by Grant Allen
And now, before passing once for all through the storied portal of the Mediterranean, it remains to bestow at least a passing glance upon the other column which guards the entrance. Over against us, as we stand on Europa Point and look seaward, looms, some ten or a dozen miles away, the Punta de Africa, the African Pillar of Hercules, the headland behind which lies Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast. Of a truth, one’s first thought is that the great doorway of the inland sea has monstrously unequal jambs. Except that the Punta de Africa is exactly opposite the Rock of Gibraltar, and that it is the last eminence on the southern side of the Straits — the point at which the African coast turns suddenly due southward, and all is open sea — it would have been little likely to have caught the eye of an explorer, or to have forced itself upon the notice of the geographer. Such as it is, however, it must stand for the African Pillar of Hercules, unless that demi-god is to content himself with only one. It is not imposing to approach as we make our way directly across the Straits from Gibraltar, or down and along them from Algeciras towards it: a smooth, rounded hill, surmounted by a fort with the Spanish flag floating above it, and walled on the sea side, so little can its defenders trust to the very slight natural difficulties offered even by its most difficult approach. Such is Ceuta in the distance, and it is little, if at all, more impressive on a closer inspection. Its name is said to come from Sebta, a corruption of Septem, and to have been given it because of the seven hills on which it is built. Probably the seven hills would be difficult to find and count, or with a more liberal interpretation of the word, it might very likely be as easy to find fourteen.
Ceuta, like almost every other town or citadel on this battle-ground of Europe and Africa, has played its part in the secular struggle between Christendom and Islam. It is more than four centuries and a half since it was first wrested from the Moors by King John of Portugal, and in the hands of that State it remained for another two hundred years, when in 1640, it was annexed to the Crown of Castille. King John’s acquisition of the place, however, was unfortunate for his family. He returned home, leaving the princes of Portugal in command of his new possession; which, after the repulse of an attempt on the part of the Moors to recapture it, he proceeded to strengthen with new fortifications and an increased garrison. Dying in 1428, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, who undertook an expedition against Tangier, which turned out so unluckily that the Portuguese had to buy their retreat from Africa by a promise to restore Ceuta, the king’s son, Don Ferdinand, being left in the hands of the Moors as a hostage for its delivery. In spite of this, however, the King and Council refused on their return home to carry out their undertaking; and though preparations were made for recovering the unfortunate hostage, the death of Edward prevented the project from being carried out, and Prince Ferdinand remained a prisoner for several years. Ceuta was never surrendered, and passing, as has been said, in the seventeenth century from the possession of Portugal into that of Spain, it now forms one of the four or five vantage-points held by Spain on the coast of Africa and in its vicinity. Surveyed from the neighboring heights, the citadel, with the town stretching away along the neck of land at its foot, looks like anything but a powerful stronghold, and against any less effete and decaying race than the Moors who surround it, it might not possibly prove very easy to defend. Its garrison, however, is strong, whatever its forts may be, and as a basis of military operations, it proved to be of some value to Spain in her expedition against Morocco thirty years ago. In times of peace it is used by the Spaniards as a convict station.
The internal attractions of Ceuta to a visitor are not considerable. There are Roman remains in the neighborhood of the citadel, and the walls of the town, with the massive archways of its gates, are well worthy of remark. Its main feature of interest, however, is, and always will be, that rock of many names which it thrusts forth into the Straits, to form, with its brother column across the water, the gateway between the Eastern and the Western World. We have already looked upon it in the distance from El Hacho, the signal tower on the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar. Abyla, “the mountain of God,” it was styled by the Phœnicians; Gibel Mo-osa, the hill of Musa, was its name among the Moors; it is the Cabo de Bullones of the Spaniard, and the Apes’ Hill of the Englishman. It may be well seen, though dwarfed a little by proximity, from its neighboring waters; a curious sight, if only for its strange contrast with the European Pillar that we have left behind. It is shaped like a miniature Peak of Teneriffe, with a pointed apex sloping away on either side down high-shouldered ridges towards its companion hills, and presenting a lined and furrowed face to the sea. It is its situation, as has been noted already, and not its conformation, which procured it its ancient name. But however earned, its mythical title, with all the halo of poetry and romance that the immortal myths of Hellas have shed around every spot which they have reached, remains to it for ever. And here we take our farewell look of the Pillars of Hercules to right and left, and borne onwards amidstream by the rushing current of the Straits, we pass from the modern into the ancient world.
II. ALGIERS
“A Pearl set in Emeralds” — Two distinct towns, one ancient, one modern — The Great Mosque — A Mohammedan religious festival — Oriental life in perfection — The road to Mustapha Supérieur — A true Moorish villa described — Women praying to a sacred tree — Excessive rainfall.
“Algiers,” says the Arab poet, with genuine Oriental love of precious stones in literature, “is a pearl set in emeralds.” And even in these degenerate days of Frank supremacy in Islam, the old Moorish town still gleams white in the sun against a deep background of green hillside, a true pearl among emeralds. For it is a great mistake to imagine North Africa, as untravelled folk suppose, a dry and desert country of arid rocky mountains. The whole strip of laughing coast which has the Atlas for its backbone may rank, on the contrary, as about the dampest, greenest, and most luxuriant region of the Mediterranean system. The home of the Barbary corsairs is a land of high mountains, deep glens, great gorges; a land of vast pine forests and thick, verdant undergrowth. A thousand rills tumble headlong down its rich ravines; a thousand rivers flow fast through its fertile valleys. For wild flowers Algeria is probably unequaled in the whole world; its general aspect in many ways recalls on a smaller scale the less snow-clad parts of eastern Switzerland.
When you approach the old pirate-nest from the sea, the first glimpse of the African coast that greets your expectant eye is a long, serrated chain of great sun-smitten mountains away inland and southward. As the steamer nears the land, you begin, after a while, to distinguish the snowy ridge of the glorious Djurjura, which is the Bernese Oberland of Algeria, a huge block of rearing peaks, their summits thick-covered by the virgin snow that feeds in spring a score of leaping torrents. By-and-by, with still nearer approach, a wide bay discloses itself, and a little range of green hills in the foreground detaches itself by degrees from the darker mass of the Atlas looming large in the distance behind. This little range is the Sahel, an outlier just separated from the main chain in the rear by the once marshy plain of the Metidja, now converted by drainage and scientific agriculture into the most fertile lowland region of all North Africa.
Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in s
tyle, square, flat-roofed boxes; all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible to insert a pin’s head between them. From within, to him that enters, sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of streets or rows on the general coup d’œil from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in picturesqueness. A spacious port has been constructed, with massive mole and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do honor to Marseilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers. Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways en plein Orient. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs, Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; muffled women in loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped straight out of the “Arabian Nights,” chaffer for centimes at the shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous; all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every instance the old mosques and palaces. The principal square, a broad place lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie. Hard by stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within doors its old Mohammedan mimbar and many curious remains of quaint Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Græco-Roman antiques is oddly installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure white marble are unsurpassed in the Moslem world for their quaintness, their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars. Decoration there is none; the mosque depends for effect entirely on its architectural features and its noble proportions. But the long perspective of these endless aisles, opening out to right and left perpetually as you proceed, strikes the imagination of the beholder with a solemn sense of vastness and mystery. As you pick your way, shoeless, among the loose mats on the floor, through those empty long corridors, between those buttress-like pillars, the soul shrinks within you, awe-struck. The very absence of images or shrines, the simplicity and severity, gives one the true Semitic religious thrill. No gauds or gewgaws here. You feel at once you are in the unseen presence of the Infinite and the Incomprehensible.
The very first time I went into the Great Mosque happened, by good luck, to be the day of a Mohammedan religious festival. Rows and rows of Arabs in white robes filled up the interspaces of the columns, and rose and fell with one accord at certain points of the service. From the dim depths by the niche that looks towards Mecca a voice of some unseen ministrant droned slowly forth loud Arabic prayers or long verses from the Koran. At some invisible signal, now and again, the vast throng of worshippers, all ranged in straight lines at even distances between the endless pillars, prostrated themselves automatically on their faces before Allah, and wailed aloud as if in conscious confession of their own utter unworthiness. The effect was extraordinary, electrical, contagious. No religious service I have ever seen elsewhere seemed to me to possess such a profundity of earnest humiliation, as of man before the actual presence of his Maker. It appeared to one like a chapter of Nehemiah come true again in our epoch. We few intrusive Westerns, standing awe-struck by the door, slunk away, all abashed, from this scene of deep abasement. We had no right to thrust ourselves upon the devotions of these intense Orientals. We felt ourselves out of place. We had put off our shoes, for the place we stood upon was holy ground. But we slunk back to the porch, and put them on again in silence. Outside, we emerged upon the nineteenth century and the world. Yet even so, we had walked some way down the Place de la Régence, among the chattering negro pedlers, before one of us dared to exchange a single word with the other.
If the new town of Algiers is interesting, however, the old town is unique, indescribable, incomprehensible. No map could reproduce it; no clue could unravel it. It climbs and clambers by tortuous lanes and steep staircases up the sheer side of a high hill to the old fortress of the Deys that crowns the summit. Not one gleam of sunshine ever penetrates down those narrow slits between the houses, where two people can just pass abreast, brushing their elbows against the walls, and treading with their feet in the poached filth of the gutter. The dirt that chokes the sides is to the dirt of Italy as the dirt of Italy is to the dirt of Whitechapel. And yet so quaint, so picturesque, so interesting is it all, that even delicate ladies, with the fear of typhoid fever for ever before their eyes, cannot refuse themselves the tremulous joy of visiting it and exploring it over and over again; nay, more, of standing to bargain for old brass-work or Algerian embroidery with keen Arab shopkeepers in its sunless labyrinths. Except the Mooskee at Cairo, indeed, I know no place yet left where you can see Oriental life in perfection as well as the old town of Algiers. For are there not tramways nowadays even in the streets of Damascus? Has not a railway station penetrated the charmed heart of Stamboul? The Frank has done his worst for the lower town of his own building, but the upper town still remains as picturesque, as mysterious, and as insanitary as ever. No Pasteur could clean out those Augean stables.
In those malodorous little alleys, where every prospect pleases and every scent is vile, nobody really walks; veiled figures glide softly as if to inaudible music; ladies, muffled up to their eyes, use those solitary features with great effect upon the casual passer-by; old Moors, in stately robes, emerge with stealthy tread from half-unseen doorways; boys clad in a single shirt sit and play pitch-and-toss for pence on dark steps. Everything reeks impartially of dirt and of mystery. All is gloom and shade. You could believe anything on earth of that darkling old town. There all Oriental fancies might easily come true, all fables might revive, all dead history might repeat itself.
These two incongruous worlds, the ancient and the modern town, form the two great divisions of Algiers as the latter-day tourist from our cold North knows it. The one is antique, lazy, sleepy, unprogressive; the other is bustling, new-world, busy, noisy, commercial. But there is yet a third Algiers that lies well without the wall, the Algiers of the stranger and of the winter resident. Hither Mr. Cook conducts his eager neophytes; hither the Swiss innkeeper summons his cosmopolitan guests. It reaches its culminating point about three miles from the town, on the heights of Mustapha Supérieur, where charming villas spread thick over the sunlit hills, and where the Western visitor can enjoy the North African air without any unpleasant addition of fine old
crusted Moorish perfumes.
The road to Mustapha Supérieur lies through the Bab-Azzoun gate, and passes first along a wide street thronged with Arabs and Kabyles from the country and the mountains. This is the great market road of Algiers, the main artery of supplies, a broad thoroughfare lined with fondouks or caravanserais, where the weary camel from the desert deposits his bales of dates, and where black faces of Saharan negroes smile out upon the curious stranger from dense draping folds of some dirty burnouse. The cafés are filled with every variety of Moslem, Jew, Turk, and infidel. Nowhere else will you see to better advantage the wonderful variety of races and costumes that distinguishes Algiers above most other cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities. The dark M’zabite from the oases, arrayed like Joseph in a coat of many colors, stands chatting at his own door with the pale-faced melancholy Berber of the Aurès mountains. The fat and dusky Moor, over-fed on kous-kous, jostles cheek by jowl with the fair Jewess in her Paisley shawl and quaint native head-gear. Mahonnais Spaniards from the Balearic Isles, girt round their waists with red scarves, talk gaily to French missionary priests in violet bands and black cassocks. Old Arabs on white donkeys amble with grave dignity down the center of the broad street, where chasseurs in uniform and spahis in crimson cloaks keep them company on fiery steeds from the Government stud at Blidah. All is noise and bustle, hurry, scurry, and worry, the ant-hill life of an English bazaar grotesquely superimposed on the movement and stir of a great European city.