In the Land of Mosques & Minarets

CHAPTER XVII

KABYLIE AND THE KABYLES

KABYLIE is a wild, strange land known to few and peopled by many, though indeed the population is mostly native. Colonization has not made great inroads into the mountains of Grande and Petite Kabylie. And though the tract is contiguous to Algiers itself, few stranger tourists know it as anything more than a name. Still less do they know its savage and undeveloped beauties.

The Algerian government has pushed a great “Route Nationale” through the heart of the mountains, and Tizi-Ouzou and Fort National have grown up into more or less important centres of European civilization; but in the main the aspect is as much Kabyle to-day as it was when this pure Berber race – the purest left in North Africa – first began to make its influence felt among the many tribes of the Mediterranean coast and the Sahara.

The mountain villages of Kabylie are not mere nests of huddled shacks, nor groups of tents, nor “lean-tos,” nor mud huts. They are of well-built houses, with sloping or flat stone roofs, and look like the little hamlets of the Pyrenees or the Cevennes in France, where the rude winters have taught men to build after a certain fashion in order to live comfortably. The Kabyles early learned the same way of doing things; for, in spite of the fact that the brilliant African sun sometimes burns, even in midwinter, with a fervour unknown elsewhere, the mountain-tops are snow-covered for three or four months of the year; and the roads over which the daily antediluvian mail-coach and diligence pass – with occasionally an intrepid automobilist – are often impassable for a week.

The railway does not penetrate this mountain fastness beyond Tizi-Ouzou, and though it skirts the sunny southern side of the woods, the snows of winter blocked it last year for forty-eight hours. And this in Africa! If the exterior of the Kabyle mountain villages do resemble those of other lands, their interiors have a style of furnishing and decoration all their own. Purely Kabyle, it is wonderfully decorative, simple, and effective. It is the artist’s ideal interior, as the illustration herewith shows. The decorative scheme is its all in all. There is little furniture, almost no bibelots, if one omits goat-skin rugs, blankets, and the homely pottery and copper domestic utensils.

From Fort National the route leads down to meet the trunk line at Beni-Mançour, and en route takes on even a wilder aspect than that by which one ascended from the seaboard plain around Algiers. The journey can be made readily in a day by hired carriage, or, better yet, in a few hours by automobile.

From either side extend mountain valleys and ravines, each of them giving place to a road of sorts, practicable to the mountain mule, but to nothing else, save a human being on foot. If one would do some real exploring, let him spend ten days in Kabylie. He will think he is in the “Forbidden Land” of Tibet so far as intercourse with the outside world is concerned.

Footprints of the naked feet of men and women, and of the cloven hoofs of animals, will be the only signs of life visible for hours at a time. Yet in spite of the fact that the land is so wild and dreary, it is the most thickly populated region of Northern Africa. The braying of donkeys, the voices of women, the cries of children, and the gutturals of the men give, if not a melody, at least a quaint and charming sound as one draws up on some hilltop Kabyle village. A flock of sheep bars the way, but an old woman with a stick pounds them hither and thither with head-cracking blows, and at last you arrive before the open door of a native café and bargain with a soft-faced brown Kabyle youth for a bourriquet to take you twenty kilometres farther on, where you may find a lodging for the night.

You must bargain, wherever you are, and for whatever you want, in Africa; even with the Kabyle. Once your bargain made, – three francs for a little donkey for a day, or five, including his owner for a guide, – you need have no fear. The Kabyle will hold to it like grim death. The Kabyle is a savage if you like, but his virtues are many.

The Kabyle villages abound in dogs. They may not be vicious dogs, but you don’t know whether they are or not, and accordingly are wary. The Kabyle dogs have all shades of pitch and gamut in their voices. There are tenors, baritones, and even sopranos, and an occasional bass. If a solitary example is met with on a by-road he is readily made to retreat with a shower of stones; but as he is liable to catch up with you later, accompanied by reinforcements, as you draw up on the village, you must ever be on the qui vive. No one ever heard of anybody but a sheep-stealer having been bitten by a Kabyle dog (which, by the way, looks like any other mongrel cur): but discretion here, as in many other tight corners, is the chief part of valour. “De l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace!” is a stimulating French slogan, but one is in doubt about putting it into practice with a grinning, long-fanged mongrel before him on a lone mountain road.

The Kabyles are one division of that great race of Berbers, the most ancient dwellers on African soil. They have kept the type comparatively pure by inhabiting this restricted area closely bordering upon the Atlas Mountains a dozen or twenty leagues from the sea. “They are,” says M. Jules Duval, “the principal types of the Berber race, and those who have best conserved their ancestral characteristics, and are perhaps the Numidians of old.” That is a pedigree worth owning up to. Brave and industrious, the Kabyles can fight as well as bargain, and they value patriotism and ancestral tradition above everything else.

Of all the Mussulman races, the Kabyles treat their women with the greatest deference, and even allow them to frequent public fêtes, faces uncovered, and to dance with the men, yatagan or gun in hand.

The Kabyle is successful in whatever occupation he follows, more so than any of his Mussulman brothers. As herders, farmers, armourers, blacksmiths, and masons, – at everything in fact that requires an aptitude and deftness of hand, – they excel.

When in straits the Kabyle will sell all his worldly goods, save his gun, without the slightest trace of emotion. Perhaps this is because his gun is the only thing on which he pays taxes and accordingly he knows its value.

It is said of the Kabyles that they eat their daughters. “Le père mange sa fille.” This comes from the custom which some of the Kabyle tribes have of bartering off the hand of their daughter to the most willing suitor at a price ranging from two hundred to a thousand francs. There’s nothing very wrong about this, seemingly, not according to African standards.

The Kabyle and his relatives in their little square house live the life of a truly happy family. He and his relatives and his live stock – except his camels, the odour from which is a little too strong for even Kabyle nostrils – all living together under the same roof. There is no more squalor about it, however, than one may see in the human and pig-inhabited huts of Connemara.

The Kabyle comes of a comparatively wealthy class, but his house furnishings are very meagre. Besides the animals before mentioned, he possesses only his batterie de cuisine, some great oil jars and earthenware pots for the storing away of olives, butter and honey. He also has a storehouse for grain, where he keeps his wheat or maize flour, which he or the members of his family have themselves ground between the traditional upper and nether millstones, which in this case are portable ones.

Such is a brief inventory of the dwellings and the round of life of the Kabyles of the mountain villages, founded by their ancestors hundreds and perhaps thousands of years ago. Some of their race have got the wandering foot, and live in the pastoral black and brown striped tent like the real nomads; but these are comparatively few in number. The real, Simon-pure Kabyle is a house-dweller.

The Kabyle mountain settlements are often mere hamlets called dehera, and in these the village schoolmaster, besides having his own duties, also performs the functions of priest of the temple. He is literally the imam of the mosque, and carries out according to his faith the monotonous repetition of the words of the Koran when not otherwise engaged. Every Kabyle village has its temples of knowledge and of religion, just as sure as it has a headsman or Sheik. The mosque is naturally the most notable edifice of the settlement; but is seldom splendid or pretentious, and often it serves as a hostelry as well as a place of worship. But only for the faithful – not for dogs of infidels.

Though the Kabyles in general are not tent-dwellers, but live in houses of stone or brick construction, these edifices exhibit no particular architectural characteristics; but are as much like the dwellings of the Pueblos as they are like those of the Thibetans. To all intents and purposes the towns and settlements and, in a measure, all Kabyle houses, are fortresses. This is an effect which is heightened by the almost universal employment of substitutes for the crenelated battlement and meurtrières or loopholes, cut in the walls in place of windows, so distinctive of European feudal architecture.

Just by way of contrast to the virtues of the Kabyles, it is bound to be recorded that they are the dirtiest lot that one finds in Africa; and inasmuch as this is contrary to the tenets of the Mussulman religion it is the more to be remarked. Up to within a few years, according to the head of a French mission which surveyed the Kabyle country, there was but one public bath establishment to be found in all their native towns and villages. The result is that hereditary affections are transmitted from generation to generation, and were it not for the efficacy of the open-air cure the Kabyles would be a considerably less long-lived race than they are.

The Kabyles live well at all events, and their couscous is renowned throughout all Algeria. Their preserved figs and ripe and unripe olives are of the first quality and bring the highest prices in the markets of Algiers, Bougie or Beni-Mançour. The Kabyle is no longer a savage, though he does stick closely to many traditions, and eats his couscous out of a great dish of beechwood fashioned by hand from a cross-section cut from a tree-trunk. The mere fact that he eats it from a plate at all, instead of from a pot, indicates, however, an approaching degree of civilization.

The Kabyle is primarily a tiller of the soil and a herder of goats and sheep. And when education was thrust upon him, or rather upon his children, by a progressive French government, he resented it. He had cut out an illiterate career for his progeny; he didn’t care if they weren’t educated, nor did they.

He explained it all to the writer in a Moorish café one afternoon, in a patois something like the following, – it’s a queer thing, Arab-French, but it’s as good as that of most foreigners nevertheless.

“Si li Beylick fasir, fic toutes lis enfants dis mitres d’icole, qu’ist-ce qui travaljar la tirre … qu’ist-ce qui gardi lis chèvres, lis motons, lis vaches?” Who indeed will guard his goats and sheep if the children all go to school! The old man probably will have to work himself.

The new generation is changing, but the old-school Kabyle is as conservative as a “down-east farmer,” a “Yorkshireman,” or a “bon Provençeau.”

The Kabyles are the Piedmontese or Auvergnats of Algeria. An indigenous race which has resisted better than any other the march of progress. They have, too, certain other foreign characteristics. One wonders how they got them. They practise the vendetta, like the Corsican; they have the landesgemeinde, as in certain of the Swiss cantons; and they have cock-fights like the Spaniards. They are a very curious race of people, but they are becoming enlightened, and rank among the most loyal towards the new French government of all the tribes of Algeria.

The Kabyle has fought for France, and fought well. The first zouaves were Kabyles, – the name comes from Zouaoua, a Kabyle tribe. General Clauzel enrolled a company of them in 1831, and taught them what, he was pleased at the time to think, was civilized warfare. Doubtless it was, as civilized as any warfare, which is not saying much for it. This new type of soldier, the zouave, has endured to this day in France and elsewhere, and a very practical, businesslike soldier he has proved.

The Kabyle women jingle with bijoux and scintillate with yards of ribbons and flying draperies, and a strong scented perfume emanates from them with an odour of sanctity, almost, so strange and exotic is it. They know the difficult art of elegance – these mountain women of Kabylie – better than their more fashionable sisters. Not all the science of the couturière or the modiste can give a tithe of the grace borne naturally by these half-savage Kabyle beauties. The Jewesses of Algiers and Tunis have a certain, if crude, voluptuous elegance, which is an adulteration of civilization and savagery; but the Kabyle woman, beneath her draperies and her bijoux, expresses something quite different. Cleopatra might well have been one of them. Their natural graces and their bijoux are the details which set off their charms so splendidly. The cross-breeding of the Berber with the Arab has no doubt debased the race somewhat. This is mostly among the men and the women who dwell in the towns.

Apparently these Kabyle women are not coquettes, though they smile, always, with their pearly teeth, rouge-red lips, and flashing eyes, bespeaking the sensuality of a land and its customs entirely foreign to European civilization. Of beauty they have little according to other standards, although their features are not crude or unlovely. Rather is theirs the beauty of a high-bred animal, or the sculptured bronze ideal replica of a race. They are types of a species and are delightful to look upon, alike in face and figure.

The Kabyle jewelry is something to be coveted by every woman. It can be bought – even in the bazaars and souks of Algiers and Tunis – at its weight for old silver. But the buying of it is an art, and one must beware of not getting dross or something made in Birmingham or Solingen. The genuine old stone or coral-set enamelled Kabyle bracelets and necklaces are becoming rarer, and the imitation ones more and more common. Still, in any aspect, the designs are beautiful, and far and away ahead of the aberrations of mind which produce the art-nouveau jewelery of Bond Street or of the Rue de la Paix. Sometimes instead of silver a substitute of dull, unburnished white metal, – pewter most probably, – is used in the settings of these bizarre ornaments, and even then the effect is charming.

The Kabyles have ever been fond of coral, which, from the earliest times, they gathered from the sea, cutting and polishing the fragments as if they were precious stones. Coral is fast disappearing from the African coast, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, wherever the Italians have exploited the commerce, and the rosy, translucent branches of old are now more often replaced with the inferior dead coral of a yellowish white or even reddish brown colour. Unless indeed celluloid imitations are not used instead.

Sea shells, too, enter into the make-up of the adornments of the Kabyle woman.

The metal work, be it gold, silver, or pewter and antimony, is invariably hand-forged, with the loving marks of the hammer still visible. This rough crudity is its charm, for the intrinsic value as a rule is not great. It looks high at fifty francs (a collaret of three or four bands strung together on a silver wire, with a clasp the size of a half-dollar), but when, by the classic process of Arab or Berber bargaining, you get the same thing for ten francs, it is really très bon marché.

Grande and Petite Kabylie, the Kabylie du Djurjura and the Kabylie des Babors, is not thickly strewn with Frenchified towns and cities. On the coast there are Dellys, an incipient seaport. Bougie, the ancient Saldae, where a colony of veterans was established by the great Augustus, but now a growing seaport with half of its fifteen thousand population French. Djidjelli, a hundred kilometres east of Bougie by a wonderful coast road, was the ancient colony of Igilgili of Augustus. Collo is an Italianized fishing village; Beni-Mançour, a flourishing small town to-day, but formerly a simple bordj or halting-place on the main caravan route from east to west; and Setif, the chef lieu, contains a mixed population of 15,000, of which a quarter part are Europeans and 1,600 Jews.

These commercial centres, and a half a dozen smaller places, are the only points where the traveller by road or rail will find any approach to European comforts in all Kabylie, excepting at Tizi-Ouzou and Fort National on the branch road from Beni-Mançour to Bougie.

Tizi-Ouzou is the centre of a Kabyle population which figures out a hundred and ten souls to the square kilometre. Its name signifies “Col des Genets,” and it occupies the site of an old bordj or rest-house of former days.

Four hours of diligence – which costs four francs – carries one from Tizi-Ouzou to Fort National, at any time of the year between April and December; at other times the pass of Tirourda may be snow-covered, and you may become stalled for hours or even days. Fort National, in the heart of Grande Kabylie, is a grim, modern fortress, perched on the highest peak of the Algerian mountain range paralleling the coast. It is only interesting from a grim picturesque point of view. The citadel crowns a height a thousand metres above sea-level, and from its terrace unfolds a remarkable panorama of mountain-tops and valleys: “Incipient mountain chains stretching out in all directions like the arms of an octopus,” a Frenchman described these topographical features, and if you know what an octopus looks like you will be struck by the simile. Fort National is the best centre from which to make excursions into Kabylie, but you must come here in the spring or autumn for the purpose, not in winter or summer.

Bougie is off the beaten track. To get there one must break his journey going from Algiers to Biskra, Constantine or Tunis at Beni-Mançour. Bougie is a coast town, and one of the terminals of the steamship lines from Marseilles. Because tourists go and come via Algiers, or via Algiers and Tunis or vice versa, Bougie is not known of all travellers in North Africa. This is where they make a mistake. Bougie is the most splendidly situated of all the African Mediterranean ports. Its points of view and panoramas are ready-made for the artists to jot them down in crude paint on dull canvas – if they can. The most one can do is to try. And Bougie, its glistening white-walled houses, its shore-line, its sky-line, and its background of cliff are motifs which will fascinate all who view it, whether for the first or last time.

All the same Bougie has little enough of interest for the conventional tourist. The native quarter is not remarkable, the mosque is a modern affair, though on good old lines, and the native market, if curious, does not equal those of Blida, Boufarik, or Constantine.

It is the site of Bougie, and its environs, that make its charms. If its hotels were not poor patterns of those of the pompous prefectures in France it would really be a delightful seaside resort.

There are some Roman ruins of the days of Augustus still remaining, some fragmentary fortifications, and some great cistern vaults. Bougie’s past was historic, for it was one day the capital of an independent state. The Spaniards came and destroyed its independence through the wiles of Pedro Navarro, who built Algiers’ Peñon. Charles V sojourned here for a time, basking under African skies, in 1541. That is all of Bougie’s romance.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONSTANTINE AND THE GORGE DU RUMMEL

CONSTANTINE is one of the natural citadels of the world. Hitherto we had only known it by name, and that chiefly by the contemplation of Vernet’s “Siége de Constantine,” in that artistic graveyard, the Musée de Versailles.

The bizarre splendour of the site now occupied by the bustling Algerian metropolis of Constantine struck us very forcibly as we rolled over its great gorge just at sundown on a ruddy autumn evening. It is all grandly theatrical, but it is very real nevertheless. A great deal more real than one would believe as he viewed that hodge-podge painting of Vernet’s.

The town sits high on a ravine-surrounded peak of bare rock, and were it to undergo a siege to-day, not even modern war-engines could reduce it till the dwellers had been starved out.

The original settlement was very ancient long before the Romans of the time of Scipio, who gave it its present name. Romans, Arabs, Vandals, and Turks all held it in turn until General Valée came in 1836 and drove the latter out by strategy. Not by siege, as the painter has tried to make us believe.

The great rock of Constantine is only attached to the surrounding country by a slim neck of land. Below lies the Rummel, still cutting its bed deeper and deeper each year, until now a very cañon is gouged out of the city’s rock foundation. The only communication between the city and the surrounding plateau is by the Bridge of El Kantara, spectacularly picturesque, though not artistically beautiful, the successor of an old Roman bridge on the same site.

Any who have marvelled at the Bridge of Ronda in Spain, and at the natural rock-bound fortress to which it leads, will observe its similarity to Constantine. Its rocky walls are impregnable, though not untakable. Nothing but a continuous dynamite performance could blow up Constantine; to accomplish it would be to blow up a mountain. Nevertheless, the French captured the Mohammedan fortress at the time of the occupation – albeit at a great expenditure of time and loss of men.

Centuries earlier than this, in Roman days, Sallust, governor of the province under Cæsar, was a property owner here, and fortified the city that it might best protect his interests. With what success is seen by the fact that, though the fortress was besieged and taken eighty times, its garrison was always starved out; it was never blown up or battered down.

The first glimpse of Constantine is confusing. It is difficult to separate its component parts; its historic picturesqueness from its matter-of-fact hurly-burly of commercial affairs. The houses seen from the railway appear commonplace and uninteresting, only saved from sheer ugliness by their remarkable situation. The great gorge of the Rummel flows beneath the ugly iron bridge, – the successor of that more splendid work of the Romans, – and ugly trams, omnibuses, and carts rumble along where one pictures troops of camels and parti-coloured Arabs. Arabs there are at Constantine, of all shades, and Turks and Jews, of all sects, and when one is actually settled down in his hotel and starts out on a wandering, with the intention of focussing all these things into some definite impression, they begin to grow upon him, and Constantine begins to take rank with the liveliest of his imaginings and memories. Constantine is a wonder, there is no doubt about that; but one must become acquainted with it intimately in order to love it. Constantine’s streets are running rivers of as mixed a crew of humanity as one may see out of Cairo, Constantinople, or Port Saïd. Tunis is its nearest approach in the Moghreb.

The main artery of the Arab town is the Rue Perrégaux. Here are the Moorish cafés, the mosques, the shops of the sweetmeat sellers, the vegetable dealers, the embroiderers, and the jewellers. The Cirta of Jugurtha has become the Constantine of to-day, but its mediævalism still lives in spite of the contrast of a gaudy opera house, a bank, and an “hôtel-de-ville.” The native quarter keeps well to itself, however; and modern improvements do not encroach upon its picturesque primitiveness as they do at Algiers.

Beside its site and its bridge, Constantine’s monuments are not many or great. The chief one is the Mosque of Salah Bey, with its marble decorations chiselled out by the hand of the slave of an olden time. The cathedral of to-day is built up out of a transformed mosque, but shows, undefiled, its ancient Mauresque arcades and faïences. On the broidered mihrab, with inscriptions from the Koran woven in the woof, some well-meaning Christian has added a bleeding heart. Is this treating the original Mussulman owner right? It seems enough to make a Christian church out of a Mohammedan mosque, without trying to incorporate two opposing religious symbols in a mural decoration.