Along all its hundreds of miles, the Maghreb is determined by Mount
Atlas, or rather, the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge between the
Sahara and the sea. It is a bulk of mountains so formed that one may
compare it to a city wall with a broad top for fighting men to move on
and a parapet along both the inner and the outer edges. The outer
parapet, which is called “The Little Atlas,” runs along the
Mediterranean shore: the inner parapet, which is called “The Great
Atlas,” runs along the desert, and is usually the higher of the two
chains. These two chains do not run quite parallel, but converge towards
Tunis and spread apart towards the Atlantic; the tableland between them,
which is called “The High Plateaux,” and is in some places three
thousand feet above the sea, broadens therefore from less than a hundred
to well over two hundred miles across; but at either end it somewhat
changes its character, for at the Tunis end it is too narrow to be a
true plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains where the Greater and the
Lesser Atlas meet, while in Morocco it becomes too broad to maintain its
character and is diversified by continual subsidiary ranges. But in
between these two extremities it is a true tableland with isolated
summits rising here and there from it, and at their feet shallow and
brackish lakes called _Shotts_, round which are rims of marshy reeds
and, in summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there is no drainage away
from the tableland to the desert or to the sea, save where, here and
there, a torrent (such as the Chélif or the Rummel) digs itself an
erratic gorge and escapes through the coast range to the Mediterranean.
These exceptions are very rare and they do not disturb the general plan
of the country, which is everywhere constructed of the Atlas running in
two ranges that hold up between them the plateau with its salt lakes and
isolated groups of hills.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Tableland]
If, therefore, one were to take a section anywhere from north to south,
from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would get some such figure as
this:
[Illustration]
where the perpendicular shading on the left is the Mediterranean slope
and drainage, the horizontal shading on the right, the desert slope, and
where the Little Atlas is marked =A=, the Great Atlas =B= (falling down
to =E=, the dunes of the Sahara), where at =C= is one of the isolated
hills of the tableland, and at =D= and =D= a couple of those salt lakes
which add so strongly to the desolation of these upland plains.
The High Plateaux, which, empty as they are, make up the body of the
Maghreb, are not only a reality to the geographer: their peculiar
character is also apparent to every traveller who crosses them. The rise
up to them from the Mediterranean, though confused, is observable; the
fall from them to the Sahara is violent, and, through its central part,
dramatic. It is not unusual for a man who has traversed this tableland
upon more than one voyage to recall clefts in the southern and the
northern ranges so placed that they were like windows through which one
could look down upon the lower world.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
These clefts resemble each other strangely. From the one a man sees the
steps of limestone, the desert cliffs, touched rarely and more rarely by
the green of palm-trees and ending southward, glaring and arid and
sharp, against the extremity of the horizon. From the other, he sees the
woods of the coast, dense and well watered, mixing with the rocks about
him, and right beyond the valley the pleasant line of the sea. But each
of the views he carries in his mind has this in common, that he has seen
it from a height, and looked down suddenly from a mountain tableland
upon a flat below: to the north upon a level of waves over which went
the shadows of clouds: to the south upon a level of sand stretching
under a small and awful sun.
If a man were to live in this land, the High Plateaux would fill up the
most of his mind, as they take up by far the most of the country itself
in space. One is compelled to move when one is upon them. There is no
resting-place: only, along the far edge, before the fall into the desert
begins, the ruins of the Roman frontier towns. These wastes hold the
soul of Numidia. The horses of Barbary are native to them. It is said
that these horses sicken on the seaboard—certainly their race dies on
the northern shores of the Mediterranean unless it is crossed with one
of our coarser breeds—for they were born to breathe this dry air and to
make rapid prints with their unshod hoofs upon the powder of the plains
and the salt.
The tableland, then, is the heart of the Maghreb, yet it has no name,
not even among the wandering Arabs.
These come up on to it in spring from the hot desert below, driving slow
files of proud and foolish camels. They pasture flocks in among the
brushwood and by the rare streams; then when the autumn descends and the
first cold appals them, before the winter scurries across these flats,
they turn back and patiently go down the mountain roads into the Sahara,
leaving the Berbers to themselves again. For four months the plains
above are swept with snow, and a traveller in that season, feeling the
sharp and frozen dust in his face before the gale, and seeing far off
bare cones of standing hills above salt marshes, thinks himself rather
in Idaho or Nevada than here in Africa which Europe thinks so warm.
[Sidenote: The Tell]
That belt of coast upon which Atlas descends is of a nature quite
distinct from the High Plateaux. The Americans can match such sudden
contrasts: we in Europe have nothing of the kind. You come down from
salt water to fresh, from a cold (or from a burning) to a genial air,
and you enter as you sink from the tableland a territory of great
luxuriance. It is called the Tell, and to seize its character it is
necessary to modify and to develop somewhat one’s idea of the mountain
chains. For though the Greater and the Lesser Atlas run in those main
lines which appear in the little sketch upon page 58, yet in detail each
range, and especially the range along the sea, is broken and complex,
and is made up of a number of separate folds, sometimes parallel and
sometimes overlapping, thus:
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Mountains]
Moreover, the heights are irregular. There are groups of high peaks and
ridges against the desert to the east in the Aurès Mountains, and to the
west in those of Morocco, while along the seaboard great bulges of
mountain rise in places from the Lower Atlas to a height rivalling the
inland range. For instance, where an =X= is marked upon the sketch map,
there is an almost isolated mass known as the Djurdjura, very high,
almost as high as Aurès, which stands up 150 miles behind it above the
Sahara.
[Sidenote: The Berber Strongholds]
It was in these groups of higher and more rugged hills along the
seaboard or the desert that the native languages and perhaps the purity
of the native race took refuge both during the Roman occupation and
during the Arabian conquest. It is in these ravines that the ancient
tongue is spoken to this day. It is there that the Berber type, though
it is still everywhere what we ourselves are, has maintained itself
least mixed with the foreigner: it is even, perhaps, allied in these
hills with a people older than we or the Berber can be.
[Sidenote: The Bays of the Tell]
The fact that the Lesser Atlas thus faces close upon the sea and falls
upon it abruptly, determines an abundant rainfall upon the Tell, and
makes it fruitful. The fact that the Lesser Atlas consists of folds
overlapping each other and running from north-east to south-west has
furnished a multitude of bays, each lying between two spurs of the
hills. Every such bay has a harbour more or less important, and that
harbour is nearly always upon the westerly side; for the prevalent
strong wind, which is from the east, drives a current with it, and this
current scours out the bays, clearing up and deepening the westerly
shore, but leaving the eastern shallow. Thus Bone, Philippeville,
Algiers, Calle, and Utica itself, which was the oldest of all, are on
the westerly sides of such bays. Into each bay a mountain torrent falls,
or sometimes a larger stream, and the long process of erosion has
scoured all the coast into a network of valleys, so that, unless one has
a clear view of the scheme in one’s mind, one is bewildered and does not
always know at what point in the upward journey one passes from the Tell
to the High Plateaux, distinct as these regions are.
[Sidenote: The Physical Constitution Of the Tell]
Thus a simple plan of a portion of the Tell is as given on the following
page, where the line of crosses indicates the watershed between the
Mediterranean and the inland drainage of the High Plateaux.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The New Vineyard]
But if one were to mark on this map a stippled surface for contours
under five hundred feet, a hatched one for the same between five and
fifteen hundred, a black one up to two thousand five hundred, and above
that leave the heights in white with little triangles for the summits,
one would get some such complicated scheme as is shown on the opposite
page, where it will be seen that a high mountain (at =C=) overlooks the
shore far from the watershed, and the scheme of valleys is complex and
might seem a labyrinth to a man on foot without a map. At =A= and =B=
are the ports of each bay, and near to each at the mouth of either river
a large plain such as is characteristic of the heads of all these
inlets. Their earth is black, deep, and fertile: inviting the plough.
Such fields fed Utica, Icosium and Hippo Regius and Cæsarea. They
remained wild and abandoned for over a thousand years, but to-day you
may see miles of vineyards planted in rows that run converging to the
limits of the plain, where, until this last generation, no one had dug
or pruned or gathered or pressed since the Latin language was forgotten
in these lands. Indeed, it would be possible for a fantastic man to see
in this replanting of the vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning;
for everywhere the people of the desert have had a fear of wine, and
their powerful legends have affected us also in the north for a time.
But the vine is in Africa again. It will not soon be uprooted.
[Illustration]
Such plains, then, their rivers and their adjacent seaport towns, make
up the Tell, in which the Romans nourished many millions and in which
the most part of the reconstituted province will at last build its
homes.
By such a bay and entering such a harbour, whoever comes to Africa
reaches land.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Bay of Hippo]
It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood,
that the best introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of
conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping small and
large, and fenced round with houses for very many miles. A far
promontory on the eastern side faces the western mountain, and half
protects the harbour from summer gales. Below the mountain, the plain
belonging to this bay stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here
and there with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines and
corn. In the midst of this great flat stands up a little isolated hill,
a sort of acropolis, and from its summit, from a window of his monastery
there, St. Augustine, looking at that sea, wrote _Ubi magnitudo, ibi
veritas_.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Hippo]
The town is utterly gone. There are those who argue that this or that
was not done as history relates, because of this or that no vestige
remains; and if tradition tells them that Rome built here or there, they
deny it, because they cannot find walls, however much they dig (within
the funds their patrons allow them). These men are common in the
universities of Europe. They are paid to be common. They should see
Hippo.
Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the host of Vandals,
slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat of the most famous
bishopric of its day, and within its walls, while the siege still
endured, St. Augustine died. It counted more than Palermo or Genoa:
almost as much as Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not
a few bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall.
There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once disturbed a few
fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better show at
Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky company officer shivered
out his time of service with perhaps a hundred men.
[Sidenote: Calama]
In the heart of the Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet
right in the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather, stands a
little town which was called Calama in the Roman time and is now, since
the Arabs, called Guelma.
It is the centre of that belt of hills. A broad valley, one of the
hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the Mediterranean
slope, lies before the platform upon which the fortress rose. A muddy
river nourishes it, and all the plain is covered with the new farms and
vineyards—beyond them the summits and the shoulders that make a tumbled
landscape everywhere along the northern shores of Africa guard the place
whichever way one turns. From the end of every street one sees a
mountain.
If a man had but one day in which to judge the nature of the province,
he could not do better than come to this town upon some winter evening
when it was already dark, and wake next morning to see the hurrying sky
and large grey hills lifting up into that sky all around and catching
the riot of its clouds. It is high and cold: there is a spread of
pasture in its fields and a sense of Europe in the air. No device in the
architecture indicates an excessive heat in summer and even the trees
are those of Italy or of Provence. Its site is a survival from the good
time when the Empire packed this soil with the cities of which so great
a number have disappeared: it is also a promise of what the near future
may produce, a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in
the refounding of such municipalities that the tradition of Europe will
work upon Africa and not in barren adventure southward towards a sky
which is unendurable to our race and under which we can never build and
can hardly govern.
[Illustration]
Guelma is typical in every way. It was Berber before the Romans came,
but nothing remains of its founders or of whatever punic influence its
first centuries may have felt. Of Rome so much endures that the heavy
walls and the arches are, as it were, the framework of the place.
[Sidenote: The Permanence of Rome]
In the citadel a great fragment larger than anything else in the town
runs right across the soldiers’ quarters, pierced with the solid arches
that once supported the palace of Calama. Only the woodwork has
disappeared. The stones which supported the flooring still stand out
unbroken, and the whole wall, though it is not very high—hardly higher
than the big barracks around it—remains in the mind, as though it had a
right to occupy one’s memory of the Kasbah by a sort of majesty which
nothing that has been built since its time has inherited. Here, as
throughout the Empire, the impression of Rome is as indefinable as it is
profound, but one can connect some part of it at least with the
magnitude of the stones and the ponderous simplicity of their courses,
with the strength that the half-circle and the straight line convey, and
with the double evidence of extreme antiquity and extreme endurance; for
there is something awful in the sight of so many centuries visibly
stamped upon the stone, and able to evoke every effect of age but not to
compel decay.
This nameless character which is the mark of the Empire, and carries, as
it were, a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in what has fallen
as in what stands. A few bricks built at random into a mud wall bear the
sign of Rome and proclaim her title: a little bronze unearthed at random
in the rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman Victory: a few flag-stones
lying broken upon a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman Road: nor
do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an irrecoverable good,
but rather its continued victory. To see so many witnesses small and
great is not to remember a past or a lost excellence, but to become part
of it and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is a surety
also for the future to see such things.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Peasant’s Wall]
There is a field where this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh
the traveller with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands
across which the wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a
peasant of the place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his
land with Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like
all his peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or
mould brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only
material he could use was the work of the old masters who had trained
his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the
vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest that he
laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power still ruled
him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea from Europe to make
good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It is with a lively
appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing or has perished.
The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs slope here and there.
But the edges of those stones, which are twenty times older than his
effort, remain. They will fall again and lie where he found them; but
they and the power that cut them are alike imperishable.
[Sidenote: The Landscape of Antiquity]
It has been said that the men of antiquity had no regard for landscape,
and that those principal poems upon which all letters repose betray an
indifference to horizons and to distant views. The objection is
ill-found, for even the poems let show through their admirable restraint
the same passion which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills
of home: they speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an
Homeric man desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising
from his own fields and after that to die. But much stronger than
anything their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality
is the emplacement of their buildings.
[Sidenote: The Theatre of Calama]
Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the spirit which built a
certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in
a place now deserted, the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of
land, and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them,
and that the shrine becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of
a composition. Of this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all
southern Europe is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high
town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.
[Illustration]
The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city
breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people and
the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for their
plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out like a quarry from
the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the
half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell
stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those
summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that were
presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the senses. We have
no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our drama, nor even with
our patriotism—such as the modern world has made it. The last centuries
of the Empire had all these things in common: great verse inherited from
an older time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one religion, and the
open sky. Therefore its memory has outlasted all intervening time, and
it itself the Empire, (though this truth is as yet but half-received,)
has re-arisen.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Greatness of The First Four Centuries]
There is one great note in the story of our race which the least learned
man can at once appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking
everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books
perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research
develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.
Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the completed Roman
Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows that the modern world
has flowed outwards from that reservoir by various channels. Everybody
knows that this formation of a United Europe was hardly completed in the
first century, that it was at last conscious of disintegration in the
fifth. The first four centuries are therefore present as dates in
everybody’s mind, yet the significance of the dates is forgotten.
Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman decline,
and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in some few
novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of the time and to
see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the
stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was coming, the men of the
time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own
self-estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality,
and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a
town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand,
especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly an industry
or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an accumulation of
experience grown to create upon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar
contribution to the State; and far the larger part of the stuff of our
own lives was created, or was preserved, by that period of unity.
That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we alone have
roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we alone in our
art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all that we do by
ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of change and can
develop from within—in a word, that we alone are Christians we derive
from that time.
Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed on,
by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions of human
dignity and of right. Even in the details our structure of society
descends from that source: we govern, or attempt to govern, by
representation because the monastic institutions of the end of the
Empire were under a necessity of adopting that device: we associate the
horse with arms and with nobility because the last of the Romans did so.
If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look
around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the first
four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion
of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the
Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in
the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled
by the vigour of the western mind between Augustus and Julian when he
finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State
what is even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a
mosaic of separate provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and
uniformity the orders of those emperors who seem to us the lessening
despots of a failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates,
to be obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which
Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the Rome
of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets, but
something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with
one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading ocean.
Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the sound of
three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do.