I don’t know how long this would have gone on had not a discreet signal from the street warned us that the police were making their rounds. In a second the light was dimmed, the music ceased, and we sat as still as mice until we heard the measured tramp of the Arab constables disappearing up the street. We felt it more discreet to depart ourselves, so we took leave of our fevered-eyed hosts and returned to our inn.
Though I spent a rather restless night, I don’t know if it was the effect of the reef or not, and we all certainly felt quite fit the next day.
Still, I can never think of that night without smiling; it was all so mysterious, so much part of another world, and I often wonder if M. J., as he sits editorially in London, or S. A., scooping in royalties, or Miss G., in her English surroundings, realize how they peeped into the past for a few seconds and lived again the life which, if it had not been Algerian, would have probably been celebrated by another De Quincey.
CHAPTER XXXIX
A LAST GLANCE AT THE ARAB
The preface of a book should always be written at the end; this insures it being read. In this particular work the first chapter rather takes the place of the preface, but at the same time there are certain things which rather need explaining.
In the first place, the necessity to compress the matter into a limited number of pages. On practically every subject mentioned, there is material in my mind to write a book, and it is difficult to realize where to stop. It is equally difficult to know where to begin as, to some, the information set out in these pages will not be new, and they may be looking for something deeper. Of these people I ask patience, for if the result of the book is encouraging, another one will follow, and perhaps another, dealing at length with the subjects only touched on now.
This work has been prepared more as something which any traveler can read during his journey to Algiers, and which will allow him to see the country through other eyes than those of the guides, be they books, chauffeurs, or the luxuriously uniformed gentlemen of the Transatlantic Company.
Let it, moreover, be understood that the history, the geography, the remarks on French administration are, more than anything else, a prelude to the rest of the book, “The Arabs.”
The Arabs, whether they be those in the scarlet burnouses of the caïd-ship or in the rags of the beggar, are all the same: a people who have destroyed without creating, who have been divided when their unity would have made them great, who have lived on theory.
We have before us the relics of the Carthaginians, of the Numidians, of the stupendous work of the Roman Empire, and then centuries of nothing. War, devastation, intrigue, mark the period covered by the Arab domination.