Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 3

be taken by siege. Each garden concealed behind its
palings the "flower" of Kabyle chivalry, only to be uprooted by the
bayonet. The women fought with fury.
We follow our course along these exquisite blue waters, and soon have
a glimpse, at three miles distance, of an isolated, abrupt cone, trimmed
at the summit into the proportions of a pyramid. It is the hill of
Gouraya, an enormous mass of granite which lifts its scarped summit
over the port of Bougie, called Salda by Strabo. We approach and
watch the enormous rock seeming to grow taller and taller as we nestle
beneath it in the beautiful harbor. Bougie lies on a narrow and stony
beach in the embrace of the mountain, white and coquettish, spreading
up the rocky wall as far as it can, and looking aloft to the protecting
summit two thousand feet above it. We abstain from dismounting, but
sweep the city with field-glasses from the deck of the ship, recollecting
that Bougie was bombarded in the reign of the Merrie Monarch by Sir
Edward Spragg. We trace the ravine of Sidi-Touati, which breaks the
town in half as it splits its way into the sea. Here, in 1836, the French
commandant, Salomon de Mussis, was treacherously shot while at a
friendly conference with the sheikh Amzian, the pretext being the
murder of a marabout by the French sentinels. The incident is worth
mentioning, because it brought into light some of the nobler traits of
Kabyle character. The sheikh, for killing a guest with whom he had just
taken coffee, was reproached by the natives as "the man who murdered
with one hand and took gifts with the other," and was forced by mere
popular contempt from his sheikhship, to perish in utter obscurity.
[Illustration: ROMAN RELICS AT PHILIPPEVILLE.]
Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly,
with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape

Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the
new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis
Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four
years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab
found within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old
towns in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older
civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and
the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of
inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an
ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman
schoolboy, showing an aquarius (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin
buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has
the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets
laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a
Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the
walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ordinarily enclose the
Eastern home or protect the Arab's wife behind their blinded windows.
[Illustration: LION-SHAPED ROCK, HARBOR OF BONA.]
If we leave Philippeville in the evening, we find ourselves next
morning in the handsome roadstead of Bona. This, for the present, will
terminate our examination of the coast, for, however fond we may be of
level traveling, we cannot reasonably expect to get over the Atlas
Mountains by hugging the shore. The harbor of Bona, though broad
and beautiful, is somewhat dangerous, concealing numbers of rocks
which lurk at about the surface of the water. Other rocks, standing
boldly out at the entrance of the port, offer a singular aspect, being
sculptured into strange forms by the sea. One makes a very good statue
of a lion, lying before the city as its guard, and looking across the
waves for an enemy as the foam caresses its monstrous feet.
Dismounting from shipboard, we become landsmen for the remainder
of our journey, and wave adieu to the steamboat which has brought us
as we linger a moment on the mole of Bona. This city is named from
the ancient Hippo, out of whose ruins, a mile to the southward, it was
largely built. The Arabs call it "the city of jujube

trees"--Beled-el-Huneb. To the Roumi (or Christian) traveler the
interest of the spot concentrates in one historic figure, that of Saint
Augustine. In the basilica of Hippo, of which the remains are believed
to have been identified in some recent excavations, the sainted bishop
shook the air with his learned and penetrating eloquence. Here he
exhorted the faithful to defend their religious liberty and their lives,
uncertain if the Vandal hordes of Genseric were not about to sweep
away the faith and the language of Rome. Here, where the forest of El
Edoug spreads a shadow like that of memory