The configuration of this country, the foot-hills of the Djurjura, is peculiar. A series of slopes confines a wealth of valleys great and small, into which project knife-edges, commonly crowned at their termination with castle-like rocks. The Djurjura range protects these valleys from the hot and drying winds of the desert, and its snows supply copious torrents and a moist atmosphere. The country affords a very striking contrast to the typical arid upland of Algeria. In such conditions we naturally find a very luxuriant vegetation. Cedars, oaks, olives, figs and vines flourish exceedingly, and beneath them the sward suggests a more northern land. Africa maintains its character as the continent of surprises.
On every vantage-point which offers possibilities of defence, especially on the narrow ridges near their final crests, stand Khabyle villages, commanding both slopes. In such a situation there is seldom water to be found; and it is the perpetual task of the women (who are unveiled) to carry it to their homes from the cascades on the neighbouring hills. The villages are composed of small stone houses densely crowded together, roofed with tiles, the lines of the roofs being generally parallel, which gives them a curiously symmetrical appearance. Their dirt and squalor is indescribable.
A strange people these Khabyles:—a white race, or at least not more tanned than many dwellers on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and recalling in physique an Italian type; ardent cultivators and determined fighters in defence; with a long-established and intelligent system of local self-government, and elaborate institutions, public and domestic; yet confessing the faith, and wearing the garb of the Arab, with whom they have nothing else in common. Till the French came they had never owned a master. Before 1871 they had maintained and been permitted a modified independence; but to their own undoing they took a leading part in the rising of that year, and committed many savage murders and outrages on helpless French colonists. Their subjugation followed as a matter of course; many of their lands were forfeited, and they became the servants of the new lords.
There is quite a large and serious literature dealing with the peculiar habits and customs of the Khabyles after the thorough and logical, if somewhat dull, manner of French writers. From an artistic point of view an Englishman, Mr. Edgar Barclay, has made Khabylia his own. His “Mountain Life in Algeria” (London, 1882) is a description of the country as it appears to an artist and a scholar. The common eye is filled with the non-essential details of personal uncleanliness and the squalor of seldom-washed garments; the artist looks below these to the inherent qualities of form. In the troops of girls filling their pitchers at the waterfall or bearing them in line to their village, in the wood-cutter and the shepherd, Mr. Barclay has seen again the types of ancient Greece when the world was young.
Fort National crowns a common ridge running east and west between the two chief valleys of Khabylia. It looks southward to the great snowy rampart of the Djurjura, here evident in all its glory. The road westward follows the ridge to its extremity and then descends to the vale in a series of abrupt and, to the motorist, rather alarming zigzags. And so we come to Tizi-Ouzou and Algiers.
The magic carpet of our day has borne us in a brief space through landscapes of astonishing contrast; through territories which are a storehouse of conflicting yet commingled human interests; across the vast cornfields which suggest man’s taming of a newly discovered continent, to the siege-scarred cliffs of Constantine, the awe-inspiring immensity of the Sahara, the speaking ruins of the Roman marches, the Alpine gorges and sylvan sweetness of the Mediterranean shore. Perhaps nowhere within so small a compass is the history of twenty centuries writ so large, nowhere the evidence of man’s struggles, and especially of his failures, more plain for him who runs to read.
ALGERIA AND TUNIS
Extracted from the Michelin Guide to the Sunny Countries 1912