Part 1
ESTO PERPETUA
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ESTO PERPETUA
ALGERIAN STUDIES AND IMPRESSIONS BY H. BELLOC
AUTHOR OF “THE PATH TO ROME”
LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO. 3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN MCMVI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
E. S. P. HAYNES
INTRODUCTION
Once, in a village that overlooked the Mediterranean, I saw a man working in an open shop, fitting together a builder’s Ornament which was to go upon the ridge-end of some roof or other. He was making the base of the Ornament so as to fit on to a certain angle of the rafters, and the Ornament itself was a Cross. It was spring time, and he was singing.
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I asked him for whom he was making it. He answered, for a man who had ordered it of him over-sea in Algiers.
But another Ornament also stood by, carved in the same way, and similar in size. I asked him for whom he had finished that other, and he said, “For the same man over-sea: he puts them upon buildings.” This second Ornament, however, happened to be a Crescent.
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The contrast moved me to cross the sea, to understand the land upon the further shore, and to write upon Africa some such little historical essay as follows.
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When a man first sees Africa, if it is just before the rising of the sun, he perceives, right up against a clean horizon, what appear to be islands standing out distinct and sharp above the sea.
[Sidenote: The Landfall]
At this hour a wind is often blowing from the eastward, and awakens the Mediterranean as though it came purposely at dawn to make the world ready for the morning. The little waves leap up beneath it, steep towards their shadows, and the bows of the ship that had surged all night through a rolling calm begin, as sailors say, to “speak”: the broken water claps and babbles along the side. In this way, if he has good fortune, the traveller comes upon a new land. It is that land, shut off from all the rest between the desert and the sea, which the Arabs call the Island of the West, the Maghreb, but to which we in Europe for many hundred years have given the name of Barbary: as it says in the song about freedom:
“... as large as a Lion reclined By the rivers of Barbary.”
It is the shore that runs, all built upon a single plan, from Tunis and the Gulf of Carthage to Tangier; that was snatched from Europe in one great cavalry charge twelve hundred years ago, and is now at last again in the grasp of Europe.
[Sidenote: The Roads]
For many hours the traveller will sail towards it until at last he comes to a belt of smooth water which, in such weather, fringes all that coast, and then he finds that what he saw at morning was not a line of islands, but the tops of high hills standing in a range along the sea: they show darker against a stronger light and a more southerly sun as he draws nearer, and beyond them he sees far off inland the first buttress mountains which hold up the plateaux of Atlas.
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[Sidenote: The Character of Barbary]
The country which he thus approaches differs in its fortune and history from all others in the world. The soil and the relief of the Maghreb, coupled with its story, have made it peculiar and, as it were, a symbol of the adventures of Europe. Ever since our western race began its own life and entered into its ceaseless struggle against the East, this great bastion has been held and lost again; occupied by our enemies and then taken back as our power re-arose. The Phœnician ruled it; Rome wrested it back; it fell for the last time when the Roman Empire declined; its reconquest has been the latest fruit of our recovery.
It is thoroughly our own. The race that has inhabited it from its origin and still inhabits it is our race; its climate and situation are ours; it is at the furthest limit from Asia; it is an opposing shore of our inland sea; it links Sicily to Spain; it retains in every part of it the Menhirs and the Dolmens, the great stones at which our people sacrificed when they began to be men: yet even in the few centuries of written history foreign gods have twice been worshipped there and foreign rulers have twice held it for such long spaces of time that twice its nature has been forgotten. Even to-day, when our reoccupation seems assured, we speak of it as though it were by some right originally Oriental, and by some destiny certain to remain so. During the many centuries of our decline and of our slow resurrection, these countries were first cut off so suddenly and so clean from Christendom, next steeped so long and so thoroughly in an alien religion and habit of law, that their very dress and language changed; and until a man has recognised at last the faces beneath the turbans, and has seen and grown familiar with the great buildings which Rome nowhere founded more solidly than in these provinces, he is deceived by the tradition of an immediate past and by the externals of things: he sees nothing but Arabs around him, and feels himself an intruder from a foreign world.
Of this eastern spirit, which is still by far the strongest to be found in the states of Barbary, an influence meets one long before one has made land. The little ships all up and down the Mediterranean, and especially as one nears the African coast, are in their rig and their whole manner Arabian.
[Sidenote: The Normal Sail]
There is a sort of sail which may be called the original of all sails. It is the sail with which antiquity was familiar. It brought the ships to Tenedos and the Argo carried it. The Norwegians had it when they were pirates a thousand years ago. They have it still. It is nearer a lug-sail than anything else, and indeed our Deal luggers carry something very near it. It is almost a square sail, but the yard has a slight rake and there is a bit of a peak to it. It is the kind of sail which seems to come first into the mind of any man when he sets out to use the wind. It is to be seen continually to-day hoisted above small boats in the north of Europe.
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But this sail is too simple. It will not go close to the wind, and in those light and variable airs which somehow have no force along the deck, it hangs empty and makes no way because it has no height.
[Sidenote: The Lateen]
Now when during that great renaissance of theirs in the seventh century the Arabs left their deserts and took to the sea, they became for a short time in sailing, as in philosophy, the teachers of their new subjects. They took this sail which they had found in all the ports they had conquered along this coast—in Alexandria, in Cyrene, in Carthage, in Cæsarea—they lightened and lengthened the yard, they lifted the peak up high, they clewed down the foot, and very soon they had that triangular _lateen_ sail which will, perhaps, remain when every other evidence of their early conquering energy has disappeared. With such a sail they drove those first fleets of theirs which gave them at once the islands and the commerce of the Mediterranean. It was the sail which permitted their invasion of the northern shores and the unhappy subjection of Spain.
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[Sidenote: Its Reefing]
We Europeans have for now some seven hundred years, from at least the Third Crusade, so constantly used this gift of Islam that we half forget its origin. You may see it in all the Christian harbours of the Mediterranean to-day, in every port of the Portuguese coast, and here and there as far north as the Channel. It is not to be seen beyond Cherbourg, but in Cherbourg it is quite common. The harbour-boats that run between the fleet and the shore hoist these lateens. Yet it is not of our own making, and, indeed, it bears a foreign mark which is very distinct, and which puzzles every northerner when first he comes across this sail: it reefs along the yard. Why it should do so neither history nor the men that handle it can explain, since single sails are manifestly made to reef from the foot to the leach, where a man can best get at them. Not so the lateen. If you carry too much canvas and the wind is pressing her you must take it in from aloft, or, it must be supposed, lower the whole on deck. And this foreign, quaint, unusual thing which stamps the lateen everywhere is best seen when the sail is put away in harbour. It does not lie down along the deck as do ours in the north, but right up along the yard, and the yard itself is kept high at the masthead, making a great bow across the sky, and (one would say) tempting Providence to send a gale and wreck it. Save for this mark—which may have its uses, but seems to have none and to be merely barbaric—the lateen is perfect in its kind, and might be taken with advantage throughout the world (as it is throughout all this united sea) for the uniform sail. For this kind of sail is, for small craft, the neatest and the swiftest in the world, and, in a general way, will lie closer to the wind than any other. Our own fore-and-aft rig is nothing else but a lateen cut up into mainsail, foresail, and jib, for the convenience of handling.
[Sidenote: The Little Ships]
The little ships, so rigged, come out like heralds far from the coast to announce the old dominion of the East and of the religion that made them: of the united civilisation that has launched them over all its seas, from east of India to south of Zanzibar and right out here in the western place which we are so painfully recovering. They are the only made thing, the only _form_ we accepted from the Arab: and we did well to accept it. The little ships are a delight.
You see them everywhere. They belong to the sea and they animate it. They are similar as waves are similar: they are different as waves are different. They come into a hundred positions against the light. They heel and run with every mode of energy.
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There is nothing makes a man’s heart so buoyant as to see one of the little ships bowling along breast-high towards him, with the wind and the clouds behind it, careering over the sea. It seems to have borrowed something of the air and something of the water, and to unite them both and to be their offspring and also their bond. When they are middle-way over the sea towards one under a good breeze, the little ships are things to remember.
So it is when they carry double sail and go, as we say of our schooners, “wing and wing.” For they can carry two sails when the wind is moderate, and especially when the vessel is running before it, but these two sails are not carried upon two masts, but both upon the same mast. The one is the common or working sail, carried in all weathers. The other is a sort of spinnaker, of which you may see the yard lying along decks in harbour or triced up a little by the halyard, so as to swing clear of the hands.
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When the little ships come up like this with either sail well out and square and their course laid straight before the general run of a fresh sea, rolling as they go, it is as though the wind had a friend and companion of its own, understanding all its moods, so easily and rapidly do they arrive towards the shore. A little jib (along this coast at least) is bent along the forestay, and the dark line of it marks the swing and movement of the whole. So also when you stand and look from along their wake and see them leaving for the horizon along a slant of the Levantine, with the breeze just on their quarter and their laden hulls careening a trifle to leeward, you would say they were great birds, born of the sea, and sailing down the current from which they were bred. The peaks of their tall sails have a turn to them like the wing-tips of birds, especially of those darting birds which come up to us from the south after winter and shoot along their way.
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Moreover the sails of these little ships never seem to lose the memory of power. Their curves and fulness always suggest a movement of the hull. Very often at sunset when the dead calm reflects things unbroken like an inland pond, the topmost angle of these lateens catches some hesitating air that stirs above, and leads it down the sail, so that a little ripple trembles round the bows of the boat, though all the water beside them is quite smooth, and you see her gliding in without oars. She comes along in front of the twilight, as gradual and as silent as the evening, and seems to be impelled by nothing more substantial than the advance of darkness.
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It is with such companions to proclaim the title of the land that one comes round under a point of hills and enters harbour.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Mediterranean]
To comprehend the accidents which have befallen the Maghreb it is necessary to consider its position and the nature of the boundaries which surround it. In order to do this one must see how it stands with regard to the Mediterranean and to the Desert.
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Here is a rough map on which are indicated the shores of that sea, and to appreciate its scale it is easiest to remember that its whole length from the Straits of Gibraltar at =M= to the Levantine coast at =A= is well over 2000 miles. In this map those shores which are well watered and upon which men can build cities and can live are marked black. The great desert beyond to the south, which perpetually threatens the further shore and in which men can only live here and there in little oases of watered land is marked with sloping lines.
It is easy to see how this great surrounded water nourished the seeds of our civilisation: why all the influences we enjoy here in the north came upwards to us from its harbours: why Asia stretched out towards it in order to learn, and attempted (but always failed) to absorb it. It is so diversified by great peninsulas and very numerous islands that the earliest sailors need never miss the land: it has so indented and varied a coast that harbours are nowhere lacking to it. Its climate is of that kind best suited to men, yielding them fruits and warmth with some labour, but not so hardly as to sour them into brutality nor so cheaply as to degrade them by indolence. The separate homes in which polities can grow up separately and cherish their separate lives, were fortified by the sea which protected its archipelagoes and its long tongues of land, and were further guarded by the many mountain chains which so affect the horizons all along these coasts that almost every landfall you make as you sail is some very high, and often sacred, hill. But all this difference was permitted to interact upon itself and to preserve a common unity by the common presence of the sea. If it be true, as the wisest men have said, that everything comes from salt water, then nowhere in the world could the influence of the sea do more to create and feed the aspirations of men. Whether our race came thither from the north and east, or, as is more probable, from the African shore, this much is certain, that there grew up round the Mediterranean, Europe, which is Ourselves.
[Sidenote: The Phœnicians]
At one part things alien to us impinge upon this sea; this part is the eastern bay which is marked off upon the map with a dotted line and the shores of which are the outposts of Asia and of the Egyptians. The projection on the south is that delta of the Nile from which Egypt looked out jealously against rivals whom she despised or ignored: the long Levantine coast which blocks the eastern end of the whole sea was alive with the essence of the Asiatic spirit: with the subtlety, the yielding and the avarice of the Phœnician cities. Egypt may have attempted something westward: there is a legend of struggles with a fair people, and to this day in the salt marshes south of Tunis a group of date-trees, abandoned and unplucked, are called the “Dates of Pharaoh” and resemble no dates of that country, but the dates of the Nile valley. But if such expeditions were made they were fruitless. The desert was still a secure boundary for us: the first attack which Europe was to suffer came not from the sands, but from its own sea, and the first conquerors of the Maghreb were the Phœnicians.
This people were Orientals, like any others; but they had, as it were, specialised upon one most notable character of their race, which is to accumulate wealth by negotiation, and to avoid as far as may be the labour of production. To no other family of men has toil appeared to be a curse save to that of which the Phœnicians were members; nor are fatigues tolerable to that family save those endured in acquiring the possessions of others and in levying that toll which cunning can always gather from mere industry. Of all effort travel alone was congenial to them, and especially travel by sea, which, when they had first developed it, became for many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying of the world and the arbitrament of its exchanges. They dwelt in a small group of harbours on that extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean, where a narrow strip of fertile land lay between them and the mountains. They sailed out before the steady northerly and easterly winds of summer, (which are but a portion of the Trade Winds;) they pushed from headland to headland and from island to island, bringing into economic contact the savage tribes and the wealthy states, passionate especially for metals, but carefully arranging that there should arise between the nations whom they exploited or served no such direct bond as would exclude their own mediation. Three thousand years ago their language was reflected in the names of half the landmarks and roadsteads of the sea—later the Greeks attempted to explain these names by punning upon their sound in some Greek dialect and fitting to each some fantastic legend.
As the Asiatics ran thus westward before the summer gales, their path was barred at last by the eastern shore of Barbary.
It is curious to note how specially designed was this coast, and especially its north-eastern promontories, for the first landing-place of Asiatics upon our shores. The recess which is marked upon the map with an =X= and which is now called the Gulf of Tunis was designed in every way to arrest these merchants and to afford them opportunities for their future dominion.
[Illustration:
=A= Phœnicia =B= Berenice =C= Cyrene =L= Leptis =S= Syrtis ]
They had sounded along the littoral of the desert: they were acquainted with the harbours which led them westward along the Libyan beach and with the little territories which were besieged all round by the sand and drew their life from the sea: where later were to rise Cyrene and Berenice and Leptis.
[Sidenote: The Bay of Carthage]
They had seen the mirage all along that hot coast, and bare sandhills shimmering above shallow roadsteads: they had felt round the lesser Syrtis for water and a landing-place and had found none, when the shore-line turned abruptly east and north before them. It showed first the rank grass of a steppe; it grew more and more fertile as they advanced: at last, as they rounded the Hermæan promontory, they opened a bay, the mountainous arms of which broke the Levanter and whose aspect immediately invited them to beach their keels.
[Sidenote: “Afrigya”]
It stands at the narrow passage between the eastern and the western basins of the Mediterranean; and the western basin had not as yet been visited (it would seem) by men capable of developing its wealth. This bay upon which the Tyrians landed was sheltered and deep: there was, as in their own country, a belt of fertile soil between the shore and the mountains; the largest river of Barbary was to hand. Their first settlements, of which Utica, near Porto Farina, was perhaps the earliest, began the new expansion of the Phœnician people. They called the shore their “Afrigya”—that is, their “colony.” The word took root and remained. It was in this way that Asia, much older than we are, much more wily, not so brave, came in as a merchant and crept along till she found, and landed on, the Maghreb, where it stands out across the entry to the western seas.
[Sidenote: Carthage]
When these first African cities had been founded for some centuries, there was built on the same gulf and at its head—perhaps as a depôt for Utica, more probably as a refuge for Tyrian exiles—a city called “The New Town”: it is of this title, whose Semitic form must have resembled some such sound as “Karthadtha,” that the Greeks made Carchedon and the Latins Carthago, and it was from this centre that there arose and was maintained for seven hundred years over the Western Mediterranean an Oriental influence which was always paramount and threatened at certain moments to become universal and permanent.
Our race was not then conscious of itself. Gaul, Spain, the Alps and Italy north of the Apennines were a dust of tribes, villages and little fortified towns to which there was not to be given for many centuries the visible unity which we inherit from Rome. Rome itself was not yet walled. Southern Italy, though far more wealthy, was divided, and as for Africa it was full of roving men, Berbers, to whom some prehistoric chance, coupled with their soil and climate, had bequeathed such horses and such a tradition of riding as their descendants still possess. These savages must have felt in their blood that the Greek colonies, (when such towns were planted among them,) were of their own family and worshipped gods whom they could understand; just as, much later, they learnt to accept quite easily the kindred domination of the Italians: but the western instinct was still far too vague to permit of any coalition, or to react with any vigour against the newcomers from the east. It was not till travel, increasing wealth and the discipline of government had permitted the nomads to know themselves for Europeans that the presence of the foreigner became first irksome and then intolerable. It was not till nearly seven hundred years had passed that Rome, the centre and representative of the West, first conquered and then obliterated the power of Asia in this land.