North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

Later in the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove with a French gentleman—we were mutually unknown—to the cascades lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a spacious prospect; and the near view in which we drove by a rising serpentine road was finely mountainous—dolomitic crags on the right, and on the left a deep ravine denting the plain whose gently sloping plateau had many a time been a chosen battle-ground. Birds flew about the heights and verdure clothed the scene. The geological formation lends itself to numerous living springs; the upper limestone rests on sandstone, which in turn lies on marl and clay, and the mountain rainfall is thus caught in natural reservoirs, which issue in innumerable outlets in the porous surface. These successive ranges of the extreme North African shore are, in fact, a continuation of the hills of Grenada, with which they form a great half circle, centred at Gibraltar, and with its hollow turned toward the Mediterranean; it is the country of the Moroccan Riff, and the character of the landscape on the African side is precisely the same as in Spain—it is Andalusian scenery. As we drew near our goal, the rocks took on more distinctly the picturesqueness of outline, due to long erosion; they had a look like natural ruins high in air, and opposite, just beyond the cascades, a superb cliff mountain filled the lower sky.

We passed through a little garden to the foot of the fall. It was a grotto scene. The water issued in masses from low cavernous walls and recesses over whose broken floors and spurs it poured. It was not a simple waterfall, however, that we had come to see, but a succession of cascades that fell from shelf to shelf far up the precipice. The whole scene was robed in new-fallen snow, and the way wet and slippery; but the ascent was easily practicable by a path that led up the incline, with many a gyration, often dipping into the bed of a flowing stream and mounting by the rocks in the midst, often too steep and slippery to climb without the friendly aid of bushes, grasping hands and canes. But one scrambled up, and the running water underfoot, snow and icy slides, only gave a wild tang and gentle touch of adventure to the rather breathless labor; and every little while one stopped and looked below into the deepening ravine, or approached the falling waters in some new aspect, till we came out at the summit of the upper cascade, where it poured beautifully down in the midst of a cirque of pointed rocks that rose from an indescribably fantastic mass of juts and hanging eyries, as it were, all clothed and thick with vegetation, vivid and bathed, inexpressibly fresh, trees and shrubs and flowers and vines, an exuberance of plant life; and the glittering cascade fell spraying far into its rocky heart and sent back mellow music from the depth. “It is a landscape of Edgar Poe,” said my companion. I was startled for a moment, but a glance assured me that the aptitude of his remark was unknown to the speaker—it was only a spontaneous tribute to genius, which perhaps the casual presence of an American had helped to germinate. But, indeed, the impression of the scene could hardly have been better given than in those words. It was “a landscape of Edgar Poe”—just such a one as he would have chosen as the scene of one of his romances, as my companion went on to say; it was sui generis, fantastic, a marriage of the garden and the wilderness, not without a touch of diablerie, the suggestion that would make of such a retreat the haunt of Arabian fancy, primitive tragedy, and enchanted legend. It had the formal character of romance and the atmosphere of natural magic; a place where unearthliness might find its home. That was the Poesque trait that the random suggestion, perhaps, overdefined. This scene, however, was not all, as, indeed, our ears warned us; and crossing a narrow crown of land toward the muffled roar, we saw another falling river; the slender column of wavering waters came from a great height, sprayed and united, and rushed with a flood of force and speed to join the waterfall below; it had the beauty of something seen against the sky, in contrast with what was seen below against the earth; it was a unique combination, and the only time I have ever seen the junction of two rivers by the waterfall of one flowing into the waterfall of the other.

We went by an upper path to the high viaduct of a railroad that crosses the deep glen at that point, and thence commanded the broad expanse of the seaward plain with its near amphitheatre of mountain ranges, and Tlemcen lying below on its headland among its orchards. The reason why it grew up, and stood for centuries, was plain; it is the key of the country. It seemed, and is, a garden city; and as we walked or scrambled down the looped pathway over the terraced face of the hill on that side, and drove on round the circuitous road and back on our track to the city, I was most struck by the endless orchards lying beneath us on the bottom-lands at the foot of the ravine, and others through which we passed; and during all my stay I saw them—orchards of orange, lemon, almond, peach, and pear, and apple trees, and olives, and especially cherries, in profusion everywhere, and among them the constant sound of running waters from the springs.