Mediterranean, it remains to bestow at least a passing glance upon the
other column which guards the entrance. Over against us, as we stand on
Europa Point and look seaward, looms, some ten or a dozen miles away, the
Punta de Africa, the African Pillar of Hercules, the headland behind which
lies Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast. Of a
truth, one's first thought is that the great doorway of the inland sea has
monstrously unequal jambs. Except that the Punta de Africa is exactly
opposite the Rock of Gibraltar, and that it is the last eminence on the
southern side of the Straits--the point at which the African coast turns
suddenly due southward, and all is open sea--it would have been little
likely to have caught the eye of an explorer, or to have forced itself
upon the notice of the geographer. Such as it is, however, it must stand
for the African Pillar of Hercules, unless that demi-god is to content
himself with only one. It is not imposing to approach as we make our way
directly across the Straits from Gibraltar, or down and along them from
Algeciras towards it: a smooth, rounded hill, surmounted by a fort with
the Spanish flag floating above it, and walled on the sea side, so little
can its defenders trust to the very slight natural difficulties offered
even by its most difficult approach. Such is Ceuta in the distance, and it
is little, if at all, more impressive on a closer inspection. Its name is
said to come from Sebta, a corruption of Septem, and to have been given it
because of the seven hills on which it is built. Probably the seven hills
would be difficult to find and count, or with a more liberal
interpretation of the word, it might very likely be as easy to find
fourteen.
Ceuta, like almost every other town or citadel on this battle-ground of
Europe and Africa, has played its part in the secular struggle between
Christendom and Islam. It is more than four centuries and a half since it
was first wrested from the Moors by King John of Portugal, and in the
hands of that State it remained for another two hundred years, when in
1640, it was annexed to the Crown of Castille. King John's acquisition of
the place, however, was unfortunate for his family. He returned home,
leaving the princes of Portugal in command of his new possession; which,
after the repulse of an attempt on the part of the Moors to recapture it,
he proceeded to strengthen with new fortifications and an increased
garrison. Dying in 1428, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, who
undertook an expedition against Tangier, which turned out so unluckily
that the Portuguese had to buy their retreat from Africa by a promise to
restore Ceuta, the king's son, Don Ferdinand, being left in the hands of
the Moors as a hostage for its delivery. In spite of this, however, the
King and Council refused on their return home to carry out their
undertaking; and though preparations were made for recovering the
unfortunate hostage, the death of Edward prevented the project from being
carried out, and Prince Ferdinand remained a prisoner for several years.
Ceuta was never surrendered, and passing, as has been said, in the
seventeenth century from the possession of Portugal into that of Spain, it
now forms one of the four or five vantage-points held by Spain on the
coast of Africa and in its vicinity. Surveyed from the neighboring
heights, the citadel, with the town stretching away along the neck of land
at its foot, looks like anything but a powerful stronghold, and against
any less effete and decaying race than the Moors who surround it, it might
not possibly prove very easy to defend. Its garrison, however, is strong,
whatever its forts may be, and as a basis of military operations, it
proved to be of some value to Spain in her expedition against Morocco
thirty years ago. In times of peace it is used by the Spaniards as a
convict station.
The internal attractions of Ceuta to a visitor are not considerable. There
are Roman remains in the neighborhood of the citadel, and the walls of the
town, with the massive archways of its gates, are well worthy of remark.
Its main feature of interest, however, is, and always will be, that rock
of many names which it thrusts forth into the Straits, to form, with its
brother column across the water, the gateway between the Eastern and the
Western World. We have already looked upon it in the distance from El
Hacho, the signal tower on the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar. Abyla,
"the mountain of God," it was styled by the Phoenicians; Gibel Mo-osa, the
hill of Musa, was its name among the Moors; it is the Cabo de Bullones of
the Spaniard, and the Apes' Hill of the Englishman. It may be well seen,
though dwarfed a little by proximity, from its neighboring waters; a
curious sight, if only for its strange contrast with the European Pillar
that we have left behind. It is shaped like a miniature Peak of Teneriffe,
with a pointed apex sloping away on either side down high-shouldered
ridges towards its companion hills, and presenting a lined and furrowed
face to the sea. It is its situation, as has been noted already, and not
its conformation, which procured it its ancient name. But however earned,
its mythical title, with all the halo of poetry and romance that the
immortal myths of Hellas have shed around every spot which they have
reached, remains to it for ever. And here we take our farewell look of the
Pillars of Hercules to right and left, and borne onwards amidstream by the
rushing current of the Straits, we pass from the modern into the ancient
world.
II
ALGIERS
"A Pearl set in Emeralds"--Two distinct towns, one ancient, one
modern--The Great Mosque--A Mohammedan religious festival--Oriental
life in perfection--The road to Mustapha Supérieur--A true Moorish
villa described--Women praying to a sacred tree--Excessive rainfall.
"Algiers," says the Arab poet, with genuine Oriental love of precious
stones in literature, "is a pearl set in emeralds." And even in these
degenerate days of Frank supremacy in Islam, the old Moorish town still
gleams white in the sun against a deep background of green hillside, a
true pearl among emeralds. For it is a great mistake to imagine North
Africa, as untravelled folk suppose, a dry and desert country of arid
rocky mountains. The whole strip of laughing coast which has the Atlas for
its backbone may rank, on the contrary, as about the dampest, greenest,
and most luxuriant region of the Mediterranean system. The home of the
Barbary corsairs is a land of high mountains, deep glens, great gorges; a
land of vast pine forests and thick, verdant undergrowth. A thousand rills
tumble headlong down its rich ravines; a thousand rivers flow fast through
its fertile valleys. For wild flowers Algeria is probably unequaled in the
whole world; its general aspect in many ways recalls on a smaller scale
the less snow-clad parts of eastern Switzerland.
[Illustration]
When you approach the old pirate-nest from the sea, the first glimpse of
the African coast that greets your expectant eye is a long, serrated chain
of great sun-smitten mountains away inland and southward. As the steamer
nears the land, you begin, after a while, to distinguish the snowy ridge
of the glorious Djurjura, which is the Bernese Oberland of Algeria, a huge
block of rearing peaks, their summits thick-covered by the virgin snow
that feeds in spring a score of leaping torrents. By-and-by, with still
nearer approach, a wide bay discloses itself, and a little range of green
hills in the foreground detaches itself by degrees from the darker mass of
the Atlas looming large in the distance behind. This little range is the
Sahel, an outlier just separated from the main chain in the rear by the
once marshy plain of the Metidja, now converted by drainage and scientific
agriculture into the most fertile lowland region of all North Africa.
Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon
the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first
sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid
block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort
stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white
steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The
city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English
down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit
with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up
steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt
acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in style, square, flat-roofed boxes;
all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their
pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the
aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible
to insert a pin's head between them. From within, to him that enters,
sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on
close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of
streets or rows on the general _coup d'oeil_ from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct
towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again
these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely
separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by
its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in
picturesqueness. A spacious port has been constructed, with massive mole
and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent
line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do
honor to Marseilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length
and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where
ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers.
Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways _en plein
Orient_. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than
that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs,
Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; muffled women in
loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered
feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped
straight out of the "Arabian Nights," chaffer for centimes at the
shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous;
all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting
to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on
the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every
instance the old mosques and palaces. The principal square, a broad place
lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white
round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie. Hard by
stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half
Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within
doors its old Mohammedan _mimbar_ and many curious remains of quaint
Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of
severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Græco-Roman antiques is oddly
installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The
Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the
finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious
pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the
companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure
white marble are unsurpassed in the Moslem world for their quaintness,
their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than
anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so
grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout
by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars.
Decoration there is none; the mosque depends for effect entirely on its
architectural features and its noble proportions. But the long perspective
of these endless aisles, opening out to right and left perpetually as you
proceed, strikes the imagination of the beholder with a solemn sense of
vastness and mystery. As you pick your way, shoeless, among the loose mats
on the floor, through those empty long corridors, between those
buttress-like pillars, the soul shrinks within you, awe-struck. The very
absence of images or shrines, the simplicity and severity, gives one the
true Semitic religious thrill. No gauds or gewgaws here. You feel at once
you are in the unseen presence of the Infinite and the Incomprehensible.
The very first time I went into the Great Mosque happened, by good luck,
to be the day of a Mohammedan religious festival. Rows and rows of Arabs
in white robes filled up the interspaces of the columns, and rose and fell
with one accord at certain points of the service. From the dim depths by
the niche that looks towards Mecca a voice of some unseen ministrant
droned slowly forth loud Arabic prayers or long verses from the Koran. At
some invisible signal, now and again, the vast throng of worshippers, all
ranged in straight lines at even distances between the endless pillars,
prostrated themselves automatically on their faces before Allah, and
wailed aloud as if in conscious confession of their own utter
unworthiness. The effect was extraordinary, electrical, contagious. No
religious service I have ever seen elsewhere seemed to me to possess such
a profundity of earnest humiliation, as of man before the actual presence
of his Maker. It appeared to one like a chapter of Nehemiah come true
again in our epoch. We few intrusive Westerns, standing awe-struck by the
door, slunk away, all abashed, from this scene of deep abasement. We had
no right to thrust ourselves upon the devotions of these intense
Orientals. We felt ourselves out of place. We had put off our shoes, for
the place we stood upon was holy ground. But we slunk back to the porch,
and put them on again in silence. Outside, we emerged upon the nineteenth
century and the world. Yet even so, we had walked some way down the Place
de la Régence, among the chattering negro pedlers, before one of us dared
to exchange a single word with the other.
If the new town of Algiers is interesting, however, the old town is
unique, indescribable, incomprehensible. No map could reproduce it; no
clue could unravel it. It climbs and clambers by tortuous lanes and steep
staircases up the sheer side of a high hill to the old fortress of the
Deys that crowns the summit. Not one gleam of sunshine ever penetrates
down those narrow slits between the houses, where two people can just pass
abreast, brushing their elbows against the walls, and treading with their
feet in the poached filth of the gutter. The dirt that chokes the sides is
to the dirt of Italy as the dirt of Italy is to the dirt of Whitechapel.
And yet so quaint, so picturesque, so interesting is it all, that even
delicate ladies, with the fear of typhoid fever for ever before their
eyes, cannot refuse themselves the tremulous joy of visiting it and
exploring it over and over again; nay, more, of standing to bargain for
old brass-work or Algerian embroidery with keen Arab shopkeepers in its
sunless labyrinths. Except the Mooskee at Cairo, indeed, I know no place
yet left where you can see Oriental life in perfection as well as the old
town of Algiers. For are there not tramways nowadays even in the streets
of Damascus? Has not a railway station penetrated the charmed heart of
Stamboul? The Frank has done his worst for the lower town of his own
building, but the upper town still remains as picturesque, as mysterious,
and as insanitary as ever. No Pasteur could clean out those Augean
stables.
In those malodorous little alleys, where every prospect pleases and every
scent is vile, nobody really walks; veiled figures glide softly as if to
inaudible music; ladies, muffled up to their eyes, use those solitary
features with great effect upon the casual passer-by; old Moors, in
stately robes, emerge with stealthy tread from half-unseen doorways; boys
clad in a single shirt sit and play pitch-and-toss for pence on dark
steps. Everything reeks impartially of dirt and of mystery. All is gloom
and shade. You could believe anything on earth of that darkling old town.
There all Oriental fancies might easily come true, all fables might
revive, all dead history might repeat itself.
These two incongruous worlds, the ancient and the modern town, form the
two great divisions of Algiers as the latter-day tourist from our cold
North knows it. The one is antique, lazy, sleepy, unprogressive; the other
is bustling, new-world, busy, noisy, commercial. But there is yet a third
Algiers that lies well without the wall, the Algiers of the stranger and
of the winter resident. Hither Mr. Cook conducts his eager neophytes;
hither the Swiss innkeeper summons his cosmopolitan guests. It reaches its
culminating point about three miles from the town, on the heights of
Mustapha Supérieur, where charming villas spread thick over the sunlit
hills, and where the Western visitor can enjoy the North African air
without any unpleasant addition of fine old crusted Moorish perfumes.
The road to Mustapha Supérieur lies through the Bab-Azzoun gate, and
passes first along a wide street thronged with Arabs and Kabyles from the
country and the mountains. This is the great market road of Algiers, the
main artery of supplies, a broad thoroughfare lined with _fondouks_ or
caravanserais, where the weary camel from the desert deposits his bales of
dates, and where black faces of Saharan negroes smile out upon the curious
stranger from dense draping folds of some dirty burnouse. The cafés are
filled with every variety of Moslem, Jew, Turk, and infidel. Nowhere else
will you see to better advantage the wonderful variety of races and
costumes that distinguishes Algiers above most other cosmopolitan
Mediterranean cities. The dark M'zabite from the oases, arrayed like
Joseph in a coat of many colors, stands chatting at his own door with the
pale-faced melancholy Berber of the Aurès mountains. The fat and dusky
Moor, over-fed on kous-kous, jostles cheek by jowl with the fair Jewess in
her Paisley shawl and quaint native head-gear. Mahonnais Spaniards from
the Balearic Isles, girt round their waists with red scarves, talk gaily
to French missionary priests in violet bands and black cassocks. Old Arabs
on white donkeys amble with grave dignity down the center of the broad
street, where chasseurs in uniform and spahis in crimson cloaks keep them
company on fiery steeds from the Government stud at Blidah. All is noise
and bustle, hurry, scurry, and worry, the ant-hill life of an English
bazaar grotesquely superimposed on the movement and stir of a great
European city.
You pass through the gates of the old Moorish town and find yourself at
once in a modern but still busy suburb. Then on a sudden the road begins
to mount the steep Mustapha slope by sharp zigzags and bold gradients. In
native Algerian days, before Allah in his wisdom mysteriously permitted
the abhorred infidel to bear sway in the Emerald City over the Faithful of
Islam, a single narrow mule-path ascended from the town wall to the breezy
heights of Mustapha. It still exists, though deserted, that old breakneck
Mussulman road a deep cutting through soft stone, not unlike a Devonshire
lane, all moss-grown and leafy, a favorite haunt of the naturalist and the
trap-door spider. But the French engineers, most famous of road-makers,
knew a more excellent way. Shortly after the conquest they carved a zigzag
carriage-drive of splendid dimensions up that steep hill-front, and paved
it well with macadam of most orthodox solidity. At the top, in proof of
their triumph over nature and the Moslem, they raised a tiny commemorative
monument, the Colonne Voirol, after their commander's name, now the
Clapham Junction of all short excursions among the green dells of the
Sahel.
The Mustapha road, on its journey uphill, passes many exquisite villas of
the old Moorish corsairs. The most conspicuous is that which now forms the
Governor-General's Summer Palace, a gleaming white marble pile of rather
meretricious and over-ornate exterior, but all glorious within, to those
who know the secret of decorative art, with its magnificent heirloom of
antique tiled dados. Many of the other ancient villas, however, and
notably the one occupied by Lady Mary Smith-Barry, are much more really
beautiful, even if less externally pretentious, than the Summer Palace.
One in particular, near the last great bend of the road, draped from the
ground to the flat roof with a perfect cataract of bloom by a crimson
bougainvillea, may rank among the most picturesque and charming homes in
the French dominions.
[Illustration]
It is at Mustapha, or along the El Biar road, that the English colony of
residents or winter visitors almost entirely congregates. Nothing can be
more charming than this delicious quarter, a wilderness of villas, with
its gleaming white Moorish houses half lost in rich gardens of orange,
palm, and cypress trees. How infinitely lovelier these Eastern homes than
the fantastic extravagances of the Californie at Cannes, or the sham
antiques on the Mont Boron! The native North African style of architecture
answers exactly to the country in whose midst it was developed. In our
cold northern climes those open airy arcades would look chilly and out of
place, just as our castles and cottages would look dingy and incongruous
among the sunny nooks of the Atlas. But here, on the basking red African
soil, the milk-white Moorish palace with its sweeping Saracenic arches,
its tiny round domes, its flat, terraced roofs, and its deep perspective
of shady windows, seems to fit in with land and climate as if each were
made for the other. Life becomes absolutely fairy-like in these charming
old homes. Each seems for the moment while you are in it just a dream in
pure marble.
I am aware that to describe a true Moorish villa is like describing the
flavor of a strawberry; the one must be tasted, the other seen. But still,
as the difficulty of a task gives zest to the attempt at surmounting it,
I will try my hand at a dangerous word-picture. Most of the Mustapha
houses have an outer entrance-court, to which you obtain admission from
the road by a plain, and often rather heavy, archway. But, once you have
reached the first atrium, or uncovered central court, you have no reason
to complain of heaviness or want of decoration. The court-yard is
generally paved with parti-colored marble, and contains in its center a
Pompeian-looking fountain, whose cool water bubbles over into a shallow
tank beneath it. Here reeds and tall arums lift their stately green
foliage, and bright pond-blossoms rear on high their crimson heads of
bloom. Round the quadrangle runs a covered arcade (one might almost say a
cloister) of horse-shoe arches, supported by marble columns, sometimes
Græco-Roman antiques, sometimes a little later in date, but admirably
imitated from the originals. This outer court is often the most charming
feature of the whole house. Here, on sultry days, the ladies of the family
sit with their books or their fancy-work; here the lord of the estate
smokes his afternoon cigar; here the children play in the shade during the
hottest African noon-day. It is the place for the siesta, for the
afternoon tea, for the lounge in the cool of the evening, for the joyous
sense of the delight of mere living.