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

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 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