In the Land of Mosques & Minarets

CHAPTER XX

BISKRA AND THE DESERT BEYOND

Biskra, tout le monde descend! ouf! It might be Jersey City or Chicago; one experiences at last that sense of having reached a journey’s end. At least it will seem so to most who come to the desert’s edge by train from Constantine or Algiers, after two days of as rocky, uncomfortable railway travelling as one can imagine in these progressive days.

Biskra is commonly reputed the ideal of a desert oasis, but indeed as an oasis it is no more delightful than that at El Kantara. Not every one will find his “Garden of Allah” at Biskra. Biskra is by no means all things to all men. Leaving out the silly sentiment, which has been propagated by a school of writers who take themselves too seriously, there is nothing at Biskra which is not better elsewhere.

It is truly, though, a typical desert oasis, and the town which has grown up around it is but the natural outcome of trade following the flag, for Biskra is the commercial and military gateway to the Sud-Constantinois.

Biskra is not without its distinctive character. Its native life, its market, and its Moorish coffee-house, are all typical; but in a way they have become contaminated with the influx from the outside world and much of their colour has paled.

One of the curses Biskra bestows upon the stranger within her gates is that of an innumerable and importunate crew of guides, – of all colours and shades, of all grades of intelligence, and of all degrees of proficiency in French. The guides of Biskra wear turbans, coifs, and fezes. They look as though they belonged to every Mohammedan tribe of the universe. Those who wear bowler hats are harder to place; one rather suspects that they are Jews.

“Get a guide to keep off the other guides,” is the best advice one can give the stranger to Biskra. What makes this state of affairs? Too much exploitation, and too many lavish and foolish English and Americans. In this respect Biskra is not as bad as Cairo, but it is getting that way.

Biskra’s attractions for the visitor are many of them artificial. There are the great hotels, with their “halls,” “smoking-rooms,” “reading-rooms,” and “bars,” and the incipient

Casino with its music and “distractions;” and there is the Café Glacier with its cool drinks at Paris prices. Everything at Biskra is good in quality, but lacking character. One hotel stands out above all others for excellence and distinctive features. It is the Hôtel des Ziban. It has a distinctive clientèle, made up largely of personages such as the officers of the garrison, a great Sheik or Caïd of a southern tribe, a grim, taciturn individual with a dozen decorations on his breast, a government official, a minister, perhaps, and so on. And of course tourists as well, for tourists are everywhere at Biskra, even in the Rue Sainte, where they ought not to be, – at least not after dark.

Biskra’s chief tourist “sights,” after the palm-tree oases of old Biskra and the Jardin Landon, are the Moorish cafés, and the naylettes, or Ouled-Naïl dancers, of the Rue Sainte. One need not affect this sort of thing if he doesn’t want to; but, aside from playing bridge in the hotel parlours, or drinking beer in the Café Glacier and listing to “la musique” of “les artistes Parisiennes,” there is not much else to do at night except doze in the hotel smoking-room or salon, with scores of other fat old ladies and gentlemen.

The café maure or Moorish coffee-shop of North Africa has no distinct form of architecture. It may be a transformed shop in the European quarter; the vestibule of a Moorish habitation, or of a mosque; a stone or mud hut by the roadside overhung by a great waving banana plant or palm; or it may be a striped lean-to tent. The interior fittings vary also. In the towns the oven is built up of blue and yellow tiles, and the pots and cups are kept on a great slab of marble or tile. By the roadside there are the cups and a tin or copper pot; but the supplies are invariably kept in an unsoldered five-gallon kerosene can. These come out from Philadelphia by the hundreds of thousands, and find their way to all the corners of the earth. The Japanese and the Chinese use them to roof their huts with; the Singapore boatmen to carry their water-supply; and the Arab as cooking utensils, and very useful they are. They are a by-product and cost nothing, except to the Standard Oil Company, the original shippers.

The Moorish cafés of Biskra are as typical of their class as any seen in the towns, even though they are tourist “sights.”

The whole establishment is gaudy and crude, with its plastered walls, its rough, unpainted furnishings, its seats and benches all smoke-coloured, as if they were centuries old, – though probably they are not. In the rear, always in plain view, is the oudjak, the vaulted oven or heater, where the thick, syrupy coffee is brewed and kept hot. The chief notes of colour are the little wine-glasses, the cups, the water-bottles, the tiled backgrounds, and the head-gear of the habitués, and the parrot – always a parrot, in his crudely built cage. The establishments of Biskra are typical cafés maures, and might well be on the edge or middle of the desert itself, instead of in a very Frenchified Algerian city of eight thousand inhabitants.

Here are congregated all that queer mélange of North African peoples: nomads and Arabs of the desert; half-bred, blue-eyed men of the coast; the delicately featured Kabyles; Moroccans; some Spahis; a negro or two, black as night; and even Makhazni from the interior, who are at home wherever their horse and saddle may be. All these and more – the whole gamut of the cosmopolitan population of the Mediterranean – are here.

In the Moorish cafés and the “Black Tents” alike, Makhazni and Spahis play the Spanish “ronda” or dominoes with all the devotion of lovers of sedentary amusements elsewhere.

The Spahi and the negro will play together all day and half the night, shuffling the cards and juggling the dominoes, and only a savage grunt, or cry, periodically breaks their silence. Their emotions are mostly expressed by indeterminable, leery grins.

Night falls, and one street alone in Biskra retains the activities and life of the daytime. It is the street of cafés, where, behind closed doors, dance the Ouleds-Naïls for the delectation of the Arab, the profit of the patron, and for the curious from overseas to speculate upon.

The performance of the Moorish cafés of Biskra, Constantine, and Tunis are amusing and instructive, if not edifying, no doubt. But those who expect the conventional “musical evening” will be disappointed. Painted sequin-bedecked women depend more upon their physical charms to appeal to the Arab bourgeoisie and the Zouaves, Spahis and Turcos, who mostly make up their audiences, than to the rhythm of the accompanying orchestra, which many a time is drowned out by the free and easy uproar.

The music of the indigènes may be soothing, but one must be an indigène to feel that way about it. There is nothing very soothing to the Anglo-Saxon about the incessant beating of a tambourine, or the prolonged shrill squeak of a reed pipe, the combination made hideous by the persistent whining of the renegade desert Arab who “bosses the job,” the only occupation at which he can work while sitting down and drinking coffee for twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. His profits must all go for coffee. A hundred cups a day and as many more in a night does not seem to jaundice his eye or dull his energies, such as they are. Coffee and tobacco – of any old kind – will keep an Arab musician going, whereas a Spaniard with a guitar, an Italian with a mandolin, or a German with a trombone, would want some solid food and alcoholic refreshment as well. From this one gathers that the Arab is temperate; and he is in most things, except coffee, cigarettes, and music.

If one is a serious, thorough, vagabond traveller, and would study the Ouled-Naïls and their histories, all well and good; there’s something in it. But if one goes to prowling around Biskra’s Rue Sainte merely for adventure, he is liable to get it, and of a costly kind, and he will learn nothing about the Ouled-Naïls from an ethnological point of view. The sentimental writers have drawn altogether too sentimental a picture of this plague-spot. In truth the Ouled-Naïls are a race of girls and women quite apart from those other Algerian tribes. They come to Biskra, to Constantine, and to Algiers, and live the lives of other free-and-easy women of the world. They dance in the Moorish cafés for the delectation of Arabs, Turks, and strangers, and they carry on a considerably less moral traffic as well, gaining sous, francs, and louis meanwhile. When she has enough golden sequins to link together in a kind of a cuirasse, which hangs from her velvet brown neck down over her chest in an amulet half a yard square, the Ouled-Naïl danseuse retires from business. She goes back to her tribe in the southwest, becomes virtuous, makes some Arab sheep-herder or camel-trader happy, and raises a family, the girls of which in time go through the same proceedings. The game is an hereditary one, and it is played desperately and, apparently, with less ill effects than one would suppose. For the women are accredited as living moral lives ever after, – once they get back to their homes. It is the contact with civilization, or semicivilization, which does them harm.

The Casino at Biskra offers as one of its attractions the sight of these dancing women of the Ouled-Naïls without the necessity of contaminating oneself by going down into their quarter and seeing the real thing. The contamination is just as great in the gilded halls of the Casino as in some dingy, smoky café maure, but the local colour is wanting.

The excursions to be made from Biskra are not as many, nor so enjoyable, as those from El Kantara. The round of Old Biskra and its villages is readily made on foot or by carriages; and one may even continue farther afield to the sandy, wavy dunes of the desert, and to the “Fontaine Chaude,” or to the Shrine of Sidi-Okba, twenty kilometres out over the camel trail of the open desert. This excursion to Sidi-Okba is classic.

Sidi-Okba sits in the midst of a fine oasis of some seventy thousand date-growing palms. It is a miserable, unlovely enough little village, but the memory of the Arab conqueror, Okba-ben-Nofi, has made it famous.

“You will find nothing to eat at Sidi-Okba,” say the guide-books. “You must carry your provisions.” It all depends on what you want to eat. If it is simple refreshment only, you will find it here at Sidi-Okba – the tomb of the founder of Kairouan – in a veritable guinguette such as one sees in suburban Paris, with arbours, trellised vines, and glittering coloured balls of glass suspended from the trees. It is a little bit of transplanted France, dull, tawdry, and uninteresting enough. But still, there it is, – a café-restaurant sitting tight in a little Arab village, before the tomb of the great Sidi-Okba, which attracts pilgrims all through the year from among the Mussulman population of all North Africa. The mosque, where repose the sainted man’s remains, is the most ancient monument of Islam in Algeria.

The tomb, the mosque, the Medersa, or Arab school, and the afore-mentioned guinguette, are all there are at Sidi-Okba; but it should be omitted from no man’s, or woman’s, itinerary in these parts.

Back again over the same route one gains Biskra after a hard day’s round en voiture, or on the back of a donkey, or a mulet, as he chooses. The only things you see en route are an occasional solitary gourbi; a mud hut or two; or perhaps a simple tomb or kouba rising away in the distance, – a white silhouette against a background of yellow sand and blue sky.

These little punctuating notes dot the landscape all through Tunisia and Algeria. Frequently you will find scattered about the kouba numerous detached tombs, still distinguishable, though half buried in the sand. These detached shrines and cemeteries, often half submerged in great waves of sand, are met with on the outskirts of nearly all Algerian towns and cities; and one is no more surprised at coming upon one beside the road than he is at the sight of a kilometre stone.

Southwest from Biskra is the region of the Ziban, a zone of steppes, planted here and there with verdant oases.

Topographically the features of the Ziban are mountainous, though ranges of the Zab slope and taper off imperceptibly into the dunes of the desert.

The inhabitants of the Ziban are of a race differing considerably from the Kabyle and the Arab, favouring the former more than the latter. The plaited hair of the women, their general barbaric love of jewelry and personal adornment, their complexion, their chains, bracelets, and collarettes all point to the fact that they are an immigrant race, the development of a stock originally brought from afar, and not descended from the desert nomad.

Throughout Algeria the nomad Arab is he who comes from the Sahara and its closer confines during the summer, returning with his herds in the winter to the desert, or to the great tents of his father’s tribe. The Arab peasant, or labourer, is a native of the Tell region, and is manifestly not of the same purity of type as the desert Arab who speaks the pure idiom of the Koran. The Kabyle is another race apart. The distinctive characteristics of the three peoples are easily recognized when you are once familiar with them.

Bordering upon the Monts du Zab (the Ziban) are the Monts des Ouled-Naïls, the home of the curiously distinct tribe before mentioned, who are more like degenerate Kabyles than they are like the desert Arab tribes.

Still farther in the southwest is a sad, gloomy land, half desert and half mountain, not wholly Saharan, and yet not wholly Algerian, either in topographical characteristics or in the characteristics of its people. It is the region of the M’zabs, wild savage children of an uncivilized land, fanatically religious and veritable débauchés, – which the Berber tribes are not. Their houses are poor, but their purses are well lined, and, since France has taken over Algeria, they are also French, though they might be Martians for all they resemble the French.

“It takes five Arabs to get the best of an Algerian Jew,” says a proverb of the Sud, “and five Jews to master a M’zabite.” In origin the people are supposed to be a mixture of the ancient Phœnicians and Numidians. Members of the tribe swarm all over Algeria, and are found even in Marseilles, as ambulant merchants, but they invariably return to their native land, for, it seems, it is a tenet of their religion not to remain away more than two years.

Among them are four orthodox sects of Mussulmans, and still another peculiar to themselves, whose chief characteristic seems to consist of interminable praying; whereas the conventional Mohammedan is contented with exhorting his God five times a day.

Their towns rank as veritable holy cities in their creed, with Ghardaïa as the capital. The satellite villes saintes are Melika, Ben-Izguen, Bou Noura, El Ateuf, Beryan, and Guerrara. In all their population numbers between thirty and forty thousand.

The general aspect of the land is one of melancholy, because of the numbers of their burial-grounds, three or four surrounding each town. The cemeteries are “places of prayer” with the M’zabites, and their population of weeping, wailing, praying faithful is always numerically greater than the dead. When the M’zabite is not selling something he is praying.

Quite the most varied ethnographic and topographic changes to be observed in North Africa are those south of Biskra, within the limits of El Kantara on the north and Oued-Souf in the south.

The religious tribes and sects are numerous, each having its own supplementary creeds and customs; the Ziban differing from those of the Ramaya, the Zogga, the Sidi-Okba, and the Oued B’hir. Still other oases passed en route have their zaouyas or brotherhoods of professing coreligionists, not differing greatly from each other in general principles, but still possessed of variants as wide apart as the Methodists and Universalists of the Christian world.

Throughout all this region the marabouts, or holy men, are most hospitable, and are as appreciative of little attentions – gifts of chocolate, of candles, or even matches – as could possibly be imagined. In many cases they are veritable hermits, whose only intercourse with the outside world is with passing strangers, – who are few.

CHAPTER XXI

IN THE WAKE OF THE ROMAN

THE path of the Roman through North Africa was widely strewn with civic and military monuments as grand as any of the same class elsewhere in the Western Empire.

One comes to associate the ancient Roman with Gaul, and is no longer surprised when he contemplates the wonderful arenas of Arles and Nîmes or the arch and the theatre at Orange. Pompeii and Herculaneum are classic memories of our school-time days, and we think it nothing strange that their ruins exist to-day. When, however, we view the vast expanse of vertical marbles at Timgad in Algeria’s plateau of the Tell, the Prætorium at Lambessa, the great Roman Arch at Tebessa, the amphitheatre at Djemel, or the ruined portal of Dougga, it all comes so suddenly upon us that we wonder what nature of a hodge-podge dream we are living in.

The effect is further heightened when one sees a caravan of camels, horses, and donkeys, and its accompanying men and women of the desert, camped beside some noble Roman arch or tomb standing alone above the desert plain. It is not alone, of course. There are other neighbouring remains buried round about, or there are still fragments that serve some neighbouring settlement as a quarry from which to draw blocks of stone to build anew, as did the builders of certain Italian cathedrals draw some of their finest marbles from the ruins of old Carthage.

All North Africa is very rich in Roman ruins, and the Arabs are as interested in these antique remains as are the whitest, longest-bearded archæologists that ever lived. It is not their love of antiquity that accounts for this, but the possibility of getting information which will lead to treasure. Most of these North African Roman ruins were despoiled of all articles of value by the ancestors of the present Arabs long before the antiquarians took it into their heads to exploit them; but the traditional game still goes on.

The Arab of Algeria to-day still looks forward to the time when he may yet discover a vast buried treasure. Perhaps he may! Who knows? Tradition and legend all but definitely locate many buried hoards which have not yet been touched, and any grotto or cavern miraculously or accidentally discovered may prove a veritable gold mine. The Arab thinks that this is as sure to happen to him as for the clock to strike twelve on the eve of the Jour des Rameaux. And that he will tumble on all fours into the midst of a cavern paved and walled with gold, pearls, and precious stones.

From Tlemcen on the west (the ancient Pomaria of the Romans, and an important Roman camp) to Tozeur in the Sud-Tunisien (the site of the still more ancient Thusuros) is one long, though more or less loosely connected, chain of relics of the Roman occupation.

At Cherchell are vestiges of an antique Roman port; at Tipaza various civic monuments; and not far distant the enigmatic “Tombeau de la Chrétienne.” On the coast, to the east of Algiers, is Stora, a port of antiquity, and Bona (the ancient Hippo-Regius), where the tourist to-day divides his attentions between the commonplace basilica erected to Saint Augustin, who was bishop of Hippo-Regius in the fourth century, and the tomb of the Marabout Sidi-Brahmin, with the balance of appeal in favour of the latter simple shrine. Modern Christian architecture often descends to base, unfeeling garishness, whereas the savage simplicity of the exotic races often produces something on similar lines, but in a great deal better taste. Here is where the onyx and marble basilica at Bona, albeit one of Christendom’s great shrines, loses by comparison with the simple kouba of the Mohammedan holy man.

On the route from Bona to Hippo-Regius (to-day Hippone) is a restored Roman bridge, so restored indeed that it has lost all semblance of antiquity, but still it is there to marvel at.

“Bône la belle!” the French fondly call the antique city. Bona of to-day is beautiful as modern cities go, but it is so modern with its quais, its promenades, its esplanade, and its pompous Hôtel de l’Orient, that one loves it for nothing but its past. The Kasba, the military headquarters on the edge of the town by the shore, piles up skyward in imposing fortress-fashion and is the chief architecturally interesting monument of the town itself.

Eastward from Bona, eighty kilometres or so along the coast, is La Calle, another port of antiquity, the Tunizia of the Romans, and one of the old French trading-posts on the Barbary coast. There are few ancient remains at La Calle to-day, but it is one of the most interesting of all the Algerian coast towns all the same.

La Calle would be worthy of exploitation as a tourist resort if one could only get to it comfortably as it lies half hidden just to the westward of the Bastion de France and hemmed in on the south by the Khoumir region. The road from Bona to La Calle is the worst in Algeria, and the light railway is very poor. La Calle has become the centre of the world’s coral fishery since the Italians have worked out their own beds. Out of about 5,000 Europeans, La Calle has quite half of its population made up of sunny Neapolitans and Sicilians, whose chief delight is to dive into deep water and bring up coral, or dig a cutting for a canal or railway. Wherever there is a job of this kind on hand, the Italian is the man to do it.