Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 2

went to Turkey, and Algeria became French.
From this time the country became more or less open, according as
France could keep it quiet, to the inroads of that modern beast of ravin,
the tourist. The Kabyle calls the tourist Roumi (Christian), a form,
evidently, of our word Roman, and referable to the times when the
bishop of Hippo and such as he identified the Christian with the
Romanist in the Moorish mind.
Modern Algiers, viewed from the sea, wears upon its luminous walls
small trace of its long history of blood. As we contemplate its mosques
and houses flashing their white profiles into the sky, it is impossible not
to muse upon the contrast between its radiant and picturesque aspect
and its veritable character as the accomplice of every crime and every
baseness known to the Oriental mind. To see that sunny city basking
between its green hills, you would hardly think of it as the abode of
bandits; yet two powerful tribes still exist, now living in huts which
crown the heights of Boudjareah overlooking the sea, who formerly
furnished the boldest of the pitiless corsairs. To the iron hooks of the
Bab (or gate) of Azoun were hung by the loins our Christian brothers
who would not accept the Koran; at the Bab-el-Oued, the Arab rebels,
not confounded even in their deaths with the dogs of Christians, were
beheaded by the yataghan; and in the blue depths we sail over, whose
foam washes the bases of the temples, hapless women have sunk for
ever, tied in a leather bag between a cat and a serpent.
The history, in truth, is the history--always a cruel one--of an
overridden nation compelled to bear a part in the wickedness of its
oppressors. This rubric of blood may be read in many a dismal page.
Algeria was a slave before England was Christian. The greatest African
known to the Church, Augustine, has left a pathetic description of the
conquest of his country by the Vandals in the fifth century: it was

attended with horrible atrocities, the enemy leaving the slain in
unburied heaps, so as to drive out the garrisons by pestilence. When
Spain overthrew the Moors she took the coast-cities of Morocco and
Algeria. Afterward, when Aruch Barbarossa, the "Friend of the Sea,"
had seized the Algerian strongholds as a prize for the Turks, and his
system of piracy was devastating the Mediterranean, Spain with other
countries suffered, and we have a vivid picture of an Algerine bagnio
and bagnio-keeper from the pen of the illustrious prisoner Cervantes.
"Our spirits failed" (he writes) "in witnessing the unheard-of cruelties
that Hassan exercised. Every day were new punishments, accompanied
with cries of cursing and vengeance. Almost daily a captive was thrown
upon the hooks, impaled or deprived of sight, and that without any
other motive than to gratify the thirst of human blood natural to this
monster, and which inspired even the executioners with horror."
While our fancy traces the figure of the author of Don Quixote, a
plotting captive, behind the walls of Algiers, the steamer is
withdrawing, and the view of the city becomes more beautiful at every
turn of the paddles. We pass through a whole squadron of fishing-boats,
hovering on their long lateen sails, and seeming like butterflies
balanced upon the waves, which are blue as the petal of the iris. Algiers
gradually becomes a mere impression of light. The details have been
effaced little by little, and melted into a general hue of gold and warmth:
the windowless houses and the walls extending in terraces confuse
interchangeably their blank masses. The dark green hills of Boudjareah
and Mustapha seem to have opened their sombre flanks to disclose a
marble-quarry: the city, piled up with pale and blocklike forms, appears
to sink into the mountains again as the boat retires, although the
picturesque buildings of the Casbah, cropping out upon the summit,
linger long in sight, like rocks of lime. As we pass Cape Matifou we
see rising over its shoulder the summits of the Atlas range, among
whose peaks we hope to be in a fortnight, after passing Bona,
Philippeville and Constantina.
Sailing along this coast of the Mediterranean resembles an excursion on
one of the Swiss lakes. Four hours after passing Algiers, in going
eastwardly toward the port of Philippeville, we come in sight of Dellys,

a little town of poor appearance, where the hussars of France first
learned the peculiarities of Kabyle fighting. This warfare was
something novel. In place of the old gusty sweeps of cavaliers on
horseback, falling on the French battalions or glancing around them in
whirlwinds, the soldiers had to extirpate the Kabyles hidden in the
houses. It was not fighting--it was ferreting. Each house in Dellys was a
fort which had to