Dante, fleuve d’enfer coulant au fond d’un abîme rouge comme si les
flammes éternelles l’avaient brûlé. Il fait un île de sa ville, ce
fleuve jaloux et surprenant; il l’entoure d’un gouffre terrible et
tortueux, aux rocs éclatants et bizarres, aux murailles droites et
dentelées.”[7]
Footnote 7:
Guy de Maupassant, “Au Soleil,” 1904.
A great part of the attraction of a city occupying such a site lies in
its suggestion of romance. It calls up visions of furious siege and
desperate defence, of attempts to scale impossible cliffs, of
hand-to-hand encounter at the only gate. And the actual records of
Constantine almost surpass the possibilities of romantic imagination. It
can lay no claim to that happiness which comes from having no history.
Alike from its commanding situation and the richness of its surrounding
lands it has been marked out by nature to be an incentive to ambition.
It has known many masters. It is said to have stood eighty sieges. Its
apparent impregnability has but invited attack. It has been a necessary
mainstay to the support of every power which has aspired to the lordship
of Barbary. It has seldom been a fitting residence for those who desired
a quiet life.
Under its early name of Cirta it was the capital of that dynasty of
Numidian kings who fought first for Rome against Carthage, and then for
themselves against Rome. It became in due course a Roman colony. In the
fourth century it was ruined in the wars which rent the empire, and
re-arose as Constantine. Re-naming, with a spice of subservience, was a
passion of the time; even so to-day do the Piazza Umberto and Boulevard
Carnot obliterate ancient landmarks. The frenzied quarrels of Christians
and Christian heretics, which tore Africa to shreds, raged within its
walls, but spared its buildings. Genseric the Vandal, and the Byzantine
Belisarius were its lords in turn. Then came the Arab. Darkness broods
over its history for centuries, broken only by lightning flashes of
capture and recapture. The Barbarossa brothers recognized the truth that
he who would rule in Algeria must hold Constantine. They and their
successors conquered it, and lost it, and conquered it again. Its Beys
were nominally subservient to the Deys of Algiers, but Constantine
breeds insurrection, and maintained its traditions during the Turkish
domination. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, during a
period of thirty years, twenty Beys succumbed to poison, the bow-string,
or the sword.
“Here Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two and went his way.”
At the time of the French invasion its Bey, Hadj-Ahmed, was in
insurrection against the Dey, but made common cause against the
unbeliever. After the capitulation of Algiers he retired to Constantine
and declared himself independent, and took the title of Pasha, with the
countenance of the Porte. His minister, Ben-Aissa, a humble Khabyle in
origin, and a blacksmith by trade, was a man of marked ability. The two
created an army of Khabyles, and breathed defiance to the French. In
1836 Marshal Clauzel advanced against Constantine with 8000 men. Among
them was a young captain of the staff, afterwards Marshal Macmahon.
Clauzel attempted an assault by the bridge of El Kantara, but was
repulsed with great loss, and hardly retreated with his broken army to
Bône. France could not brook such a defeat. Another army of 10,000 men
was despatched under General Damrémont and arrived before the city on
October 6th, 1837. To his summons to surrender came the response, “He
who will be master of Constantine must cut the throat of the last of its
defenders.” A few days later the General in command and General
Perrégaux were killed side by side in the course of siege operations,
and General Valée assumed the leadership. On the 13th he took the city
by assault. Numbers of the besieged endeavoured to escape by ropes into
the ravine, but the ropes breaking they perished. Hadj-Ahmed evaded
capture, and for eleven years maintained himself in the Aurès mountains.
In 1848 he surrendered, and died two years later. For seventy years an
unwonted peace has brooded over the heights of Constantine; but who
shall say that the end is yet?
As usual, the French have destroyed most of the remains of the Roman
city; the exigencies of space are here a better excuse than exists
elsewhere. But the antiquary may still ferret out endless evidences of
the ancient town. The ordinary traveller may amuse himself by strolling
through the Arab quarter; he may perambulate the gorge by the _Chemin
des Touristes_; he may cross the bridge and ascend the opposing height
to view in its majesty this unique city of precipices. With a map and
moderate intelligence he will need no guide; but he will be pestered by
the attentions of guides, responsible and irresponsible. They throng the
door of his hotel, they mark his goings-out and his comings-in, and
unless he succumbs to paying blackmail to one of the fraternity, they
will strive to make his life a burden to him. Yet is there a certain
fierce pleasure in denying them. The guide who haunts the hotel door is
generally one of the least estimable of men, especially in Oriental
countries. If you are weak, he will prey on your weakness; if you are
vicious, he will reap his reward in ministering to your vices. He does
not shrink from suggestion, and he seems to know no shame. He sometimes,
when not guiding, fills a menial office in the hotel; one can hardly
suppress a smile at the idea of the epicurean having his pleasures
chosen for him by the Boots. To the credit of Algiers it may be said
that one is there little troubled by these vermin; but Constantine has
something to learn.
The Roman city of Cirta must have presented a marvellously beautiful
spectacle. Classical architecture perhaps looks its noblest in buildings
which crown a height. The temples of Cirta were of course not
individually comparable with those which adorned the Acropolis of
Athens, or the line of cliffs at Girgenti; but from a general scenic
point of view the effect would be similar and on a greater scale. If the
present city, which (like the belfry of Christchurch) has no
architectural merits, looks so impressive at a little distance, the
ancient city with its marble columns and triumphal arches must have been
grand beyond our powers of realization. We know from the ruins at Timgad
what a Roman city in Africa was like, and Thamagudi was a provincial
town of no great mark, while Cirta was the capital. Its remains are to
be seen everywhere, especially by the iron bridge of El Kantara, which
replaces the ancient Roman bridge, a very remarkable structure which
stood until 1857, when two of its arches fell. It was designed to carry
an aqueduct, and a roadway, which was supported on a double series of
arches, stood 400 feet above the level of the river. It excited the
wonder and admiration of all travellers. Shaw saw it in 1740. He says it
was “ indeed a masterpiece of its kind, the gallery and the columns of
the arches being adorned with cornices and festoons, ox-heads and
garlands. The keystones also of the arches are charged with Caducei and
other figures.”
The gorge contains many other Roman remains. Numerous inscriptions,
statues and ornaments have been removed, and are collected in a garden
near the Place de la Brèche. In this neighbourhood was found a
delightful epitaph of one Praecilius, a silversmith, written in very
inaccurate and unclassical Latin, which may be thus translated:—
“Here I, silent myself, in verse describe my life. I have filled an
honourable career in prosperous times; Praecilius my name, a householder
of Cirta and a silversmith by trade; a man of acknowledged probity and
unvarying truthfulness. I have been friendly to all men, and whom has my
charity failed? Laughter and good cheer I ever enjoyed with my chosen
friends. Life was not the same to me after the death of my virtuous wife
Valeria; I found my happiness in holy wedlock. I have celebrated in
honourable fashion a hundred happy birthdays. But there has come at last
the day when I must shuffle off this mortal coil. The inscription you
read while yet living I have prepared against my death. Let it be as
Fortune wills; never has she deserted me. Follow my example. Here I
await you. Come!”
To one illustrious citizen Cirta gave birth, Fronto the orator, friend
of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, and tutor of his heir, Marcus Aurelius.
Some of the correspondence of the master and his pupil has been
preserved. It abounds in intimate and homely touches. The prince went
out hunting one morning, and on his return wrote: “I betook myself to my
books. I took off my boots and my clothes, and went to bed for two
hours. I read two orations of Cato. I think I have caught cold, perhaps
because I walked in sandals this morning. So I will pour oil on my head
and go to sleep. Farewell, my dearest and sweetest master, whom I love
better than Rome itself.” When Marcus Aurelius succeeded to his imperial
throne he offered his old tutor the proconsulship of Asia, one of the
greatest positions in the Empire, but Fronto, who perhaps preferred to
remain in his native Africa, refused the office on the ground of
ill-health. Nothing has been discovered at Cirta bearing on Fronto’s
connection with the city, but an inscription built into a house at
Guelma, the ancient Kalama, records his official appointment as patron
of that town.
The Arab quarter, which is gradually being squeezed out of existence, is
quite different in character from that of Algiers. Its lanes are equally
tortuous and narrow, and even more dirty, but it is more full of life
and more actual. In Algiers most of the native shops are in modern,
Frenchified streets; here they line the ancient alleys. Merchants sit in
the serene Eastern fashion beside their stores of merchandise; artisans
ply their little trades in a very confined space. More than half the
population appears to be occupied in making shoes. The general confusion
is increased by the constant passage of animals, horses, mules, donkeys
and camels. It is a little bit of an old world, and being in close
contact, yet hopelessly out of touch, with the dominant world of the
day, its hours are numbered. The march of improvement, especially when
cribbed and confined as by the cliffs of Constantine, brooks no denial.
And if we are compelled to hold our noses, we may nevertheless be
disposed to shed a tear.
[Illustration: ZOUAVES]
As becomes a city set on a hill, Constantine is more retentive of its
ancient customs than a port like Algiers, which is subject to the
levelling influences of the sea and its traffic. Here, for example, the
Jewesses retain their distinctive dress. They delight in bright colours,
and in heavy barbaric jewellery, such as broad bracelets and large
circular earrings. They wear a peculiar head-dress, a sort of lace veil
with gold or gilt ornaments, surmounted by a pointed cap. The girls
affect a very diminutive form of this cap, generally of brilliant red or
blue, stuck jauntily on one side of the head. They are very lovely,
these Jewish girls, the finest type of their race, with noble features
and clear olive complexions. In point of refinement and the carriage
which marks good breeding perhaps no race touches such wide extremes as
the Jewish; for some reason or other the Constantine Jews are at the top
of the tree.
You may sit in a café of the Place de la Brèche and watch the endless
pageant of commingled East and West. The military note is predominant;
Zouaves and Spahis are everywhere. Behind a series of transport waggons
of the Chasseurs d’Afrique a motor-car hoots impatiently. Next a group
of little donkeys bearing loads, heads low, and ears wearily flopping.
Then carts heavily laden with stone, drawn by five horses,—sometimes a
grey team, sometimes a brown,—harnessed in single file, the driver
walking by the penultimate horse; a group of neat French children on
their way to school; an Arab lady of high degree veiled in the daintiest
grey chiffon, riding on a caparisoned mule and holding a lovely child
before her; an old Arab seated on a mass of saddle-bags which almost
hide his donkey, waggling his feet up and down after the Arab manner,
even as civilized man works a salmon-rod; and as you turn to go there
comes a troop of men chanting a dull Gregorian measure, and bearing
something on a stretcher covered with a green and gold flowered cloth;—
an Arab on his way to his last resting-place.
Such is a fraction of the cosmopolitan and parti-coloured crowd. And as
you watch you will reflect how much it owes to the fact that the
natives, high and low,—you do not see much of the former,—wear a
distinctive dress. The Arab’s robe is often shabby and often unclean;
but it avoids the meanness and vulgarity of European clothes. The
working classes of Northern Europe have discarded their suitable dress
of the past;—even the lingering smock-frock, most appropriate and
dignified of coverings, has gone,—they habit themselves in the cast-off
clothings of the well-to-do, or in badly-made imitations of them. The
women suffer in appearance more than the men, but both combine in their
personal aspect to contribute to the grim squalor and hideousness of our
meaner streets.
It is said that the plateau on which Constantine stands is honeycombed
with caves and subterranean passages, and that formerly it was possible
to walk round the city underground. Probably these caves were excavated
by the river before it had carved out its present bed at a lower level.
These great natural storehouses were used in troublous times for the
keeping of provisions and munitions of war; and during the French attack
of 1837 many of the inhabitants took refuge in them. They are now for
the most part bricked up, but a very remarkable grotto lies beneath the
Hôtel de Paris, and may be visited from the hotel.
There is a museum at the Mairie. It is, as Mr. Lucas found the Soane
Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, very difficult to get into; and it is
still more difficult to get out of, especially if you are a sympathetic
listener. The good lady whose place is in the porter’s lodge, and who
has the key, will, when at leisure, conduct you to a long room
containing the usual assortment of battered coins and broken pottery,
and one gem, a bronze statuette of Victory, found beneath the Kasbeh.
When you are sufficiently depressed by the antiquities, your guide has
something in store for you. She will show you—you only, you are given to
understand; it is an exception;—the marble staircase and the saloon in
which the Mayor receives. And very fine the marble columns and marble
panels are, and you will notice how here a butterfly with long tails is
faithfully depicted in their rich grain, and there the head of an old
Arab to the very life. And if you will have the goodness to look out of
window, you will see a house on the hill opposite, and just beyond it on
the other side is the quarry from which all these marbles come. And in
all Algeria there is no such a Mairie as this. And you may be led to
discuss systems of local government, and to mention that you yourself,
who speak, take some small share in such matters, if only as a member of
an Education Committee, or a County Council, or what-not. And you will
perhaps be pained to discover that the very name of your important
county town is unknown to your entertainer; a pain to be mitigated later
by the reflection that the caretaker of its Town Hall is perhaps not
fully informed as to Constantine. And the _pièce de résistance_ comes
last. You shall see the _salon_ in which the Mayor conducts the
marriages. And very suitable and dignified it is. Has your Mayor so fine
a marrying-place? You are constrained to confess that as far as you are
aware your Mayor has nothing to do with any marriages but his own. A
quick look as at an impostor detected, a shrug of the shoulders, and a
sigh for the barbarous condition of foreign countries, and it is over.
Constantine is a busy place. It is naturally a great corn-market. It has
long been celebrated for its leather goods. In their manufacture a large
number of tanners, saddlers and shoemakers are employed. Here are
produced all the elaborate articles of harness affected by Arab
cavaliers, often curiously wrought and of high price. And there is a
considerable woollen industry. Here are woven the _haïks_ and _burnous_
which form part of Arab dress; and certain finer articles, called
_gandouras_, made partly of wool and partly of silk. And the development
of the minerals of the province, especially zinc, iron-ore and
phosphates, is bringing activity and prosperity to Constantine.
The last conquerors have indeed set their seal upon the ancient city.
They have wrought more damage to its beauty in less than a century than
the Arabs in a thousand years. They have done their utmost to reduce it
to the level of a common French provincial town, and they may boast such
partial success as its conditions permitted. We are inured to regarding
such proceedings as inevitable. We have let our own towns grow as the
speculative builder willed; we have spared nothing except by accident;
we should have dealt with Constantine very much as the French have,
perhaps more outrageously. The folly and iniquity of it all is dawning
on us too late, we are beginning to see that the nineteenth century
betrayed its trust; it destroyed wantonly in time of peace what even the
stress and exigencies of centuries of war had spared.
The cliffs of Constantine’s great gorge still hold aloft its plateau; if
they enclose a city unworthy of their protection, such a condition is
perhaps, relatively to their own permanence, merely transitory. They
will doubtless see the passing of all that our banal age has set up; it
is fortunately not built for lasting. And a more enlightened race of men
may yet arise to crown with the towers of a noble city the finest site
in the world.
From Constantine the traveller will doubtless turn his face southwards.
He will have in front of him the ruins of Roman cities on the northern
slope of the Aurès mountains, for which Batna, 122 kilometres from
Constantine by road, is a convenient head-quarters; and further on,
after passing through a gorge which severs the range, he will enter the
true Sahara and, at 116 kilometres from Batna, reach the oasis of
Biskra, the much honoured and much sung. The railway takes during part
of the journey a somewhat different course from the road, but the
distance is about the same, the journey occupying seven or eight hours.
There is nothing very remarkable about the first part of the route. The
country is bare and somewhat marshy. Half way to Batna both rail and
road pass close to two salt lakes, which are the haunt in winter of
flamingoes and wild duck. A little further on a glimpse is caught of the
Medrassen, a remarkable monument recalling the “Tombeau de la
Chrétienne,” near Algiers. It is interesting to the archæologist, but
perhaps hardly repays an ordinary traveller for the trouble of visiting
it. Different opinions are held as to its purpose; it was probably the
burial-place of the Numidian kings, perhaps of Massinissa, in which case
its date would be about 150 B.C.
At Batna the road to Timgad and other ancient cities of the Roman
frontier diverges to the eastward. Proceeding northwards we continue to
ascend for a few miles, until the watershed is reached, where we enter
the valley of the Oued Fedhala, the river which runs southward to Biskra
and the desert. East of the road lies the great mass of the Aurès
mountains. On their northern side they slope gradually, forming, in the
manner of Algerian mountains, great plains, which again, after the lapse
of many centuries, have been brought into cultivation. Their southern
face rises more or less precipitously from the Sahara, and defines, as
has been suggested, the limits of European colonization.
The mountain fastnesses of the Aurès, seldom penetrated by the stranger,
are the home of a race, the Chawia, which possesses remarkable
characteristics. In the main a branch of the aboriginal Berbers, they
have been preserved by the seclusion of their mountains, like their
cousins the Khabyles, from any Arab admixture. But there is little doubt
that they represent also the débris of the Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine
colonies driven to the hills by the Arab invasion. Even so were the last
remnants of Romano-British civilization driven to the highlands of Wales
and Cumberland before the Anglo-Saxon hosts. In their features, their
speech and their customs, the Chawia betray their classic origin. Many
travellers have dilated on the beauty of their women:—"their
well-featured countenances, fair-curling locks, and wholesome ruddy
looks." Their language is full of Latin words. “They observe the 25th of
December as a feast, under the name of Moolid (the birth), and keep
three days’ festival both at springtime and harvest. They use the solar
instead of the Mohammedan lunar month, and the names of the months are
the same as our own.” In the peculiarities of this isolated people, for
which I cannot personally vouch, we seem to see the germ of some of Mr.
Rider Haggard’s romances.
[Illustration: EL KANTARA]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_VIII—THE ALLURING OASIS_
El-Kantara—The Gateway of the Desert—Biskra—Its attractions—The
dancing-girls-"Hichenstown"—A garden and a vision—Railway extension—
Conquering Mohammedans—Sidi Okba—The Arab’s point of view.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst.”
_Barrack-room Ballads._
From the watershed to the north of Batna the descent by road or rail is
rapid to El-Kantara, where the mountain chain is riven by a deep and
narrow gorge. It is called by the Arabs _Foum-es-Sahara_, the Mouth of
the Sahara. The scenery is very striking; Nature is here in a theatrical
mood; the mountains are bare and rugged and of a rich yellow hue, and as
one emerges from the gorge the _coup d’œil_ is magnificent.
Immediately in front is a lovely oasis, rich in palms and fruit trees,
offering a delicious contrast of greenery to the rough weather-scarred
rocks above. Around and below, to the southward, are the rugged
foot-hills of the Aurès, and beyond all the great illimitable sea of
sand. This is one of those rare places of the earth where nature seems
to set herself of deliberate intention to produce an effect. And nothing
is wanting to its success; nothing is superfluous. No one could have
planned a more fitting, a more impressive, a more romantic, gateway to
the desert.
We continue to descend by the river, which is soon to meet its doom in
the sand, through a strange country which suggests in its apparent
absence of design the effect of some vast catastrophe,—"the quarries of
an enormous desolation." From the seamed and wrinkled and time-worn
cliffs, with their endless repetition of narrow buttresses, stand out
weird pinnacles as might the ruins of a fantastic castle, or the fangs
of some huge primeval monster, “the dead bones of the eldest born of
time”; while the floor of the valley is covered with curiously regular
pyramidal heaps, which bear the semblance of man’s fashioning. Such a
landscape might serve for a poet’s or painter’s Inferno; such may be the
scenery of the moon. Little by little we leave this nightmare of the
foot-hills and emerge into the plain. We pass several little oases, and
traverse sandy areas with scanty scrub. The river, or its bed, is ever
with us, with here and there an oleander growing on its banks. Where
water can be led away from it, a little ground is irrigated, and corn is
sown. But ever we are tending to the open desert. And at last, when we
have passed completely from all contact with the hills, and know that we
have attained the great Sahara, at last we come to Biskra.