Chapter VII: Part 7

Bougie, rising on the steep hill-side behind its protecting cape, looks almost southward, and its bay appears to it as a land-locked lake. On the southern shore stand the majestic mountains through which we have bored our way from Sétif, with plenty of snow on this, their northern face, crowning their copious forests of cedar and pine. Few seaports have such a romantic outlook. It cannot be doubted that this coast is destined some day to be a second and grander Riviera, and if another Lord Brougham sets to work to create another Cannes, it is perhaps in the neighbourhood of Bougie that he will place it. Apart from its own abounding attractions, it is surrounded east and south and west by incomparable scenery. Its charms are already beginning to be known. It is a meeting-place of excellent roads, and the motor-car has rendered it easy of access. Its comfortable hotel is always full, and is making haste to enlarge itself. Let Bougie start a casino and band, and it will begin to have a season. And in my mind’s eye I can see golf-links along the shore of the bay, _para thina thalasses_, where the sea-sand meets the verdure.

There is something theatrical about Bougie’s scenery. Stand on the shore in front of the old Saracen gateway and look upwards at the background of the town rising tier on tier, a town of brilliant white houses gay with the dazzling purple of the _bougainvillea_, with the bastions of an apparently cardboard fort to the right, and a suggestion of ruined castles to the left, and you may fancy that you are in the stalls at the Opera, and that a chorus of fisher-girls will shortly appear and point to a pirate in the offing.

Bougie, exporter of wax, is said to have given its name to the candle. And it has other historical associations. Its story is not very dissimilar from that of many ports on this coast. Phœnician traders, Roman colonists, Vandal invaders, Byzantines, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards and Turks,—all have had their day, and many of them have left their impress. Traces of the Roman wall exist; the Saracenic _enceinte_, enclosing a space seven times the size of that which lies within the present fortifications, is still marked by ruined towers which rise picturesquely among the olive trees. In the matter of piracy Bougie followed the example set by Algiers with great zeal and success. So troublesome were its corsairs to Spain that in 1508 Ferdinand V was goaded to action, and sent a fleet of fourteen ships under Don Pedro Navarro to take possession of it; and the Spaniards held it for nearly forty years. But the failure of the expedition of Charles V against Algiers in 1545 put great courage into the Algerians. They attacked the castle on the harbour and the citadel on the heights with an overwhelming force. The governor, Don Alonzo de Peralta, seeing resistance hopeless, and anxious to save the lives of his garrison and its women and children, surrendered the town on condition that all the Spaniards within the walls should be allowed to depart, and that ships should be furnished to carry them to Spain. The Emperor, doubtless still smarting under his defeat, did not take this fresh reverse in good part and condemned the unfortunate governor to lose his head. Thenceforth until the French invasion Bougie was held by a small Turkish garrison, and the town, which is said to have contained in its palmy days a population of 100,000, fell into decay. It is now once again on the up-grade of prosperity.

From Bougie it is possible to proceed to Algiers by steamer, or by train, but the traveller who has reached it by motor-car from Sétif should on no account miss the opportunity to drive through Khabylia, the beautiful and interesting mountain district which lies between the snowy Djurjura and the sea. The distance via Fort National to Tizi-Ouzou, on the western side of the upland country, whence Algiers may be reached by train in three hours, is about 150 miles. A magnificent new road breasts the mountain wall which confines the valley above Bougie, and leads with interminable curves and zigzags through forest and cultivated land, through heath and downland turf, to a chilly height of nearly 5000 feet.

The configuration of this country, the foot-hills of the Djurjura, is peculiar. A series of slopes confines a wealth of valleys great and small, into which project knife-edges, commonly crowned at their termination with castle-like rocks. The Djurjura range protects these valleys from the hot and drying winds of the desert, and its snows supply copious torrents and a moist atmosphere. The country affords a very striking contrast to the typical arid upland of Algeria. In such conditions we naturally find a very luxuriant vegetation. Cedars, oaks, olives, figs and vines flourish exceedingly, and beneath them the sward suggests a more northern land. Africa maintains its character as the continent of surprises.

On every vantage-point which offers possibilities of defence, especially on the narrow ridges near their final crests, stand Khabyle villages, commanding both slopes. In such a situation there is seldom water to be found; and it is the perpetual task of the women (who are unveiled) to carry it to their homes from the cascades on the neighbouring hills. The villages are composed of small stone houses densely crowded together, roofed with tiles, the lines of the roofs being generally parallel, which gives them a curiously symmetrical appearance. Their dirt and squalor is indescribable.

A strange people these Khabyles:—a white race, or at least not more tanned than many dwellers on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and recalling in physique an Italian type; ardent cultivators and determined fighters in defence; with a long-established and intelligent system of local self-government, and elaborate institutions, public and domestic; yet confessing the faith, and wearing the garb of the Arab, with whom they have nothing else in common. Till the French came they had never owned a master. Before 1871 they had maintained and been permitted a modified independence; but to their own undoing they took a leading part in the rising of that year, and committed many savage murders and outrages on helpless French colonists. Their subjugation followed as a matter of course; many of their lands were forfeited, and they became the servants of the new lords.

There is quite a large and serious literature dealing with the peculiar habits and customs of the Khabyles after the thorough and logical, if somewhat dull, manner of French writers. From an artistic point of view an Englishman, Mr. Edgar Barclay, has made Khabylia his own. His “Mountain Life in Algeria” (London, 1882) is a description of the country as it appears to an artist and a scholar. The common eye is filled with the non-essential details of personal uncleanliness and the squalor of seldom-washed garments; the artist looks below these to the inherent qualities of form. In the troops of girls filling their pitchers at the waterfall or bearing them in line to their village, in the wood-cutter and the shepherd, Mr. Barclay has seen again the types of ancient Greece when the world was young.

Fort National crowns a common ridge running east and west between the two chief valleys of Khabylia. It looks southward to the great snowy rampart of the Djurjura, here evident in all its glory. The road westward follows the ridge to its extremity and then descends to the vale in a series of abrupt and, to the motorist, rather alarming zigzags. And so we come to Tizi-Ouzou and Algiers.

The magic carpet of our day has borne us in a brief space through landscapes of astonishing contrast; through territories which are a storehouse of conflicting yet commingled human interests; across the vast cornfields which suggest man’s taming of a newly discovered continent, to the siege-scarred cliffs of Constantine, the awe-inspiring immensity of the Sahara, the speaking ruins of the Roman marches, the Alpine gorges and sylvan sweetness of the Mediterranean shore. Perhaps nowhere within so small a compass is the history of twenty centuries writ so large, nowhere the evidence of man’s struggles, and especially of his failures, more plain for him who runs to read.

ALGERIA AND TUNIS
Extracted from the Michelin Guide to the Sunny Countries 1912
]

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_INDEX_

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Ain-Beida, 252 Algiers, 21 _seq._, 48 _seq._, 97, 103, 104 _seq._, 124 _seq._, 298, 302 Atlas, the Lesser, 28 Aurès range, the, 185, 197, 202, 205, 208, 245, 252

Bagai, 279 Batna, 197, 198, 201, 242, 248, 252, 285 Biskra, 43, 197, 198, 203 _seq._, 247 Blidah, 88, 133, 145 Bône, 72, 184 Boufarik, 89 Bougie, 56, 171, 287, 294 _seq._ Bou-Saida, 247

Chabet-el-Akhira, 286 _seq._ Cherchel, 88, 92 _seq._, 113 Colomb-Béchar, 240 Constantine, 83, 103, 136, 178 _seq._, 245

Djebel-Chénoua, 97 Djerba, 58 Djurjura, the, 28, 180, 298, 301

El-Eubbad, 171 El-Guerrah, 178 El-Kantara, 201 El-Mzab, 43, 234

Fort National, 298, 301 Foum-ês-Sahara, 201

Gouraya, 113 Guelma, 190

Isly, the, 142 Isser, the, 179

Jardin d’Essai, 104 _seq._

Kairouan, 60 Khabylia, 143, 178, 298 _seq._ Khenchela, 252 Kherrata, 288

La Macta, 135 Lambessa, 113, 247, 252, 279 La Sikkah, 137

Mansoura, 164 _seq._ Marengo, 88, 90 Mascara, 135, 136 Matifou, Cap, 61, 97 Medea, 59, 133 Medrassen, the, 198 Ménerville, 179 Metidja, the, 145, 179 Miliana, 136 Mustapha Supérieur, 27, 109 _seq._

Oran, 56, 59, 83, 103, 134, 143, 149, 172 _seq._ Oudjda, 59 Oued Atmenia, 257 Oued Fedhala, 198 Oued Rir, 232

Palestro, 179

Roumel, the, 180 _seq._

Sahara, the, 43, 82 _seq._, 144, 201 _seq._, 228 _seq._ Sahel, the, 82, 97, 179 Sbeitla, 31 Sétif, 178, 180, 285 _seq._ Sidi Bel Abbès, 150 Sidi Bou Medine, 170 _seq._ Sidi Ferruch, 129 Sidi Okba, 221 _seq._

Tafna, the, 138 Taguine, 141 Tchad, Lake, 239 Tebessa, 245, 247, 279, 280 Tell, the 82, 85, 143 Temacin, 232 Timbuctoo, 235, 239 Timgad, 187, 243 _seq._ Tipasa, 95 _seq._ Tizi-Ouzou, 298, 302 Tlemçen, 53, 59, 117, 136, 148 _seq._ Tobna, 223 Tombeau de la Chrétienne, 89, 198 Touggourt, 216, 232 Tubusuctu, 261

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Transcriber’s Note

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original. The following issues should be noted, along with the resolutions.

14.13 Timgad: Arch [at/of] Trajan Replaced.
143.8 and [raised] the whole province of Oran _sic_: razed
221.14 As we approach Sidi O[bk/kb]a Transposed.
279.3 They [rased] the fortifications _sic_: rased

End of Project Gutenberg's About Algeria, by Charles Thomas-Stanford