But in one thing the sense of change is justified, and that is the fall of the woods. Here Islam worked itself out fully: its ignorance of consequence, its absolute and insufficient assertion, its lack of harmony with the process and modulation of time, its Arabian origin, are all apparent in the destruction of trees. If the rainfall is as abundant as ever, it is not held, for the roots of trees are lacking, and if it be true that trees in summer bring rain of themselves by their leaves, then that benefit is also gone. There are many deep channels, called secchias, traversing the soft dust of the uplands, with no trace of bridges where the Roman roads cross them: they are new. They are carved by the sudden spates that follow the cloudbursts in the hills. Here, perhaps, in the Roman time were regular and even streams, and perhaps, upon their banks, where now are stretches of ugly earth quite bare, the legionaries saw meadows. At any rate, the trees have gone.
Up in the higher hills, in Aurès and the Djurdjura, upon the flanks of the mountains where the Berbers remain unconquered, and where the melting of the snows give a copious moisture, forests still remain. They are commonly of great cedars as dark as the pine woods of the Vosges or the noble chesnut groves by which the Alps lead a man down into Italy. But these forests are rare and isolated as the aboriginal languages and tribes which haunt them. You may camp under the deep boughs within a march of Batna and then go northward and eastward for days and days of walking before you come again to the woods and their scent and their good floor of needles in the heights from which you see again the welcome of the Mediterranean.
|Story of the Determinist|
This lack of trees the French very laboriously attempt to correct. Their chief obstacle is the nature of that religion which is also the hard barrier raised against every other European thing which may attempt to influence Africa to-day.
There was a new grove planted some ten years since in a chosen place. It was surrounded with a wall, and the little trees were chosen delicately and bought at a great price, and planted by men particularly skilled. Also, there was an edict posted up in those wilds (it was within fifty miles of the desert, just on the hither side of Atlas) saying that a grove had been planted in such and such a place and that no one was to hurt the trees, under dreadful penalties. The French also, as is the laudable custom of Republicans, gave a reason for what they did, pointing out that trees had such and such an effect on climate—the whole in plain clear terms and printed in the Arabic script.
There was, however, a Mohammedan who, on reading this, immediately saw in it an advertisement of wealth and pasture. He drove his goats for nearly fifteen miles, camped outside the wall, and next day lifted each animal carefully one by one into the enclosure that they might browse upon the tender shoots of the young trees. “Better,” he thought, “that my goats should fatten than that the mad Christians should enjoy this tree-fad of theirs which is of no advantage to God or man.”
When his last goat was over two rangers came, and, in extreme anger, brought him before the magistrate, where he was asked what reason he could give for the wrong thing he had done. He answered, “R’aho, it was the will of God. Mektoub, it was written”—or words to that effect.
|Cirta or Constantine|