Part 5

The vices and the energy of this people are well known. They are perpetually critical of their own authorities, and perpetually lamenting the decline of their honour. There is no difficulty they will not surmount. They have crossed all deserts and have perfected every art. Their victories in the field would seem legendary were they not attested; their audacity, whether in civil war or in foreign adventure, has permanently astonished their neighbours to the south, the east and the north. They are the most general in framing a policy and the most actual in pursuing it. Their incredible achievements have always the appearance of accidents. They are tenacious of the memory of defeats rather than of victories. They change more rapidly and with less reverence than any other men the external expression of their tireless effort, yet, more than any other men, they preserve—in spite of themselves—an original and unchanging spirit. Their boundaries are continually the same. They are acute and vivid in matters of reason, careless in those of judgment. A coward and a statesman are equally rare among them, yet their achievements are the result of prudence and their history is marked by a succession of silent and calculating politicians. Alone of European peoples the Gauls have, by a sort of habit, indulged in huge raids which seemed but an expense of military passion to no purpose. They alone could have poured out in that tide of the third century before our era to swamp Lombardy, to wreck Delphi, and to colonise Asia. They alone could have conceived the crusades: they alone the revolutionary wars. It is remarkable that in all such eruptions they alone fought eastward, marching from camp into the early light; they alone were content to return with little spoil and with no addition of provinces, to write some epic of their wars.

It is evident that such a people would produce in Africa, not a European and a general, but a Gallic and a particular effect. They boast themselves in everything the continuators of the Romans. They do, indeed, inherit the Roman passion for equality, and they, like the Romans, have tenaciously fought their way to equality by an effort spread over many hundred years. They are Roman in their careful building, in their strict roads, in their small stature, in their heavy chests, in their clarity of language, in their adoration of office and of symbol, in their lightning marches: the heavy lading of their troops, their special pedantry, their disgust at vagueness, their ambition and their honour are Roman. But they are not Roman in permanent stability of detail. The Romans spread an odour of religion round the smallest functions of the State: of the French you can say no more than that any French thing you see to-day may be gone to-morrow, and that only France remains. They are not Roman in the determination never to retreat, nor are they Roman in the worship of silence. The French can express the majesty of the Empire in art: they cannot act it in their daily life—for this inheritance of Rome the Spaniards are better suited. As for the Roman conception of a fatal expansion the Russians exceed them, and for the Roman ease and aptitude the Italians.

Had, then, the reconquest of Barbary fallen naturally to the three sisters—to Spain, to Italy, and to France, the long attempt of Europe might have reached its end. The Spaniard would have crushed and dominated in Morocco where the Mohammedan was most strongly entrenched; the Italian, with his subtle admixture, would have kneaded Tunis and the eastern march into a firm barrier; the French would have developed their active commerce upon the many small towns of the Central Tell, would have pierced, as they are fitted to pierce, the high Central Plateaux with admirable roads, and would have garrisoned, as their taste for a risk well fits them to garrison, the outposts of the Central Atlas against the desert. Then the task would be over, and Europe would be resettled within its original boundaries.

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[Sidenote: The March]

On their long route marches, on the marches of their manœuvres and their wars, the French, along their roads which are direct and august, (and at evening, when one is weary, sombre,) seek a place of reunion and of repose: upon this the corps converges, and there at last a man may lie a long night under shelter and content to sleep: a town lies before the pioneers and is their goal. It stands, tiny with spires, above the horizon of their hedgeless plains, and as they go they sing of the halt, or, for long spaces, are silent, bent trudging under the pack: for they abhor parade. Very often they do not reach their goal. They then lie out in bivouac under the sky and light very many fires, five to a company or more, and sleep out unsatisfied. Such a strain and such an attempt: such a march, such a disappointment, and such a goal are the symbols of their history; for they are perpetually seeking, under arms, a Europe that shall endure. In this search they must continue here in Africa, as they continue in their own country, that march of theirs which sees the city ever before it and yet cannot come near to salute the guard at the gates and to enter in. It is their business to re-create the Empire in this province of Africa. It may be that here also they will come to no completion; but if they fail, Europe will fail with them, and it will be a sign that our tradition has ended.

[Sidenote: The French Genius]

They have done the Latin thing. First they have designed, then organised, then built, then ploughed, and their wealth has come last. The mind is present to excess in the stamp they have laid upon Africa. Their utter regularity and the sense of will envelop the whole province; and their genius, inflexible and yet alert, alert and yet monotonous, is to be seen everywhere in similar roads, similar bridges of careful and even ornamented stone, similar barracks and loop-holed walls.

[Sidenote: The Straight Railway]

There is a perspective upon the High Plateaux which though it is exceptional is typical of their spirit. It is on the salt plain just before the gate of the desert is reached and the fall on to the desert begun. Here the flat and unfruitful level glares white and red: it is of little use to men or none. Some few adventurers, like their peers in the Rockies, have attempted to enclose a patch or two of ground, but the whole landscape is parched and dead. Through this, right on like a gesture of command, like the dart of a spear, goes the rail, urging towards the Sahara, as though the Sahara were not a boundary but a goal. The odd, single hills, as high as the Wrekin or higher, upon which not even the goats can live, look down upon the straight line thus traced: these hills and the track beneath them afford a stupendous contrast. Nowhere is the determination of man more defiant against the sullen refusal of the earth.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The French Afforestation]

There is another effort of the French which may be watched with more anxiety and more comprehension by northern men than their admirable roads or their railways or their wires above the sand, and that is their afforestation.

It is a debate which will not be decided (for the material of full decision is lacking) whether, since the Romans crowded their millions into this Africa, the rainfall has or has not changed. It is certain that they husbanded water upon every side and built great barricades to hold the streams; yet it is certain, also, that their cities stood where no such great groups of men could live to-day. There are those who believe that under Atlas, towards the desert, a shallow sea spread westward from the Mediterranean and from Syrtis: there are others who believe that the dry water-courses of the Sahara were recently alive with streams, and that the tombs and inscriptions of the waste places, now half buried in the sand, prove a great lake upon whose shores a whole province could cultivate and live. Both hypotheses are doubtful for this reason—that no good legend preserves the record. Changes far less momentous have left whole cycles of ballads and stories behind them. The Sahara has been the Sahara since men have sung or spoken of it. Moreover, the Romans did certainly push out, as the French have done, towards certain limits, beyond which no effort was worth the while of armies. They felt a boundary to the south. They could bear the summer of Biskra, but not that of Touggourt: their posts upon the edge of the desert were ultimate posts as are the European garrisons to-day.

But in one thing the sense of change is justified, and that is the fall of the woods. Here Islam worked itself out fully: its ignorance of consequence, its absolute and insufficient assertion, its lack of harmony with the process and modulation of time, its Arabian origin, are all apparent in the destruction of trees. If the rainfall is as abundant as ever, it is not held, for the roots of trees are lacking, and if it be true that trees in summer bring rain of themselves by their leaves, then that benefit is also gone. There are many deep channels, called _secchias_, traversing the soft dust of the uplands, with no trace of bridges where the Roman roads cross them: they are new. They are carved by the sudden spates that follow the cloudbursts in the hills. Here, perhaps, in the Roman time were regular and even streams, and perhaps, upon their banks, where now are stretches of ugly earth quite bare, the legionaries saw meadows. At any rate, the trees have gone.

Up in the higher hills, in Aurès and the Djurdjura, upon the flanks of the mountains where the Berbers remain unconquered, and where the melting of the snows give a copious moisture, forests still remain. They are commonly of great cedars as dark as the pine woods of the Vosges or the noble chesnut groves by which the Alps lead a man down into Italy. But these forests are rare and isolated as the aboriginal languages and tribes which haunt them. You may camp under the deep boughs within a march of Batna and then go northward and eastward for days and days of walking before you come again to the woods and their scent and their good floor of needles in the heights from which you see again the welcome of the Mediterranean.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: Story of the Determinist]

This lack of trees the French very laboriously attempt to correct. Their chief obstacle is the nature of that religion which is also the hard barrier raised against every other European thing which may attempt to influence Africa to-day.

There was a new grove planted some ten years since in a chosen place. It was surrounded with a wall, and the little trees were chosen delicately and bought at a great price, and planted by men particularly skilled. Also, there was an edict posted up in those wilds (it was within fifty miles of the desert, just on the hither side of Atlas) saying that a grove had been planted in such and such a place and that no one was to hurt the trees, under dreadful penalties. The French also, as is the laudable custom of Republicans, gave a reason for what they did, pointing out that trees had such and such an effect on climate—the whole in plain clear terms and printed in the Arabic script.

There was, however, a Mohammedan who, on reading this, immediately saw in it an advertisement of wealth and pasture. He drove his goats for nearly fifteen miles, camped outside the wall, and next day lifted each animal carefully one by one into the enclosure that they might browse upon the tender shoots of the young trees. “Better,” he thought, “that my goats should fatten than that the mad Christians should enjoy this tree-fad of theirs which is of no advantage to God or man.”

When his last goat was over two rangers came, and, in extreme anger, brought him before the magistrate, where he was asked what reason he could give for the wrong thing he had done. He answered, “_R’aho_, it was the will of God. _Mektoub_, it was written”—or words to that effect.

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[Sidenote: Cirta or Constantine]

The platform of the Rock of Cirta is the place from which the effort of the French over all this land can best be judged, for it is the centre round which nature and history have grouped the four changes of Barbary.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: Constantine]

The rock is like those headlands which jut out from inland ranges and dominate deep harbours; it is as bold as are such capes, and is united, as they are, with the mass of land behind it by a neck of even surface—the only passage by which the rock itself can be approached. On every side but this, very sharp slopes of grass, broken by precipices, plunge down in a mountainous way to the valleys, and at the foot of the most sheer of these there tumbles noisily in a profound gorge the torrent called Rummel, that is, “The Tawny,” for it is as yellow as a lion or as sea-sand.

The trench is so deep and dark that one may stand above it towards evening and hear the noise of the water and yet see no gleam of light reflected from it, it runs so far below. It is this stream which has made on the Rock of Cirta (though it is out of the true Tell and far into the Tableland) a habitable fortress and a town; the town called Constantine.

Such sites are very rare. Luxemburg is one, a stronghold cut off by similar precipitous valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they are found the origin of their fortress goes back beyond the beginning of history, they are tribal, and their record is principally of war. So it is with Cirta. The legends of the nomads say that they descended from some enormous dusky figure, a God of the Atlas and of Spain—a giant God marching along the shores of the ocean followed perpetually by armies. Even this first of African names was mixed up with Cirta, for the title of the rock was that of his loves, and the name Cirta given it by these horsemen of Numidia was the name of their universal mother. A man can be certain, as he walks along the edges of the place to-day and looks down into the gulfs below it, that men have so moved here amid buildings and in a fixed town with altars and a name ever since first they knew how to mortar stones together and to obey laws. The close pack of houses standing thus apart upon a peak has in it, therefore, something consistently sacred. Permanence and continuity are to be discovered here only among the cities of Africa; and its landscape and character of themselves impress the traveller with a certitude that here will be planted on into time the capital of the native blood: too far removed from the sea for colonisation or piracy to destroy it: too well cut off by those trenches of defence to be sacked and overrun: too peopled and well watered to decay.

[Illustration]

The town has been taken in every conquest, and every conqueror has boasted himself to have overcome the walls of rock, the hundreds of feet of sheer climbing. The boast is manifestly absurd, though the temptation to make it was irresistible. When Cirta has been stormed only one gate admitted the invaders, and that was the isthmus which leads from the platform of the summit to the tableland beyond. It was here that Massinissa and here that the Romans entered. By this entry came the French soldiers, and the market which stands there is called to-day “The Place of the Breach.”

[Sidenote: The Inscriptions]

There is a place in Constantine where the full history of the town is best felt, and that is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon the edge of the rock upon the side furthest from the river and looks at the storms blowing over the uplands from Atlas and driving low clouds right at the crest of the walls. In this building are preserved (in no great number) the antiquities of the place and its neighbourhood. Here is a little silver victory which once fluttered, it is thought, in the hand of that great statue which adorned the Capitol, and here are long rows of tombs from the beginning of the Italian influence till the time of the martyrs: you see carved upon them the slow change of the mind until the last of the pagans boast of such virtues and have already that sort of content which the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath to succeeding time. This record of the epitaphs, though brief, is perfect; you watch at work in them the spirit that made St. Cyprian transforming the African soil; but their chief interest is in this, that they are, as it were, a rediscovery of ourselves. You dig through centuries of alien rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and, when you have dug deeply enough you come suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred years an idiom quite unfamiliar to us has alone been spoken here: beneath it you find the august and reasonable Latin, and as you read you feel about you the air of home. For all those generations the manifold aspect of the divine was forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then, deep down, you discover a tablet upon a tomb, and, reading it, you find it was carved in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so gracious and who so served the divinities of the woods that when she died _ingemuerunt Dryades_: twice I read those delicate words, delicately chiselled in hard stone, and I saw her going in black, with her head bent, through groves. A trace of colouring remains upon the lettering of the verse and a powerful affection lingers in it, so that the past is preserved. Islam destroyed with fanaticism the figures of animals and of men: here in these European carvings they are everywhere. The barbarian creed conceived or implanted a barbaric fear of vines: here you see Bacchus, young, on the corner of a frieze, and gentle old Silenus carried heavily along.

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[Sidenote: Cæsarea or Cherchel]

If it is from the Rock of Cirta, from Constantine, that the recovery of the province and its re-entry into Europe is best perceived—for there stands the unchanging centre of Africa, and there can all the threads of her destiny be grasped—yet there is another place far westward and down upon the shore, where the wound that Europe suffered by the Mohammedan invasion is more marked and long eclipse of our race more apparent. It is the Bay of Cæsarea.

Constantine is so necessary to Africa that its very name (and it is alone in this among all the cities) has been preserved. Cæsarea has lost its name and its dignity too. The Barbarians have come to call her “Cherchel”: as for her rank, it has been forgotten altogether; yet this port was for a hundred years peculiar among all others in the Mediterranean—it was more remote, more splendid, and more new. The accident which created it lent a great story to its dynasty, and its situation here, along the steeper shores that lead on to the Straits and to the outer ocean, lent some western mystery to it and some appeal.

[Sidenote: Cherchel]

Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, was famous throughout the Mediterranean for her beauty. The last of her lovers—it is well known—was Anthony the Triumvir, who had desired (until he saw her) to inherit from Cæsar and to rule the whole world. This ambition he abandoned after one battle, lost, it is said, through her folly; and soon after that defeat they chose to die. But a fruit of their loves, and a picture, perhaps, of his courage and of her magnificence, survived in a daughter whom her mother had dedicated to the Moon and had called Selene. This child was married out into Barbary, to the king of the nomads, and here, in Cherchel, she held with her husband for many years a court which gathered round it the handicraft of Corinth, the letters of Athens, and some reflected splendour from the town of Rome.

He was of those horsemen who had now for two centuries served Carthage as mercenaries or Rome as allies. To the cities of the sea coast, which were Italian or Asiatic in blood, these riders of the uplands had been outer men. They appeared barbaric to the end, and, at the very end, it was their blood, perhaps, that rebelled against the tradition of order and that joined first the Vandal and then the Arab. The king was dark and a barbarian. This wife who was sent to him inherited the broad forehead of Rome and the silence of Egypt, and was also an heiress to the generals of Alexander. There met in her, therefore, all those high sources from whose unison Christendom has proceeded. She came west to a new land that did not know cut stone and hardly roads: in a little time she had built a city.

By some economic power which no one has explained, but which may be compared to the wealth of our smaller independent States to-day and their merchants, to Antwerp or to The Hague, this city of Mauretania rose to be a marvel. The porticos stretched along that rise of land, and a mile of new work, columns and pedestalled statues and arcades, looked down from the slope and saw, making for the shore, perpetual sails from the eastward. Great libraries dignified the city: a complete security and a humane consideration for the arts continually increased its glory. The passion for scholarship, which was at that time excessive, may have touched the palace here with something of the ridiculous. The king wrote, dictated, or commanded a whole shelf of books and was eager for the pride of authorship. But no other note of indignity entered their State, and all around them, looking out to sea, was a resurrection of Greece.

This queen and her husband lived on into old age thus, untroubled in their isolation and their content, and destined (as they thought) to leave a dynasty which even the domination of Rome would protect and spare.

Nothing is left. Rome seized their town at last. Their descendants perished. All Mauretania was compelled to follow the common line of unity. For four hundred years it has no history save that under the Roman order it endured and increased. The Vandals passed it by: it might still stand had there not fallen upon it the Mohammedan invasion which everywhere destroyed, or rather abandoned, a Roman endeavour. The neglect which was native to the Arab, the sharp breach which he made in tradition, ended Cæsarea. To-day, a little market town, a tenth of the old capital, barrenly preserves a memory of those two thousand years. A few fragments which the plough recovers or which the builders have spared are gathered in one place: the rest is parched fields and trees.

[Sidenote: The Aqueduct]