Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 4

over the scene of his
walks and labors, he brought his grand life of expiation to a holy close,
praying with his last breath for his disciples oppressed by the invaders.
We reach the site of Hippo (or Hippone) by a Roman bridge, restored
to its former solidity by the French, over whose arches the bishop must
have often walked, meditating on his youth of profligacy and vain
scholarship, and over the abounding Divine grace which had saved him
for the edification of all futurity.
[Illustration: SHOPKEEPER AT BONA.]
Bona has a street named Saint Augustine, but it is, by one of the strange
paradoxes which history is constantly playing us, owned entirely by
Jews, and those of one sole family. This fact indicates how the thrifty
race has prospered since the French occupancy. Formerly oppressed
and ill-treated, taxed and murdered by the Turks, and only permitted to
dress in the mournfulest colors, the Jew of Algeria hid himself as if life
were something he had stolen, and for which he must apologize all his
days. Now, treated with the same liberality as any other colonist, the
Jew indulges in every ostentation of dress except as to the color of the
turban, which, in small towns like Bona, still preserves the black hue of
former days of oppression. On Saturdays the children of Jacob fairly
blaze with gold and gay colors. On their working days they line the
principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with a cool, easy indifference,
but never losing a chance of business. In Algeria this race is generally
thought to present a picture of arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice
not equaled on the face of the globe. An English traveler saw an Arab,
after maddening himself with opium and absinthe, run a-mok among
the shopkeepers who lined the principal street of Algiers. Selecting the

Hebrews, he drove before him a throng of twenty, dressed in all the
colors of the rainbow, who allowed themselves to be knocked down
with the obedience of ninepins. A Frenchman stopped the maniac after
he had killed one Jew and wounded several, none of them making any
effort at defence.
A few narrow streets, bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the
native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews
and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the
stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab
dress--the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches
coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil of
ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small booths,
the jewelers, blacksmiths and tailors of Bona are found at their work.
Returning to Philippeville by land, and remaining as short a time as
possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated imitation
of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern
character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland
toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride
through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the first
view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand curve of
mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat
formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of
this naked rock, like the Stylites on his pillar, stands Constantina. The
Arabs used to say that Constantina was a stone in the midst of a flood,
and that, according to their Prophet, it would require as many Franks to
raise that stone as it would of ants to lift an egg at the bottom of a
milk-pot.
[Illustration: CONSTANTINA.]
This city, under its old Roman name of Cirta, was one of the principal
strongholds of Numidia. In 1837 it was one of the most hotly-defended
strongholds of the Kabyles. The French have renamed, as "Gate of the
Breach," the old Bab-el-Djedid, where Colonel Lamoricière entered at
the head of his Zouaves. The city had to be conquered in detail, house
by house. Lamoricière himself was wounded: the Kabyles, driven to

their last extremity, evacuated the Casbah on the summit of the rock,
and let down their women by ropes into the abyss; the ropes,
overweighted by these human clusters, broke, piling the bodies and
fragments of bodies in heaps beneath the precipice, while some of the
natives descended the steep rock safely with the agility of goats.
Of all the large Algerian cities, Constantina is that which has best
preserved its primitive signet. In most quarters it remains what it was
under the Turks. These quarters are still undermined, rather than laid
out, with close and crooked streets, where the rough white houses are
pierced with narrow windows, closed to