Part 3

In the seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west had fallen, when Italy was already taxed and half governed by a few Germans, when Gaul and Spain had at their heads small bands of mixed barbarian and Roman nobles, and when everything seemed gone to ruin, this southern shore of the Mediterranean was overwhelmed and, what is more, persuaded.

There came riding upon it out of the desert continual lines of horsemen whom these horsemen of Numidia could mix with and understand. The newcomers wore the white wrapping of the south: all their ways were southern ways, suited to the intensity of the sun, and Barbary, or the main part of it, was southern and burning. Their eyes were very bright, and in their ornaments the half-tamed tribesmen recognised an old appetite for splendour. For all the effect of Rome perhaps one-third of the African provincials were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared, and that nomadic part was thickest towards the desert from which the invasion came; the invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the instinct of roving still lingered.

Islam, therefore, when it first came in, tore up what Rome had planted as one tears up a European shrub planted in the friable soil of Africa.

The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with them also a violent and simple creed. And here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of this province can alone define the character of their arrival. Their Faith was like some plant out of the solitudes; it was hard in surface; it was simple in form; it was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It was consonant with the waterless horizons and the blinding rocks from which it had sprung. Its victory was immediate. Before Charlemagne was born the whole fabric of our effort in Barbary, the traditions of St. Augustine and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared. No one from that time onwards could build a Roman arch of stone or drive a straight road from city to city or recite so much as the permanent axioms of the Roman Law.

Elsewhere, in Syria and in Asia and in Spain, the Mohammedans failed to extirpate Christianity, and were able for some centuries to enjoy the craftsmanship and the sense of order which their European subjects could lend them. It was only here, in Africa, that their victory was complete. Therefore it is only here, in Africa, that you see what such a victory meant, and how, when it was final, all power of creation disappeared. The works which have rendered Islam a sort of lure for Europe were works that could not have been achieved save by European hands.

The Roman towns did not decay; they were immediately abandoned. Gradually the wells filled; the forests were felled in bulk; none were replanted. Of the Olive Gardens, the stone presses alone remain. One may find them still beneath the sand, recalling the fat of oil. But there, to-day, not a spear of grass will grow, and the Sahara has already crept in. The olives long ago were cut down for waste, or for building or for burning. There was not in any other province of the empire so complete an oblivion, nor is there any better example of all that “scientific” history denies: for it is an example of the cataclysmic—of the complete and rapid changes by which history alone is explicable: of the folly of accepting language as a test of origin: of the might and rapidity of religion (which is like a fire): of its mastery over race (which is like the mastery of fire over the vessels it fuses or anneals): of the hierarchic nature of conquest: of the easy destruction of more complex by simpler forms....

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[Sidenote: The Atlas]

If one is to understand this surprising history of Barbary, and to know both what the Romans did in it and what the Arabs did, and to grasp what the reconquest has done or is attempting to do, it is necessary to examine the physical nature of this land.

[Sidenote: The Relief of Barbary]

Along all its hundreds of miles, the Maghreb is determined by Mount Atlas, or rather, the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge between the Sahara and the sea. It is a bulk of mountains so formed that one may compare it to a city wall with a broad top for fighting men to move on and a parapet along both the inner and the outer edges. The outer parapet, which is called “The Little Atlas,” runs along the Mediterranean shore: the inner parapet, which is called “The Great Atlas,” runs along the desert, and is usually the higher of the two chains. These two chains do not run quite parallel, but converge towards Tunis and spread apart towards the Atlantic; the tableland between them, which is called “The High Plateaux,” and is in some places three thousand feet above the sea, broadens therefore from less than a hundred to well over two hundred miles across; but at either end it somewhat changes its character, for at the Tunis end it is too narrow to be a true plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains where the Greater and the Lesser Atlas meet, while in Morocco it becomes too broad to maintain its character and is diversified by continual subsidiary ranges. But in between these two extremities it is a true tableland with isolated summits rising here and there from it, and at their feet shallow and brackish lakes called _Shotts_, round which are rims of marshy reeds and, in summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there is no drainage away from the tableland to the desert or to the sea, save where, here and there, a torrent (such as the Chélif or the Rummel) digs itself an erratic gorge and escapes through the coast range to the Mediterranean. These exceptions are very rare and they do not disturb the general plan of the country, which is everywhere constructed of the Atlas running in two ranges that hold up between them the plateau with its salt lakes and isolated groups of hills.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Tableland]

If, therefore, one were to take a section anywhere from north to south, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would get some such figure as this:

[Illustration]

where the perpendicular shading on the left is the Mediterranean slope and drainage, the horizontal shading on the right, the desert slope, and where the Little Atlas is marked =A=, the Great Atlas =B= (falling down to =E=, the dunes of the Sahara), where at =C= is one of the isolated hills of the tableland, and at =D= and =D= a couple of those salt lakes which add so strongly to the desolation of these upland plains.

The High Plateaux, which, empty as they are, make up the body of the Maghreb, are not only a reality to the geographer: their peculiar character is also apparent to every traveller who crosses them. The rise up to them from the Mediterranean, though confused, is observable; the fall from them to the Sahara is violent, and, through its central part, dramatic. It is not unusual for a man who has traversed this tableland upon more than one voyage to recall clefts in the southern and the northern ranges so placed that they were like windows through which one could look down upon the lower world.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

These clefts resemble each other strangely. From the one a man sees the steps of limestone, the desert cliffs, touched rarely and more rarely by the green of palm-trees and ending southward, glaring and arid and sharp, against the extremity of the horizon. From the other, he sees the woods of the coast, dense and well watered, mixing with the rocks about him, and right beyond the valley the pleasant line of the sea. But each of the views he carries in his mind has this in common, that he has seen it from a height, and looked down suddenly from a mountain tableland upon a flat below: to the north upon a level of waves over which went the shadows of clouds: to the south upon a level of sand stretching under a small and awful sun.

If a man were to live in this land, the High Plateaux would fill up the most of his mind, as they take up by far the most of the country itself in space. One is compelled to move when one is upon them. There is no resting-place: only, along the far edge, before the fall into the desert begins, the ruins of the Roman frontier towns. These wastes hold the soul of Numidia. The horses of Barbary are native to them. It is said that these horses sicken on the seaboard—certainly their race dies on the northern shores of the Mediterranean unless it is crossed with one of our coarser breeds—for they were born to breathe this dry air and to make rapid prints with their unshod hoofs upon the powder of the plains and the salt.

The tableland, then, is the heart of the Maghreb, yet it has no name, not even among the wandering Arabs.

These come up on to it in spring from the hot desert below, driving slow files of proud and foolish camels. They pasture flocks in among the brushwood and by the rare streams; then when the autumn descends and the first cold appals them, before the winter scurries across these flats, they turn back and patiently go down the mountain roads into the Sahara, leaving the Berbers to themselves again. For four months the plains above are swept with snow, and a traveller in that season, feeling the sharp and frozen dust in his face before the gale, and seeing far off bare cones of standing hills above salt marshes, thinks himself rather in Idaho or Nevada than here in Africa which Europe thinks so warm.

[Sidenote: The Tell]

That belt of coast upon which Atlas descends is of a nature quite distinct from the High Plateaux. The Americans can match such sudden contrasts: we in Europe have nothing of the kind. You come down from salt water to fresh, from a cold (or from a burning) to a genial air, and you enter as you sink from the tableland a territory of great luxuriance. It is called the Tell, and to seize its character it is necessary to modify and to develop somewhat one’s idea of the mountain chains. For though the Greater and the Lesser Atlas run in those main lines which appear in the little sketch upon page 58, yet in detail each range, and especially the range along the sea, is broken and complex, and is made up of a number of separate folds, sometimes parallel and sometimes overlapping, thus:

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Mountains]

Moreover, the heights are irregular. There are groups of high peaks and ridges against the desert to the east in the Aurès Mountains, and to the west in those of Morocco, while along the seaboard great bulges of mountain rise in places from the Lower Atlas to a height rivalling the inland range. For instance, where an =X= is marked upon the sketch map, there is an almost isolated mass known as the Djurdjura, very high, almost as high as Aurès, which stands up 150 miles behind it above the Sahara.

[Sidenote: The Berber Strongholds]

It was in these groups of higher and more rugged hills along the seaboard or the desert that the native languages and perhaps the purity of the native race took refuge both during the Roman occupation and during the Arabian conquest. It is in these ravines that the ancient tongue is spoken to this day. It is there that the Berber type, though it is still everywhere what we ourselves are, has maintained itself least mixed with the foreigner: it is even, perhaps, allied in these hills with a people older than we or the Berber can be.

[Sidenote: The Bays of the Tell]

The fact that the Lesser Atlas thus faces close upon the sea and falls upon it abruptly, determines an abundant rainfall upon the Tell, and makes it fruitful. The fact that the Lesser Atlas consists of folds overlapping each other and running from north-east to south-west has furnished a multitude of bays, each lying between two spurs of the hills. Every such bay has a harbour more or less important, and that harbour is nearly always upon the westerly side; for the prevalent strong wind, which is from the east, drives a current with it, and this current scours out the bays, clearing up and deepening the westerly shore, but leaving the eastern shallow. Thus Bone, Philippeville, Algiers, Calle, and Utica itself, which was the oldest of all, are on the westerly sides of such bays. Into each bay a mountain torrent falls, or sometimes a larger stream, and the long process of erosion has scoured all the coast into a network of valleys, so that, unless one has a clear view of the scheme in one’s mind, one is bewildered and does not always know at what point in the upward journey one passes from the Tell to the High Plateaux, distinct as these regions are.

[Sidenote: The Physical Constitution Of the Tell]

Thus a simple plan of a portion of the Tell is as given on the following page, where the line of crosses indicates the watershed between the Mediterranean and the inland drainage of the High Plateaux.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The New Vineyard]

But if one were to mark on this map a stippled surface for contours under five hundred feet, a hatched one for the same between five and fifteen hundred, a black one up to two thousand five hundred, and above that leave the heights in white with little triangles for the summits, one would get some such complicated scheme as is shown on the opposite page, where it will be seen that a high mountain (at =C=) overlooks the shore far from the watershed, and the scheme of valleys is complex and might seem a labyrinth to a man on foot without a map. At =A= and =B= are the ports of each bay, and near to each at the mouth of either river a large plain such as is characteristic of the heads of all these inlets. Their earth is black, deep, and fertile: inviting the plough. Such fields fed Utica, Icosium and Hippo Regius and Cæsarea. They remained wild and abandoned for over a thousand years, but to-day you may see miles of vineyards planted in rows that run converging to the limits of the plain, where, until this last generation, no one had dug or pruned or gathered or pressed since the Latin language was forgotten in these lands. Indeed, it would be possible for a fantastic man to see in this replanting of the vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning; for everywhere the people of the desert have had a fear of wine, and their powerful legends have affected us also in the north for a time. But the vine is in Africa again. It will not soon be uprooted.

[Illustration]

Such plains, then, their rivers and their adjacent seaport towns, make up the Tell, in which the Romans nourished many millions and in which the most part of the reconstituted province will at last build its homes.

By such a bay and entering such a harbour, whoever comes to Africa reaches land.

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[Sidenote: The Bay of Hippo]

It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood, that the best introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping small and large, and fenced round with houses for very many miles. A far promontory on the eastern side faces the western mountain, and half protects the harbour from summer gales. Below the mountain, the plain belonging to this bay stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here and there with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines and corn. In the midst of this great flat stands up a little isolated hill, a sort of acropolis, and from its summit, from a window of his monastery there, St. Augustine, looking at that sea, wrote _Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas_.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: Hippo]

The town is utterly gone. There are those who argue that this or that was not done as history relates, because of this or that no vestige remains; and if tradition tells them that Rome built here or there, they deny it, because they cannot find walls, however much they dig (within the funds their patrons allow them). These men are common in the universities of Europe. They are paid to be common. They should see Hippo.

Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the host of Vandals, slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat of the most famous bishopric of its day, and within its walls, while the siege still endured, St. Augustine died. It counted more than Palermo or Genoa: almost as much as Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not a few bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall. There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once disturbed a few fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better show at Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky company officer shivered out his time of service with perhaps a hundred men.

[Sidenote: Calama]

In the heart of the Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet right in the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather, stands a little town which was called Calama in the Roman time and is now, since the Arabs, called Guelma.

It is the centre of that belt of hills. A broad valley, one of the hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the Mediterranean slope, lies before the platform upon which the fortress rose. A muddy river nourishes it, and all the plain is covered with the new farms and vineyards—beyond them the summits and the shoulders that make a tumbled landscape everywhere along the northern shores of Africa guard the place whichever way one turns. From the end of every street one sees a mountain.

If a man had but one day in which to judge the nature of the province, he could not do better than come to this town upon some winter evening when it was already dark, and wake next morning to see the hurrying sky and large grey hills lifting up into that sky all around and catching the riot of its clouds. It is high and cold: there is a spread of pasture in its fields and a sense of Europe in the air. No device in the architecture indicates an excessive heat in summer and even the trees are those of Italy or of Provence. Its site is a survival from the good time when the Empire packed this soil with the cities of which so great a number have disappeared: it is also a promise of what the near future may produce, a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in the refounding of such municipalities that the tradition of Europe will work upon Africa and not in barren adventure southward towards a sky which is unendurable to our race and under which we can never build and can hardly govern.

[Illustration]

Guelma is typical in every way. It was Berber before the Romans came, but nothing remains of its founders or of whatever punic influence its first centuries may have felt. Of Rome so much endures that the heavy walls and the arches are, as it were, the framework of the place.

[Sidenote: The Permanence of Rome]

In the citadel a great fragment larger than anything else in the town runs right across the soldiers’ quarters, pierced with the solid arches that once supported the palace of Calama. Only the woodwork has disappeared. The stones which supported the flooring still stand out unbroken, and the whole wall, though it is not very high—hardly higher than the big barracks around it—remains in the mind, as though it had a right to occupy one’s memory of the Kasbah by a sort of majesty which nothing that has been built since its time has inherited. Here, as throughout the Empire, the impression of Rome is as indefinable as it is profound, but one can connect some part of it at least with the magnitude of the stones and the ponderous simplicity of their courses, with the strength that the half-circle and the straight line convey, and with the double evidence of extreme antiquity and extreme endurance; for there is something awful in the sight of so many centuries visibly stamped upon the stone, and able to evoke every effect of age but not to compel decay.

This nameless character which is the mark of the Empire, and carries, as it were, a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in what has fallen as in what stands. A few bricks built at random into a mud wall bear the sign of Rome and proclaim her title: a little bronze unearthed at random in the rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman Victory: a few flag-stones lying broken upon a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman Road: nor do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an irrecoverable good, but rather its continued victory. To see so many witnesses small and great is not to remember a past or a lost excellence, but to become part of it and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is a surety also for the future to see such things.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Peasant’s Wall]

There is a field where this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh the traveller with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands across which the wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a peasant of the place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his land with Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like all his peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or mould brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only material he could use was the work of the old masters who had trained his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest that he laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power still ruled him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea from Europe to make good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It is with a lively appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing or has perished. The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs slope here and there. But the edges of those stones, which are twenty times older than his effort, remain. They will fall again and lie where he found them; but they and the power that cut them are alike imperishable.

[Sidenote: The Landscape of Antiquity]