Part 10

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.

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_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.

It is a little difficult to analyse the charm of Biskra. The charm is great and the attraction strong. They do not lie altogether in the brilliance of its sunshine, in the shade of its palms, in the richness of its colouring, in the exuberance of its life. These things we may meet elsewhere. Biskra has other qualities; it is barbaric, African to the core, tropical in its intensity.

Biskra is barbaric. To one entering by rail or road its trim streets and squares, and housing himself in a hostelry which might be anywhere within the bounds of the civilized world, this is a hard saying. Yet he may soon perceive that its veneer is very thin and understand that it is very transitory. A hot wind from the desert in April, and it is gone, and the real Biskra will reassert itself. But even during the months of the incursion of the _hiverneurs_, the barbaric note is never absent; to the ear that listens it is predominant; it rings more shrill by force of contrast. The troops of snarling camels, with their loads from the Great Beyond, the clash of African musicless music, the thronging crowds of jostling races in its markets, the hooded figures crouched motionless round its cafés, the bedizened native harlotry which stalks unashamed,— nay, proudly as mistress of the town,—in its streets; all are there to mark its essential savagery. A few hours ago in the upper lands behind the desert gateway we breathed the chill atmosphere of Europe; at Biskra we have passed the bounds; sun and sky and earth and man and outrageous woman combine to tell us that at last we have entered Africa.

It may be that therein lies Biskra’s attraction to the jaded European. It is all a little unnatural from the European point of view. There is a sense of walking on the slopes of a volcano, or of playing with fire; and if we may believe our novelists, European nature under its influence tends to eccentric and eruptive manifestations. Yet its frequenters exhibit little outward sign of disturbance. German tourists, arrayed indeed as if about to combat a Touareg onslaught, yet read novels peacefully in the pleasant seclusion of the hotel garden; the Kodak fiend stalks his prey; the traffic in post cards goes merrily along; but we cannot escape an uneasy feeling that this nonchalance is a cloak. Perhaps the novelists have got on our nerves.

Biskra consists of a modern French town and garrison, and several more or less distinct native villages grouped together on a large oasis, a strip of cultivated ground between three or four miles in length, with an average width of half a mile. It contains an immense number of palm trees, the chief source of wealth in the great Sahara. There is abundant water from springs, and during winter from the river, which conveys the snows of Aurès to the desert, and is finally lost some miles further to the south. It has a swarming native population, of every North African race, and every hue. There is obviously a very great infusion of negro blood; no doubt because Biskra is situate on a highway of the nations, at a point where the caravan routes from the extreme south reach the mountain lands of Barbary. These natives of various races are collected in great numbers in the morning market, and throng the neighbouring cafés throughout the day, where squatting figures play interminable games of dominoes and backgammon. Conspicuous in the crowd are the dancing girls of the Ouled Naïl tribe dressed in tawdry finery, hung with barbaric jewellery and masses of gold and silver coins, their hair mixed with wool and plastered with grease, their faces tattooed and darkened with _khol_ and _henna_. These women delight their patrons with their _danses à ventre_ in the Cafés Maures at night, and later sit— waiting and watching—on little balconies in the street which is assigned to them. Many attempts have been made by French and English writers to shed a halo of romance over these unfortunate beings. The whitewashing of the harlot is a common literary pose. The story that they come to the desert towns to earn their dower and subsequently return to their own tribe and marry may have some foundation; such a procedure is not unknown in other parts of the world; but to judge from the appearance of some of them they are a long time thinking about settling down.

It may, at any rate, be said of these girls that they are not a mere “exploitation of local colour,” got up for the benefit of the tourist. They are a genuine native product, flourishing no less in the oases of the Sahara seldom visited by Europeans than under the shadow of the hotels of Biskra. Their _danses_ excite their native admirers to great enthusiasm, they often provoke furious jealousies, and are sometimes the object of extraordinary prodigality. Some of them appear to affect an air _très grande dame_. “Celles des Ouled-Naïl qui sont de grande tente apportent dans leurs relations avec leurs visiteurs toute la générosité et la délicatesse que comporte leur origine. Il suffit d’admirer une seconde l’épais tapis qui sert de lit pour que le serviteur de la noble prostituée apporte à son amant d’une minute, dès qu’il a regagné sa demeure, l’objet qui l’avait frappé.”[8]

Footnote 8:

Guy de Maupassant, “Au Soleil.”

Biskra may be compared with a Nile town such as Luxor, if one can imagine Luxor without the river, without the temples, and, it must be added, without the flies. But it is a desert town, the town of an oasis, born of springs of water rising in a dry place, and it revels in the desert sun and sky. It is most pleasant when the sky is cloudless and the air still. But its beauty is greater when a moderate wind is blowing and light clouds are passing. Then are glorious deep blue shadows thrown on scarred cliffs of the tawny Aurès range. The tower of the Royal Hotel is a vantage point from which to view Biskra and its landscape. Thence you may note the extent of the oasis, the belts of palm trees in the distance which mark the existence of other oases, and miles to the south the dunes of shifting sand which to the imagination of most of us represent the real Sahara. Especially beautiful is the scene at sunset. The changing lights on the mountains, the ruddy glow all around, the peculiar quality of transparency in the sky when the sun has set, and perhaps Venus appears and hangs like a lamp between earth and heaven,— only in the desert may we behold these last glories of departing day. The shady, bird-haunted garden of this hotel is a very haven of shelter when the desert wind blows strong and raises the light dust of Biskra in the street without. It is surrounded on all sides by the hotel buildings built in the spacious Oriental manner with corridors opening to the garden and pleasant balconies above.

Biskra of the tourists, _urbs circumcurrentium_, is in a fair way to rechristen itself Hichenstown. The novelist and his not very edifying story pervade the place; they are thrust at you everywhere with damnable iteration. And the worst of it is that however mawkish the book it has undeniable power, and if you are unfortunate enough to have read it you will be unable to avoid recognizing at every turn the scenes in which the much-longing-to-be-loved heroine and her uncouth lover played their parts. You will probably not have been in the town many hours, perhaps not many minutes, before a guide will accost you and produce with much dignity a visiting-card of Mr. Hichens, on which something is written. If you express neither interest nor emotion he will regard you with a mixture of incredulity and pity. What are you here for but to worship at the shrine of the marabout Hichens? Hichens has made—or marred—Biskra, and Biskra is not unmindful. There is little or nothing to guide you to in Biskra, wherefore is it full of guides. They are an ever-present nuisance. The easier course is to engage one, he will at least keep off the others; if you have more grit you may set out to prove yourself unguidable; every guide’s hand will be against you at first, but you will reap your reward. You will have no difficulty in hiring a guide when you really want one, and he will respect you the more. The Arab is no mean judge in such matters. The authorities have endeavoured to mitigate the nuisance by licensing certain men to act as guides; but they have not altogether suppressed the unauthorized, and the licensed merely give themselves additional airs. Silly sentimental visitors have aggravated matters, and have, moreover, turned many of the boys and girls into impudent beggars. Books have actually been written embodying the views on life and religion of these petted striplings; their remarkable inaccuracies in serious matters suggest that the youth of Biskra is not averse from “pulling the legs” of its amiable patrons. It is all rather sad. But the debasing effect of the inconsiderate tourist is not peculiar to Biskra.