This sense of harmony is felt all the more strongly by glancing for a moment at one of the new French settlements on the borders of the same country, where its absence is conspicuous; it is at once obvious, that such a village belongs to a complicated system of society.
The Kabyle village is rude and simple, the French is mean without being simple. It is built on the dusty high road, which can be seen winding in a serpentine line like a white thread, through the feverish plains. The road is traced in accordance with military and strategic reasons, and it will be found that there is little sign of traffic; a broad mule-track well trodden down, runs near, following a straighter line though more uneven gradients. This gives the road the appearance of being a sham. The village consists of a collection of hideous little houses sprinkled about in the plain, without shade from the pitiless sun, mean oblong boxes, quite unlike the model of a colon’s house that was to be seen in the gardens of the Trocadero at Paris in 1878, which showed a beautiful power of idealising. A government order has fixed the colony in its place, which so far as can be seen, might as well have been chosen at any other point. An ugly little church has been just completed, which the inhabitants do not appear either to respect or to want. All the wood used in the construction of the buildings has been brought from over the seas, from Norway, though the sides of the hills are covered with trees. The most frequented place of meeting is the dram-shop, where the heralds of civilisation congregate to tipple absinthe. Speak to the colonists, you will find that they abuse their homes and their circumstances; they one and all wish that they were somewhere else, perhaps the only point on which the natives are ready to agree with them. ‘Peut-être—oui, peut-être, le pays est joli, mais vu du loin,’ is the nearest approach to praise that I have been able to extract from a colonist in such a village.
In England men adapt their lives to the requirements and the accumulated conveniences of civilisation; but in a primitive society, there is a forced accordance between man and surrounding nature, which imposes its conditions upon life.
In Kabylia this agreement is visible in every particular and detail of life. Those bronzed and furrowed features, those sinewy limbs, do they not attest struggle and toil with nature? Watch those girls as they trip down the mountain path; at every step their movements are governed by the accidents of the ground. What a path it is! Fit emblem of half-civilised institutions. Year after year, year after year, it receives the impress of many feet, yet all the rude asperities of nature remain.
Kabylia has I think another interest, purely fanciful. On seeing the villages with tiled roofs set on the tops of the mountains, surrounded by fig-trees; and corn ripening among the fine olives; one is irresistibly reminded of Italy. But here, though the people are of a different race and religion, they have retained the habits of a very primitive age; and in this corner of the world, more than anywhere in Europe, observation of the manners of to-day, will picture the rural life of classic times.
Upon observing a phase of life so different from the world one is accustomed to, it is agreeable to discover that in odd unexpected ways, it connects itself in the mind, with a past whose beauty remains recorded for our enjoyment.
Added to these points of interest that Kabylia offers to the artist, there is the advantage that the climate is healthy and invigorating.
I first visited this country in the early spring of the year 1873, when I spent several weeks there. I revisited it in the year 1877, when I remained over a month among the mountains, living part of the time with Italians at an isolated farmhouse, and part of the time with the Missionary Fathers. In the beginning of 1880, I again returned and stayed a month at Fort National, and in April started on the expedition recorded in this narrative. On this last occasion I kept a diary. On my return home, I found that my notes were too concise to conjure up scenes to others; nevertheless they elicited so many enquiries, that I resolved to expand them in my leisure hours. The following is the result. In the hope that it may interest a wider circle than my personal friends, I with diffidence submit it to public criticism.