The Project Gutenberg eBook of Esto perpetua
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Esto perpetua
Algerian studies and impressions
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release date: February 27, 2024 [eBook #73051]
Language: English
Original publication: LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO, 1906
Credits: 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 ESTO PERPETUA ***
ESTO PERPETUA
[Illustration]
ESTO PERPETUA
ALGERIAN STUDIES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY H. BELLOC
AUTHOR OF “THE PATH TO ROME”
LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
MCMVI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
E. S. P. HAYNES
INTRODUCTION
Once, in a village that overlooked the Mediterranean, I saw a man
working in an open shop, fitting together a builder’s Ornament which was
to go upon the ridge-end of some roof or other. He was making the base
of the Ornament so as to fit on to a certain angle of the rafters, and
the Ornament itself was a Cross. It was spring time, and he was singing.
[Illustration]
I asked him for whom he was making it. He answered, for a man who had
ordered it of him over-sea in Algiers.
But another Ornament also stood by, carved in the same way, and similar
in size. I asked him for whom he had finished that other, and he said,
“For the same man over-sea: he puts them upon buildings.” This second
Ornament, however, happened to be a Crescent.
[Illustration]
The contrast moved me to cross the sea, to understand the land upon the
further shore, and to write upon Africa some such little historical
essay as follows.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
When a man first sees Africa, if it is just before the rising of the
sun, he perceives, right up against a clean horizon, what appear to be
islands standing out distinct and sharp above the sea.
[Sidenote: The Landfall]
At this hour a wind is often blowing from the eastward, and awakens the
Mediterranean as though it came purposely at dawn to make the world
ready for the morning. The little waves leap up beneath it, steep
towards their shadows, and the bows of the ship that had surged all
night through a rolling calm begin, as sailors say, to “speak”: the
broken water claps and babbles along the side. In this way, if he has
good fortune, the traveller comes upon a new land. It is that land, shut
off from all the rest between the desert and the sea, which the Arabs
call the Island of the West, the Maghreb, but to which we in Europe for
many hundred years have given the name of Barbary: as it says in the
song about freedom:
“... as large as a Lion reclined
By the rivers of Barbary.”
It is the shore that runs, all built upon a single plan, from Tunis and
the Gulf of Carthage to Tangier; that was snatched from Europe in one
great cavalry charge twelve hundred years ago, and is now at last again
in the grasp of Europe.
[Sidenote: The Roads]
For many hours the traveller will sail towards it until at last he comes
to a belt of smooth water which, in such weather, fringes all that
coast, and then he finds that what he saw at morning was not a line of
islands, but the tops of high hills standing in a range along the sea:
they show darker against a stronger light and a more southerly sun as he
draws nearer, and beyond them he sees far off inland the first buttress
mountains which hold up the plateaux of Atlas.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Character of Barbary]
The country which he thus approaches differs in its fortune and history
from all others in the world. The soil and the relief of the Maghreb,
coupled with its story, have made it peculiar and, as it were, a symbol
of the adventures of Europe. Ever since our western race began its own
life and entered into its ceaseless struggle against the East, this
great bastion has been held and lost again; occupied by our enemies and
then taken back as our power re-arose. The Phœnician ruled it; Rome
wrested it back; it fell for the last time when the Roman Empire
declined; its reconquest has been the latest fruit of our recovery.
It is thoroughly our own. The race that has inhabited it from its origin
and still inhabits it is our race; its climate and situation are ours;
it is at the furthest limit from Asia; it is an opposing shore of our
inland sea; it links Sicily to Spain; it retains in every part of it the
Menhirs and the Dolmens, the great stones at which our people sacrificed
when they began to be men: yet even in the few centuries of written
history foreign gods have twice been worshipped there and foreign rulers
have twice held it for such long spaces of time that twice its nature
has been forgotten. Even to-day, when our reoccupation seems assured, we
speak of it as though it were by some right originally Oriental, and by
some destiny certain to remain so. During the many centuries of our
decline and of our slow resurrection, these countries were first cut off
so suddenly and so clean from Christendom, next steeped so long and so
thoroughly in an alien religion and habit of law, that their very dress
and language changed; and until a man has recognised at last the faces
beneath the turbans, and has seen and grown familiar with the great
buildings which Rome nowhere founded more solidly than in these
provinces, he is deceived by the tradition of an immediate past and by
the externals of things: he sees nothing but Arabs around him, and feels
himself an intruder from a foreign world.
Of this eastern spirit, which is still by far the strongest to be found
in the states of Barbary, an influence meets one long before one has
made land. The little ships all up and down the Mediterranean, and
especially as one nears the African coast, are in their rig and their
whole manner Arabian.
[Sidenote: The Normal Sail]
There is a sort of sail which may be called the original of all sails.
It is the sail with which antiquity was familiar. It brought the ships
to Tenedos and the Argo carried it. The Norwegians had it when they were
pirates a thousand years ago. They have it still. It is nearer a
lug-sail than anything else, and indeed our Deal luggers carry something
very near it. It is almost a square sail, but the yard has a slight rake
and there is a bit of a peak to it. It is the kind of sail which seems
to come first into the mind of any man when he sets out to use the wind.
It is to be seen continually to-day hoisted above small boats in the
north of Europe.
[Illustration]
But this sail is too simple. It will not go close to the wind, and in
those light and variable airs which somehow have no force along the
deck, it hangs empty and makes no way because it has no height.
[Sidenote: The Lateen]
Now when during that great renaissance of theirs in the seventh century
the Arabs left their deserts and took to the sea, they became for a
short time in sailing, as in philosophy, the teachers of their new
subjects. They took this sail which they had found in all the ports they
had conquered along this coast—in Alexandria, in Cyrene, in Carthage, in
Cæsarea—they lightened and lengthened the yard, they lifted the peak up
high, they clewed down the foot, and very soon they had that triangular
_lateen_ sail which will, perhaps, remain when every other evidence of
their early conquering energy has disappeared. With such a sail they
drove those first fleets of theirs which gave them at once the islands
and the commerce of the Mediterranean. It was the sail which permitted
their invasion of the northern shores and the unhappy subjection of
Spain.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Its Reefing]
We Europeans have for now some seven hundred years, from at least the
Third Crusade, so constantly used this gift of Islam that we half forget
its origin. You may see it in all the Christian harbours of the
Mediterranean to-day, in every port of the Portuguese coast, and here
and there as far north as the Channel. It is not to be seen beyond
Cherbourg, but in Cherbourg it is quite common. The harbour-boats that
run between the fleet and the shore hoist these lateens. Yet it is not
of our own making, and, indeed, it bears a foreign mark which is very
distinct, and which puzzles every northerner when first he comes across
this sail: it reefs along the yard. Why it should do so neither history
nor the men that handle it can explain, since single sails are
manifestly made to reef from the foot to the leach, where a man can best
get at them. Not so the lateen. If you carry too much canvas and the
wind is pressing her you must take it in from aloft, or, it must be
supposed, lower the whole on deck. And this foreign, quaint, unusual
thing which stamps the lateen everywhere is best seen when the sail is
put away in harbour. It does not lie down along the deck as do ours in
the north, but right up along the yard, and the yard itself is kept high
at the masthead, making a great bow across the sky, and (one would say)
tempting Providence to send a gale and wreck it. Save for this
mark—which may have its uses, but seems to have none and to be merely
barbaric—the lateen is perfect in its kind, and might be taken with
advantage throughout the world (as it is throughout all this united sea)
for the uniform sail. For this kind of sail is, for small craft, the
neatest and the swiftest in the world, and, in a general way, will lie
closer to the wind than any other. Our own fore-and-aft rig is nothing
else but a lateen cut up into mainsail, foresail, and jib, for the
convenience of handling.
[Sidenote: The Little Ships]
The little ships, so rigged, come out like heralds far from the coast to
announce the old dominion of the East and of the religion that made
them: of the united civilisation that has launched them over all its
seas, from east of India to south of Zanzibar and right out here in the
western place which we are so painfully recovering. They are the only
made thing, the only _form_ we accepted from the Arab: and we did well
to accept it. The little ships are a delight.
You see them everywhere. They belong to the sea and they animate it.
They are similar as waves are similar: they are different as waves are
different. They come into a hundred positions against the light. They
heel and run with every mode of energy.
[Illustration]
There is nothing makes a man’s heart so buoyant as to see one of the
little ships bowling along breast-high towards him, with the wind and
the clouds behind it, careering over the sea. It seems to have borrowed
something of the air and something of the water, and to unite them both
and to be their offspring and also their bond. When they are middle-way
over the sea towards one under a good breeze, the little ships are
things to remember.
So it is when they carry double sail and go, as we say of our schooners,
“wing and wing.” For they can carry two sails when the wind is moderate,
and especially when the vessel is running before it, but these two sails
are not carried upon two masts, but both upon the same mast. The one is
the common or working sail, carried in all weathers. The other is a sort
of spinnaker, of which you may see the yard lying along decks in harbour
or triced up a little by the halyard, so as to swing clear of the hands.
[Illustration]
When the little ships come up like this with either sail well out and
square and their course laid straight before the general run of a fresh
sea, rolling as they go, it is as though the wind had a friend and
companion of its own, understanding all its moods, so easily and rapidly
do they arrive towards the shore. A little jib (along this coast at
least) is bent along the forestay, and the dark line of it marks the
swing and movement of the whole. So also when you stand and look from
along their wake and see them leaving for the horizon along a slant of
the Levantine, with the breeze just on their quarter and their laden
hulls careening a trifle to leeward, you would say they were great
birds, born of the sea, and sailing down the current from which they
were bred. The peaks of their tall sails have a turn to them like the
wing-tips of birds, especially of those darting birds which come up to
us from the south after winter and shoot along their way.
[Illustration]
Moreover the sails of these little ships never seem to lose the memory
of power. Their curves and fulness always suggest a movement of the
hull. Very often at sunset when the dead calm reflects things unbroken
like an inland pond, the topmost angle of these lateens catches some
hesitating air that stirs above, and leads it down the sail, so that a
little ripple trembles round the bows of the boat, though all the water
beside them is quite smooth, and you see her gliding in without oars.
She comes along in front of the twilight, as gradual and as silent as
the evening, and seems to be impelled by nothing more substantial than
the advance of darkness.
[Illustration]
It is with such companions to proclaim the title of the land that one
comes round under a point of hills and enters harbour.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Mediterranean]
To comprehend the accidents which have befallen the Maghreb it is
necessary to consider its position and the nature of the boundaries
which surround it. In order to do this one must see how it stands with
regard to the Mediterranean and to the Desert.
[Illustration]
Here is a rough map on which are indicated the shores of that sea, and
to appreciate its scale it is easiest to remember that its whole length
from the Straits of Gibraltar at =M= to the Levantine coast at =A= is
well over 2000 miles. In this map those shores which are well watered
and upon which men can build cities and can live are marked black. The
great desert beyond to the south, which perpetually threatens the
further shore and in which men can only live here and there in little
oases of watered land is marked with sloping lines.
It is easy to see how this great surrounded water nourished the seeds of
our civilisation: why all the influences we enjoy here in the north came
upwards to us from its harbours: why Asia stretched out towards it in
order to learn, and attempted (but always failed) to absorb it. It is so
diversified by great peninsulas and very numerous islands that the
earliest sailors need never miss the land: it has so indented and varied
a coast that harbours are nowhere lacking to it. Its climate is of that
kind best suited to men, yielding them fruits and warmth with some
labour, but not so hardly as to sour them into brutality nor so cheaply
as to degrade them by indolence. The separate homes in which polities
can grow up separately and cherish their separate lives, were fortified
by the sea which protected its archipelagoes and its long tongues of
land, and were further guarded by the many mountain chains which so
affect the horizons all along these coasts that almost every landfall
you make as you sail is some very high, and often sacred, hill. But all
this difference was permitted to interact upon itself and to preserve a
common unity by the common presence of the sea. If it be true, as the
wisest men have said, that everything comes from salt water, then
nowhere in the world could the influence of the sea do more to create
and feed the aspirations of men. Whether our race came thither from the
north and east, or, as is more probable, from the African shore, this
much is certain, that there grew up round the Mediterranean, Europe,
which is Ourselves.
[Sidenote: The Phœnicians]
At one part things alien to us impinge upon this sea; this part is the
eastern bay which is marked off upon the map with a dotted line and the
shores of which are the outposts of Asia and of the Egyptians. The
projection on the south is that delta of the Nile from which Egypt
looked out jealously against rivals whom she despised or ignored: the
long Levantine coast which blocks the eastern end of the whole sea was
alive with the essence of the Asiatic spirit: with the subtlety, the
yielding and the avarice of the Phœnician cities. Egypt may have
attempted something westward: there is a legend of struggles with a fair
people, and to this day in the salt marshes south of Tunis a group of
date-trees, abandoned and unplucked, are called the “Dates of Pharaoh”
and resemble no dates of that country, but the dates of the Nile valley.
But if such expeditions were made they were fruitless. The desert was
still a secure boundary for us: the first attack which Europe was to
suffer came not from the sands, but from its own sea, and the first
conquerors of the Maghreb were the Phœnicians.
This people were Orientals, like any others; but they had, as it were,
specialised upon one most notable character of their race, which is to
accumulate wealth by negotiation, and to avoid as far as may be the
labour of production. To no other family of men has toil appeared to be
a curse save to that of which the Phœnicians were members; nor are
fatigues tolerable to that family save those endured in acquiring the
possessions of others and in levying that toll which cunning can always
gather from mere industry. Of all effort travel alone was congenial to
them, and especially travel by sea, which, when they had first developed
it, became for many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying
of the world and the arbitrament of its exchanges. They dwelt in a small
group of harbours on that extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean,
where a narrow strip of fertile land lay between them and the mountains.
They sailed out before the steady northerly and easterly winds of
summer, (which are but a portion of the Trade Winds;) they pushed from
headland to headland and from island to island, bringing into economic
contact the savage tribes and the wealthy states, passionate especially
for metals, but carefully arranging that there should arise between the
nations whom they exploited or served no such direct bond as would
exclude their own mediation. Three thousand years ago their language was
reflected in the names of half the landmarks and roadsteads of the
sea—later the Greeks attempted to explain these names by punning upon
their sound in some Greek dialect and fitting to each some fantastic
legend.
As the Asiatics ran thus westward before the summer gales, their path
was barred at last by the eastern shore of Barbary.
It is curious to note how specially designed was this coast, and
especially its north-eastern promontories, for the first landing-place
of Asiatics upon our shores. The recess which is marked upon the map
with an =X= and which is now called the Gulf of Tunis was designed in
every way to arrest these merchants and to afford them opportunities for
their future dominion.
[Illustration:
=A= Phœnicia
=B= Berenice
=C= Cyrene
=L= Leptis
=S= Syrtis
]
They had sounded along the littoral of the desert: they were acquainted
with the harbours which led them westward along the Libyan beach and
with the little territories which were besieged all round by the sand
and drew their life from the sea: where later were to rise Cyrene and
Berenice and Leptis.
[Sidenote: The Bay of Carthage]
They had seen the mirage all along that hot coast, and bare sandhills
shimmering above shallow roadsteads: they had felt round the lesser
Syrtis for water and a landing-place and had found none, when the
shore-line turned abruptly east and north before them. It showed first
the rank grass of a steppe; it grew more and more fertile as they
advanced: at last, as they rounded the Hermæan promontory, they opened a
bay, the mountainous arms of which broke the Levanter and whose aspect
immediately invited them to beach their keels.
[Sidenote: “Afrigya”]
It stands at the narrow passage between the eastern and the western
basins of the Mediterranean; and the western basin had not as yet been
visited (it would seem) by men capable of developing its wealth. This
bay upon which the Tyrians landed was sheltered and deep: there was, as
in their own country, a belt of fertile soil between the shore and the
mountains; the largest river of Barbary was to hand. Their first
settlements, of which Utica, near Porto Farina, was perhaps the
earliest, began the new expansion of the Phœnician people. They called
the shore their “Afrigya”—that is, their “colony.” The word took root
and remained. It was in this way that Asia, much older than we are, much
more wily, not so brave, came in as a merchant and crept along till she
found, and landed on, the Maghreb, where it stands out across the entry
to the western seas.
[Sidenote: Carthage]
When these first African cities had been founded for some centuries,
there was built on the same gulf and at its head—perhaps as a depôt for
Utica, more probably as a refuge for Tyrian exiles—a city called “The
New Town”: it is of this title, whose Semitic form must have resembled
some such sound as “Karthadtha,” that the Greeks made Carchedon and the
Latins Carthago, and it was from this centre that there arose and was
maintained for seven hundred years over the Western Mediterranean an
Oriental influence which was always paramount and threatened at certain
moments to become universal and permanent.
Our race was not then conscious of itself. Gaul, Spain, the Alps and
Italy north of the Apennines were a dust of tribes, villages and little
fortified towns to which there was not to be given for many centuries
the visible unity which we inherit from Rome. Rome itself was not yet
walled. Southern Italy, though far more wealthy, was divided, and as for
Africa it was full of roving men, Berbers, to whom some prehistoric
chance, coupled with their soil and climate, had bequeathed such horses
and such a tradition of riding as their descendants still possess. These
savages must have felt in their blood that the Greek colonies, (when
such towns were planted among them,) were of their own family and
worshipped gods whom they could understand; just as, much later, they
learnt to accept quite easily the kindred domination of the Italians:
but the western instinct was still far too vague to permit of any
coalition, or to react with any vigour against the newcomers from the
east. It was not till travel, increasing wealth and the discipline of
government had permitted the nomads to know themselves for Europeans
that the presence of the foreigner became first irksome and then
intolerable. It was not till nearly seven hundred years had passed that
Rome, the centre and representative of the West, first conquered and
then obliterated the power of Asia in this land.
Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent, and as she grew, manifested to the
full the spirit which had made her. Her citizens sailed through the
Straits of Gibraltar; they knew the African and the Iberian coasts of
the Atlantic. They may have visited Britain. They crossed Gaul. It is
said that they saw the Baltic. And everywhere they sought eagerly and
obtained the two objects of their desire: metals and negotiation. In
this quest, in spite of themselves, these merchants, who could see
nothing glorious in either the plough or the sword, stumbled upon an
empire. Their constitution and their religion are enough to explain the
fate which befell it.
They were governed, as all such states have been, by the wealthiest of
their citizens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought
a mere plutocracy; its populace were admitted to such lethargic
interference with public affairs as they might occasionally demand;
perhaps they voted: certainly they did not rule; and the whole city
enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown
to it, for its vast mass of poorer members could not even be armed in
the service of their country, save at a wage, and certainly had no
military aptitudes to waste upon domestic quarrels. To such a people the
furious valour of Roman and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar
anarchy, nor perhaps could they understand that the States which are
destined alternately to dominate the world by thought or by armies are
in every age those whose energy creates a perpetual conflict within
themselves. It was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they
depended for their existence upon a profound sense of security and that
they based it upon a complete command of the sea. It was their
contention that since no others could (to use their phrase) “wash their
hands” in the sea without the leave of Carthage, their polity was
immortal. They made no attempt to absorb or to win the vast populations
from whom they claimed various degrees of allegiance. The whole Maghreb,
and, later, Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and
Sardinia, were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary
troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town. When they
contemplated their own greatness their satisfaction must have reposed
upon the density of their population—their walls may have held more than
half a million souls at a time when few towns of the west could count a
tenth of such a number—upon their immemorial security from invasion,
upon the excessive wealth of their great families (whose luxury the
whole nation could contemplate with a vicarious satisfaction), upon the
solidity of their credit, the resources of their treasury, and, above
all, upon the excellent seamanship, the trained activity, and the
overwhelming numbers of their navy.
As for their religion, it was of that dark inhuman sort which has in
various forms tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves. Gods remote
and vengeful, an absence of those lesser deities and shrines which grace
common experience and which attach themselves to local affections:
perhaps some awful and unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence and
fear distinguished it. Even the goddess who presided over their loves
had something in her at once obscene and murderous.
It is natural to those who are possessed by such servile phantasies that
their worship should mix in with the whole of their lives and even
penetrate to an immoderate degree those spheres of action which a
happier and a saner philosophy is content to leave untrammelled. These
dreadful deities of theirs afforded names for their leaders and served
for a link between the scattered cities of their race: the common
worship of Melcarth made an invisible bond for the whole Phœnician
world; the greatest of the Carthaginian generals bore the title of
“Baal’s Grace.”
With this gloomy and compelling faith and with this political
arrangement there went such a social spirit as such things will breed.
Not only were the Carthaginians content to be ruled by rich men always,
but the very richest were even too proud for commerce; they lived as a
gentry upon land and saw, beneath the merchants who were their immediate
inferiors (and accustomed, it may be presumed, to purchase superior
rank) a great herd of despicable and never laborious poor—incapable of
rebellion or of foreign service. The very fields around the city were
tilled, not by the Carthaginians, but by the half-breeds who had at
least inherited something of western vigour and application.
When the crowd within the walls was too great, a colony would spring
from its overflow into some distant harbour: emigrants led by one of
those superiors without whom, as it seemed, the Phœnician was unable to
act. It would appear that these daughter-nations were as averse to
military sacrifice as their parent, and that they depended for their
protection upon no effort of their own, but upon the fleet and the
treasury of Carthage. In this way was built up a vast domain of
colonies, tributaries and naval bases which was sporadic and ill
organised in plan, enormous in extent, and of its nature lacking in
permanence.
No system more corrupt or more manifestly doomed to extinction could be
conceived, nor is it remarkable that when that system disappeared not a
trace of it should remain among the millions whom it had attempted to
command. Carthage had not desired to create, but only to enjoy:
therefore she left us nothing. Her very alphabet was borrowed from our
invention. Of seven hundred years during which the Asiatics had
dominated Barbary nothing is left. The extinction of their power was
indifferent or pleasing to the Mediterranean they had ruled; their
language dwindled on through five hundred further years—its literature
has been utterly forgotten. A doubtful derivation for the names of
Cadiz, of Barcelona, and of Port Mahon, a certain one for Carthagena,
are all that can be ascribed to-day to this fanatic and alien people:
for they came of necessity into conflict with the Power that was to
unify and direct the common forces of Europe.
At first the expansion of Carthage met with nothing more than could
amuse its facile energies and increase its contemptuous security: it
judged, exploited, or subsidised the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain
and Sardinia; it wrangled with the Greek colonies whom perhaps it
thought itself “predestined” to rule—for to prophesy was a weakness in
the blood from which it sprang. Some two centuries and a half before our
era, when these Orientals had had footing for near a thousand and
Carthage an existence of six hundred years, Rome moved to the attack.
[Sidenote: The Roman Attack]
Rome had already achieved and was leading a confederation of the Italian
peoples, she had already stamped her character and impressed her
discipline upon the most advanced portion of the west, she had for a
full generation minted that gold into coin, when she became aware that a
city with whom she had often treated and whom she had thought remote,
was present: something alien, far wealthier than herself, far more
numerous and boasting a complete hold of communications and of the
western sea. Between the two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the
sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent or despicable to the other.
[Sidenote: The Punic Wars]
The Roman people were military. They had no love for ships. The sea
terrified them: their expansion was by land and their horror of the sea
explains much of their history. The very boast of maritime supremacy
that Carthage made was a sort of challenge to their genius. They
accepted that challenge and their success was complete. Within a hundred
years they had first tamed and then obliterated their rival, and the
Maghreb re-entered Europe.
The first accidents of that conflict were of such a nature as to confirm
Carthage in her creed and to lead her on to her destiny. She found,
indeed, that the command of the sea was a doubtful thing: the landsmen
beat her in the first round; clumsily and in spite of seamanship. But
when, as a consequence of such defeat, they landed upon the African soil
which she had thought inviolable, there, to her astonishment, she
overwhelmed them. The loss of Sicily, to which she consented, did
nothing to warn her. She became but the greater in her own eyes: Sicily
she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain, an expansion the more
imperial that the new province was more distant and far larger, and
indefinitely more barbarous than the last. It may be imagined what a
bitter patriotism the surprises of the early struggle had bred in the
governing class of Carthage. From the moment when, in their unexpected
victory, they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to Moloch, this
aristocracy had determined upon a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of
them undertook the task and undertook it not from the Mother Country but
from the Empire. He marched from Spain.
The Second Punic War is the best known of campaigns. Every Roman army
that took the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy was open to the
army of Hannibal, and (wherever that army was present—but only there) at
his mercy. In spite of such miracles the Phœnician attempt completely
failed. It failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between
the Phœnician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the
western blood.
[Sidenote: The Failure of Carthage]
The army which Hannibal led recognised the voice of a Carthaginian
genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid.
Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies
must receive a wage, must be “volunteer”; and meanwhile the policy which
directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome
“interfered with business”; on this account alone the costly and unusual
effort of removing her was made.
The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an
abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and
subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister. The
Italian confederation was true because it reposed on other than economic
supports. The European passion for military glory survived every
disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in
meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat. The
very Gauls in Hannibal’s army, for all their barbaric anger against
Rome, were suspected by their Carthaginian employers, and in Rome itself
an exalted resolve, quite alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was
the only result of misfortune.
Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber nomads, whose vague sense of
cousinship with the Italians was chiefly shown in their contempt for the
merchant cities, harassed Carthage perpetually; and when at last the
Roman armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage fell. For somewhat
more than fifty years she continued to live without security of
territory or any honour, harassed by the nomad kings whom she dared not
strike because they were the allies of Rome. She was still enormous in
her wealth and numbers, it was only her honour that was gone; if indeed
she had ever comprehended honour as did her rival.
[Sidenote: The Destruction of Carthage]
The lapse of time brought no ease. There was something in the temper of
Asia that was intolerable to the western people. They saw it always
ready to give way and then to turn and strike. They detested its jealous
and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed dangerous to them.
The two great struggles, at the close of which Rome destroyed as one
destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the same family,
Carthage and Jerusalem. A pretext was chosen: Carthage was abject,
yielded three hundred hostages, and even all her arms. Only the matter
of her religion moved her and the order to remove the site of the town.
To this Carthage opposed a frenzy which delayed for three years the
capture of the city; but when it was taken it was utterly destroyed.
Every stone was removed, the land was left level, and suddenly, within a
very few years of that catastrophe, every influence of Carthage
disappeared. It was in this way that the first great power of the Orient
upon the Maghreb was extinguished.
This final act of Rome was accomplished within a hundred and fifty years
of the Nativity. The life of a man went by, and little more was done. It
was close upon our era before the Roman habit took root in Africa, a
century more before the Maghreb was held with any complete organisation.
By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals had come in to ruin it.
[Sidenote: The Roman Monuments]
There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years during
which Rome was to bring up this land into the general unity of Western
Europe. There is no other portion of the world Rome governed, not even
Southern Gaul, where her genius is more apparent. In that short interval
of daylight—a tenth of the known history of the Maghreb—Rome did more
than had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to do
in seven hundred more.
[Illustration]
It is indeed the peculiar mark of Barbary, which makes it a scene of
travel different from all others, that everywhere the huge monuments of
Rome stand out in complete desertion. If civilisation had been
continuous here as it has been in nearly every city of Europe, Africa
would not move one in this fashion. Or if a race, active and laborious,
had quarried these stones to build new towns, their aspect would be more
familiar, because in Europe we are accustomed to such decay and it helps
us to forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to find it here, sometimes
in the desert, nearly always in a solitude; to round a sandy hill
without trees or men and to come, beyond a dry watercourse, upon these
enormous evidences of our forerunners and their energy, is an impression
Europe cannot give.
[Sidenote: The Ampitheatre]
On the edge of the Sahara, in the very south of Tunis, where the salt of
the waste is already upon one, there stands an arena of appalling size.
It is smaller, but only a little smaller, than the Coliseum: it seems,
in the silence and the glare, far larger. The Romans built it in their
decline. You might as you watch it be in Rome or in Nîmes or in Arles,
but you look around you and see the plain, and then the ruin grows
fantastically broad and strong. Mountains are greatest when one wakes at
morning and sees them unexpectedly after a long night journey; when the
last sight one had by sunset was of low hills and meadows. So it is with
these ruins in Africa. The silence and the loneliness frame them. They
are sudden, and when they have once been seen, especially by a man who
wanders in that country on foot and does not know what marvel he may not
find at the next turn of the path, they never afterwards leave the mind.
[Sidenote: The Roman Planting of Trees and Towns]
The things Rome did in Barbary were these: Of agriculture, which had
been exceptional, despised by the cavalry of the mountains and confined
to the little plains at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made a noble
and, while she ruled, a permanent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests
of the return of Europe to her own in the Maghreb that with the advance
of our race, corn and vineyards advance, and with our retreat they
recede. Rome planted trees which brought and stored rain. She most
elaborately canalised and used the insufficient water of the high
plateaux. She established a system of great roads. Where Carthage had
produced the congestion of a few commercial centres, Rome spread out
everywhere small flourishing and happy towns; a whole string of them
along the coast in every bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is,
perhaps, not one of the little harbours backed up against the spurs of
the Atlas, each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-place beneath
its own. Here, as throughout the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy
and desired, for it was in her temper to be of a conquering simplicity
and in her chronicles she openly confessed her sins. The same unity
which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa. The Roman arch and brick and
column, the Roman road—all of one certain type—are as plain throughout
the Maghreb as a thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims.
[Sidenote: The Legionaries]
The desert was alien to Rome, as the sea was. The old trade from the
Soudan which had been the staple of Leptis and which Carthage had
certainly maintained, drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman Africa
turned to the Mediterranean and lived upon the commerce of its further
shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a string of posts was held. Biskra
was Roman, and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt indeed is rather where
the Romans did not penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding the
southern boundary of Europe, the wall of the Atlas, against the
wandering tribes of the sand. There is a fine story of a French
commander who, having taken his column with great efforts through a
defile where certainly men had never marched before, was proud, and sent
a party to chisel the number of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock
above them, but when the men had reached it they saw in deep clear
letters, cut long before, “The IIIrd Legion. The August. The
Victorious.”
[Sidenote: Verecunda]
Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome which a man sees in less than
twenty days on foot in any part of Algiers, consider this. Beyond
Lamboesis, the frontier town of the Legionaries, with only a range of
hills between it and the Sahara, there was a little town or village. It
was quite small and a long way off from the city. It was of no
importance; we have no record of it. Except that its name was Verecunda,
we know nothing about it. One of its citizens, being grateful that he
was born in his native place, thought he would give the little town or
village a gate worthy of the love he bore it, and he built an arch all
inspired with the weightiness of Rome.
The little town has gone. There is not a single stone of it left. But as
you come round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under the height of
Aurès, you have before you this great thing, as though it were on the
Campagna or carefully railed round in some very wealthy city.
[Sidenote: The Great Arch]
It is all alone. The wind blows through it off the mountains. Every
winter the frost opens some new little crack, and every generation or so
a stone falls. But in two thousand years not so much has been ruined by
time, but that the impression of Rome remains: its height, its
absoluteness, and its strength. And this example is but one of very many
that a man might choose as he wandered up and down the high steppes and
through the gorges of the hills.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Berbers]
As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole
place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to
see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta
with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns
re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in
Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and
very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might
be fulfilled.
Rome not only governed, but also made, Africa. The foundations on which
the Maghreb is laid, and to which it must return, are Roman; the Berber
race was no conscious part of us. I have said that it did not know
itself until the Romans came, and when they came the Berbers slipped
into the Roman unity more slowly and with more political friction, (but
with less rebellion and therefore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the
Gauls. There is no more symbolic picture in the history of the Maghreb
than the picture of Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that Massinissa,
his ally, the king of the nomads who rode without stirrups or bridle.
[Sidenote: The Arabs]
The Berbers were not destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something
barbaric in them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted
in these men (though they were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius
for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose. That
Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and that even when Africa
accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history. Africa has always
stood to the rest of the Empire as a sort of ne’er-do-weel: a younger
son perpetually asking for adventure and rejecting discipline. To this
the Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid. Like Britain, Africa
was cut off from the mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined in the
disruption of the Empire to lose the Roman idiom and the traditions of
orderly life; but with this difference, that Britain was reconquered by
the religion and the manner of Europe within three generations of its
loss: Africa was finally invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the
City and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade which
galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The Arabs came in the
seventh century, like a sort of youth contemptuous of the declining head
of Rome. Barbary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian language
and religion in one cavalry charge, and that language and religion not
only became immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve
hundred years in which to take root and make a soil.
For about five hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord
to the close of the sixth century, our culture had been universal among
the Berbers. In the last three centuries the Faith was dominant. But
rebellion was in them, and when the Arabs came the whole edifice
suddenly crumbled.
Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather
obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was
like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a
breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the
periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even
than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had
admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been
thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did
no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a
little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul,
Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay
and to attain their own civilisation again after the repose of the Dark
Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west
had fallen, when Italy was already taxed and half governed by a few
Germans, when Gaul and Spain had at their heads small bands of mixed
barbarian and Roman nobles, and when everything seemed gone to ruin,
this southern shore of the Mediterranean was overwhelmed and, what is
more, persuaded.
There came riding upon it out of the desert continual lines of horsemen
whom these horsemen of Numidia could mix with and understand. The
newcomers wore the white wrapping of the south: all their ways were
southern ways, suited to the intensity of the sun, and Barbary, or the
main part of it, was southern and burning. Their eyes were very bright,
and in their ornaments the half-tamed tribesmen recognised an old
appetite for splendour. For all the effect of Rome perhaps one-third of
the African provincials were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared, and
that nomadic part was thickest towards the desert from which the
invasion came; the invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the
shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the
instinct of roving still lingered.
Islam, therefore, when it first came in, tore up what Rome had planted
as one tears up a European shrub planted in the friable soil of Africa.
The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with them also a violent and simple
creed. And here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of
this province can alone define the character of their arrival. Their
Faith was like some plant out of the solitudes; it was hard in surface;
it was simple in form; it was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It
was consonant with the waterless horizons and the blinding rocks from
which it had sprung. Its victory was immediate. Before Charlemagne was
born the whole fabric of our effort in Barbary, the traditions of St.
Augustine and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared. No one from that time
onwards could build a Roman arch of stone or drive a straight road from
city to city or recite so much as the permanent axioms of the Roman Law.
Elsewhere, in Syria and in Asia and in Spain, the Mohammedans failed to
extirpate Christianity, and were able for some centuries to enjoy the
craftsmanship and the sense of order which their European subjects could
lend them. It was only here, in Africa, that their victory was complete.
Therefore it is only here, in Africa, that you see what such a victory
meant, and how, when it was final, all power of creation disappeared.
The works which have rendered Islam a sort of lure for Europe were works
that could not have been achieved save by European hands.
The Roman towns did not decay; they were immediately abandoned.
Gradually the wells filled; the forests were felled in bulk; none were
replanted. Of the Olive Gardens, the stone presses alone remain. One may
find them still beneath the sand, recalling the fat of oil. But there,
to-day, not a spear of grass will grow, and the Sahara has already crept
in. The olives long ago were cut down for waste, or for building or for
burning. There was not in any other province of the empire so complete
an oblivion, nor is there any better example of all that “scientific”
history denies: for it is an example of the cataclysmic—of the complete
and rapid changes by which history alone is explicable: of the folly of
accepting language as a test of origin: of the might and rapidity of
religion (which is like a fire): of its mastery over race (which is like
the mastery of fire over the vessels it fuses or anneals): of the
hierarchic nature of conquest: of the easy destruction of more complex
by simpler forms....
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Atlas]
If one is to understand this surprising history of Barbary, and to know
both what the Romans did in it and what the Arabs did, and to grasp what
the reconquest has done or is attempting to do, it is necessary to
examine the physical nature of this land.
[Sidenote: The Relief of Barbary]
Along all its hundreds of miles, the Maghreb is determined by Mount
Atlas, or rather, the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge between the
Sahara and the sea. It is a bulk of mountains so formed that one may
compare it to a city wall with a broad top for fighting men to move on
and a parapet along both the inner and the outer edges. The outer
parapet, which is called “The Little Atlas,” runs along the
Mediterranean shore: the inner parapet, which is called “The Great
Atlas,” runs along the desert, and is usually the higher of the two
chains. These two chains do not run quite parallel, but converge towards
Tunis and spread apart towards the Atlantic; the tableland between them,
which is called “The High Plateaux,” and is in some places three
thousand feet above the sea, broadens therefore from less than a hundred
to well over two hundred miles across; but at either end it somewhat
changes its character, for at the Tunis end it is too narrow to be a
true plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains where the Greater and the
Lesser Atlas meet, while in Morocco it becomes too broad to maintain its
character and is diversified by continual subsidiary ranges. But in
between these two extremities it is a true tableland with isolated
summits rising here and there from it, and at their feet shallow and
brackish lakes called _Shotts_, round which are rims of marshy reeds
and, in summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there is no drainage away
from the tableland to the desert or to the sea, save where, here and
there, a torrent (such as the Chélif or the Rummel) digs itself an
erratic gorge and escapes through the coast range to the Mediterranean.
These exceptions are very rare and they do not disturb the general plan
of the country, which is everywhere constructed of the Atlas running in
two ranges that hold up between them the plateau with its salt lakes and
isolated groups of hills.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Tableland]
If, therefore, one were to take a section anywhere from north to south,
from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would get some such figure as
this:
[Illustration]
where the perpendicular shading on the left is the Mediterranean slope
and drainage, the horizontal shading on the right, the desert slope, and
where the Little Atlas is marked =A=, the Great Atlas =B= (falling down
to =E=, the dunes of the Sahara), where at =C= is one of the isolated
hills of the tableland, and at =D= and =D= a couple of those salt lakes
which add so strongly to the desolation of these upland plains.
The High Plateaux, which, empty as they are, make up the body of the
Maghreb, are not only a reality to the geographer: their peculiar
character is also apparent to every traveller who crosses them. The rise
up to them from the Mediterranean, though confused, is observable; the
fall from them to the Sahara is violent, and, through its central part,
dramatic. It is not unusual for a man who has traversed this tableland
upon more than one voyage to recall clefts in the southern and the
northern ranges so placed that they were like windows through which one
could look down upon the lower world.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
These clefts resemble each other strangely. From the one a man sees the
steps of limestone, the desert cliffs, touched rarely and more rarely by
the green of palm-trees and ending southward, glaring and arid and
sharp, against the extremity of the horizon. From the other, he sees the
woods of the coast, dense and well watered, mixing with the rocks about
him, and right beyond the valley the pleasant line of the sea. But each
of the views he carries in his mind has this in common, that he has seen
it from a height, and looked down suddenly from a mountain tableland
upon a flat below: to the north upon a level of waves over which went
the shadows of clouds: to the south upon a level of sand stretching
under a small and awful sun.
If a man were to live in this land, the High Plateaux would fill up the
most of his mind, as they take up by far the most of the country itself
in space. One is compelled to move when one is upon them. There is no
resting-place: only, along the far edge, before the fall into the desert
begins, the ruins of the Roman frontier towns. These wastes hold the
soul of Numidia. The horses of Barbary are native to them. It is said
that these horses sicken on the seaboard—certainly their race dies on
the northern shores of the Mediterranean unless it is crossed with one
of our coarser breeds—for they were born to breathe this dry air and to
make rapid prints with their unshod hoofs upon the powder of the plains
and the salt.
The tableland, then, is the heart of the Maghreb, yet it has no name,
not even among the wandering Arabs.
These come up on to it in spring from the hot desert below, driving slow
files of proud and foolish camels. They pasture flocks in among the
brushwood and by the rare streams; then when the autumn descends and the
first cold appals them, before the winter scurries across these flats,
they turn back and patiently go down the mountain roads into the Sahara,
leaving the Berbers to themselves again. For four months the plains
above are swept with snow, and a traveller in that season, feeling the
sharp and frozen dust in his face before the gale, and seeing far off
bare cones of standing hills above salt marshes, thinks himself rather
in Idaho or Nevada than here in Africa which Europe thinks so warm.
[Sidenote: The Tell]
That belt of coast upon which Atlas descends is of a nature quite
distinct from the High Plateaux. The Americans can match such sudden
contrasts: we in Europe have nothing of the kind. You come down from
salt water to fresh, from a cold (or from a burning) to a genial air,
and you enter as you sink from the tableland a territory of great
luxuriance. It is called the Tell, and to seize its character it is
necessary to modify and to develop somewhat one’s idea of the mountain
chains. For though the Greater and the Lesser Atlas run in those main
lines which appear in the little sketch upon page 58, yet in detail each
range, and especially the range along the sea, is broken and complex,
and is made up of a number of separate folds, sometimes parallel and
sometimes overlapping, thus:
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Mountains]
Moreover, the heights are irregular. There are groups of high peaks and
ridges against the desert to the east in the Aurès Mountains, and to the
west in those of Morocco, while along the seaboard great bulges of
mountain rise in places from the Lower Atlas to a height rivalling the
inland range. For instance, where an =X= is marked upon the sketch map,
there is an almost isolated mass known as the Djurdjura, very high,
almost as high as Aurès, which stands up 150 miles behind it above the
Sahara.
[Sidenote: The Berber Strongholds]
It was in these groups of higher and more rugged hills along the
seaboard or the desert that the native languages and perhaps the purity
of the native race took refuge both during the Roman occupation and
during the Arabian conquest. It is in these ravines that the ancient
tongue is spoken to this day. It is there that the Berber type, though
it is still everywhere what we ourselves are, has maintained itself
least mixed with the foreigner: it is even, perhaps, allied in these
hills with a people older than we or the Berber can be.
[Sidenote: The Bays of the Tell]
The fact that the Lesser Atlas thus faces close upon the sea and falls
upon it abruptly, determines an abundant rainfall upon the Tell, and
makes it fruitful. The fact that the Lesser Atlas consists of folds
overlapping each other and running from north-east to south-west has
furnished a multitude of bays, each lying between two spurs of the
hills. Every such bay has a harbour more or less important, and that
harbour is nearly always upon the westerly side; for the prevalent
strong wind, which is from the east, drives a current with it, and this
current scours out the bays, clearing up and deepening the westerly
shore, but leaving the eastern shallow. Thus Bone, Philippeville,
Algiers, Calle, and Utica itself, which was the oldest of all, are on
the westerly sides of such bays. Into each bay a mountain torrent falls,
or sometimes a larger stream, and the long process of erosion has
scoured all the coast into a network of valleys, so that, unless one has
a clear view of the scheme in one’s mind, one is bewildered and does not
always know at what point in the upward journey one passes from the Tell
to the High Plateaux, distinct as these regions are.
[Sidenote: The Physical Constitution Of the Tell]
Thus a simple plan of a portion of the Tell is as given on the following
page, where the line of crosses indicates the watershed between the
Mediterranean and the inland drainage of the High Plateaux.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The New Vineyard]
But if one were to mark on this map a stippled surface for contours
under five hundred feet, a hatched one for the same between five and
fifteen hundred, a black one up to two thousand five hundred, and above
that leave the heights in white with little triangles for the summits,
one would get some such complicated scheme as is shown on the opposite
page, where it will be seen that a high mountain (at =C=) overlooks the
shore far from the watershed, and the scheme of valleys is complex and
might seem a labyrinth to a man on foot without a map. At =A= and =B=
are the ports of each bay, and near to each at the mouth of either river
a large plain such as is characteristic of the heads of all these
inlets. Their earth is black, deep, and fertile: inviting the plough.
Such fields fed Utica, Icosium and Hippo Regius and Cæsarea. They
remained wild and abandoned for over a thousand years, but to-day you
may see miles of vineyards planted in rows that run converging to the
limits of the plain, where, until this last generation, no one had dug
or pruned or gathered or pressed since the Latin language was forgotten
in these lands. Indeed, it would be possible for a fantastic man to see
in this replanting of the vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning;
for everywhere the people of the desert have had a fear of wine, and
their powerful legends have affected us also in the north for a time.
But the vine is in Africa again. It will not soon be uprooted.
[Illustration]
Such plains, then, their rivers and their adjacent seaport towns, make
up the Tell, in which the Romans nourished many millions and in which
the most part of the reconstituted province will at last build its
homes.
By such a bay and entering such a harbour, whoever comes to Africa
reaches land.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Bay of Hippo]
It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood,
that the best introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of
conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping small and
large, and fenced round with houses for very many miles. A far
promontory on the eastern side faces the western mountain, and half
protects the harbour from summer gales. Below the mountain, the plain
belonging to this bay stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here
and there with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines and
corn. In the midst of this great flat stands up a little isolated hill,
a sort of acropolis, and from its summit, from a window of his monastery
there, St. Augustine, looking at that sea, wrote _Ubi magnitudo, ibi
veritas_.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Hippo]
The town is utterly gone. There are those who argue that this or that
was not done as history relates, because of this or that no vestige
remains; and if tradition tells them that Rome built here or there, they
deny it, because they cannot find walls, however much they dig (within
the funds their patrons allow them). These men are common in the
universities of Europe. They are paid to be common. They should see
Hippo.
Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the host of Vandals,
slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat of the most famous
bishopric of its day, and within its walls, while the siege still
endured, St. Augustine died. It counted more than Palermo or Genoa:
almost as much as Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not
a few bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall.
There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once disturbed a few
fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better show at
Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky company officer shivered
out his time of service with perhaps a hundred men.
[Sidenote: Calama]
In the heart of the Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet
right in the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather, stands a
little town which was called Calama in the Roman time and is now, since
the Arabs, called Guelma.
It is the centre of that belt of hills. A broad valley, one of the
hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the Mediterranean
slope, lies before the platform upon which the fortress rose. A muddy
river nourishes it, and all the plain is covered with the new farms and
vineyards—beyond them the summits and the shoulders that make a tumbled
landscape everywhere along the northern shores of Africa guard the place
whichever way one turns. From the end of every street one sees a
mountain.
If a man had but one day in which to judge the nature of the province,
he could not do better than come to this town upon some winter evening
when it was already dark, and wake next morning to see the hurrying sky
and large grey hills lifting up into that sky all around and catching
the riot of its clouds. It is high and cold: there is a spread of
pasture in its fields and a sense of Europe in the air. No device in the
architecture indicates an excessive heat in summer and even the trees
are those of Italy or of Provence. Its site is a survival from the good
time when the Empire packed this soil with the cities of which so great
a number have disappeared: it is also a promise of what the near future
may produce, a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in
the refounding of such municipalities that the tradition of Europe will
work upon Africa and not in barren adventure southward towards a sky
which is unendurable to our race and under which we can never build and
can hardly govern.
[Illustration]
Guelma is typical in every way. It was Berber before the Romans came,
but nothing remains of its founders or of whatever punic influence its
first centuries may have felt. Of Rome so much endures that the heavy
walls and the arches are, as it were, the framework of the place.
[Sidenote: The Permanence of Rome]
In the citadel a great fragment larger than anything else in the town
runs right across the soldiers’ quarters, pierced with the solid arches
that once supported the palace of Calama. Only the woodwork has
disappeared. The stones which supported the flooring still stand out
unbroken, and the whole wall, though it is not very high—hardly higher
than the big barracks around it—remains in the mind, as though it had a
right to occupy one’s memory of the Kasbah by a sort of majesty which
nothing that has been built since its time has inherited. Here, as
throughout the Empire, the impression of Rome is as indefinable as it is
profound, but one can connect some part of it at least with the
magnitude of the stones and the ponderous simplicity of their courses,
with the strength that the half-circle and the straight line convey, and
with the double evidence of extreme antiquity and extreme endurance; for
there is something awful in the sight of so many centuries visibly
stamped upon the stone, and able to evoke every effect of age but not to
compel decay.
This nameless character which is the mark of the Empire, and carries, as
it were, a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in what has fallen
as in what stands. A few bricks built at random into a mud wall bear the
sign of Rome and proclaim her title: a little bronze unearthed at random
in the rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman Victory: a few flag-stones
lying broken upon a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman Road: nor
do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an irrecoverable good,
but rather its continued victory. To see so many witnesses small and
great is not to remember a past or a lost excellence, but to become part
of it and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is a surety
also for the future to see such things.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Peasant’s Wall]
There is a field where this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh
the traveller with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands
across which the wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a
peasant of the place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his
land with Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like
all his peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or
mould brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only
material he could use was the work of the old masters who had trained
his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the
vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest that he
laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power still ruled
him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea from Europe to make
good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It is with a lively
appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing or has perished.
The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs slope here and there.
But the edges of those stones, which are twenty times older than his
effort, remain. They will fall again and lie where he found them; but
they and the power that cut them are alike imperishable.
[Sidenote: The Landscape of Antiquity]
It has been said that the men of antiquity had no regard for landscape,
and that those principal poems upon which all letters repose betray an
indifference to horizons and to distant views. The objection is
ill-found, for even the poems let show through their admirable restraint
the same passion which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills
of home: they speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an
Homeric man desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising
from his own fields and after that to die. But much stronger than
anything their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality
is the emplacement of their buildings.
[Sidenote: The Theatre of Calama]
Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the spirit which built a
certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in
a place now deserted, the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of
land, and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them,
and that the shrine becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of
a composition. Of this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all
southern Europe is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high
town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.
[Illustration]
The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city
breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people and
the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for their
plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out like a quarry from
the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the
half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell
stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those
summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that were
presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the senses. We have
no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our drama, nor even with
our patriotism—such as the modern world has made it. The last centuries
of the Empire had all these things in common: great verse inherited from
an older time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one religion, and the
open sky. Therefore its memory has outlasted all intervening time, and
it itself the Empire, (though this truth is as yet but half-received,)
has re-arisen.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Greatness of The First Four Centuries]
There is one great note in the story of our race which the least learned
man can at once appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking
everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books
perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research
develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.
Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the completed Roman
Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows that the modern world
has flowed outwards from that reservoir by various channels. Everybody
knows that this formation of a United Europe was hardly completed in the
first century, that it was at last conscious of disintegration in the
fifth. The first four centuries are therefore present as dates in
everybody’s mind, yet the significance of the dates is forgotten.
Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman decline,
and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in some few
novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of the time and to
see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the
stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was coming, the men of the
time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own
self-estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality,
and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a
town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand,
especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly an industry
or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an accumulation of
experience grown to create upon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar
contribution to the State; and far the larger part of the stuff of our
own lives was created, or was preserved, by that period of unity.
That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we alone have
roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we alone in our
art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all that we do by
ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of change and can
develop from within—in a word, that we alone are Christians we derive
from that time.
Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed on,
by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions of human
dignity and of right. Even in the details our structure of society
descends from that source: we govern, or attempt to govern, by
representation because the monastic institutions of the end of the
Empire were under a necessity of adopting that device: we associate the
horse with arms and with nobility because the last of the Romans did so.
If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look
around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the first
four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion
of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the
Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in
the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled
by the vigour of the western mind between Augustus and Julian when he
finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State
what is even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a
mosaic of separate provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and
uniformity the orders of those emperors who seem to us the lessening
despots of a failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates,
to be obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which
Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the Rome
of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets, but
something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with
one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading ocean.
Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the sound of
three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do.
“Telle que dans son char la Bérycynthienne
Couronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoir
Enfanté tant de dieux....”
This was the might and the permanence from which we sprang.
To establish the character of the Empire and its creative mission is the
less easy from the prejudice that has so long existed against the action
of religion, and especially of that religion which the Empire embraced
as its cataclysm approached. The acceptation of the creed is associated
in every mind with the eclipse of knowledge and with a contempt for the
delights which every mind now seeks. It is often thought the cause,
always the companion, of decay, and so far has this sentiment proceeded
that in reading books upon Augustine or upon Athanasius one might forget
by what a sea and under what a sunlight the vast revolution was
effected.
It is true that when every European element had mixed to form one
pattern, things local and well done disappeared. The vague overwhelming
and perhaps insoluble problems which concern not a city but the whole
world, the discovery of human doom and of the nature and destiny of the
soul, these occupied such minds as would in an earlier time have bent
themselves to simpler and more feasible tasks than the search after
finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a less extent letters,
failed: for these fringes of life whose perfection depends upon detail
demand for their occasional flowering small and happy States full of
fixed dogmas and of certain usages. But though it lost the visible
powers antiquity had known, the Empire at its end, when it turned to the
contemplation of eternity, broadened much more than our moderns—who are
enemies of its religious theory—will admit. The business which Rome
undertook in her decline was so noble and upon so great a scale that
when it had succeeded, then, in spite of other invasions, the continuity
of Europe was saved. We absorbed the few barbarians of the fifth
century, we had even the vitality to hold out in the terror and darkness
of the ninth, and in the twelfth we re-arose. It was the character of
the Western Empire during the first four centuries, and notably its
character towards their close, which prevented the sleep of the Dark
Ages from being a death. These first four centuries cast the mould which
still constrains us; they formed our final creed, they fixed the routes
of commerce and the sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest
trifles of topography you come across them still: the boundary of
Normandy, as we know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If there can be
said of Europe what cannot be said of any other part of the world, that
its civilisation never grew sterile and never disappeared, then we owe
the power of saying such a thing to that long evening of the
Mediterranean.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Arabic Influence]
If this pre-eminence of Rome in the process of her conversion is the
lesson of all travel it is especially the lesson of Africa; and nowhere
is that lesson taught more clear than in Guelma. Here also you may
perceive how it was that the particular cause which ruined the spirit of
the Roman town also saved its stones, and you may feel, like an
atmosphere, the lightness, the permeation, as it were, without
pressure:—the perpetual fluid influence which overflowed the province
upon the arrival of the Arabs. So that the bone of Rome remain, caught
in a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand, could preserve them
for ever.
For the Arab did in Calama what he did throughout Barbary: he cast a
spell. He did not destroy with savagery, he rather neglected all that he
could afford to neglect. Here also he cut down timber, but he did not
replant. Here also he let the water-pipes of the Romans run dry. Here
also the Arab, who apparently achieved nothing material, imposed a
command more powerful than the compulsion of any government or the fear
of any conqueror: he sowed broadcast his religion and his language; his
harvest grew at once; first it hid and at last it stifled the religion
and the language he had found. The speech, and the faith which renders
that speech sacred, transformed the soul of Barbary: they oppose between
them a barrier to the reconquest more formidable by far than were the
steppes and the nomads to the first advance of Rome. Of this impalpable
veil which is spread between the native population and the new settlers
the traveller is more readily aware in the little cities of the hills
than in the larger towns of the coast. The external change of the last
generation is apparent: the houses about him are European houses; the
roads might be roads in France or Northern Italy. The general aspect of
Guelma confirms that impression of modernity, nor is there much save the
low loop-holed walls which surround the town, to remind one of Africa;
but from the midst of its roofs rises the evidence of that religion
which still holds and will continue to hold all its people. The only
building upon which the efforts of an indolent creed have fastened is
the mosque, and the minaret stands alone, conspicuous and central over
all the European attempt, and mocks us.
Far off, where the walls and the barracks are confused into a general
band of white, and no outline is salient enough to distinguish the
modern from the ancient work of the place, this wholly Mohammedan shaft
of stone marks the place for Mohammedan. It is an enduring challenge.
[Illustration]
There is a triumph of influence which all of us have known and against
which many of us have struggled. It is certainly not a force which one
can resist, still less is it effected by (though it often accompanies)
the success of armies. It is the pressure and at last the conquest of
ideas when they have this three-fold power: first, that they are novel
and attack those parts of the mind still sensitive; secondly, that they
are expounded with conviction (conviction necessary to the conveyance of
doctrine); and, thirdly, that they form a system and are final. Such was
the triumph of the Arab.
Our jaded day, which must for ever be taking some drug or tickling
itself with unaccustomed emotion, has pretended to discover in Islam, as
it has pretended to discover in twenty other alien things, the plan of
happiness; and a stupid northern admiration for whatever has excited the
wonder or the curiosity of the traveller has made Mohammedism, as it has
made Buddhism and God knows what other inferiorities or aberrations of
human philosophy, the talk of drawing-rooms and the satisfaction of
lethargic men. It is not in this spirit that a worthy tribute can be
paid to the enormous invasion of the seventh century.
[Sidenote: The Arabic Invasion]
That invasion as a whole has failed. Christendom, for ever criticised,
(for it is in its own nature to criticise itself,) has emerged; but if
one would comprehend how sharp was the issue, one should read again all
that was written between Charlemagne and the death of St. Louis. In the
Song of Roland, in the “Gesta Francorum,” in Joinville, this new attack
of Asia is present—formidable, and greater than ourselves; something
which we hardly dared to conquer, which we thought we could not conquer,
which the greatest of us thought he had failed in conquering. Islam was
far more learned than we were, it was better equipped in arms and
nevertheless more civic and more tolerant. When the last efforts of the
crusades dragged back to Europe an evil memory of defeat, there was
perhaps no doubt in those who despaired, still less in those who
secretly delighted that such fantasies were ended—there was no doubt, I
say, in their minds that the full re-establishment of our civilisation
was impossible, and that the two rivals were destined to stand for ever
one against the other: the invader checked and the invaded prudent; for,
throughout the struggle we had always looked upon our rivals at least as
equals and usually as superiors.
[Sidenote: Its Continued Influence]
It is in the most subtle expressions that the quarrel between the two
philosophies appears. Continually Islam presses upon us without our
knowing it. It made the Albigenses, it is raising here and there
throughout European literature at this moment notes of determinism, just
as that other influence from the Further East is raising notes of
cruelty or of despair.
[Sidenote: The Gothic]
There is one point in which the contact between these master-enemies and
ourselves is best apparent. They gave us the Gothic, and yet under our
hands the Gothic became the most essentially European of all European
things. Consider these two tiers of one Arabian building founded in
Africa, while yet the vigour of that civilisation was strong. True, the
work is not in stone but in plaster, for to work stone they needed an
older civilisation than their own. But see how it is the origin of, or
rather identical with, our ogive. By what is it that we recognise these
intersecting segments (which are of the perfect 60° like our own) to be
something foreign? And how is it that we know that no Christian could
have built these things? Venice has windows like these: by just so much
she is not of the West, and by just that innoculation perhaps she
perished. The ecstasy of height, the self-development of form into
further form, the grotesque, the sublime and the enthusiastic—all these
things the Arab arch lacks as utterly as did the Arab spirit; yet the
form is theirs and we obtained it from them. In this similarity and in
these differences are contained and presented visibly the whole story of
our contact with them and of our antagonism.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
In the presence of the doom or message which the Arabians communicated
to our race in Africa, one is compelled to something of the awe with
which one would regard a tomb from which great miracles proceeded, or a
dead hero who, though dead, might not be disturbed. The thing we have to
combat, or which we refrain and dread from combating, is not tangible,
and is the more difficult to remove. It has sunk into the Atlas and into
the desert, it has filled the mind of every man from the Soudan which it
controls up northwards to Atlas and throughout this land.
[Sidenote: The Touaregs]
Roaming in the Sahara are bands of men famous for their courage and
their isolation. They are called the Touaregs. They are of the same race
and the same language as those original Berbers who yet maintain
themselves apart in the heights of Aurès or of the Djurdjura. They are
the enemies of all outside their tribes, especially of the Arab
merchants, upon whose caravans they live by pillage. Yet even these
Islam has thoroughly possessed and would seem to have conquered for
ever. Their language has escaped; their tiny literature (for they have
letters of their own, and their alphabet is indigenous) has survived
every external influence, but even there the God of the Mohammedans has
appeared.
One taken captive some years since wrote back from Europe to his tribe
in his own stiff characters a very charming letter in which he ended by
recommending himself to the young women of his home, for he himself was
a fighter, courteous, and in his thirtieth year. But when he had written
“Salute the Little Queens from me,” he was careful to add an invocation
to Allah. And if in their long forays it is necessary to bury hastily
some companion who has fallen in the retreat, his shallow grave in the
sand is carefully designed according to the custom of religion. They
leave him upon his right side in an attitude which they hold as sacred,
his face turned to the east and towards Mecca. In this posture he awaits
the Great Day.
[Sidenote: The Lack of an Opposing Faith]
Against this vast permanent and rooted influence we have nothing to
offer. Our designs of material benefit or of positive enlightenment are
to the presence of this common creed as is some human machine to the
sea. We can pass through it, but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out
before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will our work be
accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps through disasters suffered
in our European homes, the full tradition of our philosophy and a faith
which shall permeate all our actions as completely as does this faith of
theirs.
That no religion brought by us stands active against their own is an
apparent weakness in the reconquest, but that consequence of the long
indifference through which Europe has passed is not the only impediment
it has produced. The dissolution of the principal bond between
Europeans—the bond of their traditional ritual and confession—has also
prevented the occupation of Africa from being, as it should have been, a
united and therefore an orderly campaign of the West to recover its own.
[Sidenote: Cause of Isolated French Action]
Had not our religion suffered the violent schisms which are now so
slowly healing, and had not our general life resolved itself for a time
into a blind race between the various provinces of Europe, the
reconquest of Barbary would have fallen naturally to the nations which
regard each its own section of the opposing coast; as in the reconquest
of Spain the Asturias advanced upon Leon, the Galicians upon Portugal,
and Old Castille upon the southern province to which it extended its own
name. Then Italy would have concerned itself with Tunis—with Ifrigya,
that is—and with the rare fringe of the Tripolitan and its shallow
harbours. The French would have occupied Numidia. The Spaniards would
have swept on to re-Christianise the last province of the west from Oran
to the Atlantic, and so have completed the task which they let drop
after the march upon Granada. Such should have been the natural end of
mediæval progress, and that reconstruction of the Empire (which was the
nebulous but constant goal towards which the Middle Ages moved) would
have been accomplished. But the most sudden and the most inexplicable of
our revolutions came in and broke the scheme. The Middle Ages died
without a warning. A curious passion for metaphysics seized upon certain
districts of the north, which in their exaltation attempted to live
alone: the south, in resisting the disruption of Europe, exhausted its
energies; and meanwhile the temptation to exploit the Americas and the
Indies drained the Mediterranean of adventurers and of navies. Islam in
its lethargy acquired new vigour from its latest converts, and the
Turks, with none but the Venetians to oppose them, tore away from us the
whole of the Levant and rode up the Danube to insult the centre of the
continent. The European system flew apart, and its various units moved
along separate paths with various careers of hesitation or of fever. It
was not until the Revolution and the reconstitution of sane government
among us that the common scheme of the west could reappear.
On this account—on account of the vast disturbance which accompanied the
Reformation and the Renaissance—Europe halted for three centuries. When
at last a force landed upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it
was a force which happened to be despatched by the French.
[Sidenote: The French]
The vices and the energy of this people are well known. They are
perpetually critical of their own authorities, and perpetually lamenting
the decline of their honour. There is no difficulty they will not
surmount. They have crossed all deserts and have perfected every art.
Their victories in the field would seem legendary were they not
attested; their audacity, whether in civil war or in foreign adventure,
has permanently astonished their neighbours to the south, the east and
the north. They are the most general in framing a policy and the most
actual in pursuing it. Their incredible achievements have always the
appearance of accidents. They are tenacious of the memory of defeats
rather than of victories. They change more rapidly and with less
reverence than any other men the external expression of their tireless
effort, yet, more than any other men, they preserve—in spite of
themselves—an original and unchanging spirit. Their boundaries are
continually the same. They are acute and vivid in matters of reason,
careless in those of judgment. A coward and a statesman are equally rare
among them, yet their achievements are the result of prudence and their
history is marked by a succession of silent and calculating politicians.
Alone of European peoples the Gauls have, by a sort of habit, indulged
in huge raids which seemed but an expense of military passion to no
purpose. They alone could have poured out in that tide of the third
century before our era to swamp Lombardy, to wreck Delphi, and to
colonise Asia. They alone could have conceived the crusades: they alone
the revolutionary wars. It is remarkable that in all such eruptions they
alone fought eastward, marching from camp into the early light; they
alone were content to return with little spoil and with no addition of
provinces, to write some epic of their wars.
It is evident that such a people would produce in Africa, not a European
and a general, but a Gallic and a particular effect. They boast
themselves in everything the continuators of the Romans. They do,
indeed, inherit the Roman passion for equality, and they, like the
Romans, have tenaciously fought their way to equality by an effort
spread over many hundred years. They are Roman in their careful
building, in their strict roads, in their small stature, in their heavy
chests, in their clarity of language, in their adoration of office and
of symbol, in their lightning marches: the heavy lading of their troops,
their special pedantry, their disgust at vagueness, their ambition and
their honour are Roman. But they are not Roman in permanent stability of
detail. The Romans spread an odour of religion round the smallest
functions of the State: of the French you can say no more than that any
French thing you see to-day may be gone to-morrow, and that only France
remains. They are not Roman in the determination never to retreat, nor
are they Roman in the worship of silence. The French can express the
majesty of the Empire in art: they cannot act it in their daily life—for
this inheritance of Rome the Spaniards are better suited. As for the
Roman conception of a fatal expansion the Russians exceed them, and for
the Roman ease and aptitude the Italians.
Had, then, the reconquest of Barbary fallen naturally to the three
sisters—to Spain, to Italy, and to France, the long attempt of Europe
might have reached its end. The Spaniard would have crushed and
dominated in Morocco where the Mohammedan was most strongly entrenched;
the Italian, with his subtle admixture, would have kneaded Tunis and the
eastern march into a firm barrier; the French would have developed their
active commerce upon the many small towns of the Central Tell, would
have pierced, as they are fitted to pierce, the high Central Plateaux
with admirable roads, and would have garrisoned, as their taste for a
risk well fits them to garrison, the outposts of the Central Atlas
against the desert. Then the task would be over, and Europe would be
resettled within its original boundaries.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The March]
On their long route marches, on the marches of their manœuvres and their
wars, the French, along their roads which are direct and august, (and at
evening, when one is weary, sombre,) seek a place of reunion and of
repose: upon this the corps converges, and there at last a man may lie a
long night under shelter and content to sleep: a town lies before the
pioneers and is their goal. It stands, tiny with spires, above the
horizon of their hedgeless plains, and as they go they sing of the halt,
or, for long spaces, are silent, bent trudging under the pack: for they
abhor parade. Very often they do not reach their goal. They then lie out
in bivouac under the sky and light very many fires, five to a company or
more, and sleep out unsatisfied. Such a strain and such an attempt: such
a march, such a disappointment, and such a goal are the symbols of their
history; for they are perpetually seeking, under arms, a Europe that
shall endure. In this search they must continue here in Africa, as they
continue in their own country, that march of theirs which sees the city
ever before it and yet cannot come near to salute the guard at the gates
and to enter in. It is their business to re-create the Empire in this
province of Africa. It may be that here also they will come to no
completion; but if they fail, Europe will fail with them, and it will be
a sign that our tradition has ended.
[Sidenote: The French Genius]
They have done the Latin thing. First they have designed, then
organised, then built, then ploughed, and their wealth has come last.
The mind is present to excess in the stamp they have laid upon Africa.
Their utter regularity and the sense of will envelop the whole province;
and their genius, inflexible and yet alert, alert and yet monotonous, is
to be seen everywhere in similar roads, similar bridges of careful and
even ornamented stone, similar barracks and loop-holed walls.
[Sidenote: The Straight Railway]
There is a perspective upon the High Plateaux which though it is
exceptional is typical of their spirit. It is on the salt plain just
before the gate of the desert is reached and the fall on to the desert
begun. Here the flat and unfruitful level glares white and red: it is of
little use to men or none. Some few adventurers, like their peers in the
Rockies, have attempted to enclose a patch or two of ground, but the
whole landscape is parched and dead. Through this, right on like a
gesture of command, like the dart of a spear, goes the rail, urging
towards the Sahara, as though the Sahara were not a boundary but a goal.
The odd, single hills, as high as the Wrekin or higher, upon which not
even the goats can live, look down upon the straight line thus traced:
these hills and the track beneath them afford a stupendous contrast.
Nowhere is the determination of man more defiant against the sullen
refusal of the earth.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The French Afforestation]
There is another effort of the French which may be watched with more
anxiety and more comprehension by northern men than their admirable
roads or their railways or their wires above the sand, and that is their
afforestation.
It is a debate which will not be decided (for the material of full
decision is lacking) whether, since the Romans crowded their millions
into this Africa, the rainfall has or has not changed. It is certain
that they husbanded water upon every side and built great barricades to
hold the streams; yet it is certain, also, that their cities stood where
no such great groups of men could live to-day. There are those who
believe that under Atlas, towards the desert, a shallow sea spread
westward from the Mediterranean and from Syrtis: there are others who
believe that the dry water-courses of the Sahara were recently alive
with streams, and that the tombs and inscriptions of the waste places,
now half buried in the sand, prove a great lake upon whose shores a
whole province could cultivate and live. Both hypotheses are doubtful
for this reason—that no good legend preserves the record. Changes far
less momentous have left whole cycles of ballads and stories behind
them. The Sahara has been the Sahara since men have sung or spoken of
it. Moreover, the Romans did certainly push out, as the French have
done, towards certain limits, beyond which no effort was worth the while
of armies. They felt a boundary to the south. They could bear the summer
of Biskra, but not that of Touggourt: their posts upon the edge of the
desert were ultimate posts as are the European garrisons to-day.
But in one thing the sense of change is justified, and that is the fall
of the woods. Here Islam worked itself out fully: its ignorance of
consequence, its absolute and insufficient assertion, its lack of
harmony with the process and modulation of time, its Arabian origin, are
all apparent in the destruction of trees. If the rainfall is as abundant
as ever, it is not held, for the roots of trees are lacking, and if it
be true that trees in summer bring rain of themselves by their leaves,
then that benefit is also gone. There are many deep channels, called
_secchias_, traversing the soft dust of the uplands, with no trace of
bridges where the Roman roads cross them: they are new. They are carved
by the sudden spates that follow the cloudbursts in the hills. Here,
perhaps, in the Roman time were regular and even streams, and perhaps,
upon their banks, where now are stretches of ugly earth quite bare, the
legionaries saw meadows. At any rate, the trees have gone.
Up in the higher hills, in Aurès and the Djurdjura, upon the flanks of
the mountains where the Berbers remain unconquered, and where the
melting of the snows give a copious moisture, forests still remain. They
are commonly of great cedars as dark as the pine woods of the Vosges or
the noble chesnut groves by which the Alps lead a man down into Italy.
But these forests are rare and isolated as the aboriginal languages and
tribes which haunt them. You may camp under the deep boughs within a
march of Batna and then go northward and eastward for days and days of
walking before you come again to the woods and their scent and their
good floor of needles in the heights from which you see again the
welcome of the Mediterranean.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Story of the Determinist]
This lack of trees the French very laboriously attempt to correct. Their
chief obstacle is the nature of that religion which is also the hard
barrier raised against every other European thing which may attempt to
influence Africa to-day.
There was a new grove planted some ten years since in a chosen place. It
was surrounded with a wall, and the little trees were chosen delicately
and bought at a great price, and planted by men particularly skilled.
Also, there was an edict posted up in those wilds (it was within fifty
miles of the desert, just on the hither side of Atlas) saying that a
grove had been planted in such and such a place and that no one was to
hurt the trees, under dreadful penalties. The French also, as is the
laudable custom of Republicans, gave a reason for what they did,
pointing out that trees had such and such an effect on climate—the whole
in plain clear terms and printed in the Arabic script.
There was, however, a Mohammedan who, on reading this, immediately saw
in it an advertisement of wealth and pasture. He drove his goats for
nearly fifteen miles, camped outside the wall, and next day lifted each
animal carefully one by one into the enclosure that they might browse
upon the tender shoots of the young trees. “Better,” he thought, “that
my goats should fatten than that the mad Christians should enjoy this
tree-fad of theirs which is of no advantage to God or man.”
When his last goat was over two rangers came, and, in extreme anger,
brought him before the magistrate, where he was asked what reason he
could give for the wrong thing he had done. He answered, “_R’aho_, it
was the will of God. _Mektoub_, it was written”—or words to that effect.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Cirta or Constantine]
The platform of the Rock of Cirta is the place from which the effort of
the French over all this land can best be judged, for it is the centre
round which nature and history have grouped the four changes of Barbary.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Constantine]
The rock is like those headlands which jut out from inland ranges and
dominate deep harbours; it is as bold as are such capes, and is united,
as they are, with the mass of land behind it by a neck of even
surface—the only passage by which the rock itself can be approached. On
every side but this, very sharp slopes of grass, broken by precipices,
plunge down in a mountainous way to the valleys, and at the foot of the
most sheer of these there tumbles noisily in a profound gorge the
torrent called Rummel, that is, “The Tawny,” for it is as yellow as a
lion or as sea-sand.
The trench is so deep and dark that one may stand above it towards
evening and hear the noise of the water and yet see no gleam of light
reflected from it, it runs so far below. It is this stream which has
made on the Rock of Cirta (though it is out of the true Tell and far
into the Tableland) a habitable fortress and a town; the town called
Constantine.
Such sites are very rare. Luxemburg is one, a stronghold cut off by
similar precipitous valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they are
found the origin of their fortress goes back beyond the beginning of
history, they are tribal, and their record is principally of war. So it
is with Cirta. The legends of the nomads say that they descended from
some enormous dusky figure, a God of the Atlas and of Spain—a giant God
marching along the shores of the ocean followed perpetually by armies.
Even this first of African names was mixed up with Cirta, for the title
of the rock was that of his loves, and the name Cirta given it by these
horsemen of Numidia was the name of their universal mother. A man can be
certain, as he walks along the edges of the place to-day and looks down
into the gulfs below it, that men have so moved here amid buildings and
in a fixed town with altars and a name ever since first they knew how to
mortar stones together and to obey laws. The close pack of houses
standing thus apart upon a peak has in it, therefore, something
consistently sacred. Permanence and continuity are to be discovered here
only among the cities of Africa; and its landscape and character of
themselves impress the traveller with a certitude that here will be
planted on into time the capital of the native blood: too far removed
from the sea for colonisation or piracy to destroy it: too well cut off
by those trenches of defence to be sacked and overrun: too peopled and
well watered to decay.
[Illustration]
The town has been taken in every conquest, and every conqueror has
boasted himself to have overcome the walls of rock, the hundreds of feet
of sheer climbing. The boast is manifestly absurd, though the temptation
to make it was irresistible. When Cirta has been stormed only one gate
admitted the invaders, and that was the isthmus which leads from the
platform of the summit to the tableland beyond. It was here that
Massinissa and here that the Romans entered. By this entry came the
French soldiers, and the market which stands there is called to-day “The
Place of the Breach.”
[Sidenote: The Inscriptions]
There is a place in Constantine where the full history of the town is
best felt, and that is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon the edge
of the rock upon the side furthest from the river and looks at the
storms blowing over the uplands from Atlas and driving low clouds right
at the crest of the walls. In this building are preserved (in no great
number) the antiquities of the place and its neighbourhood. Here is a
little silver victory which once fluttered, it is thought, in the hand
of that great statue which adorned the Capitol, and here are long rows
of tombs from the beginning of the Italian influence till the time of
the martyrs: you see carved upon them the slow change of the mind until
the last of the pagans boast of such virtues and have already that sort
of content which the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath to
succeeding time. This record of the epitaphs, though brief, is perfect;
you watch at work in them the spirit that made St. Cyprian transforming
the African soil; but their chief interest is in this, that they are, as
it were, a rediscovery of ourselves. You dig through centuries of alien
rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and, when you have dug deeply enough
you come suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred years an idiom quite
unfamiliar to us has alone been spoken here: beneath it you find the
august and reasonable Latin, and as you read you feel about you the air
of home. For all those generations the manifold aspect of the divine was
forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then, deep
down, you discover a tablet upon a tomb, and, reading it, you find it
was carved in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so gracious and who
so served the divinities of the woods that when she died _ingemuerunt
Dryades_: twice I read those delicate words, delicately chiselled in
hard stone, and I saw her going in black, with her head bent, through
groves. A trace of colouring remains upon the lettering of the verse and
a powerful affection lingers in it, so that the past is preserved. Islam
destroyed with fanaticism the figures of animals and of men: here in
these European carvings they are everywhere. The barbarian creed
conceived or implanted a barbaric fear of vines: here you see Bacchus,
young, on the corner of a frieze, and gentle old Silenus carried heavily
along.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Cæsarea or Cherchel]
If it is from the Rock of Cirta, from Constantine, that the recovery of
the province and its re-entry into Europe is best perceived—for there
stands the unchanging centre of Africa, and there can all the threads of
her destiny be grasped—yet there is another place far westward and down
upon the shore, where the wound that Europe suffered by the Mohammedan
invasion is more marked and long eclipse of our race more apparent. It
is the Bay of Cæsarea.
Constantine is so necessary to Africa that its very name (and it is
alone in this among all the cities) has been preserved. Cæsarea has lost
its name and its dignity too. The Barbarians have come to call her
“Cherchel”: as for her rank, it has been forgotten altogether; yet this
port was for a hundred years peculiar among all others in the
Mediterranean—it was more remote, more splendid, and more new. The
accident which created it lent a great story to its dynasty, and its
situation here, along the steeper shores that lead on to the Straits and
to the outer ocean, lent some western mystery to it and some appeal.
[Sidenote: Cherchel]
Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, was famous throughout the Mediterranean
for her beauty. The last of her lovers—it is well known—was Anthony the
Triumvir, who had desired (until he saw her) to inherit from Cæsar and
to rule the whole world. This ambition he abandoned after one battle,
lost, it is said, through her folly; and soon after that defeat they
chose to die. But a fruit of their loves, and a picture, perhaps, of his
courage and of her magnificence, survived in a daughter whom her mother
had dedicated to the Moon and had called Selene. This child was married
out into Barbary, to the king of the nomads, and here, in Cherchel, she
held with her husband for many years a court which gathered round it the
handicraft of Corinth, the letters of Athens, and some reflected
splendour from the town of Rome.
He was of those horsemen who had now for two centuries served Carthage
as mercenaries or Rome as allies. To the cities of the sea coast, which
were Italian or Asiatic in blood, these riders of the uplands had been
outer men. They appeared barbaric to the end, and, at the very end, it
was their blood, perhaps, that rebelled against the tradition of order
and that joined first the Vandal and then the Arab. The king was dark
and a barbarian. This wife who was sent to him inherited the broad
forehead of Rome and the silence of Egypt, and was also an heiress to
the generals of Alexander. There met in her, therefore, all those high
sources from whose unison Christendom has proceeded. She came west to a
new land that did not know cut stone and hardly roads: in a little time
she had built a city.
By some economic power which no one has explained, but which may be
compared to the wealth of our smaller independent States to-day and
their merchants, to Antwerp or to The Hague, this city of Mauretania
rose to be a marvel. The porticos stretched along that rise of land, and
a mile of new work, columns and pedestalled statues and arcades, looked
down from the slope and saw, making for the shore, perpetual sails from
the eastward. Great libraries dignified the city: a complete security
and a humane consideration for the arts continually increased its glory.
The passion for scholarship, which was at that time excessive, may have
touched the palace here with something of the ridiculous. The king
wrote, dictated, or commanded a whole shelf of books and was eager for
the pride of authorship. But no other note of indignity entered their
State, and all around them, looking out to sea, was a resurrection of
Greece.
This queen and her husband lived on into old age thus, untroubled in
their isolation and their content, and destined (as they thought) to
leave a dynasty which even the domination of Rome would protect and
spare.
Nothing is left. Rome seized their town at last. Their descendants
perished. All Mauretania was compelled to follow the common line of
unity. For four hundred years it has no history save that under the
Roman order it endured and increased. The Vandals passed it by: it might
still stand had there not fallen upon it the Mohammedan invasion which
everywhere destroyed, or rather abandoned, a Roman endeavour. The
neglect which was native to the Arab, the sharp breach which he made in
tradition, ended Cæsarea. To-day, a little market town, a tenth of the
old capital, barrenly preserves a memory of those two thousand years. A
few fragments which the plough recovers or which the builders have
spared are gathered in one place: the rest is parched fields and trees.
[Sidenote: The Aqueduct]
One conspicuous monument survives to emphasise the retreat of the
empire. It is something the Arab could not waste because it did not lie
within the circuit of the walls: its great stones were too remote from
his buildings to be removed, and its mass too threatening to be
undermined. It was the Aqueduct. This, for the most part, still stands,
and carries an aspect of endurance which is the more awful in that
nothing else of the city has endured. It spans a lonely valley in which
the bay and the old harbour are forgotten, and it is as enormous as the
name of Rome.
[Illustration]
It is more like a wall for height and completeness than are any of the
huge Roman arches I know. Its height is such that it catches the mind
more strongly than does the Pont du Gard, and its completeness such that
it arrests the eye more than do the long trails of arches that stretch
like rays across the Campagna. It appalls one because it is quite alone,
and because the multitude that gave it a meaning has disappeared. One
could wish to have seen this thing before the French came, when the
brushwood of the valley was quite deserted and when one might have
thought it fixed for ever in an intangible isolation which no European
would come again to reoccupy and to disturb.
Even to-day one may climb to the further, inland, side and look down the
perspective of its arches with some illusion of loneliness, and live for
an hour in the fifteen centuries of its abandonment. Its height, its
fineness, and the ruin of its use are so best seen, and its long line of
purpose, pointing on to a city that no longer remembers baths or
fountains. It is the ceaseless refrain of Africa. Italy, Gaul, and Spain
have ruins like these, but these ruins are right against a life which
has always been vigorous and to-day is especially renewed: only in this
one province of Africa do you find Rome arrested, as it were—its spirit
caught away and its body turned into stone.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Beginning of the Journey to the Desert]
There was last to be seen, before I could leave this province, the
desert and those dead towns which stand along the hither fringe of it:
the deserted homes of the Romans, and chief among them Timgad.
The Atlas, I had heard, is there at its highest, and the knot of
mountains into which it rises is called the Aurès. Upon its southern
side it fell steeply (I was told) upon the Sahara, and its northern
supported, on the last of the High Tableland, those ruined cities. Here
the frontier legionaries had been posted, and here the Arab invasion had
so wasted the forests and dried up the run of water that the towns had
died at once. This Timgad in particular is famous for its perfection and
for the complete survival of its form, but especially for this, that you
walk along paved streets and between standing columns and look, from the
seats of a theatre, towards a great arch or gate not yet fallen, and yet
never hear the voice of a living man.
I took my way to this place, the last of the towns I desired to see—the
tombstone, as it were, of the empire, the symbol or promise of the
reconquest. I went partly by day and partly by night, partly by the
railroad and partly on foot across the High Plateau southward till I
should come to it. Upon my way I met many men who should, perhaps, have
no part in such a little historical essay as is this, but for fear I
should altogether forget them I will write them down.
The first was an ill-dressed fellow, young, and with very sad eyes such
as men keep sometimes in early life but lose at last as they learn in
time to prey upon others. He had been unfortunate. We went along
together across a plain peculiarly lonely, and towards a large, bare,
isolated rock as high as a Welsh mountain and, as it seemed, quite
uninhabited. We were already in sight of the main range of Atlas, and in
the far ravines was a darkness that might, perhaps, be made by
cedar-trees, but all around us was nothing but bare land and now and
then a glint from salt marshes far away.
[Sidenote: Story of the Lions]
I asked him from what part of France he had come. He answered that he
was born in the colony. Then I asked him whether the colonists thought
themselves prosperous or no. He said, as do all sad people, that luck
was the difference. Those whom fortune loved, prospered; those whom she
hated, failed. He was right; but when he came to examples he was
startling. He showed me, high upon the rock before us, which I had
thought quite lonely, a considerable building, made of the stones of the
place and in colour similar to the mountain itself. “Beyond this hill,”
he said, “is Batna, and beyond Batna is Lambèse. Since you are walking
to Timgad you will pass both these places, and everywhere you will hear
of the House of the Lions. Then you will learn, if ever you needed
proof, that it is luck which governs all our efforts in this colony.” I
looked curiously at the great house, and asked him to tell me the story.
This he did; and I write here, as exactly as I can from memory, the
story he told.
“In that very place upon the hillside where now stands so huge a house
stood, when we were yet children, a little hut of stone such as the
settlers build, with two rooms in it only, a bed, three chairs, a table,
and a cooking-pot. And to this poverty nothing was added, for ill-luck
pursued that roof.
“There lived under it a man and his wife who had two children. They had
come here to rise with the country (as it is said), but, instead of so
rising, first one evil and then another fell upon them till their little
horde was eaten up and the field also, and the man had to work for
others—a most miserable fate. He got work in the building of the prison
of Lambèse, but, as he was not created by God to be a merchant or a
mortar-mixer, nor even a carrier of stone, he earned very little and was
always in dread of being sent away; and his companions jeered at him,
for the unfortunate are ridiculous not only among the rich, but in every
rank; and not only the rich jeer at poverty and shun it, but the poor
also—indeed, all men.
“In a word, this man was in so miserable a way that at last he took to
following his wife to church and to having recourse to shrines, as do
many men when their afflictions are unendurable, and among other shrines
he went to that called ‘St. Anthony of the Lion.’ Now, though it is
ridiculous to believe that the Lion there helped him, (for it is not a
saint,) yet good came to him through Lions.
“One day, when he had gone off to work with a heavy heart, leaving in
the house but one five-franc piece, his wife, who was now all soured by
misfortune and was wearied out with ceaseless work, heard a single knock
at the door, and when she went to it she found a nomad boy of the desert
from beyond Aurès, who held in his arms two little cubs with soft feet
and peering eyes who were mewing for their mother: they were the cubs of
Lions.
“The Arab boy, who was dark, erect, and strong, said, ‘God sends you
these. They are five francs.’ She answered, ‘God be with you. I cannot
pay.’ When, however, he made to go away silently, without bargaining,
she said, ‘God forgive me, but I will buy them’; for she thought to
herself, ‘perhaps I can sell them again for more,’ for Lions are rare
and wonderful beasts. So she took her five-franc piece from beneath a
leaden statue of St. Anthony in the window, and she paid the Arab boy
from beyond Aurès, from the Sahara, and she said, ‘God save you, the
lioness will follow the scent’; and he said, ‘God will overshadow me,’
and went gravely away, biting the five-franc piece to see if it was
good.
“Now, when her husband came home they decided to go into Batna and sell
the cubs, but their children, for whom they could afford no sort of toy,
were already so fond of the little beasts that they had not the heart to
sell them: they skimped and starved and ran into debt, but as the love
of these Lions increased in their hearts the more determined were they
to keep them; and they used to say, ‘God will provide,’ and other things
of that sort.
“The cubs, then, grew to be the size of spaniels, and then they became
grown and were the size of hounds, and soon manes grew on them and they
were the size of St. Bernards, and their eyes grew bright and shone at
evening; and at last they were perfect Lions. But from a long
association with Christian men they were genial, decorous, and loving,
and ate nothing but cooked meat, bread, and now and then a sweetmeat.
Also, they could stand up and beg. They could roar at command. They
could jump over each other’s backs; they could play as many tricks as a
dog. It was in this way that good came from them.
“For one day, when this man and his wife were in a better mood and had
forgotten their poverty for an hour, there came to them in the carrier’s
cart a parcel of wine sent them by a relative who had a vineyard. This
may have been the turning of their luck: one cannot tell. Luck is above
mankind. But, anyhow, they asked the carrier in and gave him wine. Now
the carrier was a Mohammedan, and Mohammedans are treacherous, so when
he saw two Lions walking about in a lonely house he did not call it
witchcraft, as would a Christian man, but at once he offered a price for
them; but the man and his wife had hearts so good they would not sell.
Then the carrier changed his tune, and offered to hire them for one week
and to pay for this fifty francs: this they gladly accepted. For the
carrier and men like him are incapable of honour except in one small
thing, which is the keeping of words and dates: in this they are most
exact. So at the end of the week he brought back the Lions, and gave the
man and his wife fifty francs.
“But more was to come. For the carrier (and men like him) see profit
where a Christian man would not see it, and he made a proposition to
these people. He said: ‘Your Lions jump through hoops, they beg for
sugar, and do other entertaining things: now I will travel with you and
them, and half of all we earn shall go to you.’ The man and his wife
were so simple and so necessitous that they accepted, and the tour
began. But That Which Watches Over Us at last rewarded the man and his
wife, for within a week the carrier died, and they went on up and down
the country by themselves with their children, showing the Lions, till
they began to earn incredible sums. They went to the great towns and to
the sea coast. At last they became so rich that they went to Algiers,
and there it is, as you may imagine, large rents but larger earnings.
They lived in Algiers for one year, and became at last so rich that they
crossed the sea and showed their Lions in Provence, in Lyons, and would
have shown them in Paris but that, by the time they reached Tournus,
they came to their own people and found themselves rich enough. There
the man and his wife remained, but their children, who had been born in
Africa, came back, and here they are now. They have friends to dinner
every day, and all on account of Lions.”
When he had done this story he added, “It is true.” Then we went on to
Batna together without a word, but when we reached Batna we had dinner
together and spoke of many other things, but I have space for nothing
except this story of his about the lions.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Bargaining at Batna]
Having arrived at Batna, which is the starting-place for Timgad and also
for the desert beyond, I found that there was a good road which the
French had built going along a valley under Aurès, but that the distance
was over twenty miles. I wasted the daylight bargaining, for no one
would drive me twenty miles for less than sixteen shillings. It was
late, and in my eagerness to bargain I missed the chance of a daylight
march, for it was within an hour of sunset when the night driver who was
to start on the Tebessa road (which runs near Timgad) a little later
refused me. The poorer people whom I asked told me that no one else was
going eastward along that lonely valley, but that, if I were to reach
Timgad, I must make a night march of it or wait a night over in Batna
itself at an inn.
[Sidenote: Lamboesis]
Adventure is never to be refused, so I went out eastward alone under the
evening, and I was well rewarded, though I went hungry for hours and was
afoot nearly all the way, for I saw a great sight under the sunset, and
I met a man I shall never meet again.
The sight I saw was Lambèse, which was called Lamboesis by the Romans,
and this is what stamps it upon the mind of a lonely man before
nightfall: not what remains, for hardly anything remains, but that the
fragments which remain of it should be so far apart.
[Sidenote: The Praetorian Tower]
There is a sort of long cup or hollow here pointing at a spur of the
Atlas—that high mountain which holds up the sky. The big lift of Aurès
is on one side of this hollow, mixing into the clouds, and on the other
are isolated and uninhabited high hills. The very floor of this valley
is as high as the top of Cader Idris is in Wales; the heights beyond are
as high as the Pyrenees; and an air of desertion haunts the place. It is
impossible to forget that the Sahara is near by, down beyond the crest
of the range. For though the land is muddy and the sky full of rough
clouds and rain, yet the rain seems to make no grass and the land is
bare. In such a world there stands up before one a square and hardly
ruined tower.
[Sidenote: The Vastness of Lambèse]
A man of northern Europe looking at this thing from the high road cannot
but think it Jacobean (if he is English) or (if he is German or French)
a thing of the Thirty Years’ War. It might be later perhaps, the freak
of some Highland landlord or the relic of some local rebellion. It is
older than our language by far, and almost older than the Faith. As one
looks at it one cannot feel but only know its age, and one watches it up
an avenue of stones wondering why it stands so lonely. But one’s wonder
has no stuff in it till one goes on half a mile and more: by the
roadside is a pile of Roman stones. These also stood in Lamboesis. Then,
feeling himself yet within the walls of an unseen city, a man looks back
over the stretch he has come and is appalled. In such a gaze you look
westward towards the light beyond the mountains. The valley is already
dark. The high road which the French have made glistens as hard as stone
under the last light. Trees are still visible, especially the few
mournful and hard pyramids of the cypress, but the little village, the
modern prison (for there is a prison), and the rare labourers here and
there are muffled up in twilight; and there lies before one a mere
emptiness, beyond which, a long way off, dwindled to quite little, is
the Praetorian Tower. A sharp memory of childhood from beyond years of
common experience so strikes the mind.
The spread plain with its one central tower seems infinite; it is now
without hedges or trees or roofs or men; but once the Legion had filled
up everything.
[Sidenote: The Driver Passes]
It was all quite bare as I surveyed it—more bare than a heath or a down,
and as large as any landscape you may know.
While I was watching this empty space, and surmising what contrast it
would make with the famous and crowded ruins of Timgad to which this
Lamboesis had been a neighbouring city, as Chichester is to Arundel—or,
better still, as Portsmouth and its armament is to Southampton and its
trade—I heard the rumble of heavy and fast wheels, and a man driving a
coach passed me and then pulled up at my hail. He was the same man who
had refused my bargain an hour and more before. He was driving the night
coach to Tebessa. Not understanding men, he raised his price. I told him
that I would pay him only what I had offered at Batna, _less_ the price
of the miles I had gone. He would not yield, but he did these three
things: first, he promised to send word, as he passed, to an old Soldier
who kept a house near Timgad that a traveller was on the road; secondly,
he gave me advice, telling me that I should freeze to death by night in
that valley (for it was growing cold and the weather would not hold
under such a sky); thirdly, he informed me of the exact distance, which
was at the thirty-second stone, where there is a branch road to the
right, leading in half an hour up the slopes of the range to Timgad.
Then he drove on, and I spent what was left of a doubtful light in
pressing onwards.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Cold]
A great mass of snow had recently covered the peaks, and in the valley
up which I was trudging freezing gusts and very sharp scurries of cold
rain disturbed the traveller. I had already passed the last ruins of the
Romans and had seen, far off in the dusk, the last arch of the Legions
standing all alone with one big tree beside it. The west was wild-red
under the storm, and it was cut like a fret with the jagged edge of the
Sierras, quite black, when I saw against the purple of a nearer hill the
white cloak of an Arab.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Arab]
He drove a little cart—a light cart with two wheels. His horse was of
such a sort as you may buy any day in Africa for ten pounds, that is, it
was gentle, strong, swift, and small, and looked in the half-light as
though it did not weigh upon the earth but as though it were accustomed
to running over the tops of the sea. I said to the Arab: “Will you not
give me a lift?” He answered: “If it is the will of God.” Hearing so
excellent an answer, and finding myself a part of universal fate, I
leapt into his cart and he drove along through the gloaming, and as he
went he sang a little song which had but three notes in it, and each of
these notes was divided from the next by only a quarter of a note. So he
sang, and so I sat by his side.
At last he saw that it was only right to break into talk, if for no
other reason than that I was his guest; so he said quite suddenly,
looking straight before him:
“I am very rich.”
“I,” said I, “am moderately poor.”
At this he shook his head and said: “I am more fortunate than you; I am
very, very rich.” He then wagged his head again slowly from side to side
and was silent for a good minute or more.
He next said slyly, with a mixture of curiosity and politeness: “My
Lord, when you say you are poor you mean poor after the manner of the
Romans, that is, with no money in your pocket but always the power to
obtain it.”
“No,” said I, “I have no land, and not even the power of which you
speak. I am really, though moderately, poor. All that I get I earn by
talking in public places in the cold weather, and in spring time and
summer by writing and by other tricks.” He looked solemn for a moment,
and then said: “Have you, indeed, no land?” I said “No” again; for at
that moment I had none. Then he replied: “I have sixteen hundred acres
of land.”
When he had said this he tossed back his head in that lion-like way they
have, for they are as theatrical as children or animals, and he went on:
“Yes, and of these one-fourth is in good fruit-trees ... they bear ...
they bear ... I cannot contain myself for well-being.” “God give you
increase,” said I. “A good word,” said he, “and I would say the same to
you but that you have nothing to increase with. However, it is the will
of God. ‘To one man it comes, from another it goes,’ said the Berber,
and again it is said, ‘Which of you can be certain?’”
These last phrases he rattled off like a lesson with no sort of unction:
it was evidently a form. He then continued:
“I have little rivulets running by my trees. He-from-whom-I-bought had
let them go dry; I nurtured them till they sparkled. They feed the roots
of my orchard. I am very rich. Some let their walls fall down; I prop
them up; nay, sometimes I rebuild. All my roofs are tiled with tiles
from Marseilles.... I am very rich.” Then I took up the psalm in my
turn, and I said:
“What is it to be rich if you are not also famous? Can you sing or dance
or make men laugh or cry by your recitals? I will not ask if you can
draw or sculpture, for your religion forbids it, but do you play the
instrument or the flute? Can you put together wise phrases which are
repeated by others?”
To this he answered quite readily: “I have not yet attempted to do any
of these things you mention: doubtless were I to try them I should
succeed, for I have become very rich, and a man who is rich in money
from his own labour could have made himself rich in any other thing.”
When he said this I appreciated from whence such a doctrine had invaded
England. It had come from the Orientals. I listened to him as he went
on: “But it is no matter; my farm is enough for me. If there were no men
with farms, who would pay for the flute and the instrument and the wise
beggar and the rest? Ah! who would feed them?”
“None,” said I, “you are quite right.” So we went quickly forward for a
long time under the darkness, saying nothing more until a thought moved
him. “My father was rich,” he said, “but I am far richer than my
father.”
It was cold, and I remembered what a terrible way I had to go that
night—twenty miles or more through this empty land of Africa. So I was
shivering as I answered: “Your father did well in his day, and through
him you are rich. It says, ‘Revere your father: God is not more to
you.’” He answered: “You speak sensibly; I have sons.” Then for some
time more we rode along upon the high wheels.
But in a few minutes the lights of a low steading appeared far off under
poplar-trees, and as he waved his hand towards it he said: “That is my
farm.” “Blessed be your farm,” said I, “and all who dwell in it.” To
this he made the astonishing reply: “God will give it to you; I have
none.” “What is that you say?” I asked him in amazement. He repeated the
phrase, and then I saw that it was a form, and that it was of no
importance whether I understood it or not. But I understood the next
thing which he said as he stopped at his gates, which was: “Here, then,
you get out.” I asked him what I should pay for the service, and he
replied: “What you will. Nothing at all.” So I gave him a franc, which
was all I had in silver. He took it with a magnificent salutation,
saying as he did so: “I can accept nothing from you,” which, I take it,
was again a form. Then the night swallowed him up, and I shall never see
him again till that Great Day in which we both believed but of which
neither of us could know anything at all.
* * * * *
We were born, I cannot tell how many leagues apart, in different
climates and for different destinies, but we were two men together in
the night, and, for a short time, we were very near each other compared
with the distance of the stars, or with the distance that separates any
two philosophers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Goat-Story Again]
Many who read this will say they know the Mohammedan better than I. They
will be right: then let them explain the story of the goats, for I
cannot. I will repeat it to save them the trouble of turning back.
A young man of Ain-Yagout, hearing that the Government had carefully
planted little cedars on a distant hill, drove his goats fifteen miles
to browse upon the same. “Better,” said he, “that I should flourish than
the Government, and that my goats should give milk than that these silly
little trees should fatten.”
They caught him and brought him before the magistrate, where he
confessed what he had done, and even that he had lifted the goats
laboriously, one by one, over a high wall to get at the Government
trees. But when they asked him what good reason he could give for his
conduct, he replied:
“_R’aho!_ It was the will of God. _Mektoub_, it was written.”
Or words to that effect.
I will admit that when the full lips, the long uncertain eye and the
tall forehead of the true Arab met me in these short travels I was
always half silenced and half moved to question and to learn. But I saw
such Oriental features rarely, for, in spite of the turban and the
bernous, they are very rare.
[Sidenote: The Moor]
Indeed, of all the men I came across in this country, only two were of
the purely Oriental kind the books make out to be so common. One was a
fierce Moor of gigantic stature and incredible girth. He was dressed in
bright green, and drank the cordial called _crême de menthe_ in a little
bower. The other was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits upon a stall
in Setif. In his face there was a deep contempt of Christendom.
[Sidenote: The Little Old Semite]
The snow fell all around him swiftly, mixed with sleet and sharp needles
of cold rain. It was evening and the people were passing down the street
hurriedly to find their homes: so passed I, when I saw him standing like
a little stunted ghost in the rain. He knew me at once for some one to
whom Africa was strange, and therefore might have hoped to make me stop
even upon such a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say a word, but
only looked at me as much as to say: “Fool! will you buy?” And I looked
back at him as I passed, and put my answer into my eyes as much as to
say: “No! Barbarian, I will not buy.” In this way we met and parted, and
we shall never see each other again till that Great Day....
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Remembering him and this last one who had given me a ride, I went on
through the night towards Timgad.
It was a very lonely road.
[Sidenote: The Lonely Night March]
Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very difficult to depict, for it is
a negation and lacks quality, and therefore words fail it. But one may
express the loneliness of that valley best by saying that it felt, not
as though men had deserted it, but as though men had perpetually tried
to return to it and, as perpetually, had despaired and left the sullen
earth. The impression was false. The Romans had once thoroughly
possessed and tilled this land: the scrub had once been forests, the
shifting soil ordered and bounded fields; but the Mohammedan sterility
had sunk in so deeply that one could not believe that our people had
ever been here. Even the sharp and recent memory of those ruins of
Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my mind. The
full rivers and the fields which are to us a natural landscape are but a
made garden and are due to continuous tradition, and I wondered whether,
if that tradition were finally lost, our sons would come to see, in
England as I saw here in the night in Africa, vague hills without trees
and drifts of mould and sand through which the rain-bursts would dig
deep channels at random.
There was a moon risen by this time, but it lay behind a level flow of
clouds. All along the way, to my right, made smaller by the darkness,
lay Aurès—one could still just discern the snow upon his summits. The
road went on—French, exact, and, if I may say so, alien—bridging this
barbaric void which already smelt of the desert where it lay beyond
those mountains down under the southern wall of Atlas. For the desert,
when I had seen Timgad, I determined to strike.
[Sidenote: The Columns of Timgad]
So the road went on, and I with it till I came to the thirty-second
stone, and recognised its number by holding a match close by. Then I
knew that I had covered twenty miles and was close to Timgad. A branch
road opened out on the right, and there was a sign-post pointing along
it. I followed the new road across a careful girder bridge such as might
cross a brook in Normandy. I saw a light up on the rise of the
foot-hills, and beyond it, suddenly and yet dimly, a very mob of
columns. They stood up against the vague glimmer of the sky of every
size and in thousands, as though they were marching. A little rift in
the clouds let in the moon upon them palely. Her light was soon
extinguished, but in that moment I had seen a large city, unroofed and
dead, in the middle of this wasted land.
[Sidenote: The Old Soldier]
However men may act who see a vision but see it in extreme fatigue, so
did I. I suffered the violent impression of that ghost, but my curiosity
was no longer of the body. I took no step to see the wonder which this
gleam had hinted at, but I turned and struck at the door of the house
which was now quite near me, and which was still lit within. An old man,
small, bent, and full of energy, opened the door to me. He was that
soldier of whom they had told me at Lambèse.
“I was expecting you,” he said.
I remembered that the driver had promised to warn him, and I was
grateful.
“I have prepared you a meal,” he went on. Then, after a little
hesitation, “It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold.”
A man who has been on guard as often as had this old sergeant need not
mind awakening in the small hours, and a man who has marched twenty
miles and more in the dark must eat what he is given, though it be sheep
and tepid. So I sat down. He brought me their very rough African wine
and a loaf, and sat down opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the
candle. Then he said:
“To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in the
world.”
“Certainly not to-night,” I answered; to which he said, “No!”
[Sidenote: The Strange Food]
I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly: “Timgad is
a marvel. We call it ‘the marvel.’ I had thought of calling this house
‘Timgad the Marvel,’ or, again, ‘Timgad the——’”
“Is this sheep?” I said.
“Certainly,” he answered. “What else could it be but sheep?”
“Good Lord!” I said, “it might be anything. There is no lack of beasts
on God’s earth.” I took another bite and found it horrible.
“I desire you to tell me frankly,” said I, “whether this is goat. There
are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man for giving me
goat’s flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the Romans; only tell me
the truth, for goat is bad for me.”
He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large
and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered above
all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but remembered that their value
would forbid their being killed for the table. I again attempted the
meal, and he again began:
“Timgad is a place——”
At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, “Camel!” He did not
turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate away. I
said:
“You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country, but for
passing it under another name.”
He was a good host, and did not answer. He went out, and came back with
cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
“I do assure you it is sheep,” and we discussed the point no more.
[Sidenote: Timgad]
But in the hour that followed we spoke of many things—of the army (which
he remembered), of active service (which he regretted, for he had lost
half a hand), of money (which he loved), and of the Church—which he
hated. He was good to the bottom of his soul. His face was sad. He had
most evidently helped the poor, he had fought hard and gained his
independence, and there he was under Aurès, in a neglected place a
thousand miles away from his own people, talking French talk of
disestablishment and of the equality of all opinion before the law. So
we talked till the camel (or sheep) was stiff in its plate and cold, and
the first glimmer of dawn had begun to sadden the bare room and to
oppress the yellow light of the candle. Then he took me to a room, and
as I went I saw from a window, beyond a garden he had planted, the awful
sight of Timgad, utterly silent and ruined, stretching a mile under the
dull morning; and with that sight still controlling me I fell heavily
asleep.
When the morning came I looked out again from my window and I saw the
last of the storm still hurrying overhead, and beneath and before me, of
one even grey colour and quite silent, the city of Timgad. There was no
one in it alive. There were no roofs and no criers. It was all ruins
standing up everywhere: broken walls and broken columns absolutely
still, except in one place where some pious care had led the water back
to its old channels. There a little fountain ran from an urn that a
Cupid held.
[Illustration]
I passed at once through the gates and walked for perhaps an hour,
noting curiously a hundred things: the shop-stalls and the lines of
pedestals; the flag-stones of the Forum and the courses of brick—even,
small, Roman and abandoned. I walked so, gazing sometimes beyond the
distant limits of the city to the distant slopes of Atlas, till I came
to a high place where the Theatre had once stood, dug out of a hillside
and built in with rows of stone seats. Here I sat down to draw the
stretch of silence before me, and then I recognised for the first time
that I was very tired.
I said to myself: “This comes of my long march through the night”; but
when I had finished my drawing and had got up to walk again (for one
might walk in Timgad for many days, or for a lifetime if one chose) I
found a better reason for my fatigue, which was this: that, try as I
would I could not walk firmly and strongly upon those deserted streets
or across the flags of that Forum, but I was compelled by something in
the town to tread uncertainly and gently. When I recollected myself I
would force my feet to a natural and ready step; but in a moment, as my
thoughts were taken by some new aspect of the place, I found myself
walking again with strain and care, noiselessly, as one does in shrines,
or in the room of a sleeper or of the dead. It was not I that did it,
but the town.
I saw, some hundred yards away, a man going to his field along a street
of Timgad: he showed plainly for the houses had sunk to rubble upon
either side of his way. This was the first life I had seen under that
stormy mountain morning, and in that lonely place which had been lonely
for so very long. He also walked doubtfully and with careful feet; he
looked downward and made no sound.
I went up and down Timgad all that morning. The sun was not high before
I felt that by long wandering between the columns and peering round many
corners and finding nothing, one at last became free of the city. An
ease and a familiarity, a sort of friendship with abandoned but once
human walls, took the traveller as he grew used to the silence; but
whether in such companionship he did not suffer some evil influence, I
cannot say.
I came to one place and to another and to another, each quite without
men, and each casting such an increasing spell upon the mind as is cast
by voices heard in the night, when one does not know whether they are of
the world, or not of the world.
I came to a triumphal arch which had once guarded the main entry to the
city from Lamboesis and the west. It was ornate, four-sided, built, one
would think, in the centuries of the decline. Beyond it, the suburbs
into which the city expanded just before it fell stretched far out into
the plain. Not far from it a very careful inscription recalled a man who
has thus survived as he wished to survive; the sacred tablet testified
to the spirit which unites the religion of antiquity with our own—for it
was chiselled in fulfilment of a vow. In another place was the statue of
the gods’ mother, crowned with a wall and towers. This also was of the
decline, but still full of that serenity which faces wore before the
Barbarian march and the sack of cities.
[Illustration]
There is a crossing of the streets in Timgad where one may sit a long
time and consider her desolation upon every side. The seclusion is
absolute, and the presence of so many made things with none to use them
gradually invades the mind. The sun gives life to you as you look down
this Decumanian way, and see the runnels where the wheels ran once
noisily to the market; it warms you but it nourishes for you no
companions. The town stares at you and is blind.
[Illustration]
Against the sky, upon a little mound, stand two tall columns, much
taller than the rest. They shine under the low winter sun from every
part of Timgad and are white over the plain of grey stones. They may
have been raised for the Temple of Capitoline Jove.
These will detain the traveller for as long as he may choose to regard
them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of time. It is
said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great and
infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces of
the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each figured
in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods (it is
said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise of our
limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown by
Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone. They proceed
so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much were their
sculptors what we are in every western character: so fully do they
satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon them that
they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at once a
living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or the
clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these things were
alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering one’s sense,
there, physically present, is a desolation so complete that measure
fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the rare trees of the
horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as though not certain
centuries but an incalculable space of days coexisted with the present,
and as though, for one eternal moment, a vision of the absolute in which
time is not were permitted—for no good—to the yet embodied soul.
[Sidenote: The Stranger]
I do not know what was the hour in which I turned and left this sight,
and leaving by the southern gate made for the mountain range of Aurès.
But it was yet early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into
the hills when I saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared
stone which had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a
kind I had not met in Africa before.
By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no
turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an
unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made of
some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom. He
saluted me as I came.
When I approached him and saluted him in return, his face could be seen
inspired with a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his attitude alone
had discovered. It was not easy to be sure whether its lines were drawn
from Italy or from those rare exceptions wherein the east seems
sometimes to surpass our own race in force and dignity. His forehead was
low and very broad, his hair short, crisp, strong, and of the colour of
steel; his lips, which were thin and controlled, had in their firm
outline something of a high sadness, and his whole features recalled
those which tradition gives to the makers and destroyers of religions.
But it was his eyes that gave him so singular and (as I can still
believe though the adventure is now long past) so magical an influence.
These were in colour like the sea in March, grey-green and full of
light, or like some mountain stones which when they are polished show
the same translucent and natural hue, shining from within with vivid
changes; but, much more than their luminous colour, their expression
arrested me, for it had in it an experience of immense horizons, and
resembled that which may sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who
have seen the earth from the heights of the sky.
I first spoke and asked him whether I was well upon the path that would
lead me under Aurès, through the pass, to the sandstone hills from whose
summits one could see the desert for which I was bound.
Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or his speech had in it that something
which at the time I feared, I cannot tell; but the very short dialogue
we had together influenced me in my loneliness for a whole day, as a
vivid dream will do. I will therefore write it down.
He rose and answered me that I was on a good path all the way, and that
there was plenty of lodging: that the road was safe, and that my map
would be an ample guide.
“From the other side of Aurès,” he said, “you will see one ridge of red
rocks beyond another. Even the furthest has some scrub upon it upon this
side, but from its summit you will see the desert, and on this side it
is easy to climb.”
MYSELF: “And how is the southern side towards the Sahara?”
HE: “It is all precipice, but from the northern side you can cast about
and find a path which creeps down the end of the ridge to an oasis of
palm-trees. These are very numerous and evident from the height. When
you reach them you will find a large river flowing towards the desert, a
great road and a railway. It is easy to return.”
All this I knew already from my reading, and from my map, but I listened
to him for the sake of the tones of his voice: these had a sort of laugh
in them when he added that I should be glad to get back to water, to
trees and to men.
MYSELF: “But there is, as you say and know, no danger on this road from
the tribes or from beasts.”
HE: “No. Very little.”
MYSELF: “What other danger can there be?”
He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they desired
to learn.
I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain that
what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was changeless must
be dead. And I had noted how men who had travelled widely were more
simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known the sea; but if they had
chiefly known the desert, more subtle and often emptied of the Faith at
last: the Faith dried up out of them as the dews are dried up out of the
sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen mornings. But these men,
speaking in Christendom, had affected me little; here, so near the waste
places where men cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt
afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences were
shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what he and
his call wisdom, but I, despair. We discussed together in these brief
moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power much greater than
his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though his words were careful
and heavy.... He told me that the day was better than the night. The
daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when it was gone you could see
the dreadful hollow.
MYSELF: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked which was the
more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”
“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs) “mists and
kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the desert the
stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless distances I
remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with conviction) how
great nations, as they advance with unbroken records and heap up
experience, and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly
the enlarging actions of men, see at last that there is no Person in
destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to
legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and
whose Idol is quite blind.
We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the edge of
a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to return. We both
turned back to look at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and
the dead town: the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad, made
small by the distance and all in one group together. I looked at him as
he stood there and the fantastic thought half took me that he had known
the city while it was yet loud with men. When he had left me the
oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural reason
began to fade. I saw him go into a secchia; I saw him again upon the
further side swinging powerfully down the slope. He crossed another fold
of land, he showed upon the crest beyond, and after that I did not see
him again.
[Sidenote: The Walk to the Desert]
Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds,
but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast
instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter
oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast
shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made
a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living
things moved under the forest trees.
So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till
I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in
the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and
from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and
flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line
quite hard and level marked the extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in
the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew
off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the
country which is the prison-wall of our race.
[Sidenote: The Sight of the Desert]
The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the
division and the boundary, was abrupt.
A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up
of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the
Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp
dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the
Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this
blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space
much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the
tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but
very habitable and sown with large cities, living and dead. There are
behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true
climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone,
unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the
furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise
the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand
that blows and shifts under the wind.
[Sidenote: The View of the Desert]
On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the
plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see
showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the
northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of
blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the
desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer
I began to pick my way carefully downward.
[Sidenote: The Oasis]
I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and
such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the
plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of
that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to
be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me
was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched
together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or
heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields
and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the
least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I
chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no
obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove
looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found
first the railway, and then the strong high road which the astonishing
French have driven right out here into nothingness.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Arab Riding]
I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see
more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then
seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to
leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our
Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An
Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider
of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the
Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the
snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him
and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will
end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our
harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the
hills, for it is their native place....
[Sidenote: The Ksar]
Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the
Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things
return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They
must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully
rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring _ksours_ which
they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the
sun.... This is how it will end.”
[Illustration]
When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river, the
road and the railway all make their way together, one above the other,
from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian house
after so many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine, and asked
the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying to
get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Return]
“Very soon,” I said to myself, “I shall come back to the coast-harbours,
and I shall see again all the business of the shipping and the waves;
and I shall see, rounding the pier-heads, those happy boats which seem
to be part of the mist and of the very early morning.” So it was; for I
came at the close of a bright day through the hills of the Tell to the
sea: here was the Mediterranean, and here were all the sails. I saw
again the little harbour by which I had entered Africa, and I was glad
to find such a choice of ships at the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go
to all parts of the world. So I chose one that was a Spaniard, bound for
Palma in Majorca and I drove a bargain by which I was to go for next to
nothing, provided I stayed on deck, and ate none of their food.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Last Bargain]
When I had driven this bargain, I bought wine, bread and meat ashore,
and came back and took a place right up in the bows from which to watch
the sea. It was the afternoon when we cast off and left the harbour, and
before it was quite dark we had lost the land. I lay there for many
hours in the bows, and thought about my home. And as I went across the
sea I recalled those roofs built for true winters, and those great
fireplaces of my own land. I also thought of the thick, damp woods which
begin by Tay and go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or south of
these are never seen; I remembered Europe well. There were women there
(to whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear and simple, and whose
foreheads low; I remembered that all their gestures were easy. I
remembered that in the harbours men would meet me kindly; I was to meet
my own people again, and their ritual would not seem to be ritual
because it would be my own, and the air would be full of bells. The ship
also, going eagerly onwards dead north under the stars; she carried me
towards my native things, herself reaching her own country, for nothing
alien to Europe could make or preserve the science that had constructed
such engines and such a hull.
[Sidenote: The Memory of Europe And her Toast]
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look
back, as upon an adventure, towards my journey in this African land. I
shall be free of travel. I shall be back home. I shall come again to
inns and little towns. I shall see railways (of which I am very fond),
and I shall hear and see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I
thought about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though
she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all,
how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers
and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no
wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I
drank in my soul to her destiny. I had just come back from the land
which Europe had reconquered, and which, please God, she shall
continually hold, and I said to myself, “Remain for ever.”
“We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain
for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from you,
_Salvâ Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away.
They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall
decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are
preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this
world.”
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her
“_Esto perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not
die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my rambling book
that title.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: It Dawns]
In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet I saw no land. I saw
before me a boundary of waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel
alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a man feels on some lake inland,
knowing well that there is governed country upon every side.
This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to the shore
which Christendom has never lost.
But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for the
Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other iron
boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier against which
his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him to recall most
vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of the wild.
[Sidenote: The End]
There, where the fresh torrent that has nourished the grove is already
sinking, stagnant and brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all
alone and cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but
the line of the sand.
[Illustration]
FINIS
Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO., LIMITED
Tavistock Street, London
Transcriber’s Notes
1. Standardized hyphenated words when the same word appeared in the
text as both hyphenated and non-hyphenated.
2. Silently corrected palpable typographical errors; retained
non-standard spellings and dialect.
3. Italic text in the original is delimited by underscores.
4. Bold text in the original is delimited by equals signs.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESTO PERPETUA ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
