Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article.

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

A fact need not be a fixed fact to be a very positive one; and Kabylia, a region to whose outline no geographer could give precision, has long existed as the most uncomfortable reality in colonial France. Irreconcilable Kabylia, hovering as a sort of thunderous cloudland among the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, is respected for a capacity it has of rolling out storms of desperate warriors. These troops disgust and confound the French by making every hut and house a fortress: like the clansmen of Roderick Dhu, they lurk behind the bushes, animating each tree or shrub with a preposterous gun charged with a badly-moulded bullet. The Kabyle, when excited to battle, goes to his death as carelessly as to his breakfast: his saint or marabout has promised him an immediate heaven, without the critical formality of a judgment-day. He fights with more than feudal faithfulness and with undiverted tenacity. He is in his nature unconquerable. So that the French, though they have riddled this thunder-cloud of a Kabylia with their shot, seamed it through and through with military roads, and established a beautiful fort national right in the middle of it, on the plateau of Souk-el-Arba, possess it to-day about as thoroughly as we Americans might possess a desirable thunder-storm which should be observed hanging over Washington, and which we should annex by means of electrical communications transpiercing it in every direction, and a resident governor fixed at the centre in a balloon. France has gorged Kabylia, with the rest of Algeria, but she has never digested it.

A trip through Algeria, such as we now propose, belongs, as a pleasure-excursion, only to the present age. In the last it was made involuntarily. Only sixty years ago the English spinster or spectacled lady's-companion, as she crossed over from the mouth of the Tagus to the mouth of the Tiber, or from Marseilles to Naples, looked out for capture by "the Algerines" as quite a reasonable eventuality. (Who can forget Toepfer's mad etchings for Bachelor Butterfly, of which this little episode forms the incident?) Her respectable mind was filled with speculations as to how many servants "a dey's lady" was furnished with, and what was the amount of her pin-money. A stout, sound-winded Christian gentleman, without vices and kind in fetters, sold much cheaper than a lady, being worth thirty pounds, or only about one-tenth the value of Uncle Tom.

The opening up of Algeria to the modern tourist and Murray's guide-books is in fact due to the American nation. So late as 1815 the Americans, along with the other trading nations, were actually paying to the dey his preposterous tribute for exemption from piratical seizure. In this year, however, we changed our mind and sent Decatur over. On the 28th of June he made his appearance at Algiers, having picked up and disposed of some Algerine craft, the frigate Mashouda and the brig Estido. The Algerines gave up all discussion with a messenger so positive in his manners, and in two days Decatur introduced our consul-general Shaler, who attended to the release of American captives and the positive stoppage of tribute.

The example was followed by other nations. Lord Exmouth bombarded Algiers in 1816, and reduced most of it to ashes. In 1827 the dey opened war with France by hitting the French consul with his fan. Charles X. retorted upon the fan with thirty thousand troops and a fleet. The fort of Algiers was exploded by the last survivor of its garrison, a negro of the deserts, who rushed down with a torch into the powder-cellar. Algeria collapsed. The dey went to Naples, the janizaries went to Turkey, and Algeria became French.

From this time the country became more or less open, according as France could keep it quiet, to the inroads of that modern beast of ravin, the tourist. The Kabyle calls the tourist Roumi (Christian), a form, evidently, of our word Roman, and referable to the times when the bishop of Hippo and such as he identified the Christian with the Romanist in the Moorish mind.

Modern Algiers, viewed from the sea, wears upon its luminous walls small trace of its long history of blood. As we contemplate its mosques and houses flashing their white profiles into the sky, it is impossible not to muse upon the contrast between its radiant and picturesque aspect and its veritable character as the accomplice of every crime and every baseness known to the Oriental mind. To see that sunny city basking between its green hills, you would hardly think of it as the abode of bandits; yet two powerful tribes still exist, now living in huts which crown the heights of Boudjareah overlooking the sea, who formerly furnished the boldest of the pitiless corsairs. To the iron hooks of the Bab (or gate) of Azoun were hung by the loins our Christian brothers who would not accept the Koran; at the Bab-el-Oued, the Arab rebels, not confounded even in their deaths with the dogs of Christians, were beheaded by the yataghan; and in the blue depths we sail over, whose foam washes the bases of the temples, hapless women have sunk for ever, tied in a leather bag between a cat and a serpent.

The history, in truth, is the history--always a cruel one--of an overridden nation compelled to bear a part in the wickedness of its oppressors. This rubric of blood may be read in many a dismal page. Algeria was a slave before England was Christian. The greatest African known to the Church, Augustine, has left a pathetic description of the conquest of his country by the Vandals in the fifth century: it was attended with horrible atrocities, the enemy leaving the slain in unburied heaps, so as to drive out the garrisons by pestilence. When Spain overthrew the Moors she took the coast-cities of Morocco and Algeria. Afterward, when Aruch Barbarossa, the "Friend of the Sea," had seized the Algerian strongholds as a prize for the Turks, and his system of piracy was devastating the Mediterranean, Spain with other countries suffered, and we have a vivid picture of an Algerine bagnio and bagnio-keeper from the pen of the illustrious prisoner Cervantes. "Our spirits failed" (he writes) "in witnessing the unheard-of cruelties that Hassan exercised. Every day were new punishments, accompanied with cries of cursing and vengeance. Almost daily a captive was thrown upon the hooks, impaled or deprived of sight, and that without any other motive than to gratify the thirst of human blood natural to this monster, and which inspired even the executioners with horror."

While our fancy traces the figure of the author of Don Quixote, a plotting captive, behind the walls of Algiers, the steamer is withdrawing, and the view of the city becomes more beautiful at every turn of the paddles. We pass through a whole squadron of fishing-boats, hovering on their long lateen sails, and seeming like butterflies balanced upon the waves, which are blue as the petal of the iris. Algiers gradually becomes a mere impression of light. The details have been effaced little by little, and melted into a general hue of gold and warmth: the windowless houses and the walls extending in terraces confuse interchangeably their blank masses. The dark green hills of Boudjareah and Mustapha seem to have opened their sombre flanks to disclose a marble-quarry: the city, piled up with pale and blocklike forms, appears to sink into the mountains again as the boat retires, although the picturesque buildings of the Casbah, cropping out upon the summit, linger long in sight, like rocks of lime. As we pass Cape Matifou we see rising over its shoulder the summits of the Atlas range, among whose peaks we hope to be in a fortnight, after passing Bona, Philippeville and Constantina.

Sailing along this coast of the Mediterranean resembles an excursion on one of the Swiss lakes. Four hours after passing Algiers, in going eastwardly toward the port of Philippeville, we come in sight of Dellys, a little town of poor appearance, where the hussars of France first learned the peculiarities of Kabyle fighting. This warfare was something novel. In place of the old gusty sweeps of cavaliers on horseback, falling on the French battalions or glancing around them in whirlwinds, the soldiers had to extirpate the Kabyles hidden in the houses. It was not fighting--it was ferreting. Each house in Dellys was a fort which had to be taken by siege. Each garden concealed behind its palings the "flower" of Kabyle chivalry, only to be uprooted by the bayonet. The women fought with fury.

We follow our course along these exquisite blue waters, and soon have a glimpse, at three miles distance, of an isolated, abrupt cone, trimmed at the summit into the proportions of a pyramid. It is the hill of Gouraya, an enormous mass of granite which lifts its scarped summit over the port of Bougie, called Salda by Strabo. We approach and watch the enormous rock seeming to grow taller and taller as we nestle beneath it in the beautiful harbor. Bougie lies on a narrow and stony beach in the embrace of the mountain, white and coquettish, spreading up the rocky wall as far as it can, and looking aloft to the protecting summit two thousand feet above it. We abstain from dismounting, but sweep the city with field-glasses from the deck of the ship, recollecting that Bougie was bombarded in the reign of the Merrie Monarch by Sir Edward Spragg. We trace the ravine of Sidi-Touati, which breaks the town in half as it splits its way into the sea. Here, in 1836, the French commandant, Salomon de Mussis, was treacherously shot while at a friendly conference with the sheikh Amzian, the pretext being the murder of a marabout by the French sentinels. The incident is worth mentioning, because it brought into light some of the nobler traits of Kabyle character. The sheikh, for killing a guest with whom he had just taken coffee, was reproached by the natives as "the man who murdered with one hand and took gifts with the other," and was forced by mere popular contempt from his sheikhship, to perish in utter obscurity.

Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly, with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab found within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old towns in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman schoolboy, showing an aquarius (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ordinarily enclose the Eastern home or protect the Arab's wife behind their blinded windows.