Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11 No. 27 June 1873 by Various

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Abd-el-Kader, without losing the serenity of the marabout, argued with the Kabyles, and succeeded in obtaining their reverence and adhesion; but when he mounted his horse to go the amins significantly told him to come among them always as a simple pilgrim, demanding hospitality and white kouskoussu.

At Thizzi-Ouzzou he met the tribe of Ameraouas, who promised to submit to his authority as soon as the fractions surrounding that centre should do so. The Sons of Aicha received him with honor and games of horsemanship. At the camp of Ben Salem the chiefs of several tribes came to render homage to the noble marabout, descendant of Berber ancestry and of the Prophet. From thence he sought tribes still more wild, discarding his horse and appearing among the villagers as a simple foot-pilgrim. The natives approached him in throngs, each family bearing a great dish of rancid kouskoussu. Laying the platters before his tent and planting their clubs in them, all vociferated, "Eat! thou art our guest;" and the chieftain was constrained to taste of each. Finally, near Bougie he happened to receive a courier sent by the French commandant. The Kabyles immediately believed him to be in treasonable communication with the enemy, and he was forced to retire.

"The fire was kept up throughout the night, and when the day had fully dawned the then expiring embers were kicked aside, and as soon as a sufficient time had elapsed to render the air of the silent cave breathable, some soldiers were directed to ascertain how matters were within. They were gone but a few minutes, and then came back, we are told, pale, trembling, terrified, hardly daring, it seemed, to confront the light of day. No wonder they trembled and looked pale! They had found all the Arabs dead--men, women, children, all dead!--had beheld them lying just as death had found and left them--the old man grasping his gray beard; the dead mother clasping her dead child with the steel gripe of the last struggle, when all gave way but her strong love."

Abd-el-Kader's final defeat in 1848 was due less to the prowess of Lamorici?re and Bugeaud than to the cunning of his traitorous ally, the sultan of Morocco, who, after having induced many of the princely saint's adherents to desert, finally drove him by force of numbers over the French frontier. Confronting the duke of Aumale on the Morocco borders, he made a gallant fight, but lost half his best men in warding off an attack of the Mencer Kabyles. Fatigued now with a long effort against overwhelming pressure, and world-weary, he met the duke at Nemours, on the sea-coast close to the Morocco line. Depositing his sandals, Arab-fashion, outside the French head-quarters, he awaited the duke's signal to sit down.

"I should have wished to do this sooner," said the broken chief, "but I have awaited the hour decreed by Allah. I ask the aman of the king of the French for my family and for myself."

Louis Philippe could not come in contact with this pure spirit without an exhibition of Frankish treachery, like tinder illuminating its foulness at the striking of steel. The sultan's surrender was conditioned on the freedom to retire to Egypt. The French government no sooner secured him than it treacherously sent him to prison, first to the castle of Pau, then to that of Amboise near Blois, where he was kept from 1848 to 1852, when the late emperor made an early use of his imperial power to set him at liberty. Since his freedom, at Constantinople, Broussa and Damascus the ex-sultan has continued to practice the rigors and holiness of the Oriental saint, proving his catholic spirit by protecting the Christians from Turkish injustice, and awaiting with the deep fatigue of a martyr the moment destined to unite his soul with the souls of Washington, Bozzaris and L'Ouverture.

This noble life, which impinges a moment on our course through Kabylia, is surely the most epical of our century, which can never be reproached for the lack of a hero while Abd-el-Kader's name is remembered.

The descent from the rock-perched city of Kalaa having been made in safety, and the animals being remounted at the first plateau, our Roumi traveler and his guides arrive in a few hours at the modern, fortified, but altogether Kabylian stronghold of Akbou. Here a letter from a French personage of importance gives us the acquaintance of a Kabyle family of the highest rank.

The ancestors of Ben-Ali-Cherif, remotely descended from Mohammed through one of his sisters, were of Kabylian race, and one of them, settled in Chellata, near Akbou, founded there a prosperous college of the Oriental style. Ben-Ali-Cherif, born in Chellata and residing at Akbou, receives the tourist with a natural icy dignity which only a czar among the sovereigns of Europe could hope to equal: those who have but seen Arabs of inferior class can form no notion of the distinction and lofty gravity of the chiefs of a grand house : the Kabyle noble is quite as superb as the Arab.

Ben-Ali seats us at a rich table covered with viands half French and half Oriental: a beautiful youth, his son, resembling a girl with his blue head-drapery and slim white hands, places himself at table, and attracts the conversation of the guest. The young man answers in monosyllables and with his large eyes downcast, and the agha significantly observes, "You will excuse him if he does not answer: he is not used to talk before his father."

The host, disposing of the time of his guests, has arranged a series of diversions. The valley of the river Sahel is full of boars, and panthers and monkeys abound in the neighboring spurs of the Zouaouas. While the Roumi are examining his orchards of oranges and pomegranates the agha's courtyard fills with guests, magnificent sheikhs on Barbary horses, armed with inlaid guns. These are all entertained for the night, together with the usual throng of parasites, who choke his doors like the clients of the rich Roman in Horace.

At sunrise the party is mounted. The mare of the agha, a graceful creature whose veins form an embroidery over her coat of black satin, is caparisoned with a slender crimson bridle, and a saddle smaller than the Arab saddles and furnished with lighter stirrups. The Christian guests are furnished with veritable arquebuses of the Middle Ages; that is to say, with Kabyle guns, the stock of which, flattened and surmounted with a hammer of flints, is ignited by a wheel-shaped lock, easier to be managed by a Burgundian under Charles the Bold than by an unpretending modern Roumi.

Only the djouads and marabouts--that is to say, the religious or secular nobles--have the privilege of hunting with the falcon. The patrician bird, taken by the agha from the shoulder of his hawk-bearer, is about as large as a pigeon, the head small, beak short and strong, the claws yellow and armed with sharp talons. The bird rides upon his master's leather glove until a hare is started: then, unhooded and released, his first proceeding is to dart into the zenith as if commissioned to make a hole in the sky. No fear, however, that the poor panting quarry is lost for an instant from the vision of that infallible eye, which follows far aloft in the blue, invisible and fatal. Soon the cruel bird drops like an a?rolite, and, as the deed is explained to us, doubles up his yellow hand into a fist, and deals the animal a sharp blow on the skull. Directly, as the horsemen approach, he is found with his obtuse head bent over his prey, digging out its eyes by the spoonful.

Champagne, which the cunning Mussulmans do not consider as wine, washes the meal, and coffee and pale perfumed tobacco supplement it. But when the appetite has retired and permitted some sharpness to the ordinary senses, the travelers are amazed at the gradual and silent increase which has taken place in their numbers. Every group of guests is augmented by a circle of prone and creeping forms that, springing apparently from the earth, are busily breaking the fragments of the feast under the care of the servitors, who appear, rather to encourage than repel them. Ben-Ali-Cherif, being interrogated, replies calmly, "They are Tofailians."

The Tofailian is a parasite on system, an idler who elevates his belly into a divinity, or at least a principle. His prophet or exemplar is a certain Tofail, whose doctrine is expressed in a few practical rules, respectfully observed and numerously followed. "Let him who attends a wedding-feast," says one of his apophthegms, "having no invitation, avoid glancing here and there dubiously. Choose the best place. If the guests are numerous, pass through boldly without saluting any one, to make the guests of the bride think you a friend of the bridegroom, and those of the groom a friend of the bride."

An Arab poet said of Tofail: "If he saw two buttered pancakes in a cloud, he would take his flight without hesitation."

A Tofailian of marked genius once learned that a festival was going on at a grand mansion. He ran thither, but the door was closed and entrance impossible. Inquiring here and there, he learned that a son of the house was absent on the Mecca pilgrimage. Instantly he procured a sheet of parchment, folded it, and sealed it as usual with clay: he rolled his garments in the dust and bent his spine painfully over a long staff. Thus perfect in what an actor would call his reading, he sent word to the host that a messenger had arrived from his son. "You have seen him?" said the delighted Amphitryon, "and how did he bear his fatigues?" "He was in excellent health," answered the Tofailian very feebly. "Speak, speak!" cried the eager father, "and tell me every detail: how far had he got?" "I cannot, I am faint with hunger," said the simple fellow. Directly he was seated at the highest place of the feast, and every guest admired that splendid appetite--an appetite quite professional, and cultivated as poulterers cultivate the assimilative powers of livers. "Did my son send no letter?" asked the poor father in a favorable interval caused by strangulation. "Surely," replied the good friend, and, comprehending that the critical moment had arrived, he drew to himself a chine of kid with one hand while he unwound the letter from his turban with the other. The seal was still moist, and the pilgrim had not found time to write anything on the parchment. "Are you a Tofailian?" asked the host with the illumination of a sudden idea. "Yea, in truth, verily," said the stranger, struggling with his last mouthful. "Eat, then, and may Sheytan trouble thy digestion!" The parasite was shown the door, but he had dined.

Men of rank and wealth, like Ben-Ali-Cherif, turn the Tofailian into a proverb, and thus laugh at a plague they cannot cure.

Truly the Oriental idea of hospitality has its advantages--on the side of the obliged party. This haughty ruler, on the simple stress of a letter from a French commandant, has made himself our servant and teased his brain for devices to amuse us. His chief cook precedes us to his birthplace at Chellata, to arrange a sumptuous Arab supper. After a ride made enervating by the simoom, we descend at the arcaded and galleried Moorish house where Ben-Ali-Cherif was born, and are visited by the sheikh of the college which the agha maintains. It is a strange, peaceful, cloistered scene, consecrated to study and hospitality. Chellata, white and silent, sleeps in the gigantic shadow of the rock Tisibert, and in its graveyard, among the tombs of sacred marabouts, walk the small bald-headed students reciting passages of law or of the Koran. Algeria is dotted over with institutions similar to this, which, like monasteries of old, combine the functions of seminaries and gratuitous inns. That of Ben-Ali-Cherif, to which he contributes from his own purse a sum equal to sixteen thousand dollars a year, is enshrined in buildings strewn around the resting-place of his holy ancestors. The sacred koubba marking the bones of the marabout is swept by shadows of oak and tamarind trees: professors stray in the shadow, and the pupils con their tasks on the adjoining tombstones.

Every impression of Chellata is silvered over, as with a moonlight of beneficence, by the attentions of Ben-Ali's house-steward, who rains upon our appetites a shower of most delicious kouskoussu, soothes us with Moorish coffee, and finishes by the politeness of lighting and taking the first whiff of our cigarette--a bit of courtesy that might be spared, but common here as in parts of Spain.

With daybreak we find the town of Chellata preparing to play its r?le as a mart or place of industry. The labor seems at first sight, however, to be confined to the children and the women: the former lead the flocks out at sunrise to pasture in the mountain, the women make the town ring with their busy work, whether of grinding at the mill, weaving stuff or making graceful vases in pottery. The men are at work in the fields, from which they return at nightfall, sullen, hardy and silent, in their tattered haiks. These are never changed among the poor working-people, for the scars of a bornouse are as dignified as those of the body, and are confided with the garment by a father to his son. The women, as we have remarked before, are in a state of far greater liberty than are the female Arabs, but it is more than anything else the liberty to toil. Among these mountaineers the wife is a chattel from whom it is permissible to extract all the usefulness possible, and whom it is allowable to sell when a bargain can be struck. The Kabyle woman's sole recreation is her errand to the fountain. This is sometimes situated in the valley, far from the nodding pillar or precipice on which the town is built. There the traveler finds the good wives talking and laughing together, bending their lively--sometimes blonde and blue-eyed--faces together over their jars, and gossiping as in Naples or as in the streets around Notre Dame in Paris. The Kabyles--differing therein from the Arabs--provide a fountain for either sex; and a visit by a man to the women's fountain is charged, in their singular code of penal fines, "inspired by Allah," a sum equal to five dollars, or half as much as the theft of an ox.

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

As the tourist turns the summit of Aboudid suddenly appears, like an ornamental detail in a panorama, this vast fortress, originally named Fort Napol?on, and since the collapse of the empire called Fort National. During the French troubles of 1871, in the month of August, General C?r?s was obliged to inspire terror by burning the village of Thizzi-Ouzzou beneath, and then went on to relieve the fort. When the next opportunity will occur for the Beni Raten to assert their rights it is impossible to tell. We descend from the fort, and all becomes commonplace. The charred ruins of Thizzi-Ouzzou in its valley-bed are being replaced by new buildings. All wears a look of every-day thrift. The Arab, moving his household goods, drives before him his poor dingy wife, loaded down with worthless valuables and also with copper jewels, in which she clanks like a fettered slave. A negro musician from the Desert, a true African minstrel, capers before us and beats the tom-tom, until, distracted with his noise, we pay him and bombard him off the face of the road with projectiles.

A REMINISCENCE OF THE EXPOSITION OF 1867.

"And you traveled alone?"

"You found no difficulty?"

"Not a bit," she replied laughing.

"But you had adventures: I see it in your face."

"Who would travel without adventures?" and she made an expressive gesture.

"Romantic?"

"I am all attention: begin."

"You promise not to tell?"

"Not for the world: torture could not induce me to divulge a single word."

"Well, the way it came about was this: Annie and I had been sent from England to a small French town on the coast, for the benefit of the warm sea-water baths. It was a quaint little port; all the houses reminded you of ships in their fitting up; the beds were set into the wall like berths; closets were stowed away in all sorts of impossible places; the floors were uncarpeted and white as a main deck; and articles from distant countries hung about the walls or stood in the corners--East Indian sugar-cane, cotton from America, Chinese crockery and piles of sea-shells. The great sea by which we lodged was represented everywhere. Our food was fish, shrimps and water-fowl--our acquaintance, fishermen, shrimpers and sailors. The leading event of the day was the coming in and going out of the tide, and ducks and geese were the chief domestic animals. On one side was a prospect of wind-tossed waves and the sails of ships, on the other wind-beaten fields and the sails of mills: the few cabins that had rashly ventured beyond the protection of the village shortly lost courage, and, with their thatched roofs not a yard from the earth, seemed crouching low to avoid the continuous blasts. The church alone on the high sea-wall raised itself fearlessly against the tyrant, and though his baffled voice still howled without, within the pious prayed securely before a faith-inspiring altarpiece of Christ stilling the tempest.

"In a few weeks, after we had exhausted every amusement that the dull town afforded, become intimate with all the old gossips, tired of listening to the yarns of the pilot-tars off duty, driven the donkeys over the country until they instinctively avoided us whenever we appeared, sailed in the bay and suffered periodic attacks of sea-sickness therefrom, finished the circulating library, and half learned some barbarous sentences of Norman patois, we sat down disconsolate one afternoon to devise some means of employing the remainder of our time. It was then that the bright idea struck Annie, and she exclaimed, 'Let us go to the Paris Exposition!'

"'Just the thing!' I answered with enthusiasm. 'I wonder when the next train starts?'

"'I'll go and inquire: you begin and pack the trunks. If we can get off to-day, by to-morrow morning we can begin seeing it;' and she left the room in great excitement.

"The result was, that by seven o'clock that evening we had made our hasty preparations, and were ready to set out. It was raining terribly when the only hack of the village called for us at the door. The dripping fluid oozed and sparkled over the blinking lamps, the ribbed sides of the antiquated machine were varnished with moisture, and the horses looked as if each hair was a water-spout to drain the sky. Noah's patriarchal mansion might have presented a similar appearance during the first days of that celebrated wet season.

"The omnibus was crowded, and I had perforce to sit on Annie's knees. This, with the jolting, the queer effect of the half-light in the rickety interior, together with the expression of the good people, who evidently could see no fun in rain, excited my risibility so strongly that I indulged in a smothered laugh, tempered to fit the publicity of the occasion.

"'You must not laugh in France,' whispered Nan, pulling my dress.

"'I thought the French admired gayety,' I answered in the same tone.

"'Be quiet: it isn't proper.'

"The rest of the way was accomplished in silence. We soon arrived at the station and bought our tickets. Of course we had half a dozen bundles: in gathering them up a most gentlemanly person accosted us and asked, 'Avez vous perdu quelque chose, mademoiselle?'

"Annie replied in the negative with great dignity, and so cut off any chance of adventure in that quarter.

"As we were hastening to this most desired refuge I noticed two very student-looking young men walking near us, and caught a bit of their conversation.

"'They will.'

"'They won't: a bottle of wine on it we go up in the same car with them.'

"'I told you so!'

"As we found our car and entered the students passed on, not daring to ignore the magic words on the door; so Adventure No. 2 was nipped in the bud.

"Nan and I were the only lady-passengers, and we sank back into the soft cushions with the pleasant sense that no further effort would be needed during the journey. We had been told that the train would arrive in Paris about midnight, but the lateness of the hour caused us no uneasiness, as we had been there before and remembered the city pretty well; and, besides, we thoroughly believed in our ability to take care of ourselves.

"In an interval of wakefulness we discussed our plans, and concluded to spend the night at some hotel near the station, the next morning looking up our friends and consulting them about our future proceedings, feeling that a midnight visit from us would scarcely be welcome to any one. Annie recalled a fine-looking hotel just opposite the terminus, and, having made our selection in its favor, we dozed off again very comfortably.

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