"That great copper-coloured church high on the hill is Notre Dame d'Afrique," said the girl. "She's like a dark sister of Notre Dame de la Garde, who watches over Marseilles, isn't she? I think I could love her, though she's ugly, really. And I've read in a book that if you walk up the hill to visit her and say a prayer, you may have a hundred days' indulgence."
Much good an "indulgence" would do him now, Stephen thought bitterly.
As the ship steamed closer inshore, the dreamlike beauty of the white town on the green hillside sharpened into a reality which might have seemed disappointingly modern and French, had it not been for the sprinkling of domes, the pointing fingers of minarets with glittering tiles of bronzy green, and the groups of old Arab houses crowded in among the crudities of a new, Western civilization. Down by the wharf for which the boat aimed like a homing bird, were huddled a few of these houses, ancient dwellings turned into commercial offices where shipping business was transacted. They looked forlorn, yet beautiful, like haggard slavewomen who remembered days of greatness in a far-off land.
The Charles Quex slackened speed as she neared the harbour, and every detail of the town leaped to the eyes, dazzling in the southern sunshine. The encircling arms of break-waters were flung out to sea in a vast embrace; the smoke of vessels threaded with dark, wavy lines the pure crystal of the air; the quays were heaped with merchandise, some of it in bales, as if it might have been brought by caravans across the desert. There was a clanking of cranes at work, a creaking of chains, a flapping of canvas, and many sounds which blend in the harsh poetry of sea-harbours. Then voices of men rose shrilly above all heavier noises, as the ship slowly turned and crept beside a floating pontoon. The journey together was over for Stephen Knight and Victoria Ray.
VII
A first glance, at such close quarters, would have told the least instructed stranger that he was in the presence of two clashing civilizations, both tenacious, one powerful.
In front, all along the shore, towered with confident effrontery a massive line of buildings many stories high, great cubes of brick and stone, having elaborate balconies that shadowed swarming offices with dark, gaping vaults below. Along the broad, stone-paved street clanged electric tramcars. There was a constant coming and going of men. Cloaked and hooded white forms, or half-clad apparitions wrapped in what looked like dirty bagging, mingled with commonplace figures in Western dress. But huddled in elbow-high with this busy town of modern France (which might have been Marseilles or Bordeaux) was something alien, something remote in spirit; a ghostly band of white buildings, silent and pale in the midst of colour and noise. Low houses with flat roofs or miniature domes, small, secret doorways, tiny windows like eyes narrowed for spying, and overhanging upper stories supported on close-set, projecting sticks of mellow brown which meant great age. Minarets sprang up in mute protest against the infidel, appealing to the sky. All that was left of old Algiers tried to boast, in forced dumbness, of past glories, of every charm the beautiful, fierce city of pirates must have possessed before the French came to push it slowly but with deadly sureness back from the sea. Now, silent and proud in the tragedy of failure, it stood masked behind pretentious French houses, blocklike in ugliness, or flauntingly ornate as many buildings in the Rue de Rivoli or Boulevard Haussmann.
In those low-browed dwellings which thickly enamelled the hill with a mosaic of pink and pearly whiteness, all the way up to the old fortress castle, the Kasbah, the true life of African Algiers hid and whispered. The modern French front along the fine street was but a gay veneer concealing realities, an incrusted civilization imposed upon one incredibly ancient, unspeakably different and ever unchanging.
Stephen remembered now that he had heard people decry Algiers, pronouncing it spoiled and "completely Frenchified." But it occurred to him that in this very process of spoiling, an impression of tragic romance had been created which less "spoiled" towns might lack. Here were clashing contrasts which, even at a glance, made the strangest picture he had ever seen; and already he began to feel more and more keenly, though not yet to understand, something of the magic of the East. For this place, though not the East according to geographers, held all the spirit of the East—was in essence truly the East.