E come down the hills and back to Algiers, to find the winter in full bloom, and the 'winter swallows' in great force, In fact, so full of bustle is the town, and so frequent is the sight of English faces, and the sound of English voices, that it hardly seems like the place we had left a few weeks since.
It has been said that English people love sunshine and blue sky more than any other nation, and that the dwellers under the 'ciel nebuleuse du nord,' will go anywhere to seek a brighter clime; and it is a fact, the importance of which is hardly realised in England, that the African sun is producing a crop of English residents that is growing rapidly, and taking firm root in the soil, in spite of siroccos, in spite of earthquakes—without a thought of colonization in the strict sense of the word, and without, it must be added, any particular love for the French people.
The visitors, or tourists, are increasing also, and they are naturally, rather vulgarising our favourite places. Thus we hear of picnics at the Bouzareah, of balls at Mustapha, of 'trips' to Blidah by railway, and of 'excursions to the gorge of La Chiffa and back' in one day.
An amusing chapter might be written upon Algiers from the traveller's point of view, but one or two touches will suffice, to show the easy and familiar terms, on which our countrymen and country-women invade this stronghold of the French; once the 'city of pirates' and the terror of Mediterranean waters.
There is the cosmopolitan traveller, who, having 'done Europe,' finds Algiers, of course, rather 'slow,' by contrast; and there is the very matter-of-fact traveller, who finds it all vanity, and says,—'Take ever so copious a stock of illusions with you to the bright Orient, and within half-an-hour after landing, you are as bankrupt as a bank of deposit... and the end of it all is, that this city of the "Arabian Nights" turns out to be as unromantic as Seven Dials.' There are lady travellers, who (enjoying special advantages by reason of their sex, and seeing much more than Englishmen of Moorish interiors) are perhaps best fitted to write books about this country; there are proselytizing ladies, who come with a mission, and end by getting themselves and their friends into trouble, by distributing tracts amongst the Moors; and there are ladies who (when their baggage is detained at one of the ports), endeavour to break down the barriers of official routine in an unexpected way. 'The douane did not choose to wake up and give us our luggage,' writes one, 'it was such a lazy douane; and though I went again and again and said pretty things to the gendarmes, it was of no use.'
Another form of invasion is less polite, but it has been submitted to with tolerable grace on more than one occasion. Here is the latest instance. *
* 'Under the Palms,' by the Hon. Lewis Wingfield. London,
1867.
'Being anxious to obtain a sketch of one of the quaint streets of the upper town, I wandered one morning up its dark alleys and intricate byeways; and wishing to establish myself at a window, I knocked at a promising door, and was answered by a mysterious voice from behind a lattice; the door opened of itself, and I marched upstairs unmindful of evil. In the upper court I was instantly surrounded by a troup of women, in the picturesque private dress of the Moorish ladies, unencumbered with veil or yashmak.
'These ladies dragged at my watch-chain, and pulled my hair, until finding myself in such very questionable society, I beat a hasty retreat, flying down stairs six steps at a time, slamming the doors in the faces of the houris, and eventually reaching the street in safety, while sundry slow Mussulmans wagged their beards and said that Christian dogs did not often enter such places with impunity.'
It is pleasant to see with what good tempered grace, both the Moors and the French take this modern English invasion. We settle down for the winter here and build and plant vineyards, and make merry, in the same romping fashion that we do in Switzerland. We write to England about it, as if the country belonged to us, and of the climate, as if we had been the discoverers of its charms. But it is all so cozy and genial, and so much a matter of course, that we are apt to forget its oddity; we have friends in England who speak of Algiers with positive delight, whose faces brighten at the very mention of its name, and who always speak of going there, as of 'going home.'