of the woods. Here Islam worked itself out fully: its ignorance of
consequence, its absolute and insufficient assertion, its lack of
harmony with the process and modulation of time, its Arabian origin, are
all apparent in the destruction of trees. If the rainfall is as abundant
as ever, it is not held, for the roots of trees are lacking, and if it
be true that trees in summer bring rain of themselves by their leaves,
then that benefit is also gone. There are many deep channels, called
_secchias_, traversing the soft dust of the uplands, with no trace of
bridges where the Roman roads cross them: they are new. They are carved
by the sudden spates that follow the cloudbursts in the hills. Here,
perhaps, in the Roman time were regular and even streams, and perhaps,
upon their banks, where now are stretches of ugly earth quite bare, the
legionaries saw meadows. At any rate, the trees have gone.
Up in the higher hills, in Aurès and the Djurdjura, upon the flanks of
the mountains where the Berbers remain unconquered, and where the
melting of the snows give a copious moisture, forests still remain. They
are commonly of great cedars as dark as the pine woods of the Vosges or
the noble chesnut groves by which the Alps lead a man down into Italy.
But these forests are rare and isolated as the aboriginal languages and
tribes which haunt them. You may camp under the deep boughs within a
march of Batna and then go northward and eastward for days and days of
walking before you come again to the woods and their scent and their
good floor of needles in the heights from which you see again the
welcome of the Mediterranean.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Story of the Determinist]
This lack of trees the French very laboriously attempt to correct. Their
chief obstacle is the nature of that religion which is also the hard
barrier raised against every other European thing which may attempt to
influence Africa to-day.
There was a new grove planted some ten years since in a chosen place. It
was surrounded with a wall, and the little trees were chosen delicately
and bought at a great price, and planted by men particularly skilled.
Also, there was an edict posted up in those wilds (it was within fifty
miles of the desert, just on the hither side of Atlas) saying that a
grove had been planted in such and such a place and that no one was to
hurt the trees, under dreadful penalties. The French also, as is the
laudable custom of Republicans, gave a reason for what they did,
pointing out that trees had such and such an effect on climate—the whole
in plain clear terms and printed in the Arabic script.
There was, however, a Mohammedan who, on reading this, immediately saw
in it an advertisement of wealth and pasture. He drove his goats for
nearly fifteen miles, camped outside the wall, and next day lifted each
animal carefully one by one into the enclosure that they might browse
upon the tender shoots of the young trees. “Better,” he thought, “that
my goats should fatten than that the mad Christians should enjoy this
tree-fad of theirs which is of no advantage to God or man.”
When his last goat was over two rangers came, and, in extreme anger,
brought him before the magistrate, where he was asked what reason he
could give for the wrong thing he had done. He answered, “_R’aho_, it
was the will of God. _Mektoub_, it was written”—or words to that effect.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Cirta or Constantine]
The platform of the Rock of Cirta is the place from which the effort of
the French over all this land can best be judged, for it is the centre
round which nature and history have grouped the four changes of Barbary.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Constantine]
The rock is like those headlands which jut out from inland ranges and
dominate deep harbours; it is as bold as are such capes, and is united,
as they are, with the mass of land behind it by a neck of even
surface—the only passage by which the rock itself can be approached. On
every side but this, very sharp slopes of grass, broken by precipices,
plunge down in a mountainous way to the valleys, and at the foot of the
most sheer of these there tumbles noisily in a profound gorge the
torrent called Rummel, that is, “The Tawny,” for it is as yellow as a
lion or as sea-sand.
The trench is so deep and dark that one may stand above it towards
evening and hear the noise of the water and yet see no gleam of light
reflected from it, it runs so far below. It is this stream which has
made on the Rock of Cirta (though it is out of the true Tell and far
into the Tableland) a habitable fortress and a town; the town called
Constantine.
Such sites are very rare. Luxemburg is one, a stronghold cut off by
similar precipitous valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they are
found the origin of their fortress goes back beyond the beginning of
history, they are tribal, and their record is principally of war. So it
is with Cirta. The legends of the nomads say that they descended from
some enormous dusky figure, a God of the Atlas and of Spain—a giant God
marching along the shores of the ocean followed perpetually by armies.
Even this first of African names was mixed up with Cirta, for the title
of the rock was that of his loves, and the name Cirta given it by these
horsemen of Numidia was the name of their universal mother. A man can be
certain, as he walks along the edges of the place to-day and looks down
into the gulfs below it, that men have so moved here amid buildings and
in a fixed town with altars and a name ever since first they knew how to
mortar stones together and to obey laws. The close pack of houses
standing thus apart upon a peak has in it, therefore, something
consistently sacred. Permanence and continuity are to be discovered here
only among the cities of Africa; and its landscape and character of
themselves impress the traveller with a certitude that here will be
planted on into time the capital of the native blood: too far removed
from the sea for colonisation or piracy to destroy it: too well cut off
by those trenches of defence to be sacked and overrun: too peopled and
well watered to decay.
[Illustration]
The town has been taken in every conquest, and every conqueror has
boasted himself to have overcome the walls of rock, the hundreds of feet
of sheer climbing. The boast is manifestly absurd, though the temptation
to make it was irresistible. When Cirta has been stormed only one gate
admitted the invaders, and that was the isthmus which leads from the
platform of the summit to the tableland beyond. It was here that
Massinissa and here that the Romans entered. By this entry came the
French soldiers, and the market which stands there is called to-day “The
Place of the Breach.”
[Sidenote: The Inscriptions]
There is a place in Constantine where the full history of the town is
best felt, and that is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon the edge
of the rock upon the side furthest from the river and looks at the
storms blowing over the uplands from Atlas and driving low clouds right
at the crest of the walls. In this building are preserved (in no great
number) the antiquities of the place and its neighbourhood. Here is a
little silver victory which once fluttered, it is thought, in the hand
of that great statue which adorned the Capitol, and here are long rows
of tombs from the beginning of the Italian influence till the time of
the martyrs: you see carved upon them the slow change of the mind until
the last of the pagans boast of such virtues and have already that sort
of content which the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath to
succeeding time. This record of the epitaphs, though brief, is perfect;
you watch at work in them the spirit that made St. Cyprian transforming
the African soil; but their chief interest is in this, that they are, as
it were, a rediscovery of ourselves. You dig through centuries of alien
rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and, when you have dug deeply enough
you come suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred years an idiom quite
unfamiliar to us has alone been spoken here: beneath it you find the
august and reasonable Latin, and as you read you feel about you the air
of home. For all those generations the manifold aspect of the divine was
forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then, deep
down, you discover a tablet upon a tomb, and, reading it, you find it
was carved in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so gracious and who
so served the divinities of the woods that when she died _ingemuerunt
Dryades_: twice I read those delicate words, delicately chiselled in
hard stone, and I saw her going in black, with her head bent, through
groves. A trace of colouring remains upon the lettering of the verse and
a powerful affection lingers in it, so that the past is preserved. Islam
destroyed with fanaticism the figures of animals and of men: here in
these European carvings they are everywhere. The barbarian creed
conceived or implanted a barbaric fear of vines: here you see Bacchus,
young, on the corner of a frieze, and gentle old Silenus carried heavily
along.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Cæsarea or Cherchel]
If it is from the Rock of Cirta, from Constantine, that the recovery of
the province and its re-entry into Europe is best perceived—for there
stands the unchanging centre of Africa, and there can all the threads of
her destiny be grasped—yet there is another place far westward and down
upon the shore, where the wound that Europe suffered by the Mohammedan
invasion is more marked and long eclipse of our race more apparent. It
is the Bay of Cæsarea.
Constantine is so necessary to Africa that its very name (and it is
alone in this among all the cities) has been preserved. Cæsarea has lost
its name and its dignity too. The Barbarians have come to call her
“Cherchel”: as for her rank, it has been forgotten altogether; yet this
port was for a hundred years peculiar among all others in the
Mediterranean—it was more remote, more splendid, and more new. The
accident which created it lent a great story to its dynasty, and its
situation here, along the steeper shores that lead on to the Straits and
to the outer ocean, lent some western mystery to it and some appeal.
[Sidenote: Cherchel]
Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, was famous throughout the Mediterranean
for her beauty. The last of her lovers—it is well known—was Anthony the
Triumvir, who had desired (until he saw her) to inherit from Cæsar and
to rule the whole world. This ambition he abandoned after one battle,
lost, it is said, through her folly; and soon after that defeat they
chose to die. But a fruit of their loves, and a picture, perhaps, of his
courage and of her magnificence, survived in a daughter whom her mother
had dedicated to the Moon and had called Selene. This child was married
out into Barbary, to the king of the nomads, and here, in Cherchel, she
held with her husband for many years a court which gathered round it the
handicraft of Corinth, the letters of Athens, and some reflected
splendour from the town of Rome.
He was of those horsemen who had now for two centuries served Carthage
as mercenaries or Rome as allies. To the cities of the sea coast, which
were Italian or Asiatic in blood, these riders of the uplands had been
outer men. They appeared barbaric to the end, and, at the very end, it
was their blood, perhaps, that rebelled against the tradition of order
and that joined first the Vandal and then the Arab. The king was dark
and a barbarian. This wife who was sent to him inherited the broad
forehead of Rome and the silence of Egypt, and was also an heiress to
the generals of Alexander. There met in her, therefore, all those high
sources from whose unison Christendom has proceeded. She came west to a
new land that did not know cut stone and hardly roads: in a little time
she had built a city.
By some economic power which no one has explained, but which may be
compared to the wealth of our smaller independent States to-day and
their merchants, to Antwerp or to The Hague, this city of Mauretania
rose to be a marvel. The porticos stretched along that rise of land, and
a mile of new work, columns and pedestalled statues and arcades, looked
down from the slope and saw, making for the shore, perpetual sails from
the eastward. Great libraries dignified the city: a complete security
and a humane consideration for the arts continually increased its glory.
The passion for scholarship, which was at that time excessive, may have
touched the palace here with something of the ridiculous. The king
wrote, dictated, or commanded a whole shelf of books and was eager for
the pride of authorship. But no other note of indignity entered their
State, and all around them, looking out to sea, was a resurrection of
Greece.
This queen and her husband lived on into old age thus, untroubled in
their isolation and their content, and destined (as they thought) to
leave a dynasty which even the domination of Rome would protect and
spare.
Nothing is left. Rome seized their town at last. Their descendants
perished. All Mauretania was compelled to follow the common line of
unity. For four hundred years it has no history save that under the
Roman order it endured and increased. The Vandals passed it by: it might
still stand had there not fallen upon it the Mohammedan invasion which
everywhere destroyed, or rather abandoned, a Roman endeavour. The
neglect which was native to the Arab, the sharp breach which he made in
tradition, ended Cæsarea. To-day, a little market town, a tenth of the
old capital, barrenly preserves a memory of those two thousand years. A
few fragments which the plough recovers or which the builders have
spared are gathered in one place: the rest is parched fields and trees.
[Sidenote: The Aqueduct]
One conspicuous monument survives to emphasise the retreat of the
empire. It is something the Arab could not waste because it did not lie
within the circuit of the walls: its great stones were too remote from
his buildings to be removed, and its mass too threatening to be
undermined. It was the Aqueduct. This, for the most part, still stands,
and carries an aspect of endurance which is the more awful in that
nothing else of the city has endured. It spans a lonely valley in which
the bay and the old harbour are forgotten, and it is as enormous as the
name of Rome.
[Illustration]
It is more like a wall for height and completeness than are any of the
huge Roman arches I know. Its height is such that it catches the mind
more strongly than does the Pont du Gard, and its completeness such that
it arrests the eye more than do the long trails of arches that stretch
like rays across the Campagna. It appalls one because it is quite alone,
and because the multitude that gave it a meaning has disappeared. One
could wish to have seen this thing before the French came, when the
brushwood of the valley was quite deserted and when one might have
thought it fixed for ever in an intangible isolation which no European
would come again to reoccupy and to disturb.
Even to-day one may climb to the further, inland, side and look down the
perspective of its arches with some illusion of loneliness, and live for
an hour in the fifteen centuries of its abandonment. Its height, its
fineness, and the ruin of its use are so best seen, and its long line of
purpose, pointing on to a city that no longer remembers baths or
fountains. It is the ceaseless refrain of Africa. Italy, Gaul, and Spain
have ruins like these, but these ruins are right against a life which
has always been vigorous and to-day is especially renewed: only in this
one province of Africa do you find Rome arrested, as it were—its spirit
caught away and its body turned into stone.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Beginning of the Journey to the Desert]
There was last to be seen, before I could leave this province, the
desert and those dead towns which stand along the hither fringe of it:
the deserted homes of the Romans, and chief among them Timgad.
The Atlas, I had heard, is there at its highest, and the knot of
mountains into which it rises is called the Aurès. Upon its southern
side it fell steeply (I was told) upon the Sahara, and its northern
supported, on the last of the High Tableland, those ruined cities. Here
the frontier legionaries had been posted, and here the Arab invasion had
so wasted the forests and dried up the run of water that the towns had
died at once. This Timgad in particular is famous for its perfection and
for the complete survival of its form, but especially for this, that you
walk along paved streets and between standing columns and look, from the
seats of a theatre, towards a great arch or gate not yet fallen, and yet
never hear the voice of a living man.
I took my way to this place, the last of the towns I desired to see—the
tombstone, as it were, of the empire, the symbol or promise of the
reconquest. I went partly by day and partly by night, partly by the
railroad and partly on foot across the High Plateau southward till I
should come to it. Upon my way I met many men who should, perhaps, have
no part in such a little historical essay as is this, but for fear I
should altogether forget them I will write them down.
The first was an ill-dressed fellow, young, and with very sad eyes such
as men keep sometimes in early life but lose at last as they learn in
time to prey upon others. He had been unfortunate. We went along
together across a plain peculiarly lonely, and towards a large, bare,
isolated rock as high as a Welsh mountain and, as it seemed, quite
uninhabited. We were already in sight of the main range of Atlas, and in
the far ravines was a darkness that might, perhaps, be made by
cedar-trees, but all around us was nothing but bare land and now and
then a glint from salt marshes far away.
[Sidenote: Story of the Lions]
I asked him from what part of France he had come. He answered that he
was born in the colony. Then I asked him whether the colonists thought
themselves prosperous or no. He said, as do all sad people, that luck
was the difference. Those whom fortune loved, prospered; those whom she
hated, failed. He was right; but when he came to examples he was
startling. He showed me, high upon the rock before us, which I had
thought quite lonely, a considerable building, made of the stones of the
place and in colour similar to the mountain itself. “Beyond this hill,”
he said, “is Batna, and beyond Batna is Lambèse. Since you are walking
to Timgad you will pass both these places, and everywhere you will hear
of the House of the Lions. Then you will learn, if ever you needed
proof, that it is luck which governs all our efforts in this colony.” I
looked curiously at the great house, and asked him to tell me the story.
This he did; and I write here, as exactly as I can from memory, the
story he told.
“In that very place upon the hillside where now stands so huge a house
stood, when we were yet children, a little hut of stone such as the
settlers build, with two rooms in it only, a bed, three chairs, a table,
and a cooking-pot. And to this poverty nothing was added, for ill-luck
pursued that roof.
“There lived under it a man and his wife who had two children. They had
come here to rise with the country (as it is said), but, instead of so
rising, first one evil and then another fell upon them till their little
horde was eaten up and the field also, and the man had to work for
others—a most miserable fate. He got work in the building of the prison
of Lambèse, but, as he was not created by God to be a merchant or a
mortar-mixer, nor even a carrier of stone, he earned very little and was
always in dread of being sent away; and his companions jeered at him,
for the unfortunate are ridiculous not only among the rich, but in every
rank; and not only the rich jeer at poverty and shun it, but the poor
also—indeed, all men.
“In a word, this man was in so miserable a way that at last he took to
following his wife to church and to having recourse to shrines, as do
many men when their afflictions are unendurable, and among other shrines
he went to that called ‘St. Anthony of the Lion.’ Now, though it is
ridiculous to believe that the Lion there helped him, (for it is not a
saint,) yet good came to him through Lions.
“One day, when he had gone off to work with a heavy heart, leaving in
the house but one five-franc piece, his wife, who was now all soured by
misfortune and was wearied out with ceaseless work, heard a single knock
at the door, and when she went to it she found a nomad boy of the desert
from beyond Aurès, who held in his arms two little cubs with soft feet
and peering eyes who were mewing for their mother: they were the cubs of
Lions.
“The Arab boy, who was dark, erect, and strong, said, ‘God sends you
these. They are five francs.’ She answered, ‘God be with you. I cannot
pay.’ When, however, he made to go away silently, without bargaining,
she said, ‘God forgive me, but I will buy them’; for she thought to
herself, ‘perhaps I can sell them again for more,’ for Lions are rare
and wonderful beasts. So she took her five-franc piece from beneath a
leaden statue of St. Anthony in the window, and she paid the Arab boy
from beyond Aurès, from the Sahara, and she said, ‘God save you, the
lioness will follow the scent’; and he said, ‘God will overshadow me,’
and went gravely away, biting the five-franc piece to see if it was
good.
“Now, when her husband came home they decided to go into Batna and sell
the cubs, but their children, for whom they could afford no sort of toy,
were already so fond of the little beasts that they had not the heart to
sell them: they skimped and starved and ran into debt, but as the love
of these Lions increased in their hearts the more determined were they
to keep them; and they used to say, ‘God will provide,’ and other things
of that sort.
“The cubs, then, grew to be the size of spaniels, and then they became
grown and were the size of hounds, and soon manes grew on them and they
were the size of St. Bernards, and their eyes grew bright and shone at
evening; and at last they were perfect Lions. But from a long
association with Christian men they were genial, decorous, and loving,
and ate nothing but cooked meat, bread, and now and then a sweetmeat.
Also, they could stand up and beg. They could roar at command. They
could jump over each other’s backs; they could play as many tricks as a
dog. It was in this way that good came from them.
“For one day, when this man and his wife were in a better mood and had
forgotten their poverty for an hour, there came to them in the carrier’s
cart a parcel of wine sent them by a relative who had a vineyard. This
may have been the turning of their luck: one cannot tell. Luck is above
mankind. But, anyhow, they asked the carrier in and gave him wine. Now
the carrier was a Mohammedan, and Mohammedans are treacherous, so when
he saw two Lions walking about in a lonely house he did not call it
witchcraft, as would a Christian man, but at once he offered a price for
them; but the man and his wife had hearts so good they would not sell.
Then the carrier changed his tune, and offered to hire them for one week
and to pay for this fifty francs: this they gladly accepted. For the
carrier and men like him are incapable of honour except in one small
thing, which is the keeping of words and dates: in this they are most
exact. So at the end of the week he brought back the Lions, and gave the
man and his wife fifty francs.
“But more was to come. For the carrier (and men like him) see profit
where a Christian man would not see it, and he made a proposition to
these people. He said: ‘Your Lions jump through hoops, they beg for
sugar, and do other entertaining things: now I will travel with you and
them, and half of all we earn shall go to you.’ The man and his wife
were so simple and so necessitous that they accepted, and the tour
began. But That Which Watches Over Us at last rewarded the man and his
wife, for within a week the carrier died, and they went on up and down
the country by themselves with their children, showing the Lions, till
they began to earn incredible sums. They went to the great towns and to
the sea coast. At last they became so rich that they went to Algiers,
and there it is, as you may imagine, large rents but larger earnings.
They lived in Algiers for one year, and became at last so rich that they
crossed the sea and showed their Lions in Provence, in Lyons, and would
have shown them in Paris but that, by the time they reached Tournus,
they came to their own people and found themselves rich enough. There
the man and his wife remained, but their children, who had been born in
Africa, came back, and here they are now. They have friends to dinner
every day, and all on account of Lions.”
When he had done this story he added, “It is true.” Then we went on to
Batna together without a word, but when we reached Batna we had dinner
together and spoke of many other things, but I have space for nothing
except this story of his about the lions.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Bargaining at Batna]