Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 5

brown, give a perfectly original aspect to the city as seen from any of the neighboring eminences. The plateau of Mansourah is connected with the town by a magnificent Roman bridge, two stories in height, restored by the French.
[Illustration: ROMAN BRIDGE AT CONSTANTINA.]
From this bridge, which is three hundred feet high by three hundred and fifteen feet in length, and has five arches, you look down into the bed of the Rummel, while the vultures and eagles scream around you, and you recite the words of the poet El Abdery, who called this river a bracelet which encircles an arm. The gorge opens out into a beautiful plain rich with pomegranates, figs and orange trees. The sea is forty-eight miles away.
The last bey of Constantina, not knowing that he was merely building for the occupancy of the French governors who were to come after him, decreed himself, some fifty years ago, a stately pleasure-dome, after the fashion of Kubla Khan. From the ruins of Constantina, Bona and Tunis, Ahmed Bey picked up whatever was most beautiful in the way of Roman marbles and carving. With these he built his halls, while the Rummel, through caverns measureless to man, ran on below. Some Frenchman of importance will now-a-days give you the freedom of this curious piece of Turkish construction, where, among storks and ibises gravely perched on one stilt, you examine the relics of Roman history, preserved by its very destroyers, according to the grotesque providence that watches over the study of arch?ology.
[Illustration: BEY'S PALACE, CONSTANTINA.]
You are told how Ahmed, wishing to adorn the walls of his gallery or loggia with frescoes, of which he had heard, but which he had no artist capable of executing, whether Arab, Moor or Jew, applied to a prisoner. The man was a French shoemaker, who had never touched a brush: he vainly tried to decline the honor, but the bey was inflexible: "You are a vile liar: all the Christians can paint. Liberty if you succeed, death if you disobey me."
[Illustration: SHAMPOOING THE ROUMI.]
Extremely nervous was the hand which the painter malgré lui applied to the unlooked-for task. From the laborious travail of his brain issued at length an odd mass of arabesques with which the walls were somehow covered. His invention exhausted, he awaited in an agony of fear the inspection of his Turkish master. He came, and was enchanted. The painter was free, and the bey observed: "The dog wanted to deceive me: I knew that all the Christians could paint."
You are amazed to find, in this nest of Islamite savagery and among these wild rocks, the uttermost accent of modern French politeness. Your presence is a windfall in quarters so retired, and you sit among orange plants and straying gazelles, while the military band throws softly out against the inaccessible crags the famous tower-scene from the fourth act of Il Trovatore. As night draws on, tired of your explorations, you seek a Moorish bath.
Let no tourist, experienced only in the effeminate imitations of the hummum to be found in New York or London, expect similar considerate treatment in Algeria. He will be more likely to receive the attention of the M'zabite bather after the fashion narrated in the following paragraph, which is a quotation from an English journalist in the land of the Kabyles:
"We were told to sit down upon a marble seat in the middle of the hall, which we had no sooner done than we became sensible of a great increase of heat: after this each of us was taken into a closet of milder temperature, where, after placing a white cloth on the floor and taking off our napkins, they laid us down, leaving us to the further operations of two naked, robust negroes. These men, newly brought from the interior of Africa, were ignorant of Arabic; so I could not tell them in what way I wished to be treated, and they handled me as roughly as if I had been a Moor inured to hardship. Kneeling with one knee upon the ground, each took me by a leg and began rubbing the soles of my feet with a pumice stone. After this operation on my feet, they put their hands into a small bag and rubbed me all over with it as hard as they could. The distortions of my countenance must have told them what I endured, but they rubbed on, smiling at each other, and sometimes giving me an encouraging look, indicating by their gestures the good it would do me. While they were thus currying me they almost drowned me by throwing warm water upon me with large silver vessels, which were in the basin under a cock fastened in the wall. When this was over they raised me up, putting my head