The platform of the Rock of Cirta is the place from which the effort of the French over all this land can best be judged, for it is the centre round which nature and history have grouped the four changes of Barbary.
|Constantine|
The rock is like those headlands which jut out from inland ranges and dominate deep harbours; it is as bold as are such capes, and is united, as they are, with the mass of land behind it by a neck of even surface—the only passage by which the rock itself can be approached. On every side but this, very sharp slopes of grass, broken by precipices, plunge down in a mountainous way to the valleys, and at the foot of the most sheer of these there tumbles noisily in a profound gorge the torrent called Rummel, that is, “The Tawny,” for it is as yellow as a lion or as sea-sand.
The trench is so deep and dark that one may stand above it towards evening and hear the noise of the water and yet see no gleam of light reflected from it, it runs so far below. It is this stream which has made on the Rock of Cirta (though it is out of the true Tell and far into the Tableland) a habitable fortress and a town; the town called Constantine.
Such sites are very rare. Luxemburg is one, a stronghold cut off by similar precipitous valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they are found the origin of their fortress goes back beyond the beginning of history, they are tribal, and their record is principally of war. So it is with Cirta. The legends of the nomads say that they descended from some enormous dusky figure, a God of the Atlas and of Spain—a giant God marching along the shores of the ocean followed perpetually by armies. Even this first of African names was mixed up with Cirta, for the title of the rock was that of his loves, and the name Cirta given it by these horsemen of Numidia was the name of their universal mother. A man can be certain, as he walks along the edges of the place to-day and looks down into the gulfs below it, that men have so moved here amid buildings and in a fixed town with altars and a name ever since first they knew how to mortar stones together and to obey laws. The close pack of houses standing thus apart upon a peak has in it, therefore, something consistently sacred. Permanence and continuity are to be discovered here only among the cities of Africa; and its landscape and character of themselves impress the traveller with a certitude that here will be planted on into time the capital of the native blood: too far removed from the sea for colonisation or piracy to destroy it: too well cut off by those trenches of defence to be sacked and overrun: too peopled and well watered to decay.
The town has been taken in every conquest, and every conqueror has boasted himself to have overcome the walls of rock, the hundreds of feet of sheer climbing. The boast is manifestly absurd, though the temptation to make it was irresistible. When Cirta has been stormed only one gate admitted the invaders, and that was the isthmus which leads from the platform of the summit to the tableland beyond. It was here that Massinissa and here that the Romans entered. By this entry came the French soldiers, and the market which stands there is called to-day “The Place of the Breach.”
|The Inscriptions|
There is a place in Constantine where the full history of the town is best felt, and that is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon the edge of the rock upon the side furthest from the river and looks at the storms blowing over the uplands from Atlas and driving low clouds right at the crest of the walls. In this building are preserved (in no great number) the antiquities of the place and its neighbourhood. Here is a little silver victory which once fluttered, it is thought, in the hand of that great statue which adorned the Capitol, and here are long rows of tombs from the beginning of the Italian influence till the time of the martyrs: you see carved upon them the slow change of the mind until the last of the pagans boast of such virtues and have already that sort of content which the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath to succeeding time. This record of the epitaphs, though brief, is perfect; you watch at work in them the spirit that made St. Cyprian transforming the African soil; but their chief interest is in this, that they are, as it were, a rediscovery of ourselves. You dig through centuries of alien rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and, when you have dug deeply enough you come suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred years an idiom quite unfamiliar to us has alone been spoken here: beneath it you find the august and reasonable Latin, and as you read you feel about you the air of home. For all those generations the manifold aspect of the divine was forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then, deep down, you discover a tablet upon a tomb, and, reading it, you find it was carved in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so gracious and who so served the divinities of the woods that when she died ingemuerunt Dryades: twice I read those delicate words, delicately chiselled in hard stone, and I saw her going in black, with her head bent, through groves. A trace of colouring remains upon the lettering of the verse and a powerful affection lingers in it, so that the past is preserved. Islam destroyed with fanaticism the figures of animals and of men: here in these European carvings they are everywhere. The barbarian creed conceived or implanted a barbaric fear of vines: here you see Bacchus, young, on the corner of a frieze, and gentle old Silenus carried heavily along.