ALGIERS: DOORWAY, RUE MEDEA
And it would seem that women everywhere must still have chains to hug. If in Western countries the husband is no longer lord, and the priest no more director, the tyranny of the dressmaker is cheerfully, nay, eagerly, accepted. In one decade a tight cape prevents the lifting of the arms, in the next a skimpy skirt hobbles the legs; a mere man may venture to see in these disagreeable manifestations a surviving badge of ingrained servitude.
The lanes of this old town, with its squalid exteriors and possibly rich interiors, are not very clean, and to the Western eye, if not nose, they suggest insanitary conditions. But it is never safe to judge from appearances, and it may be that your brand-new hôtel de luxe is richer in lethal germs than this ramshackle city. I am not armed with any statistics bearing on the point. At any rate, these devious thoroughfares appear to be admirably policed, and in spite of their cut-throat appearance it is said that they are safe for passage by day or by night.
If the aspiring word-painter has failed to convey any due impression of this curious labyrinth, the artist has seldom been more successful. Perhaps it passes the endurance of flesh and blood to sit and paint, where there is too little room to sit, exposed to the torments of an Arab crowd. Even the humble photographer must own defeat. The narrowness of the lanes, the height of the houses and the unwelcome attentions of the passers-by try his skill beyond endurance. The casual wayfarer, content with his own impressions, has the best of it.
It appears that in Turkish times the streets of the city had no distinctive names. It may be that everyone knew where everyone else lived. The Arab, at any rate, had no address. Presumably he had no extensive correspondence. And perhaps he seldom received callers. There were certainly no public vehicles, indeed no vehicles at all. It was all, and is, a strange tangle; an incongruous medley of great houses and squalid shops, of “the grey homes of the people and the palaces of the mighty,” as Mr. Lloyd George said at Mile End. With laudable intentions the French set to work to unravel it—to give at least to every street a name, for to the European mind a street without a name is inconceivable; although we frequently see in new-fledged localities names bestowed on streets which are as yet in embryo. The official who was entrusted with the job deserves immortality in the pillory. A more hopelessly inappropriate collection of titles it would be difficult to conceive. Such aberration almost touches genius. Rue du 4 Septembre, Rue d’Amfreville, Rue du Galmier, Rue Annibal,—such are the gems which greet our astonished eyes. And, above all, Rue Sidney Smith! What is the witty parson—or is it the admiral?—doing in this galley? If only he had lived to know it. But so for all time, or until the next conqueror arrives, will it be.
The amateur will look in vain in Algiers for fine examples of Arab art, such as he may study at Cairo, at Granada, or at Tlemçen, in the province of Oran. The ravages of war, the stress of successive bombardments, amply account for this. The old minarets are gone; such work of the best period as may have existed has long disappeared; what the French have spared is chiefly of the Turkish domination.
But, in truth, during the great days of Mohammedan art Algiers was not of much importance. Its site had been previously occupied by the Roman Icosium, a town of little place in history, but the seat of one of the numerous North African bishoprics of the fifth century. The Arab town was founded in the tenth century, at which time numerous monuments of the Roman period are said to have been still standing. About the year 1500, when the Moors were expelled from Spain, many settled here, and adopted the profession of pirates. It is at this time that the importance of Algiers in the history of Europe commences.
ALGIERS: DOORWAY IN THE RUE BEN-ALI
The Penon, the islet which, being connected with the shore by a mole, forms the present inner harbour of Algiers, the old harbour of the corsair fleet, is intimately connected with this period. Some good Arab work is to be seen, notably a magnificent doorway in the Bureau de la Marine, carved in white marble, or ornamented with inscriptions and with tigers,—an infringement of the Moorish law which perhaps indicates its Persian origin.[[1]] A small and very charming Arab house with good carving and many tiles is used as the residence of the Admiral. As I gazed deferentially at the exterior an obliging sailor invited me to enter. “This,” he said, “is the grand salon of the Admiral; and this,” laying his hand on the handle of a door, “the Admiral’s bureau.” I recalled the Oxford undergraduate who showed “his people” over his college: “That,” he said, “is the Master’s Lodge, and that,” hurling a stone at a window, “is the Master.” Perhaps my face showed some apprehension of the possible apparition of a fierce French admiral with bristling moustache hastening to repel the foreign invader, for my conductor reassured me. “M. l’Amiral est absent,” he said. From a pleasant flagged terrace, with a summer-house at the further end, the Admiral may look down on the inner harbour, packed now with the French torpedo-boats which have replaced the lateen-rigged vessels of its former owners.