IV

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands

another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road

alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people

were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the

interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not

at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The

French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been

like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of

the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah

lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with

towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a

Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many

years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At

one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn,

smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives,

and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone,

some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single

tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the

tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting

days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population;

the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and

children along with it and the people who were necessary to its

subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life

on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve

especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer

find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town;

and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow

up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before

Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering,

had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however,

was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end

drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving

only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.

I found little of interest in the detail except that splendid tower,

which was a spectacle of ruin; it commanded the scene by its single

and solitary figure, and was imposing to the eye and to the mind. It

was a minaret, but of a different order from any I ever saw. It

stood in the middle of the façade of the mosque, which was entered

by the central door of the minaret, massively crowned by concentric

arches over the portal; and this base was continued above, in the

upper stories, by a bolder and more solid construction than usual,

with ornamental details fitted to its severe lines, with a balcony

halfway up, and at the top a group of small Gothic arches. It was

thus more like a cathedral tower in aspect, position, and use; and

in its majestic ruin it seemed such. The treatment of the surface,

however, was altogether Moorish. The material was a beautiful rosy

stone; and, overlaid on this, one still saw the half-obliterated

green and blue lights of the incrusted work like a dull peacock

lining. The discreet relief of this ceramic ornament on the rose

stone, used as a ground and having its own warm and massive effect

in the harmony of tints, must have made a superb example of that

mosaic art of color which treated great surfaces like a jewel

box. But what a marvel it is to find the camp of a horde of Berber

tribes, in the confusion of a fierce and bloody siege, a _foyer_

of the great arts—of architecture, delicate sculpture, and mosaic

color! All those onyx columns that have so delighted me were brought

from these ruins and reset in their new places in Tlemcen. What

an interesting group of impressions a few days had brought me,

here! not one city, but a nest of cities, like a nest of boxes—or

like Troy, superposed one on another: Pomaria, Agadir, Tagrart,

Mansourah, Tlemcen. A necropolis of saints; a mountain-pleasance of

fountains, orchards, grottos, the haunt of pigeons and fruits, rich

in the privacy and delights of country life; a land of campaigns,

and Berber dynasties, and sieges! I began to feel the inadequacies

of my schoolboy geography and college histories, the need of a new

orientation of my ideas to serve as a ground-plan for my knowledge

of the people and its past, the race-character; and, on my return,

I sought out the book-shop—an excellent one—and purchased all

the little city could tell me about itself.

V

The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the

glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal

change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and

cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and

moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old

that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social

organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism,

whether classical or heathen, without a violent disturbance of

the primeval roots of old religion with its annual flowering of

fêtes, its local worships, its sheltering thoughts of protection

in the human task-work, its adumbrations of the world of spirits,

its ritual toward the good and evil powers; and the religion of

Mohammed, sweeping over Africa on the swords of Arab raiders and

hordes, subdued the country to the only God, but the Berber soul

remained much as it had been, a barbarian soul, still deeply engaged

in fetichism, magic, diabolism, primitive emotions, and ancestral

tribal practices—superstition; nor was this the first time that

the Berber soul had encountered the religion of the foreigner,

for pagan temples and Christian churches already stood upon the

soil. The faith of Mohammed was more fiercely proselytizing; it was,

moreover, of desert and tribal kin; and it imposed its formulas and

exterior observance more widely and thoroughly than its predecessors.

The Berber race, nevertheless, was hard-bitted, obstinate,

independent; it was scattered over deserts and in mountain

fastnesses; its conversion was slow and remained imperfect in spite

of much missionary work on the part of the pious proselytizers from

the schools of Seville and Fez, who in later generations followed

the fiery conquerors to “Koranize” the rude mountaineers, such

as those of Kabylie, and settled beside them as daily guides and

teachers. Long after the first conquest Christianized Berbers and

other dissident groups were to be found here and there, and were

tolerated. The elements of primitive savagery held their own in

the life of the people at large, just as pagan practice and thought

survived in southern Italy, and in the last century were easily to be

observed there; the Riff, in particular, was a stronghold of magic;

and everywhere beneath the thin Moslem veneer was the old substratum

of superstition embedded in an unchanging savage heredity of mood,

belief, and social custom. Fetichism persisted in the mental habit

of the people, and still shows in their addiction to holy places,

magical rites and modes of healing, charms and amulets, and the

whole rosary of primitive superstition.

The Berbers were also by nature a Protestant race; their independent

spirit quickly availed itself of every sectarian difference, reform

or pretension, to make a core of revolt, inside the pale of the

religion, against their foreign orthodox masters. It was their way

of asserting their nationalism against the Arab domination; it was,

essentially, a political manœuvre. The first great Moslem heresy,

Kharedjism, instituted by the followers of Ali, the son-in-law of

Mohammed, found the Berber tribes an army flocking to its banners;

and, afterward, wherever schism broke out or a pretender arose,

there were the Berbers gathered together. In that world they

were the opposition. Islam itself, by the example of Mohammed,

had shown the way; every tribe had its inspired prophet, sooner

or later; and one, at least, among them, the Berghouaia, once most

powerful in this region, had its own Koran, specially received in

the Berber tongue from the only God, whose prophet in this instance

was Saleh. The expectation of the Mahdi, too—the last imam, who,

having mysteriously disappeared, shall come again to bring justice

on the earth—a tradition that mounted to Mohammed himself, was

an incentive to his appearance; and inasmuch as the prediction

circulated under the popular form—“the sun shall arise in the

west”—the Berbers regarded themselves as the chosen people

among whom the Mahdi should arise. Under these conditions there

was no lack of Mahdis. One of them, the greatest, Obéïd Allah,

the Fatémide, built that lonely seaport of Mahdia on the Tunisian

coast, whence he extended his sovereignty over the Moslem dominions

from the Egyptian border to the Atlantic, including Sicily, and

warred on Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia; but his son had to contend

with a prophet pretender, “the man with the ass,” who with

a great following from the tribes maintained himself for a while,

until between his own new-found taste for fine horses and the desire

of the tribesmen to return to their own country, his authority and

the army melted away together, like snow in the desert. It was a

characteristic incident in Berber history.

The natural and various course of such events had ample illustration

in the Morocco country about Tlemcen. Edris, the last alleged

descendant of Ali, found refuge in this quarter on the Atlantic edge

of the Mohammedan world; the Berbers, after their custom of rallying

about a promising dissenter, soon had him at their head; his son

founded Fez, and the dynasty was prosperous and glorious. Then

a cloud appeared in the far south, a cloud of horsemen with the

veil—I suppose the blue veil that I associate with the Touaregs,

themselves doubtless the best living type of that old horde

of desert raiders. They mounted up from the borders of Senegal,

gathering masses of foot-followers as they went, preaching a reform

of faith and manners, breaking all musical instruments, and cleansing

the land; they were fighting Puritans of their age and religion,

establishing an austere life and a pure form of the faith. So

the princely Edrisides gave place to the princely Almoravides,

and their dynasty, too, was prosperous and glorious, and extended

its realm into Spain. Then rose the Mahdi. In this instance he

was Ibn Toumert, a Berber, lame and ugly, small, copper-colored,

sunken-eyed, who had schooled himself at Cordova, and then, like

Sidi bou-Médyen, warmed his enthusiastic and mystic temperament in

the oriental fires of Baghdat and Mecca, and had returned along the

cities of the African seaboard a reformer, breaking winecasks and

violins, and publicly reproaching devout dignitaries for corruption

of manners, even the reigning prince of the Almoravides. He was soon

the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity

of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in

the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had

once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to

come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the

college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains;

but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion,

and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty,

like its predecessors prosperous and glorious; and it was he who

drove the Normans out of their last stronghold at Mahdia, having

extended his power so far, and with his conquering arms brought

the Andalusian arts to Tunis. In the four centuries of this brief

historic survey—from the eighth to the twelfth—a sectary,

a reformation, and a Mahdi were the initial points on which the

great changes of the government of the country turned.

It might seem that in this civilization politics was only another

form of religion; but, deeply engaged as political changes were

in religious phenomena, this is perhaps a superficial view. It may

also be maintained that the Berbers took no metaphysical interest in

dogma, and found in divergent sects and the incessant agitation of

unbridled religious enthusiasm only modes of partisanship and levers

of political ambition; their religion was, at least, compatible

with a vigorous secular life. On the theatre of history religious

events gave to politics their dramatic form, at moments of crisis;

but the religious life of the community is not to be found in them,

but rather in facts of more usual nature and daily occurrence. The

cardinal fact, and one that swallowed up all the others, from this

point of view, was the extraordinary development of saint worship;

its mortal efflorescence and fossilized deposit, so to speak, was

this strata of tombs, koubbas, which cover the region. The Marabout,

to give the saint his peculiar designation, was a man bound to

religion, and was called the “friend of God”; he was revered in

his life, and in his death he became the protector of the locality of

his tomb, the intermediary of prayer to Allah, whose personality he

obscured and tended to displace in practice. It was natural that the

cult of saints should flourish in such a superstitious population;

and the country itself, by its inaccessible character—desert and

wilderness—lent itself to hermit lives, to types of the religious

brooder and mystic, the solitary, with his dreams, illusions, and

trances. Religious consecration was also a protection in a country

of rapine and disorder, and a source of profit among a credulous

people. There was, indeed, in the circumstances everything to favor

such an order of men. It appears, also, that in the time of the great

exodus of the Moors from Spain, a considerable body of fugitives,

learned men, found refuge in the Zaouïa of Saguiet-el-Hamra,

a famous monastery in Morocco; and the labor of these “men of

God,” pious and ardent, who seemed to be almost of another order

of beings between mankind and the divinity, is sometimes assigned

as the original source of the magnitude of the development of saint

worship in these regions. It was they who “Koranized” the tribes,

a body of missionary monks, educated, devoted, with the traits of

apostolic zeal and ascetic temperament. There were Marabouts long

before their day, but to them and their example may be due the

fact that the tombs, the holy koubbas, increase toward the west,

beyond Algiers and in Morocco, where they “star” the earth.

The lives of the Algerian saints, of which many may be read, do not

differ materially from that kind of biography in any religion. Every

village has its patron saint, its “master of the country,” as

he was called, and, as at Tlemcen, one may oust another with the

lapse of time. The koubba was a shrine, a local hearth of religious

life and practice, and the worship of the shrine was the near and

warm fact in daily experience; the veneration of the Marabout

appears to hold that place in the hearts of the people where

religion is most human. The Marabout himself was of many types,

ranging from plain idiocy, as was the case of Sidi bou-Djemaa on

the hill above Mansourah, to the mystic height, the “pole of

being,” as was the case of Sidi bou-Médyen on the hill above

Agadir. He was miracle-worker, thaumaturgist, medicine-man, and

might be consulted for all human events, from cattle disease to

thief hunting; he was a preacher, a doctor of the law, an agitator,

a recluse, a madman, anything out of the common; and the story of

the legends runs the whole gamut of friar, anchorite, and fanatic

in all religious history. Women, in particular, gathered about him

and his shrine. In a region and civilization where there was no

effective mastery of authority or reason, given over to individual

initiative in a half-barbarized mental condition, such a development

was entirely natural; and the landscape itself is the history and

mark of it—there is a koubba on every hilltop, in the beds of the

streams, on the slopes of the plains—sometimes clumps of them;

in every prospect emerges the shining white cube of the holy tomb.