedere, park of, 44
bey of, 44, 48, 51-52
Bou-Kornein, peaks of, 44 _et seq._
cemetery, Jewish, 54-55
cemetery of St. George, 55
_chéchias_, manufacture, 40
Dar-el-Bey, palace of, 43-44
Djamaa-es-Zeitouna, 50
Djamaa Sidi Mahrez, 52
executions, 45
hats, 39
Jewesses, 53 _et seq._
_kasbah_, 42-43
leather goods, 38
loot of Carthage, 32
Medina, 28
mosaics, ancient, 49
mosques, 50 _et seq._
Night of the Prophet, 51
Payne, John Howard, author of “Home, Sweet Home,” 55
perfume-sellers, 33 _et seq._
Porte de France, 42
porters, 29
Ramadan, observance, 44-45
routes, 8
saddlery, 38-39
slippers, 40
Souk des Etoffes, 36
Souk-el-Attarin, 33
Souk-el-Blagdjia, 40
_souks_, 30 _et seq._, 51
women, 52
Tunisia, 102 _et seq._
agriculture, 103-104, 112
area, 111 _et seq._
character of country, 102, 111 _et seq._
conquest, 314
declaration of French protectorate, 160
Djerid, 149, 154
French policy, 26-27, 49, 311 _et seq._
government, 312
hot springs, 146
olive culture, 113, 120
railways, 155-156
roads, 117-118
Roman remains, 115
Sahara, Tunisian, 149, 155
Sahel, 113, 115
Shats, 149 _et seq._
sponge-fishing, 119, 121, 138
Tell, 112
topography, 112
Turks in Algeria, 284 _et seq._, 331
Tussid, Mount, 174
Ulric, Admiral, 291
Ulysses, 136, 142
Um-er-Rabi’a, Moroccan river, 431
United States at war with corsairs, 291
Utica, 56, 69, 72
Vagas, Martin, Spanish commander, 285
Valée, Marshal, 253, 296
Van de Capellen, Admiral, 291
Vandals in Africa, 79, 87, 114, 243, 330, 344
Vienna Congress, 291
Villa Cisneros (Rio de Oro), 365
Volubilis, 344, 401, 404, 407-408
Von Bülow, German chancellor, 351
Wadai (French Equatorial Africa), 174
Wad Fas (Morocco), 380
Wadi Martil (Morocco), 366
Wadi M’zab (Algerian Sahara), 214
Wahabis in Djerba, 139
War Mountains, 174
Wargla; see Ourgla
Wattasi dynasty, 347
Weapons, Tunis, 37
Marrákesh, 437-438
White Fathers, order of, 86, 94-95, 221
Wild flowers, Djerba, 138
Morocco, 451-452
Women, Algiers, 282
Djerba, 139
El Hamma, 147
Fez, 390 _et seq._
Marrákesh, 440 _et seq._
Tunis, 52
Xanthippus, 17, 63
Yakoub, Sultan, 334, 408
Yarmorasen, Sultan, 330, 332
Yazid, Sultan, 347
Yusuf ibn Tashfin, Sultan, 434
Zab, 222
Zaffarines (Spanish Morocco), 366
Zaghouan (Tunisia), 87, 104
Zama, Battle of, 70
Zarzis (Tunisia), 136
Zenata Berbers, 330
Ziban (Algeria), 222
Zinder (Niger Territory), 161, 166, 193
Zouaves, 279
Zuara (Tripolitania), 8
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