In the Land of Mosques & Minarets

CHAPTER XXIV

THE GLORY THAT ONCE WAS CARTHAGE

CARTHAGE, redolent of the memories of Dido, of Æneas, of Hannibal, of Cato, of Scipio, and a thousand other classic souvenirs of history, is the chief sight for tourists in the neighbourhood of Tunis. All we have learned to expect is there, deformed ruins and relics of a grandeur long since past. The aqueduct which plays so grand a rôle in the opera of “Salambo” is there, but it is manifestly Roman and not Punic. Thus did Flaubert nod, as indeed did Homer before him.

Carthage, as Carthage is to-day, is not much. It is but a vast, conglomerate mass of fragmentary ruins, a circus whose outlines can scarcely be traced, a very much ruined amphitheatre, various ground-plans of great villas of other days, the cisterns of the Romans, some Punic tombs, and the two ports of Carthage around which history, romance and legend have woven many tales. The rest is modern, the great basilica of St. Louis, the palaces of the Bey, and the princes of his family, the villas of the foreign consuls, the seminary of the White Fathers and a hotel or two. That is Carthage to-day.

Thus the history and romance of a past day must supply the motive for the visitors’ emotions, for there is little else save the magnificent site and the knowledge that one is treading historic ground. The tract might well have been made a sort of national park, and kept inviolate; but it has been given over to the land exploiter like Tottenham Park and South New York, and the overflow from Tunis is already preëmpting choice plots.

Through the gates of the Venice of Antiquity, all the wealth of the East was brought to be stored in the warehouses of the ports of Carthage, but to-day all this is only an historic memory. The palaces and warehouses have disappeared, and the two mud-puddle “ports” have silted up into circular pools which glisten in the African sunlight like mirrors of antiquity, – which is exactly what they are.

Carthage, or what is left of it, is a dozen or fifteen kilometres from Tunis, by a puffing little steam-tram (to be supplanted some day by an electric railway, which will be even less in keeping).

One gets off at La Malga, and, in a round of half a dozen kilometres “does” Carthage, Sidi-bou-Saïd, and La Marsa in the conventional manner in half a day. If he, or she, is an artist or an archæologist, he, or she, spends a day, a week, or a month, and then will have cause to return if opportunity offers.

According to tradition the Tyrians founded Carthage in 813 B.C., being conducted thither by Elissa, a progressive young woman, the sister of Pygmalion. Cart-hadchat was its original name, which the Romans evolved into Carthago, signifying “the new city,” that is to say, probably, the “New Tyre.” Owing to its proximity to Sicily, to all the vast wealth of Africa, and the undeveloped and unexplored shores of the Western Mediterranean, Carthage was bound to prosper. As Tyre fell into decadence, and the Greeks menaced the Phœnicians in the East, Carthage came to its own very rapidly, not by a mushroom growth, as with new-made cities of to-day, but still rapidly for its epoch.

The riches of the people of Carthage became immense, every one prospered, and its merchants trafficked with the Soudan and sailed the seas to Britain, while Hanno, the Carthaginian admiral, first discovered and explored the full extent of the West African Atlantic coast.

In the first Punic war Carthage disputed the ownership of Sicily with Rome, but without success; though indeed she was able to hold the gateway of the Western Mediterranean, and thus remain mistress of the trade with the outside world.

With the second Punic war Carthage lost further prestige, and her military and maritime strength was reduced to such an extent that her hitherto vast African Empire was restricted to the city itself and a closely bounding suburban area.

Even then Carthage ranked as the richest city in the world, with a population of 700,000 souls. In the year 146 B.C. the Romans rose again and gave Carthage a sweeping knock-out blow so far as its independence went.

Cæsar and Augustus came, and the city, peopled anew, was restored to something resembling its former magnificent lines and made the capital of the Roman African Province. A commercial city, wealthy, luxurious, gay, and cultivated, it became, next to Rome, the first Latin city of the Occident.

Christianity was introduced in the early centuries, and through the gateway of Carthage was spread over all North Africa. Religious partisanship was as rife and violent here as elsewhere, and Tertullian tells how, in the great circus amphitheatre, whose scantly outlined ruins are still to be seen as one leaves the railway at La Malga, Saint Perpétua and her companions were put to death by ferocious beasts, and how, in 258 A.D., Saint Cyprien, who was bishop at the time, was martyred.

The Vandals captured the city in 439 A.D., and the Byzantine powers under Justinian’s general, Belisarius, got it all back again in 533 A.D., though they held it but a hundred and sixty years. The city finally succumbed, in the seventh century, to Hassan-ben-Nomane, who destroyed it completely. How completely this destruction was one may judge by a contemplation of the ruins to-day. The Tunisians and the Italians have used the site as a quarry for centuries, and Pisa’s cathedral was constructed in no small part from marbles and stone from glorious Carthage.

Dido, Hannibal, and Salambo have passed away, and with them the glory of Carthage. To-day tourists come and go, the “White Fathers” exploit their vineyards, and the promoters sell land in this new subdivision to the profit, the great profit – of some one.

The Punic remains at Carthage, the tombs and other minor constructions, are of course few (the Musée Lavigerie on the height now guarding all the discoveries of value). But the fragments of the great civic buildings of the Romans are everywhere scattered about.

These ruins cannot even be detailed here, and the plan herewith will serve as a much better guide than a mere perfunctory catalogue.

Various erudite historical accounts and guide-books have been written concerning this historic ground; shorter works, of more interest to the tourist, can be had in the Tunis book-shops.

The discoveries of the last ten years on the site of the ancient Carthage have been many and momentous. They are of intense interest, revealing a people who possessed a far higher development than had been supposed, and who were, contrary to the general belief in modern times, something more than mere traffickers and merchants, and who evolved an art of their own, a unique and fascinating blend of the ideals of the Semitic and the Greek.

Our knowledge of the Phœnicians is still shadowy and fragmentary; but the work conducted by the “White Fathers” of Carthage, under the direction of Père Delattre, has provided at least a foundation for further researches and comparisons, which no doubt will soon be undertaken.

The recent discoveries of Carthage may well be described as fascinating. Take for example the sarcophagus of a Phœnician priestess unearthed in 1902. It is believed that she lived in the third century B.C. The coloured marble sarcophagus is of the best period of Greek workmanship. A Greek carved this tomb, no doubt, but in the representation of the priestess we have a figure of a type unlike any Greek art known, – a type of beauty delightfully strange, a countenance of a noble loveliness and charm.

A sympathetic French archéologue puts it in the following words:

“The brilliancy of colour and strangeness of attire, far from detracting from the dignity of her presence, seem to enhance the noble simplicity and reserve suggested by the figure. A rare and lovely personality seems to have been the inspiration of the sculptor. She was not a Greek, nor an Egyptian, and the Semitic features are hardly recognizable. The dove in the figure’s right hand may well be taken as a symbol of her own gentle beauty and sweetness. Surely this is a pure type of Phœnician womanhood. That majestic calm which is the outward and visible sign of the highest courage within comports well with the reputation of the women of Carthage, and their bearing in that terrible siege which tried them unto death.”

This is the sort of sentiment which still hovers over Carthage; but to sense it to the full, one must know the city’s history in detail, and not merely by a hurried half a day round, out from Tunis and back between breakfast and dinner. Another recent find is the unearthed Roman palace built up over an old Punic burial-place. Luxurious, though of diminutive proportions, this palace, or villa, possesses a pavement in mosaic worthy to rank with that classic example of the Villa Hadrian at Tivoli. It may be seen to-day at the Musée, and is one of the things to be noted down by even the hurried traveller.

En route from Tunis to Bizerta, thirty-five kilometres from the former city and about the same from Carthage, is the ancient Utica, founded by the Phœnicians centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, and which, after the destruction of Carthage, became the first city of Africa.

To-day the domain of Bou-Chateur, belonging to a M. Chabannes, contains all that remains above ground of this vassal city of Carthage. Once a seaport of importance, like Carthage, it gradually succumbed to a sort of dry rot and is no more.

The remains existing to-day are extensive, but very fragmentary. Only bare outlines are here and there visible; but from them some one has been able to construct a plan of the city on something approaching its former lines.

Immediately neighbouring upon Carthage is Sidi-bou-Saïd, easily the most picturesque village around Tunis, if one excepts the low-lying fishing village of La Goulette, better known by its Italian name of La Goletta. La Goulette itself played an important rôle in the sixteenth century. Charles V occupied it in 1535, and it became a fortified stronghold of the Spanish; but in spite of the fact that it was further fortified by Don Juan of Austria, after the battle of Lepanto, it was captured by the Turks under Sinan-Pacha the following year after a memorable siege. For the devout, La Goulette is of great interest from the fact that Saint Vincent de Paul was a captive here in the seventeenth century.

The little indigène village of Sidi-bou-Saïd sits on the promontory called Cap Carthage and has a local colour all its own. It is purely “native,” the land agent not yet having marked it for his own. The panorama of the snow-white walls and domes and turrets of the little town, the red-rock base on which it sits, the blue sea offshore, and the blue sky overhead, is a wonderful sight to the person of artistic tastes. Certainly its like is not in Africa, if elsewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean.

Beyond Sidi-bou-Saïd is La Marsa, without character or history, save that the Bey’s summer palace and the country residences of the foreign consuls are here. The site is delightful and looks seaward in most winning fashion. On the hillsides round about is grown the grape from which is made the celebrated “vin blanc de Carthage,” as much an accompaniment of the shrimps of the Lac de Tunis as is the “vin de Cassis” of bouillabaisse, or Chablis of oysters. In the neighbourhood are numerous caves, forming the ancient Jewish necropolis of Carthage under Roman domination.

Due north from Tunis a matter of nearly a hundred kilometres is Bizerta, now a French Mediterranean naval base as formidable, or at any rate as useful, as Gibraltar. It was the Hippo-Diarrhytus of the ancients, whose inhabitants were at continual warfare with those of Carthage. Under the Empire it was a Roman colony, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries became one of the refuges of the Moors expelled from Spain.

The French occupation has made of Bizerta and its lake a highly active and prosperous neighbourhood, where formerly a scant population of the mixed Mediterranean races gave it only the dignity of a fishing village. It is very picturesque, its waterside, its canals, and its quais, but the primitiveness of other days is giving way before the moves in the game of peace and war, until everywhere one hears the bustle and groan of ships and shipping, and sees clouds of smoke piling up into the cloudless sky from the gaping chimneys of machine-shops on shore and torpedo boats and battle-ships on the water. It is old Bizerta rubbing shoulders with new Bizerta at every step.

Bizerta is now the most important strategic point in the Mediterranean. Gibraltar is covered by the Spanish fortifications at Algeçiras and Ceuta, and Malta is merely a rock-bound fortress that could be starved out in a month. The Mediterranean is French, – a French lake if you will, – as it always has been, and as it always will be. Tripoli in Barbary and Morocco, when they come under the French flag, as they are bound to do, will only accentuate the fact.

CHAPTER XXV

THE BARBARY COAST

THE real Barbary coast of the romantic days of the corsairs was the whole North African littoral. Here the pirates and corsairs had their lairs, their inlet harbours known only to themselves and their confrères, who as often pillaged and murdered among themselves as they did among strangers.

To-day all this is changed. It was the government of the United States and Decatur, as much as any other outside power, who drove the Barbary pirates from the seas.

Under the reign of Louis XIV Duquesne was charged to suppress the piracies of the Tripolitan coasts. The celebrated admiral – it was he who also gave the original name to the site of the present city of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela – got down to business once the orders were given, sighted eight of the Barbary feluccas and gave them chase. They took refuge in the Sultan’s own port of Chio, but, with the French close on their heels, they were captured forthwith, and the Pacha of Tripoli was forced without more ado to make a treaty containing many onerous conditions. The corsairs gave back a ship which they had taken, and all the French who had fallen prisoners in their hands and who were virtually held in slavery. The admirals of those days had a way of doing things.

After the French came the English. Blake, the British admiral, who never trod the deck of a vessel until he was fifty, did his part to sweep these fierce Mediterranean pirates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli from the seas. The United States Navy did the rest. This is history; let those who are further interested look it up.

The North African coast-line from Tunis to Tangier has the aspect of much of the rest of the Mediterranean littoral, but that strip sweeping around from Cap Carthage to Tripoli in Barbary, the shores of the great Tripolitan gulf, may still furnish the setting for as fierce a piratical tale as can be conceived, – only the pirates are wanting.

This low-lying ground south of Tunis is not a tourist-beaten ground; it is almost unknown and unexplored to the majority of winter travellers, who include only Algiers, Biskra, and Tunis in their African itinerary.

South from Tunis, the first place of importance is Hammamet, an embryotic watering-place for the Tunisians, called by the natives “the city of pigeons.”

This up-and-coming station on the route which binds “Numidia” with “Africa” is possessed of a remarkable source of fresh-water supply. The Romans in ancient times exploited this same source, and built a monumental arcade on the site. All vestiges of this architectural work have however disappeared.

At Nabeul, a few kilometres away, one gets a curious glimpse of native life interspersed with that of the Jews. Mosques, souks, and synagogues give an Oriental blend as lively in colouring and variety as will satisfy the most insistent. Nabeul’s industry consists chiefly in the fabrication of pottery, – a fragile, crude, but lovely pottery, which travellers carry afar, and which is the marvel of all who contemplate it. The enterprise is of French origin, but the labour which produces these quaint jugs, vases, and platters (which are not dear in price) is purely native. The potter’s thumb marks are over all. The pieces have not been rubbed and burnished down, and accordingly the collector knows he has got the real thing, and not a German or Belgian clay-thrower’s imitation.

Nabeul was the ancient Neapolis, which was destroyed by the Romans at the same time that Carthage came under the domination of Augustus.

South again from Nabeul, by road or rail, for the railroad still continues another hundred kilometres, and one is at Sousse. Change cars for Kairouan, the Holy City of Tunisia!

Sousse is an important and still growing port with as mixed a population as one will see in any Mediterranean town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The French number perhaps twelve hundred, the Italians three or four thousand, and the Maltese as many as the French. The rest are Arabs; you might call them seafaring Arabs rather than desert Arabs, for they are as often on the sea as off it.

The souks of Sousse are famous. There is no longer a great Berber or Byzantine city closed in with walls with a gate on each cardinal face; all this has disappeared in the march of progress; but the Arab town, everywhere in Algeria and Tunisia, is a feature of the life of the times, even though it has been encroached upon by European civilization. The souks, or markets, are here more bizarre and further removed from our twentieth-century ideas of how business is, and should be, done than in any other mixed European-Mussulman centre of population.

In the Souk des Herbages are sold roots and herbs of all sorts, pimento peppers, henna, garance, dried peas, and other vegetables. The Souk des Arabes holds the rug and carpet sellers, the armourers, the weavers of the cloth of the burnous, tailors, etc. In the Souk des Juifs, a dark, ill-smelling, tiny nest of narrow corridors, are found the jewelry makers and the broiderers.

This and more of the same kind is Sousse. In addition there are the brilliant variegated sails of the Italian and Maltese fishing-boats, the dhows of the Arabs, and all the miscellaneous riffraff which associates itself mysteriously with a great seaport. Sousse is an artist’s paradise, and its hotels are excellent, – if one cares for sea food and eternal mutton and lamb.

The Kasba of Sousse sits high on the hillside overlooking the Arab town and the souks. A long swing around the boulevards brings one to the same culminating point.

A Phœnician acropolis stood here before the eleventh century, and the remains of a pagan temple to-day bear witness to the strong contrast of the manners of yesterday and to-day. The great signal-tower of the citadel is a reconstruction of a pharo called Khalef-el-Feta, which stood here in 1068. Whatever may have been the value of this fortification in days gone by, it looks defective enough to-day with its hybrid mass of nondescript structures. At all times, and from all points of view, it is imposing and spectacular, and is the dominant note of every landscape round about. Its angularities are not beautiful, nor even solid-looking, and the whole thing is stagy; but for all that it is imposing and above all grim and suggestive of unspeakable Turkish atrocities that may have been carried on in its immediate neighbourhood.

Monastir is a near neighbour of Sousse, twenty odd kilometres away, over as fine a roadway as one may see anywhere. Automobilists take notice! The Hôtel de Paris at Monastir has a “sight” in its dining-hall, which alone is worth coming to see, aside from the excellent breakfast which you get for fifty sous. This apartment was formerly the great reception-hall of the Arab governors of the province, and as such becomes at once an historic shrine and a novelty.

Not a town in Algeria or Tunisia has so quaint a vista as that looking down Monastir’s “Grande Rue.” It’s not very ancient, nor squalidly picturesque, but somehow it is characteristically quaint. And it “composes” wonderfully well, for either the artist’s canvas or the kodaker’s film. Sousse and Monastir should be omitted from no artist’s itinerary which is supposed to include unspoiled sketching grounds.

Kairouan, the Mohammedan Holy City of Tunisia, lies sixty kilometres southwest from Sousse.

Kairouan dates only from the Mussulman conquest, having been founded by the propagator of Islam in Africa, Okba-ben-Nafi (50 Heg. 671 A.D.). Kairouan became the capital of what is now Tunisia in the ninth century, and Tunis itself was its servitor. Up to this day Kairouan has guarded its religious supremacy as the Holy City of the Eastern Moghreb, and accordingly is a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of all North Africa.

The French occupied the city in 1881 without resistance on the part of the inhabitants. And to-day it is a live, wide-awake important centre of affairs, besides being a Mohammedan shrine of the very first rank.

The native city is entirely free from French innovations and remains almost as it was centuries ago. The mosques and the native city are all-in-all for the stranger within the gates, particularly the mosques, for here, of all places in Tunisia, their doors are opened to the “dogs of infidels” of overseas. But you must remove your shoes as you enter, or put on babouches over your “demi-Americain” boots, which you bought in Marseilles before leaving France (poor things, by the way; one suspects they were made in England, not in America at all).

Of first importance are the mosques of Sidi-Okba, the “Grande Mosquée;” and of Sidi-Sahab, the “Mosquée du Barbier.” The Djama Sidi-Okba, or “Grande Mosquée,” is a grandly imposing structure with a massive square minaret of the regulation Tunisian variety. Within it is of the classic type, with seventeen aisles and eight great thoroughfares crossing at right angles. It is a cosmopolitan edifice in all its parts, having been variously rebuilt and added to with the march of time, the earliest constructive details being of the third century of the Hegira, the ninth of our era.