THE GREAT WHITE CITY--ALGIERS
The first view of Algiers from the ship, as one enters the port, is a
dream of fairyland, "_Alger la Blanche!_" "_El Djesair la molle!_" If it
is in the morning, all is white and dazzling; if in the evening, a rosy
violet haze is over all, with the background of the "Petit Atlas" and
the Djurjura shutting off the littoral from the wide Sahara to the
south. At twilight a thousand twinkling lights break out, from the Kasba
on the height, from Mustapha, from the terrace boulevard which flanks
the port and from the ships in the harbour. A stronger ray flashes from
the headland lighthouse at Cap Matifou, and still others from war-ships
in the great open gulf. Algiers is truly fairy-like from any point of
view.
The Algiers of to-day is a great and populous city. It is the Icosium of
the Romans doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. Three towns in
juxtaposition stretch from Saint-Eugène on the west to Mustapha on the
east, while Algiers proper has for its heart the "Place du
Gouvernement" and the "Grande Mosquée."
The Place du Gouvernement is a vast square, a sort of modern forum,
flanked on one side by the Mosque of Djema-el-Djedid, the Grande
Mosquée, and on the others by shops, cafés, and hotels. From it stretch
the four great thoroughfares of the city, Bab-el-Oued, La Marine, La
Kasba, and Bab-Azoum. All the animation and the tumult of the city
centres here, and the passing throng of Arabs, soldiers, Jews,
Mauresques, and the French and foreign elements, forms an ethnological
exhibit as varied as it is unusual.
Algiers has a special atmosphere all its own. It lacks those little
graces which we identify as thoroughly French, in spite of the fact that
the city itself has become so largely Frenchified; and it lacks to a
very great extent--from almost every view-point--that Oriental flavour
which one finds at Cairo and Tunis. But for all that, Algiers is the
most wonderful exotic and conventional blend of things Arab and European
on top of earth.
The environs of Algiers are rugged and full of character, opening out
here and there into charming distant vistas, and wide panoramas of land
and sea and sky. All is large, immense, and yet as finely focussed as a
miniature. One must not, however, attempt to take in too great an angle
at a single glance, else the effect will be blurred, or perhaps lost
entirely.
The impulsive ones, who like the romance of Touraine and the daintiness
of valley of the Indre and the Cher, will find little to their liking
around Algiers. All is of a ruggedness, if not a savageness, that the
more highly developed civilization of the "Midi" has quite wiped out.
Here the ragged eucalyptus takes the place of the poplar, and the
_platane_ is more common than the aspen or the birch. The palm-trees are
everywhere, but just here they are of the cultivated or transplanted
variety and generally of the feather-duster species, decorative and
pleasing to look upon, but givers neither of dates nor of shade.
Algiers and its life, and that of its immediate environs, whether the
imported gaieties of Mustapha or the native fêtes of Bouzarea, and the
periodical functions for ever taking place in the city itself, give
about as lively an exposition of cosmopolitanism as one may observe
anywhere.
The historical monuments of Algiers are not as many as might at first be
supposed, for most of its memories of historic times deals with places
rather than things; and, indeed, this is true of the whole surrounding
country, from Tizi-Ouzou in Kabylie to Cherchell and Tipaza in the
Sahel, to the west.
The chief of Algiers' architectural charms--aside from that varied
collection of crazy walls and crooked streets which make up the Arab
town--are the Archbishop's Palace,--a fine old Arab house of a former
Dey of Algiers; the Peñon and the Amirauté, or what is left of it, on
the mole below the Palais Consulaire; its three principal mosques; the
cathedral,--the mosque of other days transformed; the Palais d'Eté of
the Governor-General, in part dating from the seventeenth century, and
the Kasba fortress, high up above the new and old town.
These are all guide-books sights, and the only comments herewith are a
few hazarded personal opinions.
High above, up through the streets of stairs, scarce the width of two
people side by side, and still up by whitewashed walls, great
iron-studded doors and grilled windows, sits the Kasba, the great
fortress defence of Algiers since the days when Turkish rule gave it the
most unenviable reputation in all the world. There is a continual
passing and repassing of all Algiers' population, apparently, from the
lower town to the height above, Europeans, Arabs, Moors and Jews. The
scene is ever changing and kaleidoscopic. A white wraith toddles along
before one, and, as you draw near, resolves into a swaddled Mauresque
who, half afraid, giggles at you through the opening of her veil and
suddenly disappears through some dim-lighted doorway, her place only to
be taken by another form as shapeless and mysterious.
This is the Arab town day or night; and but for the steep slope one
might readily lose himself in the maze of streets and alleys. As it is
all one has to do is to keep moving, not minding the gigglings and
gibings of the natives. One enters the _ville Arabe_ by any one of a
hundred streets or alleys. At its outmost height you are at the Kasba;
when you reach the bottom you are in the European town. To the right or
left you reach a sort of encircling boulevard which in turn brings you
to the same objectives. It is not so difficult as it looks, and one need
fear nothing, night or day, until he reaches the European town and
civilization, where thievery and murderings are nightly occurrences.
Here in the old Arab town one is in another world; here are the _maisons
à terrasse_, the mosques, the narrow _ruelles_ with their overhung
porches and only occasional glimpses of the starry sky overhead. Verily
it is as if one had left the electric-lighted "Place," the _cafés
chantants_, the tramway, and the shipping behind in another world,
though in reality a hundred steps, practically, in any direction will
bring them all within sight and sound and smell again.
After all, the quaint streets of the hillside town are Algiers' chief
sights, after the magnificent panorama of the bay and that wonderful
first view as seen from the ship as one enters the port.
Algiers' native quarter has been somewhat spoiled by the cutting through
of new streets, and the demolishing and refurbishing of old buildings;
but, nevertheless, there are little corners and stretches here and there
where the daily life of the native men and women goes on to-day as it
did when they lived under Turkish rule. Here are the shopkeepers of all
ranks: a butcher dozing behind his _moucharabia_, looking like the
portraits of Abd-el-Kader; a date-seller, the image of the Khedive of
Egypt; a baker with a Jewish cast of figure; and next door a
_café-maure_ with all the leisure population of the neighbourhood
stretched out on the _nattes_ and benches,
[Illustration: _A Cemetery Gate_]
smoking and talking and drinking. It is not fairyland, nor anything like
it; it is not even Oriental; but it is strange to Anglo-Saxon, or even
European, eyes that such things should be when we ourselves are
wallowing in an over-abundance of labour-saving, comfort-giving luxuries
which the Arab has never dreamed of. We chase our flies away with an
electric fan, whilst he idly waves a _chasse-mouches_ of antique
pattern, and does the thing quite as effectively, and with very little
more effort.
They are very grave, magnificently tranquil, these turbaned Turks and
Jews and Arabs, sitting majestic and silent before some café door, clad
in all the rainbow colours of civilization and savagery. Their peace of
mind is something we might all acquire with advantage, instead of
strenuously "going the pace" and trying to keep up with, or a little
ahead of, the next.
In spite of its strangeness, Algiers is not at all Oriental. The Arabs
of Algiers themselves lack almost totally the aspect of Orientalism. The
Turk and Jew have made the North African Arab what he is, and his
Orientalism is simply the Orientalism of the East blended and browned
with the subtropical rays of the African sun. It is undeniably
picturesque and exotic, but it is not the pure Eastern or Byzantine
variety which we at first think it. To realize this to the full, one has
only to make the comparison between Algiers and Cairo and Tunis.
It is the cosmopolitan blend of the new and the old, of the savage with
the civilized, that makes cosmopolitan Algiers what it is. This mixture
of many foreign elements of men and manners is greatly to be remarked,
and nowhere more than in Algiers' cafés, where French, English,
Americans, and Arabs meet in equality over their _café-cognac_, though
the Arab omits the cognac. The cosmopolitanism of Marseilles is lively
and varied, that of Port Saïd ragged and picturesque, but that of
Algiers is brilliantly complicated.
Algiers is the best kept, most highly improved, and, by far, the most
progressive city on the shores of the great Mediterranean Lake, and this
in spite of its contrast of the old and new civilizations. San Francisco
could take a lesson from Algiers in many things civic, and the
street-cleaners of London and Paris are notably behind their brothers of
this African metropolis.
The _marchand de cacaoettes_ is the king of Algiers' Place du
Gouvernement; or, if he isn't, the bootblack with his "_Cire,
m'ssieu!_" holds the title. Anyway, the peanut-seller is the aristocrat.
He sits in the sun with a white or green umbrella over his head, and is
content if he sells fifty centimes worth of peanuts a day. His possible
purchasers are many, but his clients are few, and at a sou for a
fair-sized bag full, he doesn't gather a fortune very quickly. Still he
is content, and that's the main thing. The bootblack is more difficult
to satisfy. He will want to give your shoes a "_glace de Paris_," even
if another of his compatriots has just given them a first coating of the
same thing. The bootblacks of Algiers are obstinate, importunate, and
exasperating.
From a document of 1621 one learns that Algiers had a population of
100,000 in 1553, a half a century later 150,000, and in 1621 200,000.
Then came the decadence; and, at the coming of the French in 1832,
Algiers was but a city of 34,000, Moors, Turks, Jews, Negroes, and Arabs
all counted.
They were divided as follows:
Mussulmans 17,858
Negroes 1,380
Jews 5,758
Floating population 9,888
------
34,884
By 1847 a European population had crowded in which brought the figures
up to 103,610 and gave Algiers a rank of fifth among French cities.
Algiers' busy port is picturesque and lively in every aspect, with the
hourly comings and goings of great steamships from all the length and
breadth of the Mediterranean, and from the seven seas as well. Over all
is the great boundless blue of a subtropical, cloudless sky; beneath the
restless lapping of the waves of the still bluer Mediterranean; and
everywhere the indescribable odour of _bitume_, of sea salt, and of
oranges. The background is the dazzling walls of the arcaded terraces of
the town, and the still higher turrets and towers of a modern and
ancient civilization. Still farther away are the rolling, olive-clad
hills and mountains of the Sahel. Sunrise or sunset on Algiers' port are
alike beautiful; one should miss neither.
The best-remembered historical and romantic figures of Algiers are Pedro
Navarro, who built the Peñon; the brothers Barberousse, Corsairs from
the Dardanelles, whom the Algerians called in to help them fight their
battles against Christianity; and Cervantes, the author of "Don
Quixote," who was imprisoned here, and who left an imperishable account
of the city of his captivity, ever useful to later historians.
Charles V and Louis XIV both had a go at Algiers, but it fell not to
their attack; and it was only with later times, incident upon an insult
offered the French ambassador by Hussein Dey, the Turkish ruler of the
El-Djezair of the ancients, that Algiers first capitulated to outside
attack.
Old Algiers was not impregnable, perhaps, but such weapons of warfare as
were used against the Turks were inefficient against its thick walls,
its outposts, and its fortified gates.
The historic Peñon underwent many a mediæval siege, but was finally
captured from its Spanish defender, De Vegas, and his little band of
twenty-five survivors, who were summarily put to death. Khair Ed Din
pulled down, in part, the fortifications and joined the remainder by a
jetty to the mainland, the same break-water which to-day shelters the
port on the north. A fragment of one of the original signal towers was
built up into the present lighthouse, and a system of defences, the most
formidable on the North African coast, was begun. The fortifications of
Algiers were barriers which separated the growing civilization of Europe
from the barbarian nether world, and they fell only with the coming of
the French in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Such is the
story of the entering wedge of progressive civilization in Algeria.
Algiers' veiled women are one of the city's chief and most curious
sights for the stranger within her walls. On Friday, the _jour des
morts_ of the Arab women, they go to the cemetery to weep or to make
gay, according as the mood is on. For the recluse Arab women it is more
apt to be a fête-day than a day of sorrow. They dress in their finest,
their newest, and their cleanest, and load themselves down with jangling
jewelry to the limit of their possessions. By twos and threes, seldom
alone, they go to make their devotions at the _Kouba_ of Didi-Mohammed
Abd-er-Rahman Bou Kobrin.
Poor prisoner women; six days a week they do not put foot outside their
doors; and on the seventh they take a day's outing _in the cemetery_.
"_Pas gai!_" says the Frenchwoman, and no wonder.
When the sun commences to lower, they quit the cemetery of Bou-Kobrin
and file in couples and trios and quartettes back to their homes in the
narrow shut-in streets which huddle about the grim walls of the hilltop
Kasba. They toddle and crawl and almost creep, as if they feared
entering their homes again; they have none of that proud, elastic,
jaunty step of the Kabyle women or of the Bedouins of the "Great Tents;"
they are only poor unfortunate "Arab women of the walls."
One after another these white-veiled pyramids of femininity disappear,
burrowing down through some low-hung doorway, until finally their weekly
outing is at an end and they are all encloistered until another seventh
day rolls around.
That these Mauresque women of Algiers are beautiful there is no doubt,
but their beauty is of the qualified kind. The chief attribute to the
beauty of the Mauresque woman is _kohl_ or _kohol_ or _koheul_, a
marvellous preparation of sulphur, of antimony of copper and of
alum--and perhaps other things too numerous to mention, all of which is
made into a paste and dotted about all over the face as beauty-spots.
Sometimes, too, they kalsomine the face with an enamel, like that on a
mediæval vase. Those of the social whirl elsewhere use a similar
concoction under another name which is sold by high-class chemists and
perfumers, but they don't let you know what it is made of, or at any
rate, don't take you into their confidence--neither the chemists nor the
women.
When a Mauresque dyes herself to the eyes with _kohl_, and dips her
finger-tips in henna until they are juicy red, then she thinks she is
about as ravishing as she can be in the eyes of God, her lover, and
herself. She has to do this, she thinks, to keep her favour with him,
because others might perchance put it on a little thicker and so
displace her charms, and his affection.
It is a belief among Mussulman women that Mahomet prescribed the usage
of _kohl_, but this idea is probably born of the desire. Certainly no
inspiration of God, nor the words of his prophet, ever suggested such a
thing.