ZOUAVES
As becomes a city set on a hill, Constantine is more retentive of its ancient customs than a port like Algiers, which is subject to the levelling influences of the sea and its traffic. Here, for example, the Jewesses retain their distinctive dress. They delight in bright colours, and in heavy barbaric jewellery, such as broad bracelets and large circular earrings. They wear a peculiar head-dress, a sort of lace veil with gold or gilt ornaments, surmounted by a pointed cap. The girls affect a very diminutive form of this cap, generally of brilliant red or blue, stuck jauntily on one side of the head. They are very lovely, these Jewish girls, the finest type of their race, with noble features and clear olive complexions. In point of refinement and the carriage which marks good breeding perhaps no race touches such wide extremes as the Jewish; for some reason or other the Constantine Jews are at the top of the tree.
You may sit in a café of the Place de la Brèche and watch the endless pageant of commingled East and West. The military note is predominant; Zouaves and Spahis are everywhere. Behind a series of transport waggons of the Chasseurs d’Afrique a motor-car hoots impatiently. Next a group of little donkeys bearing loads, heads low, and ears wearily flopping. Then carts heavily laden with stone, drawn by five horses,—sometimes a grey team, sometimes a brown,—harnessed in single file, the driver walking by the penultimate horse; a group of neat French children on their way to school; an Arab lady of high degree veiled in the daintiest grey chiffon, riding on a caparisoned mule and holding a lovely child before her; an old Arab seated on a mass of saddle-bags which almost hide his donkey, waggling his feet up and down after the Arab manner, even as civilized man works a salmon-rod; and as you turn to go there comes a troop of men chanting a dull Gregorian measure, and bearing something on a stretcher covered with a green and gold flowered cloth;—an Arab on his way to his last resting-place.
Such is a fraction of the cosmopolitan and parti-coloured crowd. And as you watch you will reflect how much it owes to the fact that the natives, high and low,—you do not see much of the former,—wear a distinctive dress. The Arab’s robe is often shabby and often unclean; but it avoids the meanness and vulgarity of European clothes. The working classes of Northern Europe have discarded their suitable dress of the past;—even the lingering smock-frock, most appropriate and dignified of coverings, has gone,—they habit themselves in the cast-off clothings of the well-to-do, or in badly-made imitations of them. The women suffer in appearance more than the men, but both combine in their personal aspect to contribute to the grim squalor and hideousness of our meaner streets.
It is said that the plateau on which Constantine stands is honeycombed with caves and subterranean passages, and that formerly it was possible to walk round the city underground. Probably these caves were excavated by the river before it had carved out its present bed at a lower level. These great natural storehouses were used in troublous times for the keeping of provisions and munitions of war; and during the French attack of 1837 many of the inhabitants took refuge in them. They are now for the most part bricked up, but a very remarkable grotto lies beneath the Hôtel de Paris, and may be visited from the hotel.
There is a museum at the Mairie. It is, as Mr. Lucas found the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, very difficult to get into; and it is still more difficult to get out of, especially if you are a sympathetic listener. The good lady whose place is in the porter’s lodge, and who has the key, will, when at leisure, conduct you to a long room containing the usual assortment of battered coins and broken pottery, and one gem, a bronze statuette of Victory, found beneath the Kasbeh. When you are sufficiently depressed by the antiquities, your guide has something in store for you. She will show you—you only, you are given to understand; it is an exception;—the marble staircase and the saloon in which the Mayor receives. And very fine the marble columns and marble panels are, and you will notice how here a butterfly with long tails is faithfully depicted in their rich grain, and there the head of an old Arab to the very life. And if you will have the goodness to look out of window, you will see a house on the hill opposite, and just beyond it on the other side is the quarry from which all these marbles come. And in all Algeria there is no such a Mairie as this. And you may be led to discuss systems of local government, and to mention that you yourself, who speak, take some small share in such matters, if only as a member of an Education Committee, or a County Council, or what-not. And you will perhaps be pained to discover that the very name of your important county town is unknown to your entertainer; a pain to be mitigated later by the reflection that the caretaker of its Town Hall is perhaps not fully informed as to Constantine. And the pièce de résistance comes last. You shall see the salon in which the Mayor conducts the marriages. And very suitable and dignified it is. Has your Mayor so fine a marrying-place? You are constrained to confess that as far as you are aware your Mayor has nothing to do with any marriages but his own. A quick look as at an impostor detected, a shrug of the shoulders, and a sigh for the barbarous condition of foreign countries, and it is over.
Constantine is a busy place. It is naturally a great corn-market. It has long been celebrated for its leather goods. In their manufacture a large number of tanners, saddlers and shoemakers are employed. Here are produced all the elaborate articles of harness affected by Arab cavaliers, often curiously wrought and of high price. And there is a considerable woollen industry. Here are woven the haïks and burnous which form part of Arab dress; and certain finer articles, called gandouras, made partly of wool and partly of silk. And the development of the minerals of the province, especially zinc, iron-ore and phosphates, is bringing activity and prosperity to Constantine.
The last conquerors have indeed set their seal upon the ancient city. They have wrought more damage to its beauty in less than a century than the Arabs in a thousand years. They have done their utmost to reduce it to the level of a common French provincial town, and they may boast such partial success as its conditions permitted. We are inured to regarding such proceedings as inevitable. We have let our own towns grow as the speculative builder willed; we have spared nothing except by accident; we should have dealt with Constantine very much as the French have, perhaps more outrageously. The folly and iniquity of it all is dawning on us too late, we are beginning to see that the nineteenth century betrayed its trust; it destroyed wantonly in time of peace what even the stress and exigencies of centuries of war had spared.
The cliffs of Constantine’s great gorge still hold aloft its plateau; if they enclose a city unworthy of their protection, such a condition is perhaps, relatively to their own permanence, merely transitory. They will doubtless see the passing of all that our banal age has set up; it is fortunately not built for lasting. And a more enlightened race of men may yet arise to crown with the towers of a noble city the finest site in the world.
From Constantine the traveller will doubtless turn his face southwards. He will have in front of him the ruins of Roman cities on the northern slope of the Aurès mountains, for which Batna, 122 kilometres from Constantine by road, is a convenient head-quarters; and further on, after passing through a gorge which severs the range, he will enter the true Sahara and, at 116 kilometres from Batna, reach the oasis of Biskra, the much honoured and much sung. The railway takes during part of the journey a somewhat different course from the road, but the distance is about the same, the journey occupying seven or eight hours.