Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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:

[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.

[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.

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.

* * * * *

[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_.

[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.

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.

[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]

It has been said that the men of antiquity had no regard for landscape, and that those principal poems upon which all letters repose betray an indifference to horizons and to distant views. The objection is ill-found, for even the poems let show through their admirable restraint the same passion which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills of home: they speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an Homeric man desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising from his own fields and after that to die. But much stronger than anything their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality is the emplacement of their buildings.

[Sidenote: The Theatre of Calama]

Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the spirit which built a certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in a place now deserted, the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of land, and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them, and that the shrine becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of a composition. Of this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all southern Europe is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.

The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people and the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for their plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out like a quarry from the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that were presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the senses. We have no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our drama, nor even with our patriotism—such as the modern world has made it. The last centuries of the Empire had all these things in common: great verse inherited from an older time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one religion, and the open sky. Therefore its memory has outlasted all intervening time, and it itself the Empire, (though this truth is as yet but half-received,) has re-arisen.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Greatness of The First Four Centuries]

There is one great note in the story of our race which the least learned man can at once appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.

Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the completed Roman Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows that the modern world has flowed outwards from that reservoir by various channels. Everybody knows that this formation of a United Europe was hardly completed in the first century, that it was at last conscious of disintegration in the fifth. The first four centuries are therefore present as dates in everybody’s mind, yet the significance of the dates is forgotten.

Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman decline, and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in some few novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was coming, the men of the time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own self-estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.

The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand, especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly an industry or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an accumulation of experience grown to create upon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar contribution to the State; and far the larger part of the stuff of our own lives was created, or was preserved, by that period of unity.

That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we alone have roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we alone in our art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all that we do by ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of change and can develop from within—in a word, that we alone are Christians we derive from that time.

Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions of human dignity and of right. Even in the details our structure of society descends from that source: we govern, or attempt to govern, by representation because the monastic institutions of the end of the Empire were under a necessity of adopting that device: we associate the horse with arms and with nobility because the last of the Romans did so.

If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled by the vigour of the western mind between Augustus and Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State what is even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and uniformity the orders of those emperors who seem to us the lessening despots of a failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates, to be obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the Rome of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets, but something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading ocean.

Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the sound of three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do.

“Telle que dans son char la Bérycynthienne
Couronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoir
Enfanté tant de dieux....”

This was the might and the permanence from which we sprang.

To establish the character of the Empire and its creative mission is the less easy from the prejudice that has so long existed against the action of religion, and especially of that religion which the Empire embraced as its cataclysm approached. The acceptation of the creed is associated in every mind with the eclipse of knowledge and with a contempt for the delights which every mind now seeks. It is often thought the cause, always the companion, of decay, and so far has this sentiment proceeded that in reading books upon Augustine or upon Athanasius one might forget by what a sea and under what a sunlight the vast revolution was effected.

It is true that when every European element had mixed to form one pattern, things local and well done disappeared. The vague overwhelming and perhaps insoluble problems which concern not a city but the whole world, the discovery of human doom and of the nature and destiny of the soul, these occupied such minds as would in an earlier time have bent themselves to simpler and more feasible tasks than the search after finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a less extent letters, failed: for these fringes of life whose perfection depends upon detail demand for their occasional flowering small and happy States full of fixed dogmas and of certain usages. But though it lost the visible powers antiquity had known, the Empire at its end, when it turned to the contemplation of eternity, broadened much more than our moderns—who are enemies of its religious theory—will admit. The business which Rome undertook in her decline was so noble and upon so great a scale that when it had succeeded, then, in spite of other invasions, the continuity of Europe was saved. We absorbed the few barbarians of the fifth century, we had even the vitality to hold out in the terror and darkness of the ninth, and in the twelfth we re-arose. It was the character of the Western Empire during the first four centuries, and notably its character towards their close, which prevented the sleep of the Dark Ages from being a death. These first four centuries cast the mould which still constrains us; they formed our final creed, they fixed the routes of commerce and the sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest trifles of topography you come across them still: the boundary of Normandy, as we know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If there can be said of Europe what cannot be said of any other part of the world, that its civilisation never grew sterile and never disappeared, then we owe the power of saying such a thing to that long evening of the Mediterranean.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Arabic Influence]

If this pre-eminence of Rome in the process of her conversion is the lesson of all travel it is especially the lesson of Africa; and nowhere is that lesson taught more clear than in Guelma. Here also you may perceive how it was that the particular cause which ruined the spirit of the Roman town also saved its stones, and you may feel, like an atmosphere, the lightness, the permeation, as it were, without pressure:—the perpetual fluid influence which overflowed the province upon the arrival of the Arabs. So that the bone of Rome remain, caught in a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand, could preserve them for ever.

For the Arab did in Calama what he did throughout Barbary: he cast a spell. He did not destroy with savagery, he rather neglected all that he could afford to neglect. Here also he cut down timber, but he did not replant. Here also he let the water-pipes of the Romans run dry. Here also the Arab, who apparently achieved nothing material, imposed a command more powerful than the compulsion of any government or the fear of any conqueror: he sowed broadcast his religion and his language; his harvest grew at once; first it hid and at last it stifled the religion and the language he had found. The speech, and the faith which renders that speech sacred, transformed the soul of Barbary: they oppose between them a barrier to the reconquest more formidable by far than were the steppes and the nomads to the first advance of Rome. Of this impalpable veil which is spread between the native population and the new settlers the traveller is more readily aware in the little cities of the hills than in the larger towns of the coast. The external change of the last generation is apparent: the houses about him are European houses; the roads might be roads in France or Northern Italy. The general aspect of Guelma confirms that impression of modernity, nor is there much save the low loop-holed walls which surround the town, to remind one of Africa; but from the midst of its roofs rises the evidence of that religion which still holds and will continue to hold all its people. The only building upon which the efforts of an indolent creed have fastened is the mosque, and the minaret stands alone, conspicuous and central over all the European attempt, and mocks us.

Far off, where the walls and the barracks are confused into a general band of white, and no outline is salient enough to distinguish the modern from the ancient work of the place, this wholly Mohammedan shaft of stone marks the place for Mohammedan. It is an enduring challenge.

There is a triumph of influence which all of us have known and against which many of us have struggled. It is certainly not a force which one can resist, still less is it effected by (though it often accompanies) the success of armies. It is the pressure and at last the conquest of ideas when they have this three-fold power: first, that they are novel and attack those parts of the mind still sensitive; secondly, that they are expounded with conviction (conviction necessary to the conveyance of doctrine); and, thirdly, that they form a system and are final. Such was the triumph of the Arab.

Our jaded day, which must for ever be taking some drug or tickling itself with unaccustomed emotion, has pretended to discover in Islam, as it has pretended to discover in twenty other alien things, the plan of happiness; and a stupid northern admiration for whatever has excited the wonder or the curiosity of the traveller has made Mohammedism, as it has made Buddhism and God knows what other inferiorities or aberrations of human philosophy, the talk of drawing-rooms and the satisfaction of lethargic men. It is not in this spirit that a worthy tribute can be paid to the enormous invasion of the seventh century.

[Sidenote: The Arabic Invasion]

That invasion as a whole has failed. Christendom, for ever criticised, (for it is in its own nature to criticise itself,) has emerged; but if one would comprehend how sharp was the issue, one should read again all that was written between Charlemagne and the death of St. Louis. In the Song of Roland, in the “Gesta Francorum,” in Joinville, this new attack of Asia is present—formidable, and greater than ourselves; something which we hardly dared to conquer, which we thought we could not conquer, which the greatest of us thought he had failed in conquering. Islam was far more learned than we were, it was better equipped in arms and nevertheless more civic and more tolerant. When the last efforts of the crusades dragged back to Europe an evil memory of defeat, there was perhaps no doubt in those who despaired, still less in those who secretly delighted that such fantasies were ended—there was no doubt, I say, in their minds that the full re-establishment of our civilisation was impossible, and that the two rivals were destined to stand for ever one against the other: the invader checked and the invaded prudent; for, throughout the struggle we had always looked upon our rivals at least as equals and usually as superiors.

[Sidenote: Its Continued Influence]

It is in the most subtle expressions that the quarrel between the two philosophies appears. Continually Islam presses upon us without our knowing it. It made the Albigenses, it is raising here and there throughout European literature at this moment notes of determinism, just as that other influence from the Further East is raising notes of cruelty or of despair.

[Sidenote: The Gothic]

There is one point in which the contact between these master-enemies and ourselves is best apparent. They gave us the Gothic, and yet under our hands the Gothic became the most essentially European of all European things. Consider these two tiers of one Arabian building founded in Africa, while yet the vigour of that civilisation was strong. True, the work is not in stone but in plaster, for to work stone they needed an older civilisation than their own. But see how it is the origin of, or rather identical with, our ogive. By what is it that we recognise these intersecting segments (which are of the perfect 60° like our own) to be something foreign? And how is it that we know that no Christian could have built these things? Venice has windows like these: by just so much she is not of the West, and by just that innoculation perhaps she perished. The ecstasy of height, the self-development of form into further form, the grotesque, the sublime and the enthusiastic—all these things the Arab arch lacks as utterly as did the Arab spirit; yet the form is theirs and we obtained it from them. In this similarity and in these differences are contained and presented visibly the whole story of our contact with them and of our antagonism.

In the presence of the doom or message which the Arabians communicated to our race in Africa, one is compelled to something of the awe with which one would regard a tomb from which great miracles proceeded, or a dead hero who, though dead, might not be disturbed. The thing we have to combat, or which we refrain and dread from combating, is not tangible, and is the more difficult to remove. It has sunk into the Atlas and into the desert, it has filled the mind of every man from the Soudan which it controls up northwards to Atlas and throughout this land.

[Sidenote: The Touaregs]

Roaming in the Sahara are bands of men famous for their courage and their isolation. They are called the Touaregs. They are of the same race and the same language as those original Berbers who yet maintain themselves apart in the heights of Aurès or of the Djurdjura. They are the enemies of all outside their tribes, especially of the Arab merchants, upon whose caravans they live by pillage. Yet even these Islam has thoroughly possessed and would seem to have conquered for ever. Their language has escaped; their tiny literature (for they have letters of their own, and their alphabet is indigenous) has survived every external influence, but even there the God of the Mohammedans has appeared.

One taken captive some years since wrote back from Europe to his tribe in his own stiff characters a very charming letter in which he ended by recommending himself to the young women of his home, for he himself was a fighter, courteous, and in his thirtieth year. But when he had written “Salute the Little Queens from me,” he was careful to add an invocation to Allah. And if in their long forays it is necessary to bury hastily some companion who has fallen in the retreat, his shallow grave in the sand is carefully designed according to the custom of religion. They leave him upon his right side in an attitude which they hold as sacred, his face turned to the east and towards Mecca. In this posture he awaits the Great Day.

[Sidenote: The Lack of an Opposing Faith]

Against this vast permanent and rooted influence we have nothing to offer. Our designs of material benefit or of positive enlightenment are to the presence of this common creed as is some human machine to the sea. We can pass through it, but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will our work be accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps through disasters suffered in our European homes, the full tradition of our philosophy and a faith which shall permeate all our actions as completely as does this faith of theirs.

That no religion brought by us stands active against their own is an apparent weakness in the reconquest, but that consequence of the long indifference through which Europe has passed is not the only impediment it has produced. The dissolution of the principal bond between Europeans—the bond of their traditional ritual and confession—has also prevented the occupation of Africa from being, as it should have been, a united and therefore an orderly campaign of the West to recover its own.

[Sidenote: Cause of Isolated French Action]

Had not our religion suffered the violent schisms which are now so slowly healing, and had not our general life resolved itself for a time into a blind race between the various provinces of Europe, the reconquest of Barbary would have fallen naturally to the nations which regard each its own section of the opposing coast; as in the reconquest of Spain the Asturias advanced upon Leon, the Galicians upon Portugal, and Old Castille upon the southern province to which it extended its own name. Then Italy would have concerned itself with Tunis—with Ifrigya, that is—and with the rare fringe of the Tripolitan and its shallow harbours. The French would have occupied Numidia. The Spaniards would have swept on to re-Christianise the last province of the west from Oran to the Atlantic, and so have completed the task which they let drop after the march upon Granada. Such should have been the natural end of mediæval progress, and that reconstruction of the Empire (which was the nebulous but constant goal towards which the Middle Ages moved) would have been accomplished. But the most sudden and the most inexplicable of our revolutions came in and broke the scheme. The Middle Ages died without a warning. A curious passion for metaphysics seized upon certain districts of the north, which in their exaltation attempted to live alone: the south, in resisting the disruption of Europe, exhausted its energies; and meanwhile the temptation to exploit the Americas and the Indies drained the Mediterranean of adventurers and of navies. Islam in its lethargy acquired new vigour from its latest converts, and the Turks, with none but the Venetians to oppose them, tore away from us the whole of the Levant and rode up the Danube to insult the centre of the continent. The European system flew apart, and its various units moved along separate paths with various careers of hesitation or of fever. It was not until the Revolution and the reconstitution of sane government among us that the common scheme of the west could reappear.

On this account—on account of the vast disturbance which accompanied the Reformation and the Renaissance—Europe halted for three centuries. When at last a force landed upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it was a force which happened to be despatched by the French.

[Sidenote: The French]

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.

[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.

[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.

* * * * *

[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.

[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.