“A Pearl set in Emeralds” — Two distinct towns, one ancient, one modern — The Great Mosque — A Mohammedan religious festival — Oriental life in perfection — The road to Mustapha Supérieur — A true Moorish villa described — Women praying to a sacred tree — Excessive rainfall.
“Algiers,” says the Arab poet, with genuine Oriental love of precious stones in literature, “is a pearl set in emeralds.” And even in these degenerate days of Frank supremacy in Islam, the old Moorish town still gleams white in the sun against a deep background of green hillside, a true pearl among emeralds. For it is a great mistake to imagine North Africa, as untravelled folk suppose, a dry and desert country of arid rocky mountains. The whole strip of laughing coast which has the Atlas for its backbone may rank, on the contrary, as about the dampest, greenest, and most luxuriant region of the Mediterranean system. The home of the Barbary corsairs is a land of high mountains, deep glens, great gorges; a land of vast pine forests and thick, verdant undergrowth. A thousand rills tumble headlong down its rich ravines; a thousand rivers flow fast through its fertile valleys. For wild flowers Algeria is probably unequaled in the whole world; its general aspect in many ways recalls on a smaller scale the less snow-clad parts of eastern Switzerland.
When you approach the old pirate-nest from the sea, the first glimpse of the African coast that greets your expectant eye is a long, serrated chain of great sun-smitten mountains away inland and southward. As the steamer nears the land, you begin, after a while, to distinguish the snowy ridge of the glorious Djurjura, which is the Bernese Oberland of Algeria, a huge block of rearing peaks, their summits thick-covered by the virgin snow that feeds in spring a score of leaping torrents. By-and-by, with still nearer approach, a wide bay discloses itself, and a little range of green hills in the foreground detaches itself by degrees from the darker mass of the Atlas looming large in the distance behind. This little range is the Sahel, an outlier just separated from the main chain in the rear by the once marshy plain of the Metidja, now converted by drainage and scientific agriculture into the most fertile lowland region of all North Africa.
Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in style, square, flat-roofed boxes; all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible to insert a pin’s head between them. From within, to him that enters, sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of streets or rows on the general coup d’œil from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in picturesqueness. A spacious port has been constructed, with massive mole and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do honor to Marseilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers. Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways en plein Orient. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs, Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; muffled women in loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped straight out of the “Arabian Nights,” chaffer for centimes at the shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous; all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every instance the old mosques and palaces. The principal square, a broad place lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie. Hard by stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within doors its old Mohammedan mimbar and many curious remains of quaint Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Græco-Roman antiques is oddly installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure white marble are unsurpassed in the Moslem world for their quaintness, their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars. Decoration there is none; the mosque depends for effect entirely on its architectural features and its noble proportions. But the long perspective of these endless aisles, opening out to right and left perpetually as you proceed, strikes the imagination of the beholder with a solemn sense of vastness and mystery. As you pick your way, shoeless, among the loose mats on the floor, through those empty long corridors, between those buttress-like pillars, the soul shrinks within you, awe-struck. The very absence of images or shrines, the simplicity and severity, gives one the true Semitic religious thrill. No gauds or gewgaws here. You feel at once you are in the unseen presence of the Infinite and the Incomprehensible.
The very first time I went into the Great Mosque happened, by good luck, to be the day of a Mohammedan religious festival. Rows and rows of Arabs in white robes filled up the interspaces of the columns, and rose and fell with one accord at certain points of the service. From the dim depths by the niche that looks towards Mecca a voice of some unseen ministrant droned slowly forth loud Arabic prayers or long verses from the Koran. At some invisible signal, now and again, the vast throng of worshippers, all ranged in straight lines at even distances between the endless pillars, prostrated themselves automatically on their faces before Allah, and wailed aloud as if in conscious confession of their own utter unworthiness. The effect was extraordinary, electrical, contagious. No religious service I have ever seen elsewhere seemed to me to possess such a profundity of earnest humiliation, as of man before the actual presence of his Maker. It appeared to one like a chapter of Nehemiah come true again in our epoch. We few intrusive Westerns, standing awe-struck by the door, slunk away, all abashed, from this scene of deep abasement. We had no right to thrust ourselves upon the devotions of these intense Orientals. We felt ourselves out of place. We had put off our shoes, for the place we stood upon was holy ground. But we slunk back to the porch, and put them on again in silence. Outside, we emerged upon the nineteenth century and the world. Yet even so, we had walked some way down the Place de la Régence, among the chattering negro pedlers, before one of us dared to exchange a single word with the other.
If the new town of Algiers is interesting, however, the old town is unique, indescribable, incomprehensible. No map could reproduce it; no clue could unravel it. It climbs and clambers by tortuous lanes and steep staircases up the sheer side of a high hill to the old fortress of the Deys that crowns the summit. Not one gleam of sunshine ever penetrates down those narrow slits between the houses, where two people can just pass abreast, brushing their elbows against the walls, and treading with their feet in the poached filth of the gutter. The dirt that chokes the sides is to the dirt of Italy as the dirt of Italy is to the dirt of Whitechapel. And yet so quaint, so picturesque, so interesting is it all, that even delicate ladies, with the fear of typhoid fever for ever before their eyes, cannot refuse themselves the tremulous joy of visiting it and exploring it over and over again; nay, more, of standing to bargain for old brass-work or Algerian embroidery with keen Arab shopkeepers in its sunless labyrinths. Except the Mooskee at Cairo, indeed, I know no place yet left where you can see Oriental life in perfection as well as the old town of Algiers. For are there not tramways nowadays even in the streets of Damascus? Has not a railway station penetrated the charmed heart of Stamboul? The Frank has done his worst for the lower town of his own building, but the upper town still remains as picturesque, as mysterious, and as insanitary as ever. No Pasteur could clean out those Augean stables.
In those malodorous little alleys, where every prospect pleases and every scent is vile, nobody really walks; veiled figures glide softly as if to inaudible music; ladies, muffled up to their eyes, use those solitary features with great effect upon the casual passer-by; old Moors, in stately robes, emerge with stealthy tread from half-unseen doorways; boys clad in a single shirt sit and play pitch-and-toss for pence on dark steps. Everything reeks impartially of dirt and of mystery. All is gloom and shade. You could believe anything on earth of that darkling old town. There all Oriental fancies might easily come true, all fables might revive, all dead history might repeat itself.
These two incongruous worlds, the ancient and the modern town, form the two great divisions of Algiers as the latter-day tourist from our cold North knows it. The one is antique, lazy, sleepy, unprogressive; the other is bustling, new-world, busy, noisy, commercial. But there is yet a third Algiers that lies well without the wall, the Algiers of the stranger and of the winter resident. Hither Mr. Cook conducts his eager neophytes; hither the Swiss innkeeper summons his cosmopolitan guests. It reaches its culminating point about three miles from the town, on the heights of Mustapha Supérieur, where charming villas spread thick over the sunlit hills, and where the Western visitor can enjoy the North African air without any unpleasant addition of fine old crusted Moorish perfumes.
The road to Mustapha Supérieur lies through the Bab-Azzoun gate, and passes first along a wide street thronged with Arabs and Kabyles from the country and the mountains. This is the great market road of Algiers, the main artery of supplies, a broad thoroughfare lined with fondouks or caravanserais, where the weary camel from the desert deposits his bales of dates, and where black faces of Saharan negroes smile out upon the curious stranger from dense draping folds of some dirty burnouse. The cafés are filled with every variety of Moslem, Jew, Turk, and infidel. Nowhere else will you see to better advantage the wonderful variety of races and costumes that distinguishes Algiers above most other cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities. The dark M’zabite from the oases, arrayed like Joseph in a coat of many colors, stands chatting at his own door with the pale-faced melancholy Berber of the Aurès mountains. The fat and dusky Moor, over-fed on kous-kous, jostles cheek by jowl with the fair Jewess in her Paisley shawl and quaint native head-gear. Mahonnais Spaniards from the Balearic Isles, girt round their waists with red scarves, talk gaily to French missionary priests in violet bands and black cassocks. Old Arabs on white donkeys amble with grave dignity down the center of the broad street, where chasseurs in uniform and spahis in crimson cloaks keep them company on fiery steeds from the Government stud at Blidah. All is noise and bustle, hurry, scurry, and worry, the ant-hill life of an English bazaar grotesquely superimposed on the movement and stir of a great European city.
You pass through the gates of the old Moorish town and find yourself at once in a modern but still busy suburb. Then on a sudden the road begins to mount the steep Mustapha slope by sharp zigzags and bold gradients. In native Algerian days, before Allah in his wisdom mysteriously permitted the abhorred infidel to bear sway in the Emerald City over the Faithful of Islam, a single narrow mule-path ascended from the town wall to the breezy heights of Mustapha. It still exists, though deserted, that old breakneck Mussulman road a deep cutting through soft stone, not unlike a Devonshire lane, all moss-grown and leafy, a favorite haunt of the naturalist and the trap-door spider. But the French engineers, most famous of road-makers, knew a more excellent way. Shortly after the conquest they carved a zigzag carriage-drive of splendid dimensions up that steep hill-front, and paved it well with macadam of most orthodox solidity. At the top, in proof of their triumph over nature and the Moslem, they raised a tiny commemorative monument, the Colonne Voirol, after their commander’s name, now the Clapham Junction of all short excursions among the green dells of the Sahel.
The Mustapha road, on its journey uphill, passes many exquisite villas of the old Moorish corsairs. The most conspicuous is that which now forms the Governor-General’s Summer Palace, a gleaming white marble pile of rather meretricious and over-ornate exterior, but all glorious within, to those who know the secret of decorative art, with its magnificent heirloom of antique tiled dados. Many of the other ancient villas, however, and notably the one occupied by Lady Mary Smith-Barry, are much more really beautiful, even if less externally pretentious, than the Summer Palace. One in particular, near the last great bend of the road, draped from the ground to the flat roof with a perfect cataract of bloom by a crimson bougainvillea, may rank among the most picturesque and charming homes in the French dominions.
It is at Mustapha, or along the El Biar road, that the English colony of residents or winter visitors almost entirely congregates. Nothing can be more charming than this delicious quarter, a wilderness of villas, with its gleaming white Moorish houses half lost in rich gardens of orange, palm, and cypress trees. How infinitely lovelier these Eastern homes than the fantastic extravagances of the Californie at Cannes, or the sham antiques on the Mont Boron! The native North African style of architecture answers exactly to the country in whose midst it was developed. In our cold northern climes those open airy arcades would look chilly and out of place, just as our castles and cottages would look dingy and incongruous among the sunny nooks of the Atlas. But here, on the basking red African soil, the milk-white Moorish palace with its sweeping Saracenic arches, its tiny round domes, its flat, terraced roofs, and its deep perspective of shady windows, seems to fit in with land and climate as if each were made for the other. Life becomes absolutely fairy-like in these charming old homes. Each seems for the moment while you are in it just a dream in pure marble.
I am aware that to describe a true Moorish villa is like describing the flavor of a strawberry; the one must be tasted, the other seen. But still, as the difficulty of a task gives zest to the attempt at surmounting it, I will try my hand at a dangerous word-picture. Most of the Mustapha houses have an outer entrance-court, to which you obtain admission from the road by a plain, and often rather heavy, archway. But, once you have reached the first atrium, or uncovered central court, you have no reason to complain of heaviness or want of decoration. The court-yard is generally paved with parti-colored marble, and contains in its center a Pompeian-looking fountain, whose cool water bubbles over into a shallow tank beneath it. Here reeds and tall arums lift their stately green foliage, and bright pond-blossoms rear on high their crimson heads of bloom. Round the quadrangle runs a covered arcade (one might almost say a cloister) of horse-shoe arches, supported by marble columns, sometimes Græco-Roman antiques, sometimes a little later in date, but admirably imitated from the originals. This outer court is often the most charming feature of the whole house. Here, on sultry days, the ladies of the family sit with their books or their fancy-work; here the lord of the estate smokes his afternoon cigar; here the children play in the shade during the hottest African noon-day. It is the place for the siesta, for the afternoon tea, for the lounge in the cool of the evening, for the joyous sense of the delight of mere living.
From the court-yard a second corridor leads into the house itself, whose center is always occupied by a large square court, like the first in ground-plan, but two-storied and glass-covered. This is the hall, or first reception room, often the principal apartment of the whole house, from which the other rooms open out in every direction. Usually the ground-floor of the hall has an open arcade, supporting a sort of balcony or gallery above, which runs right round the first floor on top of it. This balcony is itself arcaded; but instead of the arches being left open the whole way up, they are filled in for the first few feet from the floor with a charming balustrade of carved Cairene woodwork. Imagine such a court, ringed round with string-courses of old Oriental tiles, and decorated with a profusion of fine pottery and native brasswork, and you may form to yourself some faint mental picture of the common remodeled Algerian villa. It makes one envious again to remember how many happy days one has spent in some such charming retreats, homes where all the culture and artistic taste of the West have been added to all the exquisite decorative instinct and insight of the Oriental architect.
Nor are fair outlooks wanting. From many points of view on the Mustapha Hill the prospect is among the most charming in the western Mediterranean. Sir Lambert Playfair, indeed, the learned and genial British Consul-General whose admirable works on Algeria have been the delight of every tourist who visits that beautiful country, is fond of saying that the two finest views on the Inland Sea are, first, that from the Greek Theater at Taormina, and, second, that from his own dining-room windows on the hill-top at El Biar. This is very strong praise, and it comes from the author of a handbook to the Mediterranean who has seen that sea in all aspects, from Gibralta to Syria; yet I fancy it is too high, especially when one considers that among the excluded scenes must be put Naples, Sorrento, Amalfi, Palermo, and the long stretch of Venice as seen from the Lido. I would myself even rank the outlook on Monaco from the slopes of Cap Martin, and the glorious panorama of Nice and the Maritime Alps from the Lighthouse Hill at Antibes, above any picture to be seen from the northern spurs of the Sahel. Let us be just to Piræus before we are generous to El Biar. But all this is, after all, a mere matter of taste, and no lover of the picturesque would at any rate deny that the Bay of Algiers, as viewed from the Mustapha Hill, ranks deservedly high among the most beautiful sights of the Mediterranean. And when the sunset lights up in rosy tints the white mole and the marble town, the resulting scene is sometimes one of almost fairy-like splendor.
Indeed, the country round Mustapha is a district of singular charm and manifold beauty. The walks and drives are delicious. Great masses of pale white clematis hang in sheets from the trees, cactus and aloe run riot among the glens, sweet scents of oleander float around the deep ravines, delicious perfumes of violets are wafted on every breeze from unseen and unsuspected gardens. Nowhere do I know a landscape so dotted with houses, and nowhere are the houses themselves so individually interesting. The outlook over the bay, the green dells of the foreground, the town on its steep acclivity, the points and headlands, and away above all, in the opposite direction, the snow-clad peaks of the Djurjura, make up a picture that, after all, has few equals or superiors on our latter-day planet.
One of the sights of Mustapha is the Arab cemetery, where once a week the women go to pray and wail, with true Eastern hyperbole, over the graves of their dead relations. By the custom of Islam they are excluded from the mosques and from all overt participation in the public exercises of religion; but these open-air temples not made with hands, even the Prophet himself has never dared to close to them. Ancestor-worship and the veneration of the kindred dead have always borne a large part in the domestic creed of the less civilized Semites, and, like many other traces of heathenism, this antique cult still peeps sturdily through the thin veil of Mohammedan monotheism. Every hillock in the Atlas outliers is crowned by the tiny domed tomb, or koubba, of some local saint; every sacred grove overshadows the relics of some reverend Marabout. Nay, the very oldest forms of Semitic idolatry, the cult of standing stones, of holy trees, and of special high places on the mountain-tops, survive to this day even in the midst of Islam. It is the women in particular who keep alive these last relics of pre-Moslem faith; it is the women that one may see weeping over the narrow graves of their loved ones, praying for the great desire of the Semitic heart, a man-child from Allah, before the sacred tree of their pagan ancestors, or hanging rags and dolls as offerings about the holy grove which encloses the divine spring of pure and hallowed water.
Algiers is thus in many ways a most picturesque winter resort. But it has one great drawback: the climate is moist and the rainfall excessive. Those who go there must not expect the dry desert breeze that renders Luxor and Assiout so wholesome and so unpleasant. Beautiful vegetation means rain and heat. You will get both in Algiers, and a fine Mediterranean tossing on your journey to impress it on your memory.