Due north from the land of the Ouled-Naïls, and hemmed in by the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, is the Grand Kabylia, a wild, strange region, peopled by many but known to few. Whence the Kabyles came nobody knows, though their fair complexions, red hair, and blue eyes lead the ethnologists to suppose that they are a branch of that equally white and equally mysterious Berber race who occupy the Moroccan ranges of the Atlas. Thirteen hundred years ago they came to North Africa from out of the East, bringing with them a civilisation and a culture and institutions distinctively their own. Retreating into their mountain fastnesses before that Arab invasion which spread the faith of the Prophet over all North Africa, they have dwelt there ever since, the French, who conquered them in the middle of the last century only after heavy losses, having wisely refrained from interference in their tribal laws or customs, which remain, therefore, almost unmodified.
Though the Kabyles, of all the Moslem races, treat their women with the greatest respect, neither imprisoning them in harems nor hiding them beneath veils and swaddling-clothes, they share with the mountaineers of the Caucasus the somewhat dubious distinction of selling their daughters to the highest bidder. Between the Circassians and the Kabyles there is, however, a distinction with a difference, for, whereas the former sell their daughters in cold blood and take not the slightest interest in what becomes of them thereafter, the Kabyle parent expects, even if he does not always insist, that the man who purchases his daughter shall marry her. A fine, upstanding Kabyle maiden of fifteen or thereabouts, with the lines of a thoroughbred, the profile of a cameo, and a skin the colour of a bronze statue, will fetch her parents anywhere from eighty to three hundred dollars, at least so I was told at Tizi-Ouzou, the chef-lieu of the district, and the man who told me assured me very earnestly that, the crops having been bad, a girl could be bought very cheaply, and begged me to think it over.
Though the Mauresques of Algeria, the Jewesses of Tunisia, and the fair-skinned beauties of Circassia combine a voluptuous figure with an altogether exceptional beauty of complexion and features, the women of Kabylia, with their flashing teeth, their sparkling eyes, their full red lips, their lithe, slender bodies, and their haughty, insolent manners, suggest a civilisation older and more sensuous, and entirely alien to our own. The humblest peasant girl, grinding the family flour between the upper and the nether stones in the doorway of a mud hovel, possesses so marked a distinction of feature and figure and bearing that it is not difficult to believe that Cleopatra or Helen of Troy might well have come from this same race.
The approach of a Kabyle woman is heralded in two ways: first, by a strong-scented perfume, which, like the celebrated parfum du Bey of Tunis, is composed of the blended scents of a score or more different kinds of blossoms, the odour changing from carnation to rose, to heliotrope, to violet, and so on every few minutes (no, I didn't believe it either, until I tried it); and, secondly, by the clink and jingle of the bracelets, anklets, necklaces, and bijoux of gold, silver, turquoise, and coral with which they are loaded down, and which sound, when they move, like an approaching four-in-hand. Good specimens of this Kabyle jewelry are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, by the way, and bring high prices in the shops of Tunis and Algiers, being eagerly sought after by collectors.
Personally, I am quite unable to picture an admirer making love to one of these insolent-eyed beauties, for they are headstrong and hot of temper, and if the gentleman happened to say the wrong thing he would very probably find the yataghan, which every Kabyle maiden carries, planted neatly between his shoulders. They seem to be fond of cold steel, do these Kabyles, for at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony the bridegroom, walking backward, holds before him an unsheathed dagger and the bride, following him, keeps the point of it between her teeth. Another wedding custom of Kabylia, no less strange, consists of the partial martyrdom of the bride, who, clad in her marriage finery, stands for an entire morning with her back to a stone pillar in the village square, her eyes closed, her arms close at her sides, and her only foothold the column's narrow base, the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes. Despite the stern stuff of which the Kabyle women are made, it is small wonder that the bride usually faints before this peculiarly harrowing ordeal is over.
As far removed from these half-savage women of Ouled-Naïl and of Kabylia as a Philadelphia Quakeress is from a Cheyenne squaw are those poor prisoner women of whose pale, half-hidden faces the visitor to the North African coast towns sometimes gets a glimpse at the barred window of a harem, or meets at nightfall hastening home from their sole diversion, the weekly excursion to the cemetery. You can see them for yourself any Friday afternoon if you will loiter without the whitewashed gateway to the cemetery of Bou-Kabrin, on the hill above Algiers, for they believe that on that day—the Moslem Sabbath—the spirits of the dead re-visit the earth, and hence their weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company. When the sun begins to sink behind the Atlas these white-veiled pyramids of femininity reluctantly begin to make their way back through the narrow, winding lanes of the native city, disappearing one by one through doors which will not open for them until another Friday has rolled around. Picture such a life, my friends: six days a week encloistered behind jealously guarded doors and on the seventh taking an outing in the cemetery!
That many of these Mauresque women of the coast towns are very beautiful—just as many others are exceedingly ugly—there is but little doubt, though they are so sheeted, shrouded, veiled, and draped from prying masculine eyes that a man may know of their beauty only by hearsay. I imagine that the dress of the Mauresque woman was specially designed to baffle masculine curiosity, for if Aphrodite herself were enveloped in a white linen sheet from head to waist, and in enormous and ridiculous pantaloons from waist to ankle, she could go where she pleased without being troubled by admirers. Not only is a Mauresque woman never permitted to see a man—or rather, the man is not permitted to see her, for despite all precautions she sometimes manages to catch glimpses of people through the lattices of her harem windows—but she may not receive a visit from her father or brother without her husband's permission. When she is ill enough to require the services of a physician—and she has to be very ill indeed before one is summoned—incredibly elaborate are the preparations. All the women of her household are ranged about the bed, while her servants hide her under the bedclothes almost to the point of suffocation. If her pulse has to be felt a servant covers her hand and arm so carefully that only an inch or so of her wrist is visible. If she has hurt her shoulder, or back, or leg, a hole is made in the bedclothes so that the doctor may just be able to see the injured place, and nothing more. Should he have the hardihood to insist on looking at her tongue, the precautions are still more elaborate, the attendants covering the patient's face with their hands and just leaving room between their fingers so that her tongue may be stuck out. I know a French physician in Tunis who told me that he was once called to attend the favourite wife of a wealthy Arab merchant, and that while he was conducting the examination the lady's husband stood behind him with the muzzle of a revolver pressed into the small of his back.
JEWISH WOMEN IN THE CEMETERY OF TUNIS.
“They believe that the spirits of the dead revisit the earth, and hence the weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company.”