CONCLUDING PAPER.
A noble life, whose course belongs to the subject of these pages, is, while they are preparing, apparently drawing to a close. The severe illness now reported of Abd-el-Kader, coming upon old age, disappointment, war and the lassitude of a great purpose foiled, can have but one result. Dimmed to-day, as our hurrying century so rapidly dims her brightest renowns, Abd-el-Kader's existence has only to cease and his memory will assume the sacred splendor of the tomb.
Hapless Washington of a betrayed revolution! In these latter days of enforced quiet in Palestine how his early scenes of African experience must have flooded his mind!—his birth, sixty-six years ago, in a family group of Moslem saints; the teachings of his beautiful mother Leila and of his marabout father; his pilgrimage when eight years old to Mecca, and his education in Italy; his visions among the tombs, and the crown of magic light which was seen on his brows when he began to taste the enchanted apple; then, with adolescence, the burning sense of infidel tyranny that made his home at Mascara seem only a cage, barred upon him by the unclean Franks; and soon, while still a youth, his amazing election as emir of Mascara and sultan of Oran, at a moment when the prophet-chief had just four oukias (half-dimes) tied into the corner of his bornouse!
"God will send me others," said young Abd-el-Kader.
The tourist remembers the trinity-portrait of him, by Maxime David, in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, where his face, framed in its white hood, is seen in full, in profile and in three-quarters view. The visage is aquiline, olive-tinted, refined; but we can describe it more authentically in the terms of one of his enemies, Lieutenant de France, who became his prisoner in 1836, and who followed his movements for five months, taking down his daily talk and habits like a Boswell, but leaving nothing in his narrative that is not to the sultan's credit. Of Abd-el-Kader at twenty-eight the lieutenant says: "His face is long and deadly pale, his large black eyes are soft and languishing, his mouth small and delicate, and his nose rather aquiline: his beard is thin, but jet-black, and he wears a small moustache, which gives a martial character to his soft, delicate face, and becomes him vastly. His hands are small and exquisitely formed, and his feet equally beautiful." Every interlocutor leaves a similar portrait, impressing upon the mind the image of some warrior-saint of the Middle Ages, born too late, and beating out his noble fanaticism against our century of machines and chicanery.
Himself, according to some accounts, a Berber, the young marabout early saw the importance of inducing the Kabyles to join with him and his Arabs in expelling the French. He affiliated himself with the religious order of Ben-abd-er-Rhaman, a saint whose tomb is one of the sacred places of Kabylia; and it is certain that the college of this order furnished him succor in men and money. He visited the Kabyles in their rock-built villages, casting aside his military pomp and coming among them as a simple pilgrim. If the Kabyles had received him better, he could have shown a stouter front to the enemy. But the mountain Berbers, utterly unused to co-operation and subordination, met him with surprise and distrust.
At least, such is the account of General Daumas: in this interesting relation we are forced to depend on the French. Daumas, amply provided with documents, letters and evidence, has arranged in his work on La Grande Kabylie the principal evidence we possess of this epoch of Abd-el-Kader's life.
The chief appeared in 1836 at Bordj-Boghni and at Si-Ali-ou-Moussa among the mountains. The Kabyle tribes visited him in multitudes. He addressed them at the door of his tent, and these rude mountaineers found themselves face to face with that saintly sallow visage, those long gazelle eyes and the prophetic countenance framed in its apostolic beard. Raising his arms in the attitude of Raphael's Paul at Lystra, he said simply, "I am the thorn which Allah has placed in the eye of the Franks. And if you will help me I will send them weeping into the sea."
But when it came to a demand for supplies, the Kabyles, says Daumas, utterly refused.
"You have come as a pilgrim," said their amins, "and we have fed you with kouskoussu. If you were to come as a chief, wishing to lay his authority on us, instead of white kouskoussu we should treat you to black kouskoussu" (gunpowder).
Abd-el-Kader, without losing the serenity of the marabout, argued with the Kabyles, and succeeded in obtaining their reverence and adhesion; but when he mounted his horse to go the amins significantly told him to come among them always as a simple pilgrim, demanding hospitality and white kouskoussu.
At Thizzi-Ouzzou he met the tribe of Ameraouas, who promised to submit to his authority as soon as the fractions surrounding that centre should do so. The Sons of Aicha received him with honor and games of horsemanship. At the camp of Ben Salem the chiefs of several tribes came to render homage to the noble marabout, descendant of Berber ancestry and of the Prophet. From thence he sought tribes still more wild, discarding his horse and appearing among the villagers as a simple foot-pilgrim. The natives approached him in throngs, each family bearing a great dish of rancid kouskoussu. Laying the platters before his tent and planting their clubs in them, all vociferated, "Eat! thou art our guest;" and the chieftain was constrained to taste of each. Finally, near Bougie he happened to receive a courier sent by the French commandant. The Kabyles immediately believed him to be in treasonable communication with the enemy, and he was forced to retire.
The young chief was in fact at that time in peaceful communication with the French, having made himself respected by them in the west, while they were attending to the subjugation of Constantina and founding of Philippeville in the east. Protected by the treaty of Taafna in 1837, Abd-el-Kader was at leisure to attempt the consolidation of his little empire and the fusion of the jealous tribes which composed it. The low moral condition of his Arabs, who were for the most part thieves and cowards, and the rude individuality of his Kabyles, who would respect his religious but scoff at his political claims, made the task of the leader a difficult one. To the Kabyles he confided the care of his saintly reputation, renouncing their contributions, and asking only for their prayers as a Berber and as a khouan of the order of Ben-abd-er-Rhaman. For a few years his power increased, without one base measure, without any soilure on the blazon of increasing prosperity. In 1840 the sultan of Oran, at the zenith of his influence, swept the plains beneath the Atlas with his nomad court, defended by two hundred and fifty horsemen. Passing his days in reviewing his troops and in actions of splendid gallantry, he resumed the humility of the saint at evening prayers: his palace of a night received him, watched by thirty negro tent-guards; and here he sheltered his lowly head, whose attitude was perpetually bowed by the habitual weight of his cowl. The French soon became jealous, and encroached upon their treaty. The duke of Orleans, we are told, had Abd-el-Kader's seal counterfeited by a Jewish coiner at Oran, and with passports thus stamped sent scouting-parties toward the sultan's dominions, protected by the sultan's forged safe-conduct. Open conflict followed, and a succession of French razzias. In 1845, Colonels Pelissier and St. Arnaud, under Marshal Bugeaud, conducted that expedition of eternal infamy during which seven hundred of Abd-el-Kader's Arabs were suffocated in a cave-sanctuary of the Dahra. This sickening measure was put in force at a cul-de-sac, where a few hours' blockade would have commanded a peaceful surrender.
"The fire was kept up throughout the night, and when the day had fully dawned the then expiring embers were kicked aside, and as soon as a sufficient time had elapsed to render the air of the silent cave breathable, some soldiers were directed to ascertain how matters were within. They were gone but a few minutes, and then came back, we are told, pale, trembling, terrified, hardly daring, it seemed, to confront the light of day. No wonder they trembled and looked pale! They had found all the Arabs dead—men, women, children, all dead!—had beheld them lying just as death had found and left them—the old man grasping his gray beard; the dead mother clasping her dead child with the steel gripe of the last struggle, when all gave way but her strong love."
Abd-el-Kader's final defeat in 1848 was due less to the prowess of Lamoricière and Bugeaud than to the cunning of his traitorous ally, the sultan of Morocco, who, after having induced many of the princely saint's adherents to desert, finally drove him by force of numbers over the French frontier. Confronting the duke of Aumale on the Morocco borders, he made a gallant fight, but lost half his best men in warding off an attack of the Mencer Kabyles. Fatigued now with a long effort against overwhelming pressure, and world-weary, he met the duke at Nemours, on the sea-coast close to the Morocco line. Depositing his sandals, Arab-fashion, outside the French head-quarters, he awaited the duke's signal to sit down.
"I should have wished to do this sooner," said the broken chief, "but I have awaited the hour decreed by Allah. I ask the aman (pardon) of the king of the French for my family and for myself."
Louis Philippe could not come in contact with this pure spirit without an exhibition of Frankish treachery, like tinder illuminating its foulness at the striking of steel. The sultan's surrender was conditioned on the freedom to retire to Egypt. The French government no sooner secured him than it treacherously sent him to prison, first to the castle of Pau, then to that of Amboise near Blois, where he was kept from 1848 to 1852, when the late emperor made an early use of his imperial power to set him at liberty. Since his freedom, at Constantinople, Broussa and Damascus the ex-sultan has continued to practice the rigors and holiness of the Oriental saint, proving his catholic spirit by protecting the Christians from Turkish injustice, and awaiting with the deep fatigue of a martyr the moment destined to unite his soul with the souls of Washington, Bozzaris and L'Ouverture.
This noble life, which impinges a moment on our course through Kabylia, is surely the most epical of our century, which can never be reproached for the lack of a hero while Abd-el-Kader's name is remembered.
The descent from the rock-perched city of Kalaa having been made in safety, and the animals being remounted at the first plateau, our Roumi traveler and his guides arrive in a few hours at the modern, fortified, but altogether Kabylian stronghold of Akbou. Here a letter from a French personage of importance gives us the acquaintance of a Kabyle family of the highest rank.
The ancestors of Ben-Ali-Cherif, remotely descended from Mohammed through one of his sisters, were of Kabylian race, and one of them, settled in Chellata, near Akbou, founded there a prosperous college of the Oriental style. Ben-Ali-Cherif, born in Chellata and residing at Akbou, receives the tourist with a natural icy dignity which only a czar among the sovereigns of Europe could hope to equal: those who have but seen Arabs of inferior class can form no notion of the distinction and lofty gravity of the chiefs of a grand house (or of a grand tent, as they are called): the Kabyle noble is quite as superb as the Arab.
Ben-Ali seats us at a rich table covered with viands half French and half Oriental: a beautiful youth, his son, resembling a girl with his blue head-drapery and slim white hands, places himself at table, and attracts the conversation of the guest. The young man answers in monosyllables and with his large eyes downcast, and the agha significantly observes, "You will excuse him if he does not answer: he is not used to talk before his father."
The host, disposing of the time of his guests, has arranged a series of diversions. The valley of the river Sahel is full of boars, and panthers and monkeys abound in the neighboring spurs of the Zouaouas. While the Roumi are examining his orchards of oranges and pomegranates the agha's courtyard fills with guests, magnificent sheikhs on Barbary horses, armed with inlaid guns. These are all entertained for the night, together with the usual throng of parasites, who choke his doors like the clients of the rich Roman in Horace.
At sunrise the party is mounted. The mare of the agha, a graceful creature whose veins form an embroidery over her coat of black satin, is caparisoned with a slender crimson bridle, and a saddle smaller than the Arab saddles and furnished with lighter stirrups. The Christian guests are furnished with veritable arquebuses of the Middle Ages; that is to say, with Kabyle guns, the stock of which, flattened and surmounted with a hammer of flints, is ignited by a wheel-shaped lock, easier to be managed by a Burgundian under Charles the Bold than by an unpretending modern Roumi.
The usual features of an Algerian hunt succeed. A phantom-like silence pervades the column of galloping horsemen up to the moment when the boar is beaten up. Then, with a formidable clamor of "Haou! haou!" from his pursuers, the tusked monster bursts through the tamarinds and dwarf palms: after a long chase he suddenly stops, and then his form instantly disappears under the gigantic African hounds who leap upon him and hang at his ears. A huntsman dismounts and stabs his shoulder with the yataghan. After a rest the chase is resumed, but this time under the form of a hawking-party.
Only the djouads and marabouts—that is to say, the religious or secular nobles—have the privilege of hunting with the falcon. The patrician bird, taken by the agha from the shoulder of his hawk-bearer, is about as large as a pigeon, the head small, beak short and strong, the claws yellow and armed with sharp talons. The bird rides upon his master's leather glove until a hare is started: then, unhooded and released, his first proceeding is to dart into the zenith as if commissioned to make a hole in the sky. No fear, however, that the poor panting quarry is lost for an instant from the vision of that infallible eye, which follows far aloft in the blue, invisible and fatal. Soon the cruel bird drops like an aërolite, and, as the deed is explained to us, doubles up his yellow hand into a fist, and deals the animal a sharp blow on the skull. Directly, as the horsemen approach, he is found with his obtuse head bent over his prey, digging out its eyes by the spoonful.
By noontide the troop is naturally famished. A luncheon, has, however, been prepared by the thoughtfulness of the agha. Riding up to a tent which appears as by magic in the wilderness, the provisions for a sumptuous repast are discovered. Two fires are burning in the open air, and are surrounded by a host of servants or followers. The Roumi and their host adjourn from the neighborhood of the preparations, and are served under a plane tree beautiful as that whose limbs were hung by Xerxes with bracelets. A soup, absolutely set on fire with red pepper, introduces the repast: pancakes follow, and various meats smothered with eggs or onions. Then two half-naked cooks stagger up bearing on a wooden dish, under a gold-bordered napkin, a sheep roasted entire and still impaled with the spit. The chief cook takes hold of the skewer and draws it violently toward himself, applying a smart stroke with his naked heel to the tail of the creature—a contact which would seem almost as trying as the ancient ordeal of the ploughshares, or as the red-hot horseshoes which the fire-eating marabouts are accustomed to dance upon. The Roumi travelers taste the succulent viand, taste again, eat till ashamed, and are ready to declare that never was mutton properly dressed before. If possible, they vow to introduce the undissected roast, the bonfire, the spit and the cook with imperturbable heel into the cuisine of less-favored lands more distant from the sun.
Champagne, which the cunning Mussulmans do not consider as wine, washes the meal, and coffee and pale perfumed tobacco supplement it. But when the appetite has retired and permitted some sharpness to the ordinary senses, the travelers are amazed at the gradual and silent increase which has taken place in their numbers. Every group of guests is augmented by a circle of prone and creeping forms that, springing apparently from the earth, are busily breaking the fragments of the feast under the care of the servitors, who appear, rather to encourage than repel them. Ben-Ali-Cherif, being interrogated, replies calmly, "They are Tofailians."
The Tofailian is a parasite on system, an idler who elevates his belly into a divinity, or at least a principle. His prophet or exemplar is a certain Tofail, whose doctrine is expressed in a few practical rules, respectfully observed and numerously followed. "Let him who attends a wedding-feast," says one of his apophthegms, "having no invitation, avoid glancing here and there dubiously. Choose the best place. If the guests are numerous, pass through boldly without saluting any one, to make the guests of the bride think you a friend of the bridegroom, and those of the groom a friend of the bride."
An Arab poet said of Tofail: "If he saw two buttered pancakes in a cloud, he would take his flight without hesitation."
A Tofailian of marked genius once learned that a festival was going on at a grand mansion. He ran thither, but the door was closed and entrance impossible. Inquiring here and there, he learned that a son of the house was absent on the Mecca pilgrimage. Instantly he procured a sheet of parchment, folded it, and sealed it as usual with clay: he rolled his garments in the dust and bent his spine painfully over a long staff. Thus perfect in what an actor would call his reading, he sent word to the host that a messenger had arrived from his son. "You have seen him?" said the delighted Amphitryon, "and how did he bear his fatigues?" "He was in excellent health," answered the Tofailian very feebly. "Speak, speak!" cried the eager father, "and tell me every detail: how far had he got?" "I cannot, I am faint with hunger," said the simple fellow. Directly he was seated at the highest place of the feast, and every guest admired that splendid appetite—an appetite quite professional, and cultivated as poulterers cultivate the assimilative powers of livers. "Did my son send no letter?" asked the poor father in a favorable interval caused by strangulation. "Surely," replied the good friend, and, comprehending that the critical moment had arrived, he drew to himself a chine of kid with one hand while he unwound the letter from his turban with the other. The seal was still moist, and the pilgrim had not found time to write anything on the parchment. "Are you a Tofailian?" asked the host with the illumination of a sudden idea. "Yea, in truth, verily," said the stranger, struggling with his last mouthful. "Eat, then, and may Sheytan trouble thy digestion!" The parasite was shown the door, but he had dined.
Men of rank and wealth, like Ben-Ali-Cherif, turn the Tofailian into a proverb, and thus laugh at a plague they cannot cure.
The Algerine coast has enriched our language with at least two words, respectively warlike and peaceful—razzia and fantasia. The latter is applied to a game of horsemanship, used to express joy or to honor a distinguished friend. A spirited fantasia is organized by the guests of the agha on returning to Akbou. Twenty of the best-mounted horsemen having gone on before, and being completely lost to sight in the whirlwind of dust created by their departure, all of a sudden reappear. Menacing their host and his companions like an army, they gallop up, their bornouses flying and their weapons flashing, until at a few paces they discharge their long guns under the bodies of the horses opposite, and take flight like a covey of birds. Loading as they retire and quickly forming, again they dash to the charge, shouting, galloping, and shooting among the legs of their host's fine horses: this sham attack is repeated a score or two of times, up to the door of the agha's house. The Bedouins, in their picturesque expression, are making the powder talk. Finer horsemanship can nowhere be seen. Their horses, accustomed to the exercise, enter into the game with spirit, and the riders, secure in their castellated saddles, sit with ease as they turn, leap or dance on two feet. Used, too, from infancy to the society of their mares, they move with them in a degree of unity, vigor and boldness which the English horseman never attains. The Arab's love for his horse is not only the pride of the cavalier: it is an article of faith, and the Prophet comprehended the close unity between his nation and their beasts when he said, "The blessings of this world, up to the day of judgment, shall be suspended to the locks which our horses wear between their eyes."
Truly the Oriental idea of hospitality has its advantages—on the side of the obliged party. This haughty ruler, on the simple stress of a letter from a French commandant, has made himself our servant and teased his brain for devices to amuse us. His chief cook precedes us to his birthplace at Chellata, to arrange a sumptuous Arab supper. After a ride made enervating by the simoom, we descend at the arcaded and galleried Moorish house where Ben-Ali-Cherif was born, and are visited by the sheikh of the college which the agha maintains. It is a strange, peaceful, cloistered scene, consecrated to study and hospitality. Chellata, white and silent, sleeps in the gigantic shadow of the rock Tisibert, and in its graveyard, among the tombs of sacred marabouts, walk the small bald-headed students reciting passages of law or of the Koran. Algeria is dotted over with institutions (zaouias) similar to this, which, like monasteries of old, combine the functions of seminaries and gratuitous inns. That of Ben-Ali-Cherif, to which he contributes from his own purse a sum equal to sixteen thousand dollars a year, is enshrined in buildings strewn around the resting-place of his holy ancestors. The sacred koubba (or dome) marking the bones of the marabout is swept by shadows of oak and tamarind trees: professors stray in the shadow, and the pupils con their tasks on the adjoining tombstones.
Every impression of Chellata is silvered over, as with a moonlight of beneficence, by the attentions of Ben-Ali's house-steward, who rains upon our appetites a shower of most delicious kouskoussu, soothes us with Moorish coffee, and finishes by the politeness of lighting and taking the first whiff of our cigarette—a bit of courtesy that might be spared, but common here as in parts of Spain.
With daybreak we find the town of Chellata preparing to play its rôle as a mart or place of industry. The labor seems at first sight, however, to be confined to the children and the women: the former lead the flocks out at sunrise to pasture in the mountain, the women make the town ring with their busy work, whether of grinding at the mill, weaving stuff or making graceful vases in pottery. The men are at work in the fields, from which they return at nightfall, sullen, hardy and silent, in their tattered haiks. These are never changed among the poor working-people, for the scars of a bornouse are as dignified as those of the body, and are confided with the garment by a father to his son. The women, as we have remarked before, are in a state of far greater liberty than are the female Arabs, but it is more than anything else the liberty to toil. Among these mountaineers the wife is a chattel from whom it is permissible to extract all the usefulness possible, and whom it is allowable to sell when a bargain can be struck. The Kabyle woman's sole recreation is her errand to the fountain. This is sometimes situated in the valley, far from the nodding pillar or precipice on which the town is built. There the traveler finds the good wives talking and laughing together, bending their lively—sometimes blonde and blue-eyed—faces together over their jars, and gossiping as in Naples or as in the streets around Notre Dame in Paris. The Kabyles—differing therein from the Arabs—provide a fountain for either sex; and a visit by a man to the women's fountain is charged, in their singular code of penal fines, "inspired by Allah," a sum equal to five dollars, or half as much as the theft of an ox.
By the white light of day-dawn we quit Chellata, with the naked crests of the Djurjura printing themselves on the starry vault behind us and the valley below bathed in clouds. As we descend we seem to waken the white, red-roofed villages with our steps. The plateaus are gradually enlivened with spreading herds and men going forth to labor. We skirt the precipice of Azrou-n'hour, crowned with its marabout's tomb. The plains at our feet are green and glorious, pearled with white, distant villages. Opposite the precipice the granite rocks open to let us pass by a narrow portal where formerly the Kabyles used to stand and levy a toll on all travelers. This straitened gorge, where snow abounds in winter, and which has various narrow fissures, is named the Defile of Thifilkoult: it connects the highways of several tribes, but is impassable from December to April from the snow and the storms which rage among the cliffs. We are still four thousand feet above the plain, whose depth the swimming eye tries in vain to fathom, yet the snowy peaks above us are inaccessible. Descending chains of rocks mingled with flint and lime, we attain a more clement landscape. Kabyle girls crowd around a well called the Mosquitoes' Fountain, a naked boy plays melancholy tunes on a reed, and the signs of a lower level are abundant in the fields of corn and orchards of olive. But the rugged mountains, in whose grasp we have found so many wonders, are not left without regret. The most picturesque part of our course is now behind us, and as day dies upon our crossing through Iferaouenen, we turn back to behold the fine line of the mountains, half sad and regretful,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
Fourteen expeditions were found necessary by the French between 1838 and 1857 to subdue the Kabyles, who under leaders such as Ben-Salem, Ben-Kassim, the Man-with-the-Mule, the Man-with-the-She-Ass, and other chiefs less celebrated, defended their territory step by step. In the great chastisement of 1857, Marshal Randon, after subduing this part of the Djurjura ridge in detail, determined to preserve the fruits of victory by two new constructions—a fort and a military road. France was to reside among her unwilling colonists, and she was to possess an avenue of escape. The building of these two conveniences, as we may call them, over the smoking ruins of victory, was a conspicuous example of the excellent engineering genius of the nation. An English officer, Lieutenant-colonel Walmsley, witnessed, and has left a spirited account of, the great conquest, and the immediate improvement of it. The strongholds of the Djurjura (it being May, 1857) were taken: the most difficult, Icheriden, was soon to fall, yielding only to the assault of the Foreign Legion—that troop of Arabs and of Kabyles from the Zouaoua plain wherefrom we derive the word zouave. Marshal Randon selected for his fort the key of the whole district: it was a place known as the Souk-el-Arba ("Market of Wednesday"). It was in the heart of the Beni Raten land, and in a spot where three great mountain-ridges ran down into the plain of the Sebaou. These ridges, subdued and friendly, would be held in respect by the garrison of the fort, and the other ridge of Agacha, still rebellious, would likewise terminate at the fort. The works were immediately laid out and quickly built. As the road sprang into its level flight like magic, the peeping Kabyles, perfectly unaware that they were conquered, laughed in derision. "It is to help the cowards to run away," they said. In due time rose the pale walls of the citadel, with mountains above and hills below. The Kabyles call it the White Phantom. Their songs, the "traditions" of illiterate tribes, recite the building of the terrible stronghold: "The Roumi has arrived at the Market: he is building there. Weep, O my eyes! tears of blood. The children of Raten are valiant men: they are known as masters of the warlike art. They fell upon the enemy at Icheriden. The Franks fell like lopped branches. Glory to those brave men! But the Roumi has peeled us like seeds. The powder talks no more. The warlike men are fainting. Cover thyself with mourning, O my head!"
As the tourist turns the summit of Aboudid suddenly appears, like an ornamental detail in a panorama, this vast fortress, originally named Fort Napoléon, and since the collapse of the empire called Fort National. During the French troubles of 1871, in the month of August, General Cérès was obliged to inspire terror by burning the village of Thizzi-Ouzzou beneath, and then went on to relieve the fort. When the next opportunity will occur for the Beni Raten to assert their rights it is impossible to tell. We descend from the fort, and all becomes commonplace. The charred ruins of Thizzi-Ouzzou in its valley-bed are being replaced by new buildings. All wears a look of every-day thrift. The Arab, moving his household goods, drives before him his poor dingy wife, loaded down with worthless valuables and also with copper jewels, in which she clanks like a fettered slave. A negro musician from the Desert, a true African minstrel, capers before us and beats the tom-tom, until, distracted with his noise, we pay him and bombard him off the face of the road with projectiles.
From Thizzi-Ouzzou to Algiers it is but four hours' journey, and the four hours are passed in a diligence. Yes, our circumstances are subdued to the conditions of the diligence! Adieu, our spahi guides, like figures from Lalla Rookh! Adieu, our dream of an African Switzerland! The Roumi, outside of Kabylia, quickly fades into the light of common day, and becomes plain Tom or Harry.