minaret. Here your guide will not accompany you. Arabs object to any
prying eye surveying their roofs, which are the resort of their women.
They have perhaps grown accustomed to the irrepressible European, who
will always go to the highest point at all hazards; he is also beneath
their contempt, and in any case will depart and be no more seen. With
one of their own countrymen it is different; he may be the European’s
servant, but he is a fellow-religionist and not a mere animal like his
employer. So the European is tolerated with a shrug. For the office of
_muezzin_, the custodian of the mosque, whose business it is to ascend
the minaret and call the faithful to prayer, a blind man with a brazen
voice is in much request. If not actually, the _muezzin_ is
conventionally blind. So he will light a candle to guide you up the dark
staircase, and accompany you to the top. The town lies below you and all
around,—a curious collection of square mud boxes. On many of the roofs
are basket-work erections, which are explained to you as the framework
of tents, in which the inhabitants sleep during the great summer heats.
Over the heads of countless palm trees your eye ranges to the desert,
bounded on the north by the cliffs of Barbary, limitless to the south.
And southwards you will gaze till you grow weary of immensity.
Perhaps nowhere more than at Sidi Okba, under the shadow of the great
conqueror’s tomb, may you feel the haughty disdain of the Arab. He
stalks past you apparently in utter unconsciousness of your presence.
You belong to a civilization which for the moment has conquered his in
war. Allah has willed it. But you represent with your anthropomorphic
religion, your abominable demeanour and social arrangements, especially
your own lack of dignity and the licence you allow to your women, all
that he holds most accursed. You attach undue importance to human life
in this world; and this leads you into a ridiculous state of worry about
trumpery matters of sanitation and so forth, which are quite beneath the
notice of a man concerned with the higher mysteries of the universe and
considerations of eternity. Your grovelling disregard of the really
great things gives you leisure to devote yourself to such trifles as
trade and transport, and so you grow rich, which is rather to your
discredit than the reverse. Wherefore the Arab expresses his contempt
for you by the supremest indifference, striving only to preserve the hem
of his robe from contact with the unclean.
The ordinary traveller will perhaps leave Biskra with no great regret,
however much he may have found of interest in his visit. But to those
rare spirits among us who endeavour to repair the mischief caused by our
first parents, Biskra presents very special opportunities. There is very
little to see, and nothing whatever to do; it is a capital place for
sitting in the shade with a brilliant sky above. The Garden of Eden is
an Oriental ideal; these Arabs who exist in contemplation of their palm
trees are striving to live up to it. It is not at all an English ideal.
The primeval curse lies heavy on the Englishman; he has made the best of
it and has come to regard work as a virtue. Not only by the sweat of his
brow must he earn his living; by the sweat of his brow must he achieve
his pleasure. A paradise in which he could not knock a ball about or
kill the other animals were no paradise to him. Yet even among our
strenuous people there are emancipated individuals, to whose simple
needs a sunny climate and regular meals at a comfortable hotel suffice:—
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse,”
such will find a congenial resting-place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_IX—THE SAHARA_
The desert in imagination and reality—Underground water—Artesian
wells—Mozabites—Touaregs—The camel—Recent developments—Railway
projects—The Army of Africa.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I’ve in the desert with these eyes beheld
The hurrying pilgrim to the slow-stepped yield;
The rapid courser in the rear remains,
While the slow camel still its step maintains.”
THE GULISTĀN.
Everyone, it has been said, has his own Sahara. For many of us perhaps
the geography lessons of childhood left an impression of an ocean of
shifting sand, sometimes separated from the sea by a narrow strip of
cultivated land, sometimes extending to the very shore, from which
majestic lions, appropriate lords of the inhospitable desert, gaze
pensively at the setting sun. If we had the misfortune to be born half a
century or more ago, the maps of Africa of the period, with their vast
interior emptiness, suggested to our youthful imagination that this
unpleasant region extended over the greater part of the continent, the
elephant taking the place of the lion in the more southern portions.
[Illustration: THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE SAHARA]
“So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.”
The last generation has seen these mediæval ideas considerably modified.
Travel and war have been the means of filling much of the blank space;
the arts of peace have followed in their wake; African railways would
occupy quite a respectable page in a world-wide Bradshaw; and the Stock
Exchange in a searching for economy of syllables has irreverently
shortened the poetical Tanganyika to the practical Tank. The great flat
plain is last to go;—the millions of acres of rather light soil which
the French have been so unaccountably anxious to daub with their colour
on the map. We have given up the lions; we know that such carnivorous
beasts can only live in a fairly fertile country which supplies
sufficient food to their prey. But we have clung to the plain and the
sand. Nevertheless it seems that they must go too. We read that you may
travel for days in the Sahara on rocky hills and not find enough sand to
dry your signature. So perish the beliefs of youth.
Yet to any picture of Algeria the Sahara supplies a romantic background.
The sight of a caravan arriving from some distant oasis still has power
to stir the imagination. Even in face of our information as to the
Sahara’s only partial sterility, we cherish some shreds of wonder at the
men who can wring a livelihood and find the means of travel under such
inhospitable conditions.
The Sahara has been defined as the region which receives only as an
exception any rainfall, whether of Mediterranean origin, or from the
tropical regions of West Africa. It is only relatively a desert in the
strict sense of the word; no part of it is absolutely without rain, and
even in the districts which are reputed the most dry the traveller may
meet with violent storms. The generally arid nature of the soil is due
to the fact that water circulates not on the surface, but underground.
Where it comes to light either by natural or artificial means, a focus
of intense cultivation, an oasis, is produced.
The Algerian Sahara is only a portion of the great desert of Northern
Africa. Yet it is ten times the size of Algeria itself. It consists
roughly of two great depressions separated by an isthmus of calcareous
hills. Each of these basins contains a great expanse of dunes, and the
two chief groups of oases occur in their lower levels. A generation ago
it was commonly believed that the Sahara was the bed of a sea which had
disappeared at no very distant date; and projects were formed of
admitting the Mediterranean by means of a canal. But more precise
knowledge has shown that its sterility is due to other causes; that like
the rest of the continent it has its ancient conformation of mountain
and plain; that it has distinctive flora and fauna long established; and
that the portion which lies below the level of the Mediterranean is of
very small extent.
Between eighty and ninety per cent of the surface is of rock, slightly
undulating and broken occasionally by perpendicular ravines and large
crevasses. Here, as a rule, no water can be found, and the only
vegetation is an occasional thorny shrub. With the regions of the sand
dunes it is different. Their sterility is by no means absolute. They
have a vigorous vegetation of their own, which will support camels, and
even sheep at a favourable season. They absorb eagerly the rainfall
which runs off the rocky plateaux, and acting as a sponge retain it for
a long period. Their comparative barrenness is due only to the dryness
of the climate; wherever they can be irrigated they become fertile.
Of the underground rivers the best known is the Oued Rir, which is met
with about fifty miles to the south of Biskra, and extends as far as
Temacin, fourteen miles south-west of Touggourt. Its course is marked by
a number of oases, some of which have been created, and others much
improved by the Artesian wells of the French engineers. The first
experiment of this sort was tried as early as 1856 at the oasis of
Tamerna. After twenty-two days of work, in the presence of a crowd of
incredulous and scarcely friendly natives the bore produced a veritable
river of a thousand gallons a minute.
“In the desert a fountain is springing.”
At this welcome spectacle, the ingrained distrust of and smothered
hostility towards the stranger and his methods vanished; all gave way to
a transport of joy and enthusiasm. The work thus begun has been
continued with great success, chiefly by French companies; new wells
have been sunk and old wells repaired; and it is estimated that the
value of the oases of the Rir has increased fivefold, and their
population more than doubled.
[Illustration: AN ARTESIAN WELL]
Similar results have been attained elsewhere. But while they increase
the productiveness of the oases, and at the same time improve the routes
and the condition of the nomads, they do not warrant any hopes of
extensive cultivation in the Sahara. The conditions of life continue
difficult. The oases are very unhealthy; their sedentary inhabitants are
the prey of malignant fevers and chronic diseases. The summer climate is
appalling; a variation between freezing-point and 120° Fahrenheit in the
twenty-four hours is not unknown. Those of the inhabitants, Arabs or
Berbers, who have an admixture of the blood of the Soudanese negroes,
are best fitted to support such trying conditions. As a place of
residence for Europeans the Sahara cannot be recommended with any
confidence.
Of the sedentary peoples of the Sahara the most interesting are the
Mozabites; of the nomads the Touaregs, who range over the vast region to
the extreme south. Both are considered to be of Berber origin. The
Mozabites have already been mentioned as traders in Algiers. Their
country, the Mzab, is situate in one of the most sterile parts of the
Sahara, on the rocky promontory which separates the eastern and western
depressions. It lies about 400 miles due south of Algiers. Here with
amazing toil they have created a fertile region. They have dug wells and
found water, and have built dams to intercept and retain the occasional
rainfall. The contrast of their fertile gardens with the bare and
fantastic rocks which surround them, a land of exaggerated sterility
where Nature herself seems dead, is described by travellers as very
striking. The industry and commercial aptitude of the Mozabites is very
remarkable. They excel as money-lenders and in small banking business.
It is said that among them a Jew must work with his hands.
[Illustration: A NATIVE WELL]
During the last few years, without attracting much attention from the
outer world, France has quietly conquered the Sahara, or at all events
brought its nomad tribes under effective control. The Touaregs, neither
very numerous nor very well armed, have succumbed to persistent pressure
and a few trifling defeats. Some are settling on the fringe of the
oases; others drifting into the service of the State. The systematic
brigands of centuries will pass, it has been said, in a few years from
the Stone Age to the age of aviation. They recognize, not without
humour, that their rôle of levying contributions has fallen into other
hands. A captain of spahis in garrison at Timbuctoo, was ordered to
pursue a caravan which had made off in the night without paying the
market dues. “We also,” said the Touaregs, “when we stop a caravan, do
so to collect _le droit de passage_.”
The conquest of the desert, long delayed, has only been achieved by the
regular employment of the camel. For nearly a century, since Napoleon’s
expedition to Egypt, the French had made spasmodic efforts to utilize
this animal, but with little success. The camel corps were regarded with
ridicule and contempt, and the peculiarities of the beast were little
understood. A common belief in fabulous stories of its powers of speed
and endurance, its capacity for doing without food and water, occasioned
much suffering and immense loss. In fact it requires, year in year out,
as much sustenance as other herbivorous beasts of its bulk; where it
differs from others is in its power to support extreme irregularity in
its meals. This quality, and especially its ability to take in at one
drink enough water for several days, render it of unequalled value for
desert journeyings. The camel can work for six months in the year on the
meagre diet which the sparse vegetation of the Sahara affords; it is
necessary for his existence that he should spend the remaining six in
complete rest at pasture, where he feeds voraciously from morning to
night without losing a minute. “But it must not be believed,” says M.
Gautier, “that the camel on active service does not eat; he feeds when
he has the opportunity, and the opportunities must not be rare. For a
caravan of camels traversing the desert, the stomach of the beasts is
the sovereign lord of marches and halts, the director of the daily
programme; day and night, the fatigue and hunger and sleep of the men do
not enter into the account; everything is subordinated to the single
necessity of nourishment for the herd. Whenever a little edible
vegetation is met with, at whatever point of the itinerary, a halt is
made for several hours or several days; in the intervals, even as
happens sometimes, of two or three hundred kilometres or of five or six
days, progress, slow and regular, is made without truce, almost without
sleep, beneath sun and stars alike. One can only stop at a pasturage; a
voyage in the Sahara is a hunt for a blade of grass.”
God, says the proverb, having made the desert, repaired the mischief by
creating the camel. Considered absolutely it is an inferior beast of
burden to the horse and mule, considered relatively to the conditions of
the Sahara it is invaluable. But it must be treated according to its
necessities. In the mines of Algeria, for props in the galleries, pine
is preferred to oak; oak breaks suddenly when the limit of its strength
is reached, pine on the contrary cracks and creaks,—it gives warning.
The camel is as the oak, he gives no warning. Exhausted, he stops
abruptly like a motor-car which has run short of petrol; he crouches and
dies, with plenty of dignity and with an air of thinking of something
else. So have ended countless camels in the service of France. But since
1902 camel corps have been raised on a scientific basis; the animal used
being almost invariably the _méhari_, a species of dromedary. A body of
natives of the tribe of the Chaamba has been organized, each of whom in
return for a definite sum of money supplies two or three camels, which
are his own property, to exchange, to sell, to traffic with as he
pleases. He is, in fact, a contractor. For a further sum he provides his
own food, clothing and equipment. This system seems to be a reversion to
an ancient custom, which the very word “soldier” recalls.
The effect has been magical. Almost without a blow the Touareg has
recognized his master. The Chaamba patrol the desert and enforce French
conceptions of law and order. Communications have been opened in all
directions; the tremendous journey between Algeria and the West African
possessions of France is now frequently made without danger and without
exciting remark. The _méharistes_ have solved the problem so long
insoluble.
[Illustration: A CARAVAN]
But a greater project is agitating the minds of the forward Colonial
party, the linking of the French possessions by a Trans-Saharian
railway. The scheme is not a new one. It was much discussed thirty years
ago. The French Government appointed a scientific commission to study
the matter, and the French public, ever ready to support a vast
engineering scheme, was eager to subscribe the necessary capital. The
murder by Touaregs of the Flatters mission administered a cold douche,
and for the time being the subject dropped. It has been revived of late
by M. Leroy Beaulieu and other writers. Two lines are projected, one to
Lake Tchad, the other to Timbuctoo. The distance to be covered is
enormous, in each case about 2700 miles, of which 2000 is desert. The
engineering difficulties are not great, but the commercial prospects of
such a line seem very poor. A train or two a year would deal with all
the existing traffic, and there appears little scope for development. It
is suggested that the Upper Niger may become another Nile, but even then
its trade would seek an outlet rather to the Atlantic than to the
Mediterranean and across the Great Sahara. The post route to South
America might be shortened a little, but at what cost and inconvenience!
The best hope for the would-be railway builders lies in the discovery of
minerals. A mining industry would develop the Sahara as it has developed
the bare uplands of the Transvaal and the icy wastes of Klondyke. But of
this there is no present indication.
Meantime, in the extreme west, on the borders of Morocco, the railway
has been extended as far as Colomb-Béchar, a distance of 728 kilometres
to the south-west of Oran. This is a strategic line. It is in the
direction of Morocco that the eyes of the army of Africa are now turned.
French writers are never tired of repeating that Barbary is one, and
should be undivided, that the masters of Tunis and Algeria must be lords
of Morocco too. The safety of Algeria itself is said to depend on the
French control of Morocco. Such is ever the language of him who would go
forward. We have said it ourselves often enough, and to fix the limits
of empire is sometimes more difficult than to advance them.
It may be worth while to note what is the present military force of
France in North Africa. According to the project for the Budget of 1911,
the force in Algeria consists of 2134 officers and 52,927 men; in
Tunisia of 698 officers and 17,007 men. The cavalry numbers in all 440
officers and 9074 men. The number of native troops is singularly small,
about 15,000 infantry and 1800 spahis. Judging by our experience in
India it would be possible to make a far larger use of native military
talent, to the great advantage of the population, and to the
consolidation of the French hold on the country. The native troops
employed in the late Morocco campaign, especially the Tunisians, bore
themselves with the greatest credit.
In the Sahara special companies have been recently raised. They contain
a certain admixture of French troops:—24 officers and 123 men to 817
men. It would seem a special field for the raising of a force of natural
cavalry and camel-men.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_X—TIMGAD_
The Roman frontier—Lambessa—The Empire ruined by bad finance—African
Emperors—The plan of Timgad—Buildings, inscriptions, and mosaics—
Prosperity of Roman Africa—Local patriotism—The Roman tradition.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“As in those realms where Cæsars once bore sway,
Defaced by time and tottering to decay,
There in the ruin heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
GOLDSMITH.
East and west of Batna lay the Roman frontier line during the first two
centuries of the Empire. It was marked by a series of cities, partly
military, partly commercial; extensive ruins bespeak their ancient
importance. As elsewhere in Europe and North Africa the fall of the
Empire seldom meant the abandonment of the city sites; they continued to
be occupied by successive generations of men, even though, like Rome
herself, for a period they sank to insignificance. And their ruined
buildings, public and private, offered a convenient quarry to the
builders of subsequent ages. It results that we are scarcely able to
find an ancient city in which the original plan of house and street has
not been seriously interfered with. While, as in many English towns, the
main lines of the streets often follow the Roman thoroughfares, we have
seldom the opportunity of studying the scheme as a whole, although all
through Southern and Western Europe innumerable individual features
exist more or less well preserved.
We owe the existence of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the accident of their
overwhelming by ashes and lava from Vesuvius. The former has been laid
bare; the excavation of the latter, a much more serious matter, awaits
the day when the disposers of wealth, public or private, shall see fit
to undertake a work, which promises the greatest results. It happens by
a piece of exceptional good fortune that here, on the southern edge of
Barbary, Pompeii has a serious rival. The Roman city of Thamagudi, now
called Timgad, has since its destruction at the time of the Arab
invasion of A.D. 692 never been the habitation of man. To this cause
alone may its present condition be attributed. It has passed twelve
centuries in a great silence. Its ruined temples and baths have been the
haunt of the panther and the jackal. No neighbouring town despoiled its
stones, or ground its marbles to make mortar. Its columns lay prone, its
temples and houses were for the most part levelled with the ground; yet
a massive arch or two told through the centuries to the watcher from
afar that here once stood a Roman city.
[Illustration: A STREET AT TIMGAD]
The night of centuries is past; the long silence is broken; the jackals
have fled to their mountains; and a Latin race is tenderly safeguarding
its heritage. Once again a road leads to the portals of the ancient
city, and with infinite skill and care the debris has been cleared away.
Columns have been re-erected, masonry replaced in its original position
and fragments of inscriptions pieced together; a very triumph of that
vast capacity for taking pains which is such an important element of
French genius. One charm of the place to the visitor is that it is not
exploited as a tourist resort. A little museum has been set up to hold
the treasures found among the ruins, a modest hotel has been built, and
the neighbouring Arabs have been encouraged to hold a weekly market
outside the walls; but there is no turnstile to be passed, you are not
delivered over to a guide, no tout is permitted to worry you, and you
are free to pass to and fro, to go in and out as you list as long as you
don’t steal or deface anything. So for a contemplative mind every
possible attraction is conserved.
The Roman conquest and civilization—or rather assimilation—of North
Africa were slow, tentative and reluctant. Scipio Æmilianus burnt
Carthage in 146 B.C.; it was more than a hundred years later that Julius
Cæsar handed over Cirta to the soldiers of Sittius. Under Augustus a
camp was established at Theveste (Tebessa), and the Third Legion,
Augusta, was stationed there with the object of protecting the territory
of Cirta, and the proconsular province which is now Tunisia. Under the
shelter of this post, during the first century of our era, the great
corn lands enclosed by the Aurès mountains were gradually brought under
Roman control. The building of Thamagudi in the reign of Trajan, in the
year A.D. 100, is evidence of the importance to which this region had by
that time risen. This process continued during the next two centuries.
No doubt as the population of Italy declined, and her fertility
decreased, Rome came to rely more and more on the corn of Africa, and
more land was continually brought under cultivation. This is the
significance of such a city as Timgad, lying over 3000 feet above the
sea on a slope of the Aurès mountains.