ALGIERS.
‘High Street, Africa,’ is a very nice address to give to your creditors
or to people who worry you with letters about nothing at all, and
require an immediate and categorical answer; but it is not an address
which facilitates the reception of the latest news from England. I have
been able to leave nothing more definite at home for the guidance of the
officials of the International Postal Service. For this reason I am in a
state of the most blissful ignorance as to what is happening at home. I
am sitting in the sun, I pluck oranges, gather bananas and prickly
pears, and go into the garden after breakfast and pick green peas and
dig up new potatoes. When you are where you can do this in the first
week of January, it would be the concentrated essence of idiotism to
bother yourself as to who is the responsible person for clearing away
the snow and the slush that have stopped the traffic of Downing Street,
and converted legislative pedestrianism into a process of slipping and
sliding, and coming down bang on your back.
I like High Street, Africa, very much indeed. I have got so far along it
as the Djur-Djura Hills, among the Atlas Mountains. I am on friendly
terms with the great mountain tribes of Kabylia, and the lion and the
panther are my next-door neighbours. But I did not get so far all at
once, and as the process of getting there has been to me both novel and
instructive, I fancy it may be the same to some of my readers--say
eighteen out of the twenty millions. The other two millions can skip
this chapter if they don’t care about it, and read the advertisements at
the end of this volume.
We left Marseilles, not by the Messageries, but by a much more ‘up to
date’ line--the Compagnie Transatlantique. A more magnificent vessel
than the _Ville de Tunis_ it would be hard to find in the Mediterranean
service, and she rushes through the water at the rate of
nineteen-and-a-half knots an hour. But oh, that ‘awful night at sea!’
Tell me no more of your blue Mediterranean. I had it black--black and
furious. It blew a gale nearly the whole voyage, and the ship rolled to
such an extent that it was impossible to lie in one’s berth. All night
long it was a hideous crash of crockery and furniture, piteous groans of
men, and the terrified cries of women, and the day brought no relief.
For twenty-eight long hours did we roll from side to side in the trough
of a raging sea, expecting every moment that the ship would roll an inch
too far and go right over. If you don’t know what it is to feel for a
night and day that you are going to be drowned in a minute, you won’t
appreciate the feelings of the poor bruised and battered and bilious and
broken-hearted passengers who sailed with me over that five hundred
miles of misery that separates France from Africa, Marseilles from
Algiers.
We made Algiers shortly before midnight on Sunday. But our troubles were
not over. Beautiful in the moonlight lay Algiers, the houses and mosques
of the Arabs glistening in pearly whiteness above the long line of
lights of the European quarter, and the whole shut in by a background of
far-off hills of snow. But we had to get there, and the ships don’t go
up to the quays. To the terror of the timorous it was explained that as
soon as the ship’s doctor had gone ashore, and certified that we had no
cholera or infectious disease on board, we should be fetched off in
small boats by Arab boatmen. And so we were.
There came about fifty boats manned by wild-looking Arabs. They crushed
round the steamer shouting and swearing at each other, and gesticulating
to attract the attention of the passengers. When at last the signal was
given they swarmed up the sides of the ship, and at once laid hold of
all the luggage that was unguarded. Two or three men would lay hands on
a bag and fight over it. Presently all the hand-bags and the rugs were
in the boats; but some of the passengers found themselves in one boat,
while their rugs and bags were being carried ashore in another. We
managed to keep our things together, but for a quarter of an hour we had
a bad time of it, and I had begun to doubt that the French had ever
conquered Algiers, because these boatmen were so much like pirates.
When we landed, we were taken in tow by a handsome, barefooted Arab lad
of about seventeen, who insisted upon shouldering all our bags and rugs,
and putting a heavy portmanteau on his head, and conducting us to the
Custom House. Here, to my utter astonishment, the Custom House officer,
instead of asking if we had tobacco, cigars, eau-de-Cologne, or spirits,
demanded sternly if we had any ‘verdure.’ I hesitated before replying. I
have a considerable amount of verdure. I am as green in some things as a
country bumpkin, but I hesitated to confess it in public. I might have
parried the question with a joke, by asking the grave official if he saw
any verdure in my eye, but his solemnity of manner overawed me. I
ventured to ask what he meant by verdure. A French officer attached to
the Bureau Arabe, who had crossed with us and become friendly, hastened
to the rescue, and explained that ‘verdure’ means ‘green stuff’ at the
Custom House. The officials were merely anxious to know if I had any
fruit, flowers, or vegetables in my baggage.
The key to the enigma was soon supplied. Algeria is in a state of morbid
terror lest the dreaded phylloxera should be imported from France and
destroy her vines. Not a green leaf, not an orange, not a flower is
allowed to pass the Custom House. I assured the official that I had
nothing of the sort, when, with a sudden yell, he sprang at me and
seized me by the coat. Two soldiers ran to his assistance, a crowd
gathered around me, and, amid the indignant cries of the multitude, a
poor little faded rosebud was torn from my buttonhole. I had taken it
from the dinner-table on board ship, put it in my buttonhole, and had
forgotten it was there. I believe that the rosebud was put into a boat
at once, rowed out ten miles to sea, and sunk in the Mediterranean by
means of a big stone tied to its stalk. My own fate was less terrible. I
was severely lectured and allowed to pass, but for many days afterwards,
when I walked abroad in the town, the inhabitants turned and gazed after
me with scowling faces, and muttered imprecations on the head of the
‘Sale Anglais,’ who had basely endeavoured to introduce the phylloxera
into Algeria.
Once free of the Custom House, Achmet, our young Arab, conducted us to
hotel after hotel. All were full. At last we succeeded in getting two
rooms on a top landing. Achmet carried our luggage up, and then asked us
for the ticket of the heavier portmanteaux, which were in the ship’s
hold, and could not be got out till the morning. I hesitated, but Albert
Edward instantly handed it to him. ‘Trust him,’ he said; ‘an Arab never
betrays a trust.’ And so Achmet walked off with the ticket of our
portmanteaux.
At nine the next morning ragged, barefooted Achmet knocked at our door.
He wanted the keys of our baggage to pass it at the Custom House. We
gave them to him, and in an hour the lad came to the hotel and brought
the baggage, and returned the keys. And not so much as a handkerchief or
a pair of socks had disappeared. To me this is one of the most wonderful
features of my journey. Here was a lad--almost a beggar lad--utterly
unknown to us, we could not even recognise him in the crowd of Arabs
that haunt the quays, and we had trusted him blindly and implicitly with
the sole custody and control of valuable property. I shouldn’t like to
try the same experiment in London or anywhere else. And it wouldn’t do
to try it in Algiers with a European boy of the same position. This is
one great feature of the Arab character. Trust them, and they would die
rather than betray the trust; suspect them and guard against their
dishonesty, and they will glory in robbing and tricking you at the first
opportunity.
For his trouble and his civility I gave Achmet a five-franc piece. He
grinned and smiled and chuckled, and tied it up in a piece of rag, and
put it in his bosom. I asked him what he was going to do with it. ‘Ah!
monsieur, it will help to buy me a wife,’ replied Achmet, and then he
told us how he was saving up to get £5 that he might buy a wife. An old
woman had told him of a very pretty girl, and the father only wanted 125
francs for her. I engaged Achmet there and then to do all my little
commissions for me, and to accompany me to the Arab quarter, and show me
everything; and I promised him that if he was good, before I left
Algeria I would give him the balance he needed, and leave him a happy
married man.
The Arab marriage system is curious but simple. There can be no love and
no courtship about it. That must come after marriage, because the Arab
husband never sees his wife’s face, or speaks to her until the marriage
ceremony has been performed. Old women are the match-makers. They see
the Arab girls at home, and describe their beauty in glowing Eastern
language to the eligible Arab men. A young fellow is kind to an old
woman, runs errands for her (I am speaking of Achmet’s class now), and
in return she gives him ‘the straight tip’ as to whose daughter to buy
for a wife. Achmet had saved his old lady friend from being insulted by
a drunken Zouave, and she had rewarded him by telling him of the
beautiful Saidah Bint Mohammed, the fifteen-year-old daughter of
Mohammed Ben Omar, the old Arab donkey-driver of the Upper Town. Papa
wanted 150 francs, but he would take 125. Achmet was in great terror
lest some other young fellow should hear of the bargain first.
These young Arab women are rarely seen in the streets. The old women and
the divorced women (women sent back to their fathers) go about, but
closely veiled, so that only the eyes are visible. The Arab divorce is
curious, and, like the marriage system, singularly easy. An Arab with
too many wives who wants to get rid of one, or the poor Arab with one
who wants a change in his domestic circle, says to the wife, ‘I divorce
thee.’ This he must say three times at a week’s interval. The girl then
goes back to her father, and takes all her jewellery, and any property
she brought with her. Divorce, however, is not very frequently resorted
to. Husband and wife jog along together. Jealousy does not exist on the
female side, and the wife has very little opportunity of causing her
lord uneasiness. There is nothing in the domestic arrangements to cause
words. The Arab husband does not dine with his wife, and it never enters
into her head to object to his latchkey and late hours at the café.
The system of polygamy prevents the poor Arab from feeling the pressure
of a large family, and the labour market is not affected by female
competition. These people escape the difficulties of our London poor. A
man’s sons work for him at a very early age, and the daughters are all
marketable. When they are very pretty they are really valuable property.
Besides this, the Koran _commands_ charity, and there is no such thing
as an Arab who has been true to his faith dying of hunger. Arabs, again,
are forbidden by their religion to drink intoxicants. An Arab can cross
Africa from Morocco to the Soudan with nothing in his pocket. Shelter
and food are offered him gratis by every tribe he meets. The rich help
the poor, not as an act of charity, but as an act of religion. Islamism
does not at present enjoy the benefit of the teaching of the Charity
Organization Society.
With Achmet to accompany me, and Albert Edward to exchange Arabic
pleasantries with the natives, I have been able to sit among them at
their own cafés, to chat with them in their bazaars, and to visit some
of them in their homes. To me this has been more instructive than
wandering about the famous old town of the pirates and its picturesque
environs. No one can look without emotion for the first time on this
once blood-bespattered spot, on the wild African coast from which the
scourges of Christendom sailed forth to sweep the seas and then desolate
the neighbouring lands; to bring back thousands of slaves--the men to
toil their lives away in cruel bondage, and the women to be sold in the
great market to the wealthy lords of vast harems--no one, I say, can
look upon this spot without feeling stirred and interested. But, after
all, the proper study of mankind is man. The condition of a race
existing is a more useful study than the story of a race which has
passed away. Algiers has had its Dey, and now it has its
Governor-General; but I doubt much whether the Arabs of Algeria are
really fonder of the French soldiers than the Christians of old were of
the Moorish corsairs.
The best way to get an idea of Algiers as a whole is to row out into the
bright blue bay. Then you see as pretty a picture as ever was sent to a
Royal Academy. The town seems to rise from the sea in a series of
shining white marble terraces. Above the European quarter lies the old
Arab town--white and weird and wonderful. But it is the background that
makes the picture. The glorious green heights that frame the landscape
are dotted with French villas and Moorish palaces, amid the rich
colouring of tropical fruit and flower, and, high over all, stretching
far away into the dim distance, are the snowclad summits of the Atlas
Mountains.
But the greatest beauty of all lies in the sky and the sea and the sun,
and the ever-glowing, smiling landscape. You can’t describe this sort of
thing--at least, I can’t. My stock of adjectives is small, and I should
exhaust it in a paragraph if I tried to depict the loveliness of this
favoured spot.
The best of scenery soon palls on me, but the ever-changing, ever-moving
crowd never does. I should like to have the great gathering-place of
Algiers, the Place du Gouvernement, packed and exported to London for my
especial benefit. Always at my dark hour, when I begin to wonder whether
razors or poisons or water-butts are the best solutions of the enigma of
life, I would go and sit down on the Place du Gouvernement, and my dark
hour would give way to the dawn--nay, to the full glory of the noonday
sun. What a marvellous crowd it is that saunters up and down! The
stately Arab, spurning the ground as he paces it in white burnous; the
gaudy Moor, in his bright blue, gold-embroidered jacket, short white
trousers, and red fez; the Jew, with his yellow turban, his black
jacket, and his many-coloured sash; the black Bedouins of the desert;
the Greek; the Turk; the Maltese; the swarthy, fierce-eyed Spaniard; the
French Zouaves and Turcos; the raven-haired, lustrous-eyed daughters of
Spain and Southern Italy; the Arab woman, veiled upwards to the nose and
downwards to the eyes--how you wonder what they look like behind that
tantalizing gauze!--the Jewess, with her straight silk robe and
slippered feet--all these races mix and commingle with the dandy
Frenchman and the commonplace Englishman, and make a ‘bit of colour’
which it would be hard to find equalled anywhere.
How one despises broadcloth and chimney-pot and all the sober hues of
cockneydom as one gazes on this scene! I feel that even I might begin to
find a few minutes’ pleasure in life if I could only dress myself up in
one of these romantic garbs and wear a bright-coloured sash instead of
braces, and shining buff boots or scarlet slippers. If I could wear
these things and have a fierce black moustache and a turban or a fez, I
am quite sure the world would also wear a different aspect. Of course I
may be wrong. It is quite possible that these picturesque people who eye
me as I pass are envying me my prosaic billycock hat and my
tallow-coloured complexion and my commonplace black coat.
How these people ever get about Algiers without spoiling their finery is
a great mystery to me. I have not been out five minutes before I am
mud-colour from top to toe--not black mud; that does not exist here--but
a brown-coloured mud, which dries _café-au-lait_, or fawn colour, and
shows up splendidly on your dark garments. The roads of Algiers are
awful. They are sometimes a foot thick in light, liquid mud. If you take
an open carriage, you might as well put the mud on with a
whitewash-brush at starting to save trouble. The administration of
Algiers does not worry itself about such a thing as road-making or
road-sweeping. The mayor is a learned professor, and the council
probably join with him in learned discussions on abstruse questions.
They never do anything for Algiers.
To take a good drive in the neighbourhood you want nerves of iron. One
Sunday I drove a roundabout way to our Lady of Africa, the church that
stands on the summit of the high hill of Bou Zarea. Two little Arab
horses drew me, and the driver left the path to them. He only attended
to the pace, which was the maximum all the way. Go up the side of a
house and down the side of a house in an open carriage at full speed,
then dash round the house on the extreme verge of the gutter, then,
without getting out of the carriage, make your steeds jump from the roof
of one detached house to the next, then drive straight across a row of
roofs, taking the centre and never turning to the right or the left
merely because a stack of chimneys is in the way--do all this, and you
will then be able to understand the sort of drives my coachman takes me
in Algeria. I am told the precipices and the ravines we pass over and
the mountains we scale are grand and glorious. I can’t say; I always,
when I come to them, shut my eyes, and wonder whether they will think to
join my pieces together before they pack me for transportation to
England, just to see if I am ‘all there.’
Our Lady of Africa stands upon a precipice overlooking the sea. Here I
saw a ceremony which is, I believe, unique. The priests and the
acolytes, and the whole religious procession, filed out after prayers
and stood on the brow of the precipice. Then began a grand and beautiful
service. The priest ‘blessed the sea,’ and then performed a solemn
funeral service for all those who have died therein. It was a very
impressive service, and it was a very lovely idea. Some of us were so
touched by the solemn ceremony at the edge of that vast grave that we
broke down a little. Amid the sad-faced women who stood around there
were evidently some to whom the prayers for the dead who lay beneath the
sad sea-waves brought back the loved face lost, the vanished hand, and
the sound of the voice for ever still. The ceremony is one no visitor to
Algiers should miss, but it leaves a sadness on the mind which does not
soon pass away.
The interior walls of Our Lady of Africa are covered with votive
offerings from the faithful, chiefly pictures of wrecks and narrow
escapes by land and sea, from fire and water, which are intended to
commemorate the miraculous intercession of the Holy Virgin; and there is
also to be seen a very quaint statue of the Archangel Michael, usually
hidden behind drapery, and which is said to be worth a hundred thousand
francs, being made of solid silver. It is the property of a
confraternity of Neapolitan fishermen. The church of Our Lady of Africa
is the place of worship of Mediterranean seafarers, irrespective of
nationality; and Spanish smugglers, Italian fishermen and French sailors
forget their differences when they kneel down in prayer before her
shrine.
The village of Bou Zarea, which is built on a slope of the mountain,
lies 1,300 feet above the sea, and from it you can get some idea of
what this coast must have looked like in the days of the Deys and the
pirates. Every prominent point is studded with the ruins of a fort, or
the tomb of a saint. These tombs, properly called koubbas, but usually
styled marabouts by the French, are often exceedingly picturesque. Just
behind us, half a mile up the mountain, there is the koubba of Sidi
Naaman, a venerated patriarch who worked miracles while in the flesh,
and whose fame is still green among the Arabs. But this is but one in a
hundred, or a thousand, and there are few pretty spots on the seashore
or in the mountain without a koubba.
One day, while wandering in the hills, I came upon one of these koubbas,
the tomb of a very celebrated marabout, whose life had been one of
holiness. I was quite alone, there was not a living soul to be seen, so
I opened the door of the mausoleum and walked in. To my surprise, I
found inside the tomb a beautiful bed hung with gorgeous draperies, and
by the side of the bed was a little table, on which stood a plate of
oranges, a plate of bananas, and a plate of dates. I fancied I had
mistaken somebody’s one-roomed house for a tomb, so I crept out
cautiously and walked away. The same evening, while talking with a
French officer, I related my adventure, and he explained the mystery.
The beautiful bed was for the marabout to sleep on, the food was for his
refreshment. After sunset all holy men are believed to rise from the
earth and lie upon the more comfortable bed, and take a little light
refreshment. Some Arabs go so far as to put a pipe and some tobacco and
a box of lights on the table, in case the dead saint should like a
smoke. What a delightful idea of death! Why, the grave would lose all
its terrors to some men if they could be sure of a pipe after dinner!