About Algeria: Algiers, Tlemçen, Constantine, Biskra, Timgad

by Charles Thomas-Stanford

[12]. “Esto Perpetus.” London, 1906.

The actual gorge is about four miles long. The valley then gradually widens, the hills become rather less abrupt, their sides are clothed with ample vegetation, chiefly forests of cork and oak trees, and the lateral valleys grow larger, in due proportion to the general scheme. We pass from the thrilling sensations of the unique defile into a mountain valley of great beauty, but less unusual in character.

It happened that I offered a seat in my car to a gentleman whose party were inconveniently crowded in their own. I began by doing the unpardonable thing; deceived by certain guttural syllables, I said, “Are you a German?” He replied: “No! thank God, I am Dutch.” And my heart was glad within me, for the Dutchman is our brother, and our friend; perhaps because we have fought him over and over again, and sometimes we have beaten him, and sometimes he us. We have had, as far as I am aware, no such pleasant relations with the German; perhaps if we had fought him for a century or two we should appreciate his good qualities. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, I soon found points in common with my chance companion. We both knew many lands; especially we both knew the same places and the same men in Norway. My Dutchman loved Norway as I love it, and knew it better. Our points of view were different. His to range far and wide, to sip as a bee winging from flower to flower the varied beauties of fjord and fell, of fond and brae; mine to mark the rise and fall of one much-studied river, chained as a galley-slave to my angle.

So we played the pretty and seductive game of resemblances. Here in this fierce African landscape we contrived to see Bratlandsdal, here Sundal, here the smoothened rock-faces of Naerodalsosen. Lower down where a vast amphitheatre of hills guarded the meeting of two waters we saw the Pyrenees. But the while I was hugging to myself a secret study of which my comrade recked nothing. Even as a man may travel by train, and mark a country, and consider within himself how he would ride over it to hounds;—so was I noting the pools and streams of the river, muddy as a glacier-fed river may be in a hot July, and judging where the fish would be like to lie, and how I should put the fly to them. A very pretty pastime, but clouded by the knowledge that no fish that is a fish, not even a wee trout, may live in these waters. They contain calcareous salts, or something unpleasant, which no fish of the royal race will stand. There are hopes of acclimatizing tench; but who can wax warm at the prospect? Yet was this to look upon a real river, the finest river (with all respect to the Nile and the Zambesi; I speak as an angler) that I have seen in Africa; a fair succession of pool and stream,—of pools running swiftly beneath steep banks and shelving shores, of streams just steep enough to make the pools holding. The pity of it! From end to end Africa has an air of being unfinished and ill-designed; there is always something wanting to its completeness; in some ways it is too big, in others too small; it lacks water, or it has too much; and things are seldom what they seem,—when you descry a distant lake it is generally the mirage; wherefore a salmon river without salmon falls quite within the natural order of African things.

So on through the broadening valley, with glimpses of azure sea ahead, and soaring mountains, clad with primeval forest, all around. The road, well engineered,—that goes without saying,—is much cut up by the heavy traffic to and from certain mining enterprises in the hills. One iron-ore mine,—the property of an English company, I hear with national pride,—on the opposite side of the valley has a little railway and a little port of its own; and two vessels, hovering suspiciously in the offing, are not corsairs, but intent on a lawful freight. But here, as everywhere, the authorities are busy in making the road smooth for the motor-car, and the repairers and a steam-roller are at work. The car is not yet a familiar object to man and beast. A mule bearing a native bolts at our approach, and unseats its rider. We call to the chauffeur to stop. He replies, “Mais, ce n’est qu’un Khabyle”; in which I recognize a common colonial note. We look round to see the mule caught and the rider up again, and go on happily.

The long descent comes to an end at length, and at a point about twenty-three miles short of Bougie we reach the sea. The coast-lands here consist of a series of semicircular plains, divided by great spurs which run northward from the main range, and form capes. Across these flat and highly cultivated plains our road lies where it may with Algerian directness, but rises to dizzy heights by zigzags to surmount the precipitous headlands which once or twice bar its progress. The contour of this variable and rocky coast is eminently picturesque, the views of sea and mountain of infinite variety. And afar the dazzling whiteness of Bougie stretching upwards from its harbour among the olive groves invites us. The level lands appear to be of great fertility; amid great fields of corn and vine pleasant and prosperous-looking country houses stand, girt about with fruit trees,—figs, apricots and peaches. In some places the cultivation is carried almost to high-water mark, in others a sward of fine turf seems to meet the sand.

Bougie, rising on the steep hill-side behind its protecting cape, looks almost southward, and its bay appears to it as a land-locked lake. On the southern shore stand the majestic mountains through which we have bored our way from Sétif, with plenty of snow on this, their northern face, crowning their copious forests of cedar and pine. Few seaports have such a romantic outlook. It cannot be doubted that this coast is destined some day to be a second and grander Riviera, and if another Lord Brougham sets to work to create another Cannes, it is perhaps in the neighbourhood of Bougie that he will place it. Apart from its own abounding attractions, it is surrounded east and south and west by incomparable scenery. Its charms are already beginning to be known. It is a meeting-place of excellent roads, and the motor-car has rendered it easy of access. Its comfortable hotel is always full, and is making haste to enlarge itself. Let Bougie start a casino and band, and it will begin to have a season. And in my mind’s eye I can see golf-links along the shore of the bay, para thina thalasses, where the sea-sand meets the verdure.

There is something theatrical about Bougie’s scenery. Stand on the shore in front of the old Saracen gateway and look upwards at the background of the town rising tier on tier, a town of brilliant white houses gay with the dazzling purple of the bougainvillea, with the bastions of an apparently cardboard fort to the right, and a suggestion of ruined castles to the left, and you may fancy that you are in the stalls at the Opera, and that a chorus of fisher-girls will shortly appear and point to a pirate in the offing.

Bougie, exporter of wax, is said to have given its name to the candle. And it has other historical associations. Its story is not very dissimilar from that of many ports on this coast. Phœnician traders, Roman colonists, Vandal invaders, Byzantines, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards and Turks,—all have had their day, and many of them have left their impress. Traces of the Roman wall exist; the Saracenic enceinte, enclosing a space seven times the size of that which lies within the present fortifications, is still marked by ruined towers which rise picturesquely among the olive trees. In the matter of piracy Bougie followed the example set by Algiers with great zeal and success. So troublesome were its corsairs to Spain that in 1508 Ferdinand V was goaded to action, and sent a fleet of fourteen ships under Don Pedro Navarro to take possession of it; and the Spaniards held it for nearly forty years. But the failure of the expedition of Charles V against Algiers in 1545 put great courage into the Algerians. They attacked the castle on the harbour and the citadel on the heights with an overwhelming force. The governor, Don Alonzo de Peralta, seeing resistance hopeless, and anxious to save the lives of his garrison and its women and children, surrendered the town on condition that all the Spaniards within the walls should be allowed to depart, and that ships should be furnished to carry them to Spain. The Emperor, doubtless still smarting under his defeat, did not take this fresh reverse in good part and condemned the unfortunate governor to lose his head. Thenceforth until the French invasion Bougie was held by a small Turkish garrison, and the town, which is said to have contained in its palmy days a population of 100,000, fell into decay. It is now once again on the up-grade of prosperity.

From Bougie it is possible to proceed to Algiers by steamer, or by train, but the traveller who has reached it by motor-car from Sétif should on no account miss the opportunity to drive through Khabylia, the beautiful and interesting mountain district which lies between the snowy Djurjura and the sea. The distance via Fort National to Tizi-Ouzou, on the western side of the upland country, whence Algiers may be reached by train in three hours, is about 150 miles. A magnificent new road breasts the mountain wall which confines the valley above Bougie, and leads with interminable curves and zigzags through forest and cultivated land, through heath and downland turf, to a chilly height of nearly 5000 feet.