So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Years go by after Borgia: The strange alphabet keeps its mystery and the mausoleum stands intact—how long?—in the space and ruins of ex-Thugga.

  3

  THE ARCHEOLOGIST LORD

  AT THE BEGINNING of the summer of 1832 in Algiers, the painter Delacroix, returning from a visit to Morocco, stops and spends three days painting at the home of a former raïs. On June 22 he departs once more, carrying in his sketches and in his memory the elements of the composition that several years later will become the masterpiece Women of Algiers in Their Apartment—a lighthouse on the outposts of the colonial darkness represented by Algerian history. Thus placed so suddenly and prominently on display for the public to see, the feminine Algeria will henceforth make itself invisible in its heart of darkness and iridescence for generations to come.

  Delacroix left at the end of June, and on July 5 a British lord, Sir Granville Temple, who is a fanatic about archeology, lands in Algiers. Accompanied by his wife, his sister, a couple of English friends, and a young French artist, whose job it is to draw views and landscapes, Lord Temple stays with the English consul, St. John, who had witnessed the capture of Algiers by the French.

  They launch into a fashionable social life “with the charming daughters of the duchess of Rovigo,” and they attend the very brilliant ball given by the governor on July 29 (at which the former bey of Médéa appears, dazzling the foreigners with his oriental elegance). Ecstatic over the beauty of the countryside, which he explores from Algiers to Bouzareah, Sir Temple also has time to visit the American consul, discover the city, and note the price of merchandise at the market of Algiers, as well the number of schools (twenty-six Koranic, three Christian, and eight Jewish).

  He leaves Algiers to return to the city of Bône, which, on March 28 of that same year, had been conquered by Colonel Yousouf. From there he sets off again by sea and has his presence announced to the English consul in Tunis when he arrives there on August 19.

  The consul, Sir Thomas Reade, greets Lord Granville Temple and his family and friends at their boat and accompanies them to La Goulette; from there he takes them to his property at La Marsa. But Granville is dying to do just one thing.

  The next morning I was going to walk on the site of great Carthage, he writes. It is the ultimate goal of his Excursions en Méditerranée, the collection that he will publish shortly after his return to London.

  In it he recounts how, after having visited Monastir, Mahdia, and Jem, he wants to travel farther into the interior but is kept in Tunis by the incessant rains of January 1833. Finally, on the first day of Ramadan, he sets out on his ride eastward, which will take him, in four days, to the site of Dougga.

  The next day at dawn Granville Temple begins to look around the area. He remarks that Doctor Shaw, who in the middle of the preceding century left a description of his travels in this region as well as in Algeria, never visited this city, although it must have been “remarkable and thriving with many beautiful buildings.” The first of these that he admires is a temple of Jupiter with a dedication allowing him to date it back to the reign of Hadrian.

  Lord Temple is drawn above all by how beautiful and well preserved the mausoleum standing in the center of an olive grove is. He notes its dimensions and describes the two stories and what remains of a third, the stepped foundations of the pyramid where a beautiful statue and other ornaments remain—one of them a quadriga with a warrior and a chariot driver. He also notes a statue of a draped woman, already damaged by bad weather.

  On the east face a double inscription catches his eye and he is fascinated by it: One of the scripts is Punic—he quickly recognizes it. The other has unknown letters, probably “some form of old African,” he says to himself. He supposes therefore that this mausoleum dates from the last years of Punic Carthage—shortly before its disappearance, in 146 B.C.E.—or after?

  He in turn copies down the double inscription and in all good faith believes himself the first foreigner to do so. In any event, when his account, Excursions en Méditerranée, appears in London in 1835, this version of the bilingual inscription will be reproduced by the scholar Gésénius. Learned researchers will follow him in attempting to decipher the mysterious writing: Honneger, Étienne Quatremère (who had already published work on Punic inscriptions), but also de Saulcy and A. C. Judas (a specialist in the study of the Libyan language).

  Lord Temple presses on with his journey into the regency of Tunis, where he takes notes both about the ancient past and its stones and about everyday life in the present. Before leaving the country he makes friends with a Dane, Falbe, who has lived near Tunis for eleven years and who has just published a topographical map of the ruins of Carthage.

  These two amateurs will meet up again in Paris in 1837 in an archeological association established by eighteen members of high society (among them a prince, a duke, two counts, but also the painter Chassériau) to undertake “digs at Carthage and other ancient cities in the regencies of Barbary.” Sir Temple and Falbe, because of their shared passion and their knowledge of the region, agree to go to the area themselves as volunteers in charge of directing the first excavations.

  Summer 1837: To make up for the stinging failure of the siege of Constantine the previous autumn, the French government is actively preparing its revenge against the Algerians with the son of the king, the duke de Nemours, as one of the leaders of this campaign.

  They decide on a military landing in Bône, attempting once again to take Constantine, where the bey Ahmed still rules.

  Following behind the French army, Sir Temple and Falbe meet in Bône in September, where General Valée has promised to help the two archeologists by creating a scientific commission. The two take advantage of the occasion by identifying the ruins of Hippone, and they hope soon to locate those of Cirta, once the city has been captured.

  Thus our two friends become witnesses, from an unexpected—apparently “scholarly”—perspective, to the siege and capture of Constantine in all its dramatic and murderous detail. Cirta, an eagle’s nest that only on rare occasions over the centuries had been made to submit!

  The siege begins 6 October 1837. It will be trying for both armies: Torrential rain falls without break until 12 October and Lord Temple is already dreaming a little less ardently of discovering the tomb of Masinissa! For six nights in succession it is the work of the engineer corps to move the artillery cannons, which sometimes tip over into the ravines despite all the efforts of sappers and zouaves. They flounder in the mud and the sticky earth clings to the feet of both men and horses.

  Everything is told from the point of view of those laying siege, sometimes in vividly realistic detail: “happy were the men who had tents!” to rest in, says the narrator with a sigh. In the cemeteries of Koudier Aly, soldiers break open the sides of tombs and “took out the remains of the dead so that they could lie down in their place.”

  On the morning of the twelfth, good weather returns. Making a tour of inspection on horseback to study the area with his telescope, Damremont, head of the command post, is struck down by a cannon. He dies on the spot and is followed in turn by General Perrégaux, also fatally shot.

  That very day the city is surrounded. The bey Ahmed, who thought it was impregnable (“nature has made it a second Gibraltar,” writes Lord Temple) had only provided for weak fortifications. On the evening of the two French generals’ death, the city is breached. On 13 October, at four in the morning, the attack is on, led by the Lamoricière’s column.

  Hand-to-hand combat, house by house, street by street, alley by alley; the battle is made even more relentless by the explosion of a munitions depot belonging to the resistants, many of whom are killed there. The defenders begin to withdraw into the Casbah. Lord Temple gives a rather brief account of one episode: the death of hundreds upon hundreds of the people of the city as they try to flee through the ravine of el-Medjerday. “They descend the precipice using ropes” that give way under the weight; “they are all dragged down onto each other as
they fall.” The next day, hundreds of bodies that have not been removed will be counted.

  At the end of the morning of the fourteenth (“the night of 13–14 October there is a total eclipse of the moon between nine in the evening and two in the morning,” adds the witness), the Casbah is taken: the tricolor flag floats over the city.

  During the night, thanks to this eclipse perhaps, the bey Ahmed and most of his cavalry are able to reach the nearby mountains. As for the survivors, the civilian population either unable to or not wishing to flee, almost sixteen thousand of them remain, holed up in their tile-roofed houses. They begin the experience of French occupation: provisions of wheat and barley are requisitioned from each home to fill the needs of the conquering army. The city dwellers huddle over their memory, their patios, the invisibility of their women.

  Gustave Flaubert, who will visit the city almost twenty years later—before heading east, like our archeologists, to Carthage—will have as his guide the grandson of the great Salah Bey (a legendary figure from the beginning of the century, a hero of the resistance, and martyred by the Turkish rulers). And now his descendent is a mere secretary of some French officer! Going down into the Rummel Gorge, the great writer recalls the fall of hundreds of unfortunate people attempting to flee—a scene from the past that was now the subject of a currently popular painting. At the bridge of el-Kantara, the great novelist muses over the wild scene: “this is a place that is both enchanting and satanic.” Flaubert concludes magnificently: “I think of Jugurtha; the place resembles him. Constantine, moreover, is a true city in the ancient sense.”

  Let us return to October 1837 and to our two friends, Sir Temple and Falbe, living in the captured city. Doctor Shaw’s English account in hand, they list the ancient monuments still in good repair twenty years earlier. Many have been demolished, but the underground cisterns are there; the fountain of Aïn el-Safsaf (“the poplar spring”) described by Leon the African at the beginning of the sixteenth century is still there, but without the hieroglyphic characters, no trace of which remains.

  In the Casbah, an old Byzantine church is almost intact. As for the famous bridge, when one enters through Bab el-Kantara, it is visible with its two rows of vaults and the “remarkable structure,” about which Edrisi had already exclaimed. Our two tourists resume their calculations, locating various sites, then Sir Temple admires a statue of a woman with two elephants that Shaw had drawn. With two hands she lifts up to her belt the cape that she is wrapped in; the dress underneath fits closely. She is nodding her head—the features of her face are erased—to one side: her braided hair is down to her shoulders. At her feet there are little elephants that have lost their trunks.

  The beautiful unknown woman in stone materializes: an immutable pagan idol, preserved because it was placed down low, set way down against the ravine. Although rage and death on the move spread out now above her head in these October days, the two foreigners, the Englishman and the Dane, have come only for the past. These men are only concerned with her, the unknown woman whose face has been eroded by the centuries, foreshadowing for them what if not destruction from now on?

  4

  DESTRUCTION

  THE DESTRUCTION OF Cirta’s freedom sounded the deathknell for Algerian independence, for any last bursts it made after 1830.

  The bey Ahmed, who took the resistance off into the Aurès Mountains, becomes the head of an underground movement and will hold on for ten years more. To the west the emir Abd el-Kader continues to wage war; he will not be conquered until nine years later.

  The year of Constantine’s fall, the son of Hamdane Khodja, an important dignitary from Algiers, is in Paris. His reaction to the news of the disaster is to write an account of a journey he made earlier with his father who had to cross Kabylia—still undefeated—to meet with the bey Ahmed. During the negotiations with the tribal chiefs that were necessary in order to gain anaia, that is, the host’s protection—the young Ali Effendi served as interpreter for his father in the Berber language.

  Ali ben Hamdane Khodja had his text translated into French, and printed, by the orientalist de Saulcy. The latter had known Hamdane Khodja, who spoke English and French fluently as well as Arabic and Turkish and had correspondents in several capitals of Europe. Hamdane Khodja tried in vain, after the surrender of the dey of Algiers, to save what could be saved, but rapidly became the leader of a peaceful opposition—a position that was hardly tenable. He was attacked for his wealth; he was pushed to the limit.

  He came to Paris, where he had plenty of friends who supported a French presence that would respect individual Algerian freedoms. He wrote a book, Le Miroir, in which he denounced the encroachments by French soldiers in Algiers, thus becoming the first essayist on the subject of this servitude now beginning.

  In 1836 he throws in the towel. Leaving his son in Paris and escorted by sixty friends and relations, he takes the road to Constantinople, where the sultan provides him with a pension. There he hopes to use Ottoman power to sway the politics of the Maghreb, not abandoning Ahmed Bey to his own forces alone. He corresponds with the latter in the name of the sultan, writing in code.

  After his defeat and the conquest of his city, Ahmed Bey, in a letter to the sultan demanded that cannons and four thousand soldiers be sent. Now here in Constantinople, faced with the unrest breaking out in the Tripolitaine, Ahmed Bey is expected to be named the pasha of Libya. But the Turkish powers go back and forth for a long time, despite the warnings of Hamdane Khodja: “The French,” he said, “are going to occupy Constantine; next they will infiltrate Tunis and Tripoli and carry their ambitions all the way into Egypt, I have no doubts. Tomorrow it will be too late!”

  The statue of the Constantine woman prefigured another destruction for Lord Temple and Falbe—in such a rush were they to get to the ruins of Carthage, there was so much to do in this year of 1837!

  Of course, ever since Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt, there had been treasure there, inexhaustible treasure, giving rise to trafficking, theft and irreparable loss: Ancient objects (including mummies and papyruses) are easily negotiable and enrich the intermediaries. Rivalries become intense among states and consular agents in Cairo.

  The consul general of England in Tunis, Thomas Reade, the same man who welcomed Lord Temple and his friends in 1833, sees by Temple’s second trip that there is increased interest in Carthaginian archeology. Knowing the extent to which his colleagues from every nation are rivals in this lucrative commerce in Egypt, he goes for the bilingual stele at Dougga. He decides to take it and sell it to the British Museum. He counts on getting at least fifteen hundred pounds for it.

  In 1842 he goes to Dougga and hires there a team of workers to pull down the monument and bring back the stele! He has probably obtained some authorization from an official of the bey’s government, it being a well-known fact that the bureaucracies of Muslim countries are more often than not indifferent to this remembering of antiquity … Reade has the entire façade bearing the engraved stele demolished, and the stele is sawed in two to make it easier to transport.

  The local workers hired on the spot lack the technical means to detach this stele carefully. The other blocks of stone stacked on each other should have been pulled away to get to the block on which the inscription fit. They throw down the top blocks by lifting them with heavy levers. Thus the bilingual stele carried off to Tunis leaves a field full of ruins behind it!

  A French visitor, Victor Guérin, who was there more than ten years later, described the scene: “In the jumbled heap I caught sight of the trunk of a statue of a winged woman (but with no head, arms or legs). On one of the remaining blocks a chariot pulled by four horses can be seen; the driver of it is mutilated, as is a second statue of a winged woman …”

  Earlier an Englishman, Nathan Davis, had even more fiercely denounced “the shameless demolition” resulting from “the avarice of Europeans driven only by money matters.” He, too, described this mausoleum broken apart “barbarously,” and calle
d his compatriot’s plundering a “crime.”

  In a sad irony he reports that the consul indeed sold the stele to the British Museum, but not for the fifteen hundred pounds he had counted on—for a mere five pounds!

  Time goes by and Tunisia is now a protectorate of French.

  The field of ruins, Punic as well as Roman, becomes an area reserved for French archeologists. One of them, C. L. Poinsot, attempts to reconstruct the cenotaph of Dougga, making use of the sketches made in 1765 by J. Bruce in his travels.

  Shortly after 1900 they begin the careful work of reconstructing the monument, making initial use of the stones still there, reconstituting the sculptures of the winged women, the quadriga, and the chariot driver. In 1910, with the exception of the bilingual inscription, which is still in London, the mausoleum is once again standing, almost intact, but stripped of its double writing.

  Fifty years later C. L. Poinsot will devote himself to studying the papers of Count Borgia, forgotten in Leyden. Reconstituting a portion of the stele’s secret, he will prove that at Dougga there were, in fact, two steles, and that the second—probably the most important—of these had been partially erased.

  Thus, even if the funerary monument has regained its hybrid—half Greek, half oriental—elegance, some mystery still seems to hang over Dougga, over the lapidary writing, the words in stone that were desecrated and carried off but also those words, victims of erosion, that have almost entirely vanished.

  5

  THE SECRET

  THE WRITING AT DOUGGA began to raise interesting questions starting with the scholar Gésénius, who outlines several conjectures after learning about it through the copy published in 1835 by Lord Temple. In Paris, de Saulcy does detailed research, then Honegger visits the site, but it is Célestin Judas, especially, who, during the years from 1846 through the 1860s, clarifies the meaning of the seven lines in Libyan and succeeds in listing the twenty-three characters of the alphabet.