FRONTIERS OF ROME
Some one has not inaptly compared the Barbary States—Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco—to an overseas cap perched jauntily on the bald head
of Africa. This picturesque simile has, moreover, some scientific
justification, for geological authorities have frequently advanced the
interesting theory that when the world was young this region, which has
a compacted and clearly defined physical system of its own, was not a
part of Africa at all, but, cut off from that continent by an ocean which
covered what we now know as the Sahara, formed a great peninsula attached
to Europe by the isthmus which at one time unquestionably spanned the
present Straits of Gibraltar. Not being a geologist, I am incompetent to
pass an opinion on this theory, but its plausibility must be apparent to
any one familiar with the topography of North Africa.
Barbary—I am here employing the term to designate the region lying
between the Mediterranean and the main range of the Atlas—may be divided
into two zones, wholly dissimilar from each other in character. Skirting
the coast is a broad band of mountainous but, on the whole, fertile
country, sprinkled with populous cities, watered by numerous streams,
rich in forests and valleys, known as the Tell—the Arabic for “hill.”
Behind the Tell, stretching southward to the barrier formed by the Great
Atlas, is a region of lofty table-lands, or steppes, having an average
elevation of three thousand feet, bleak and desolate in appearance, with
a climate very different from the sunny warmth of the littoral, but
providing fine grazing lands for cattle and bountiful crops of esparto
grass and grain. Beyond the Atlas there occurs a still more sudden and
startling change, as, descending its steep southern slopes, we come out
upon the Sahara.
In many respects the country lying to the north of the Atlas belongs, as
Mr. L. March Phillips has pointed out,[4] more to the European than to
the African system. It is distinctly European in aspect, in its variety
of hills and valleys and rivers; it is European in its fertility, in
its olive-groves and vineyards, its waving fields of grain, its forests
of oak and pine; and it is European in climate, in the temperateness of
its heat, which is no greater than that of southern Italy, and in the
comparative abundance of its rainfall. The mighty barrier of the Great
Atlas cuts it off completely from the Sahara, on which it seems to turn
its back, while it faces the Mediterranean and the company of northern
nations to which it feels related. Only when you have crossed the Atlas,
when the verdure-clothed mountains and pleasant valleys give way to naked
plains of sand, the pine-forests to occasional palm-groves, the houses
of brick and stone to mud hovels and goat’s-hair tents, the settled
agricultural population to nomadic sheep and camel-raisers, the light
skins of the Berbers to the black ones of the negroes and the brown ones
of the Arabs, do you fully realize that you are in Africa. And when,
conversely, you turn your back upon the desert and emerge from the narrow
defile of El Kantara upon the Algerian table-lands, you have the feeling
that you are back in Europe again.
* * * * *
On leaving Biskra we headed straight north across the desert for El
Kantara, forty miles away. Here the lofty wall of the Aurés is riven
by a deep and narrow gorge, just wide enough to let the road, the
railway, and the little rushing river through. It is called by the Arabs
Foum-es-Sahara, the Mouth of the Sahara; but to us, coming up from the
south, it was the gateway to the Tell. At the southern entrance to the
gorge is the little oasis of El Kantara, which derives its name from a
Roman bridge, much restored by the third Napoleon, for this was the site
of Calcius Herculis, a fortress-town on Rome’s African frontier. Nestling
amid the palm-groves of the oasis, or perched on the crags which mark the
entrance to the pass, are three small villages, the Red, the Black, and
the White, so named by the imaginative Arabs from the color of the bricks
with which they are built, or, to be more exact, from the respective
shades which they assume at sunrise and sunset.
When Nature planned the Foum-es-Sahara she was in a dramatic mood; a more
fitting, a more impressive, or a more romantic gateway to the desert
could scarcely be imagined. The gorge itself is so narrow that there
is barely room for the road and the railway above and for the river
beneath. Its perpendicular walls of red and yellow rock have been carved
by wind-blown sand into the most curious and fantastic shapes—spires,
pinnacles, gargoyles, flying-buttresses—one great monolith which rises
abruptly from the flank of the Aurés bearing a striking resemblance to
a medieval castle, with towers, battlements, and keep. But the most
impressive view of the Foum-es-Sahara is to be had at nightfall, when
that face of the Aurés which rises precipitously from the desert is
transformed by the westering sun into a rampart of ruddy coral in the
center of which yawns a mysterious purple aperture—the mouth of the pass
itself. A caravan entering it seems to be swallowed up by the earth.
[Illustration: A SAHARAN MARKET-PLACE
The _souks_ of the towns along the desert’s fringe are cross-sections
of North African life, for to them come buyers of horses, camels, wool,
and leather from the cities of the littoral, and caravans laden with the
strange products of the Sudan and the Congo, of Lake Tchad and Timbuktu]
We lunched at Batna, a thoroughly Europeanized little town of low
buildings and wide streets, which holds little of either interest or
amusement. Commanding the pass at El Kantara, through which from time
immemorial the desert tribes have invaded the settled regions of the
Tell, it is a place of great strategic importance and has a large
garrison, housed in _casernes_ which are the most conspicuous buildings
in the town. Batna is of interest to the tourist only because it is there
that he turns sharply to the eastward on the ancient military road which
leads to Lambessa, Timgad, Tebessa, and the other garrison towns which
marked the line of Rome’s southern frontier.
Set on the slopes of the Aurés, three thousand feet above the sea, Timgad
may be reached by motor-car from Batna, some thirty miles away, within
the hour, the road passing within sight of the ruins of Lambessa. In
Roman times Lambessa was an important military outpost, the headquarters
of the Third Augustan Legion; but, with the exception of the Prætorium,
a massive foursquare building which rises in lonely dignity from amid
the crumbled masonry and toppled columns of what was once the Forum, its
ruins are scarcely worth the prolonged attention of any one who is not
an archæologist, particularly as such picturesqueness as they possess is
marred by the proximity of a huge military prison.
A few miles more, across a bleak and treeless plain waist-high in
ripening grain, and Timgad comes in view. A whole hillside is thickly
strewn with the white bones of the city, which was built in the reign of
Trajan, during the first quarter of the second century by the soldiers
of the Third Legion, then stationed at Tebessa. From the inscriptions
found in the Forum, Colonia Marciana Trajana Thamugas, as it was called,
appears to have been founded thirty-six years after Rome burned to the
strains of Nero’s fiddle and to have been completed in seventeen years.
With the lesson of the great fire fresh in their minds, and with a
determination to avoid such disastrous conflagrations, its architects
built with almost unnecessary solidity, and, as a further precaution, saw
to it that all the more important buildings should have a clear space
all around them. Never very large, the town was yet of great importance
strategically, having been garrisoned by the Thirtieth Ulpian Legion,
composed of veterans who had served in Trajan’s campaigns against the
Parthians.
Though Timgad has frequently been compared to Pompeii, which had been
destroyed two decades before the other was begun, the two had as little
in common as Palm Beach and Omaha. One was a lath and plaster city of
pleasure; the other was a substantially built frontier town devoted
to military purposes and to trade. While, like all Romans, the sturdy
colonists who formed the population of Thamugas demanded a certain
measure of magnificence, they could not be expected to rival the rich
and luxury-loving Pompeians. Consequently, the statues which have been
unearthed are not of the highest order, and the little museum contains
few of the exquisite bronzes, pieces of jewelry, and frescos such as have
been found in the ruins on the slopes of Vesuvius, but the excavators
have laid bare some of the finest mosaics in existence, many of them in a
perfect state of preservation.
For the first two hundred years or so of its existence Thamugas appears
to have enjoyed a peaceful and highly prosperous existence, being one
of the chief strongholds of Christianity in North Africa, but this
happy state of affairs was rudely interrupted in the fourth century by
the Donatists, fanatical schismatics who by their persecutions of the
orthodox precipitated a religious struggle which wrecked Rome’s African
empire. Occupied in the following century by the Vandals, its importance
rapidly declined, and when, in 535, the Byzantine general, Solomon,
drew rein before its gates, he found it in ruins, the Berbers from the
neighboring mountains having destroyed it in order that it might not be
used as a base of military operations against them. Though rebuilt and
repopulated, it did not much longer endure, passing from history in the
seventh century, when, during the great Arab invasion, it was stormed,
sacked, and burned. For twelve hundred years it lay neglected and almost
forgotten, but in 1880 its systematic exploration and excavation was
undertaken by the Service des Monuments Historiques of the Algerian
government, though even to-day, after nearly fifty years of laborious
effort, nearly two thirds of the city remain unearthed.
The attraction of Timgad lies less in its turbulent history, however,
than in the beauty of its ruins, considerable portions of which, thanks
to the French excavators, now lie open like a book, from which even the
casual visitor may obtain a graphic idea of what life was like in a
frontier town of Roman Africa. Like all Roman camps, Thamugas was divided
into four parts by two main streets—the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus
Maximus—which intersected at right angles, their pavements still showing
the ruts of chariot wheels. At the junction of these thoroughfares was
situated what would to-day be termed a municipal center, consisting of
the Forum, the Theater, and other public buildings, which, judging from
their remains, must have formed a group at once beautiful and imposing.
The Forum, a spacious and stately building with the same dimensions as
those of the Pantheon at Rome, was originally surrounded by a double row
of marble columns, forty-five feet in height, some of which are still
standing. Here was the principal rendezvous of the people of Thamugas,
for the Forum was a place for the transaction of mercantile, political,
and judicial business as well as a public promenade; a combination, as
it were, of a stock-exchange, a city hall, a law-court, a convention
building, and a public plaza. On one side the merchants and bankers
discussed commerce and finance; on the other the judges dispensed
justice; at the far end was a rostrum from which officials, politicians,
and others who possessed “the gift of gab” read official communications,
delivered funeral elegies, or thundered political orations.
That even the Africa of those far-off days had its Andrew Carnegies
is shown by an inscription which was found in fragments during the
excavation of a building, the nature of which was uncertain, not far from
the Forum. When the fragments had been pieced together the inscription
read: “Out of the funds bequeathed by Marcus Julius Flavus Rogatianus,
of senatorial memory, by his will to the colony of Thamugas his mother
city, the erection of a library has been completed at a cost of four
hundred thousand sesterces, under the direction of the city authorities.”
It has been estimated by some one of a mathematical turn of mind that
the shelves of the library which this Roman philanthropist gave to his
home town contained upward of twenty-three thousand volumes—not books
in our sense of the word, of course, but papyrus rolls inclosed in metal
cylinders, which looked not unlike the music-rolls for a player-piano.
[Illustration: THE GLORY THAT WAS ROME
When men who had witnessed the Crucifixion were still living, there arose
on the northern slopes of the Aurés, in southern Algeria, a splendid
city, an outpost of the empire of Rome. Thamugas its builders called it;
Timgad it is called to-day. For the most part it lies in ruins, but the
great triumphal arch still stands, but little changed since it was raised
by order of Trajan nearly nineteen centuries ago]
Thamugas had all the usual features of a Roman city and some which other
Roman cities had not. They must have been a scrupulously clean people,
the Thamugundi, for the remains of thirteen great public bath-houses
have already been uncovered, together with the complicated underground
arrangements for distributing heat to the various rooms, while even the
dwellings of persons of comparatively modest means were provided with
bathing facilities of astonishing luxury and completeness. The auditorium
of the Theater held nearly four thousand persons, which suggests that
Thamugas must have been a good “show town,” for the only playhouse in
America with such a seating capacity is the New York Hippodrome. And
it is an interesting commentary on modern progress that this frontier
town of nineteen hundred years ago was far better provided with sanitary
arrangements than are most of the cities of present-day Italy; in fact,
the “comfort-stations” behind the Forum might serve as models for
municipal planning commissions.
Beyond the Forum, astride the Decumanus Maximus, is the splendid
Arch of Trajan, the outstanding feature of the whole city and the
finest structure of its kind in Africa. In a state of almost perfect
preservation, it rears itself in solitary grandeur above the stones of
the ruined city. The arch is of pure white sandstone, its three openings
flanked by fluted columns of colored marble. Set on a little eminence, as
is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it can be seen from every quarter of the
city—a thing of surpassing majesty and beauty against that hot blue sky.
But the thing that appealed to me most in Timgad was an inscription cut
deep into a stone set between two columns of the Forum:
VENARI LAVARI
LUDERE RIDERE
OCCEST VIVERE
TO HUNT TO BATHE
TO PLAY TO LAUGH
THAT IS TO LIVE
The dour-minded have seized upon this pleasing little inscription to
point a moral, to illustrate the laxity, the unworthy ideals which
prevailed among the Romans during the empire’s decadence and decline.
But to me it bespeaks a joyousness, a candid love of harmless pleasures
which in this strenuous age, when mere wealth is the chief goal, is most
refreshing.
To most visitors, I suppose, Timgad is merely a picturesque and
interesting ruin, but to my way of thinking it appeals less to the eye
than to the imagination. It is a token of the dim and distant past. It
brings to us across a chasm of close on two thousand years a message
from a civilization not materially different from our own. It serves
to remind us that the power and wealth and progress of which we are so
prone to boast were to be found here on the edge of the desert when white
man’s America was yet unborn; that the mighty nation which stretches
from the Atlantic to the Pacific had a parallel in another nation which
stretched from the Sahara to Scotland. Yet Thamugas, be it remembered,
was never a Roman city of the first rank. Its architectural splendors
notwithstanding, it was but a border town. It stood on the very frontier
of an empire whose greatness is vividly illustrated by the fact that
Septimius Severus, during whose reign Thamugas attained its greatest
prosperity, was born in Africa and died at York.
Every traveler in India seeks so to time his visit to Agra that he may
view the Taj Mahal by moonlight. The same should be done in the case
of Timgad, and the visitor who does so will be richly repaid for his
trouble—provided, of course, he has any imagination in his soul. Nor will
he suffer any discomfort by doing so, for hard by the entrance to the
ruins is a modest but well-kept hotel where he can obtain a clean and
comfortable bed; or, if he prefers, he can dine there leisurely, spend
the evening amid the ruins, and then motor back to Batna, which is but an
hour away.
By day Timgad is only an interesting skeleton, but its bones become
reclothed with flesh under the magic of the moon. Along the Decumanus
marble columns rise again in stately rows; the flagstones of the
Cardo resound once more to the clatter of hoofs and the rumble of
chariot-wheels; the Forum becomes peopled with the white-clad forms of
merchants and orators and statesmen; fires glow on the altars of Jupiter
Capitolinus; from atrium and loggia float the sound of music and women’s
laughter; along the narrow byways flit barbarians from the outer desert
in paint and feathers; through the central opening of the great arch,
dimly outlined against the stars, tramps in measured cadence a column
of ghostly soldiery in the bronze helmets and leathern jerkins of the
Thirtieth Legion ... Thamugas lives once more!
* * * * *
There is nothing very remarkable about the first part of the journey
from Batna to Constantine, though the white road which smoked with dust
beneath the tires of our Cadillac was, I recalled, the same highway
which, twenty centuries before, the Roman legions trod. About half-way
to Constantine, however, near two salt lakes which were alive with
flamingos and other wild fowl, the road passes within sight of a large
and curious sepulchral monument called the Medrassen, which resembles
the so-called Tomb of the Christian Woman at Kolea, near Algiers, though
it is somewhat smaller and considerably older. The Medrassen, which is
sixty feet high, consists of a truncated cone encircled by sixty Doric
columns, the whole standing on a cylindrical base 196 feet in diameter.
Though its age, origin, and purpose were long matters for dispute among
archæologists, recent investigations have confirmed the theory that it
was the burial-place of one of the Numidian kings, perhaps of Masinissa,
in which case it must have been erected about a century and a half before
the Crucifixion.
Of all the cities I have seen in my peregrinations up and down the globe,
none can boast a setting so romantic, a situation so utterly amazing,
as Constantine. Nature must have intended it for a fortress, else she
would not have guarded it with walls a thousand feet in height nor
have encircled it on three sides with a moat which takes the form of a
stupendous chasm, leaving the fourth side connected with the surrounding
country only by a narrow isthmus. Constantine’s extraordinary aspect is
due to the erosion of the soft limestone rock on which it stands by the
River Rummel, which, roaring down from the heights of the Aurés, sweeps
around three sides of the city through a deep and narrow C-shaped gorge,
the sheer walls of which are at one point only fifteen feet apart. The
lofty plateau-peninsula thus created is about a thousand yards square and
so crowded with houses that many of them overhang the brink of the giddy
abyss, their hold on the rock being so precarious that it seems as though
a heavy wind would blow them off. But the grandeur of the gorge and the
immense height of its walls dwarf the works of man into insignificance;
the effect produced by this amazing pedestal of rock holding aloft a city
is so overwhelming in its majesty and impressiveness that one scarcely
notices the houses clinging to its brow or the river tumbling at its feet.
The Rummel, sweeping down from the sunny country-side to the south,
from the grain-fields and olive-groves, from the wooded hill-slopes
and the snowy peaks beyond, plunges suddenly into the shadows of the
huge vertical cliffs which gird the town to thunder beneath a series
of enormous natural arches or to lose itself for a time in gloomy
bat-infested caverns, only to emerge into the dazzling sunlight again
hundreds of yards further on, finally flinging itself recklessly over
a lofty precipice, amid a smother of spray and spume, into the lovely
valley below, down which it meanders, subdued and placid now, on its long
journey through the Djurjuras to the sea.
From the town it is difficult and dangerous to peer into the depths, for
the overhanging cliffs are exceedingly slippery and treacherous, as more
than one Arab has discovered at the cost of his life, though hasheesh
addicts will frequently descend these same precipices at the imminent
risk of breaking their necks in order to enjoy the forbidden drug without
interference from the police. On the other side, however, the gorge is
followed for its entire length of the Corniche Road, a superb example
of highway engineering, here consisting of a narrow shelf blasted from
the living rock, there supported above the giddy chasm on buttresses of
masonry, in places built around the rocky shoulders of the gorge, in
others tunneled through them.
Deep down in the gorge itself winds and climbs the _chemin des
touristes_, a narrow foot-path consisting for the most part of an
interminable series of steep stone staircases or creaking iron bridges
bolted to the face of the rock. Countless giddy steps, slippery with moss
and dampness, lead down, down, down to the dark waters of the Rummel,
which race madly between the grim, forbidding walls or swirl in seething
caldrons as though stirred by a titanic unseen spoon. Turning up-stream,
the way leads beneath four natural arches, none of them less than 400
feet in height (the celebrated Natural Bridge in Virginia is only 215);
through dim and awesome caverns, strongly reminiscent of the Mammoth
Cave of Kentucky, where the water forms black pools on the rocky floor
and great bats flap overhead; and so into the deepest part of the gorge,
where the walls rise sheer for a thousand feet on either hand. From here
the sky is but a narrow jagged strip of vivid blue, infinitely remote;
the girders of the great iron bridge which the French have thrown across
the chasm at a point called El Kantara seem no larger than gossamer
strands; of the city itself no sign is to be seen. Continuing to work our
way around the base of the tremendous rock on which the city perches,
we emerge at length, after two hours of arduous walking and climbing,
into a gradually expanding valley, its steep, stone-strewn slopes dotted
with stunted palms, aloes, and crimson poppies, and bathed in blinding
sunshine.
* * * * *
The history of Constantine is in large measure the history of all
North Africa. Originally called Cirta (the Phenician word for city),
it was in ancient times the capital of Numidia and the seat of the
Massylian kings, who first fought for Rome against Carthage and later for
themselves against Rome. It attained its greatest prosperity about two
centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, when it was able to
place in the field an army of thirty thousand men, though no traces are
now left of the splendid palace of Syphax, or of the stately buildings
erected by his successful rival, Masinissa—whose wife, Sophonisba, it
will be remembered, committed suicide shortly after her marriage rather
than fall into the hands of the Romans; by Masinissa’s son, Micipisa;
and by his grandson, Jugurtha, who led the Numidians in a revolt
against Rome, was defeated, was led in chains behind the chariot of his
conqueror, Marius, and died in “the bath of ice” in the subterranean
prison beneath the Capitol. Roman rule left a deeper impress on the
ancient city; but, barring the remains of the old bridge, dating from
the time of the Emperor Constantine, the five remaining arches of the
aqueduct built during the reign of Justinian, and numerous fragments of
sculptures and inscriptions, little is left of the flourishing colony,
founded by Julius Cæsar, which the Romans called Cirta Sittianorum.
Ruined in the wars which during the fourth century rent the Roman
Empire, Cirta was rebuilt by Constantine, who gave it his own name. The
religious struggles between the orthodox Christians and the Donatist
schismatics did no material harm to Constantine, though they tore Roman
Africa to shreds. The city escaped capture by the Vandals, but upon the
Mohammedan conquest it was looted of its ancient treasures by successive
Arab dynasties, such monuments of antiquity as escaped destruction at
their hands being finally swept away by “municipal improvements” under
the French régime. Through the long centuries when Arab rule lay
like a blight upon the land, the history of Constantine is enveloped
in darkness, rent, however, by occasional lightning-flashes of siege,
assault, capture, and recapture, for it is said to have been besieged
eighty times. Yet, despite its reputation for turbulence, it retained
sufficient prosperity to attract merchants from Genoa, Pisa, and Venice,
who were always willing to take a chance where there was a prospect of
gain.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain and Turkey, then at
the height of their power, drove out the decaying Arab dynasties which
had ruled in North Africa for five hundred years and divided between
themselves the empire of the Mediterranean. The Spaniards occupied the
African coast as far eastward as Oran, while Tunisia and virtually the
whole of Algeria were seized by three enterprising Turkish sea-rovers,
Arouj, Isaak, and Khizr (or Khair-ed-Din), better known as the Barbarossa
brothers, the nickname being given to the family because of their red
beards. Khair-ed-Din took Algiers and so firmly established himself in
middle and eastern Barbary that he was made beylerbey of Africa by the
Sultan Selim. Recognizing that he who would rule Algeria must hold the
rock-girt Constantine, Khair-ed-Din captured it and lost it and captured
it again. For upward of three hundred years the star-and-crescent
standard of the Turks flaunted above the heights of Constantine, which
became under their rule the seat of a bey, subordinate to the dey of
Algiers. The job of ruling Constantine was not a healthy one, however,
for during the first three decades of the nineteenth century twenty
of its beys died with their slippers on, by the sword, poison, or the
bowstring.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF THE PRECIPICES
Constantine is said to have withstood eighty sieges, and no wonder, for
it stands on a rocky plateau, cut off from the surrounding country on
all sides save one by the tremendous ravine in places a thousand feet in
depth, cut by the Rummel in the limestone rock]
In 1826 the ruling bey, Hadji Ahmed, led a revolt against the dey of
Algiers and proclaimed the independence of Constantine, but when the
French invaded the country ten years later he made common cause with his
former suzerain against the unbeliever. Upon the fall of Algiers Hadji
Ahmed fled to Constantine, raised an army of Kabyles, and defied the
French to dislodge him from his precipice-bordered stronghold. In 1836
Marshal Clausel advanced on the city with an army of eight thousand men.
He attempted to storm it under cover of night by way of the old Roman
bridge at El Kantara but was repulsed with great loss and fell back with
his beaten army to Bône. But in the following year a stronger force
under General Damrémont approached the town by the connecting western
isthmus. To the French summons to surrender Hadji Ahmed sent the curt
response, “He who would be master of Constantine must cut the throat
of the last of its defenders.” During the course of the siege which
followed, General Damrémont and his second in command General Perrégaux,
were killed side by side while directing the operations from an exposed
position, whereupon the command was assumed by Marshal Valée, who, in
spite of enormous losses, carried the town by storm. In their efforts to
evade capture, hundreds of Kabyles sought to lower themselves down the
cliffs by ropes, but the ropes broke and the fugitives met their deaths
on the rocks a thousand feet below. Hadji Ahmed evaded capture, however,
and for eleven years defied the French from his stronghold in the Aurés
Mountains, but he accepted the rule of France in 1848 and passed to the
Moslem paradise two years later. With the unfurling of the tricolor on
the heights of Constantine the turbulence and bloodshed which had marked
the city’s history all down the ages came to an end. Numidians, Romans,
Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, all tried to hold it and failed.
But French for three quarters of a century it has been, and French it
promises to remain.
* * * * *
Its towering heights crowded with palaces, temples, villas, and triumphal
arches, dazzlingly white under the blazing African sun, Constantine must
have presented a spectacle of surpassing beauty in Roman times. Yet
astonishingly few mementos of its former grandeur remain; for, during
the years immediately following the French occupation, the military
authorities took no interest in preserving the monuments of the city’s
colorful and hectic past, which were ruthlessly destroyed to make way
for municipal buildings in the ornate style of the Second Empire, for
huge and hideous barracks of red brick, for a whole system of streets
and parks and plazas, and for the railway. The greatest vandalism was
the destruction of the magnificent triumphal arch erected by one of the
Roman emperors; but temples, colonnades, and baths were all swept away
by the army engineers in their mania for “modern improvements.” Even
the splendid bridge, built during the reign of Constantine, which stood
intact until 1857, when two of its arches fell, instead of being restored
was battered down by artillery and replaced with a hideous structure of
iron. A curious commentary on our boasted modern civilization, is it not,
that seventy-five years of peace have destroyed wantonly what was spared
by two thousand years of warfare?
Of the public buildings, the most noteworthy is the palace built about
1830 by Ahmed Pasha, the last of the beys, which is one of the finest
examples of modern Moorish architecture in existence. In its construction
the Turks followed their customary method of tearing down other buildings
in order to obtain fine old tiles and beautiful carvings, and by looting
the Roman ruins which dot the country-side of their columns, capitals,
and marbles. Its exterior, as in the case of so many Oriental buildings,
is gloomy and forbidding, but within is a series of sun-drenched
courtyards, flagged with marble, filled with orange and lemon trees, and
surrounded by cloisters, their carven arches supported by fluted columns
in porphyry of many colors, where the bey and his concubines were wont
to pass the heat of the day. On the walls of the cloisters which border
the central patio, is a series of naïve and crudely executed paintings
of land battles and naval engagements, in which, of course, the Turks
are depicted as uniformly victorious. They are said to be the work of an
Italian shoemaker who, taken prisoner by the Barbary corsairs, painted
them as the price of his freedom. Mellowed by time, the general effect
of the pictures is not unpleasing, but it is to be hoped that upon his
release the cobbler-artist stuck to shoemaking.
The gardens of the palace—which is now the residence of the French
general who commands the garrison—more nearly approach those so glowingly
described in Eastern poems than any others I have ever seen; for their
lofty walls completely shut out the dust and turmoil of the city; the
only sound is the gentle splash of water in the marble fountains; the
sun, sifting through the foliage of the orange-trees, falls on the marble
pavement in patterns of lace-like delicacy; and the air is fragrant with
the scent of many flowers.
But when the shadows of night have settled down upon them I wonder if
they are not haunted by the wraiths of the wretched Christian women who
were torn from their homes and families by the corsairs and brought
here to gratify the lust of the bey; if white figures do not flit
distractedly through the cloisters or down the lanes of orange-trees; if
from yonder latticed balcony do not come strains of ghostly music made by
the flutes and fiddles of the poor blinded musicians whose eyes were torn
out by order of the tyrant in order that they might not look upon the
unveiled loveliness of the dancers for whom they played.
With what terrible memories are they filled, these enchanted gardens!
They have looked on countless scenes of misery and horror, resounded
to the shrieks of tortured men and outraged women, witnessed the dying
struggles of captives who perished by poison, strangulation, or the
knife. And all this, remember, was not in the dim and distant past but
within memory of men who are still alive. Some of the tales of those
days are incredible in their ferocious cruelty. Such is the story of the
beautiful white concubine, who, having displeased her lord and master,
was hurled by his orders over the cliffs of Sidi Rechad. Miraculously
saved from death when her garments caught on a jutting rock, she was
rescued with the utmost difficulty only to meet a still more hellish end
at the hands of the bey’s torturers.
The remaining sights of Constantine which would appeal to the casual
traveler are not numerous and can be visited quite easily in a single
day. From the northwestern angle of the plateau rises the _kasbah_, or
citadel, now used as barracks and military hospital; a massive structure
dating from Roman times and preserving in its more modern portions
numerous remains of other Roman edifices. The Great Mosque, or, as it is
called by the natives, the Djamaa-el-Kebir, occupies the site of what
was probably an ancient pantheon; like other Moslem places of worship in
Algeria it is inaccessible to unbelievers. Hard by the palace, facing on
a spacious square, stands the cathedral, formerly a mosque bearing the
romantic name of Suk-er-Rezel, Market of the Gazelles, but now known as
the Church of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. In the Mairie, a pretentious
and highly ornate building decorated in beautiful native marbles and
containing some interesting paintings of the military operations which
ended in the capture of the city by the French, is a small and mediocre
museum, its shelves and cases crowded with the usual collection of
coins, vases, inscriptions, and fragments of sculpture. It is well worth
visiting, however, for the sake of one real gem—a superbly executed
statuette of a winged victory, twenty-three inches in height, which was
discovered by excavators beneath the _kasbah_. Some hundreds of feet
beneath the Hôtel de Paris, accessible by numerous flights of steep and
slippery stone steps, is a very remarkable grotto, one of a series of
caves and passageways which honeycomb the rock on which the city stands,
and which, in the old days, were used by the inhabitants as storehouses
and places of concealment.
The Arab town, or such part of it as has not been swept away by the march
of progress, is tucked away behind a fringe of modern buildings, which
is, perhaps, as well, for it reeks with noisome smells and possesses no
architectural merits whatsoever. Its streets are steep and tortuous,
the upper floors of the houses being built out on supports which look
like inverted steps, thus bringing them so close together that their
owners can almost shake hands from their second-story windows across
the intervening thoroughfare. Here and there, set into the masonry, one
recognizes a column, a capital, or a slab of marble looted from some
Roman building, but, generally speaking, the _quartier indigène_ is
squalid and uninteresting.
The _souks_, though far smaller than those of Tunis and Algiers, are not
materially different from the bazaars of other North African cities,
the turbaned merchants sitting somnolently before little open-fronted
booths whose interiors are stacked high with merchandise; while artisans,
too poor to be lethargic, industriously ply their trades wherever they
can find elbow-room and space for a work-bench. It is a busy place, is
Constantine, the shopping center of the extensive province which bears
its name, and widely known for the manufacture of the richly decorated
saddlery affected by the Arab horsemen, for the embossing and engraving
of copper and brass utensils, and for the weaving of the _haiks_ and
burnouses which form such important articles of native dress, and of
other garments, called _gandourahs_, the best of which are made partly of
wool and partly of silk.
The best way to obtain an idea of Constantine life is to take a seat
before one of the numerous cafés which front upon the Place de la
Brèche—so named from the breach that was here made in the walls by the
French storming battalions in ’37—and over an _apéritif_ watch the
motley throng. Here East and West meet and mingle on equal terms, for
the population of the city is about equally divided between natives and
Europeans. French officers rub shoulders with Arab sheikhs; Greek and
Maltese traders haggle with Berber farmers and Kabyle mountaineers;
Catholic priests nod to Moslem mollahs and Jewish rabbis; fashionably
clad women from the Paris boulevards glance askance at veiled women from
the Turkish harems: white troopers of the _chasseurs d’Afrique_ joke with
tall black _tirailleurs_ from the banks of the Niger.
The Jews of Constantine, who number several thousand, are the finest
specimens of their race to be found in the entire East, showing a
breeding and refinement rarely found among their coreligionists of the
littoral. The Jewesses—many of whom, particularly the young girls, are
strikingly handsome, with fine features and clear olive skins—retain
their distinctive and highly picturesque costume, characterized by richly
embroidered gowns of plush or velvet, gaily colored shawls, and, as might
be expected, enormous quantities of heavy, ornate jewelry, which jingles
at every movement of the wearer like the pole-chains of a four-in-hand.
The older women wear a most curious and striking head-dress, consisting
of a gilt-spangled veil surmounted by a high, pointed cone of velvet, in
shape somewhat like a dunce’s cap, which, in the case of the rich, is
held in place by massive golden chains. The girls and the younger married
women, however, have modified this rather trying form of head-gear into
a jaunty sort of bonnet, usually of pink, pale-blue, or emerald-green
velvet, which they wear tilted rakishly above their raven locks in a
fashion which is both coquettish and becoming.
One of the finest views of Constantine is to be had from the terrace
of the Hôtel Transatlantique, a new and charmingly designed hostelry
standing amid lawns and rose-gardens on a plateau to the northeast of
the city, from which it is separated by the gorge of the Rummel. To sit
at déjeuner in a perfectly appointed dining-room, surrounded by all the
comforts and luxuries of the Ritz, looking out across the tremendous
abyss to the white city perched upon its mighty rock, is to enjoy an
experience which even the most blasé traveler does not soon forget. There
are other hotels, it is true, whose windows command views of entrancing
beauty—Bertolini’s in Naples, or the Villa Serbelloni above Bellagio,
come to mind—but whereas from them one is gazing upon scenery only, he
who peers across the gorge at Constantine is viewing history—he is
looking across the yawning gulf of Time.
* * * * *
A two hours’ run by motor to the north of Constantine, along the _route
nationale_, which leads to the coast and Philippeville, brings us to one
of the wonders of North Africa, the hot springs of Hammam Meskoutine.
They rise amid clouds of smoke and steam from a rocky plateau set in a
region of soft outlines, a land of wooded hills and leafy glens and lush
green pastures, suggestive of ancient Greece in its peaceful loveliness
and sylvan charm. The water, which has a temperature of more than 200
degrees Fahrenheit, comes bubbling up through the gray crust to fall into
numerous natural basins, in which it deposits thick layers of carbonate
of lime, so that they look like enormous wash-bowls of creamy white
porcelain. These pools the Arabs of the neighborhood use as open-air
kitchens, boiling their eggs in them and cooking their vegetables; while
strangers come from afar to drink and bathe in the healing waters, whose
medicinal properties have been celebrated since Roman times.
The numerous rivulets which drain the pools meander across the plateau
to unite in a stream of considerable volume which plunges over a series
of rocky terraces of many colors—ocher yellow, orange, russet, red,
pink, and green—into the sylvan valley two hundred feet below. The
water, as it falls, leaves on the terraces a thick coating of lime, very
much as in winter the cliffs at Niagara are coated with ice, the effect
thus produced being that of a petrified cascade of cream. The sediment
thrown up by the innumerable geysers at the foot of the cascade has
in the course of centuries risen and hardened into a great number of
gigantic, fantastically shaped limestone cones, or stalagmites, some of
them nearly forty feet in height, which rise like gray ghosts from the
plain. Some of the cones are quite bare, but on others sufficient earth
has accumulated to provide a root-hold for a great variety of shrubs,
grasses, and ferns. One group, distinguished by the size and the peculiar
shape of its stalagmites, holds such terrors for the superstitious Arabs
that they refuse to approach it after nightfall, holding that its waters
are accursed—whence the name Hamman Meskoutine, Accursed Baths.
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in short thick pants was breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced....
Back of the superstitions which cling to Hammam Meskoutine is a curious
legend. There once lived on this spot, so the natives tell you, a
young Arab sheikh named Ali, who was so jealous of his beautiful
sister, Ourida, that, rather than see her in the arms of another, he
determined to wed her himself. The elders of the tribe, scandalized by
the contemplated incest, made violent protest, whereupon Ali had them
beheaded before his tent. The wedding day arrived, guests came from
afar to attend the nuptials, the festivities were about to begin, when
suddenly the judgment of an outraged Allah descended upon the guilty
pair; fire burst from the earth, the streams became filled with boiling
water, a great cloud of smoke and steam descended upon the scene, and,
when it subsided, lo and behold, the whole wedding party had been turned
into stone! Perhaps, with the skepticism of the West, you may be led to
question the truth of the tale, whereupon the Arabs will point out to you
the two great cones, which, they will assure you soberly, are All and
Ourida petrified, while the smaller cones scattered over the plain are
the heads of the decapitated elders. With the proof of the story there
before your eyes, there is nothing more to be said.