CHAPTER III.
Notre Dame d'Afrique—Lady of Africa—is an ugly lady, homely and black; and the church that is dedicated to her is ugly too—new and mock-Moorish; but, like many another ugly lady, being very nobly placed, she has a great and solemn air. It is Our Lady of Africa who first gives us our greeting as we steam in from seawards; it is to Our Lady of Africa that the fisher-people climb to vespers, and to the touching office that follows, when priests and acolytes pass out of the church to the little plateau outside, where, sheer against the sky, stands a small Latin cross, with a plain and, as it seems, coffin-shaped stone beneath it, on which one reads the inscription:
"À la mémoire de tous ceux, qui ont péri dans la mer, et ont été ensevelis dans ses flots."
"All those who have perished in the sea, and been buried in her waves."
What a gigantic company to be covered with one little epitaph!
Notre Dame d'Afrique stands grandly on the cliff-tops, overlooking the sea, whose cruel deeds she is so agonizedly prayed to avert, whose cruelty she is sometimes powerful to assuage, witness the frequent votive tablets with which the church walls are covered:
"Merci, oh ma mère."
"J'ai prie, et j'ai été exaucé."
"Reconnaissance à Marie."
"Reconnaissance à Notre Dame d'Afrique."
She does not look very lovable, this coal-black Marie, who stands in her stiff brocade, with her ebon hands stretched straight out above the high-altar; but how tenderly these poor fisherwives must have felt towards her when she brought them back their Pierre or their Jean, from the truculent deeps of the ocean!
Burgoyne has been told, both by his guide-book and by his table-d'hôte neighbour, that he ought to see Notre Dame d'Afrique; nor is he loth to pay further obeisance to that high lady who already yesterday beckoned to him across the blue floor of her waters. He does not tell Cecilia of his intention, as he knows that she would offer to accompany him; but on leaving her he takes his way through the gay French town, along its Arab-named streets, Bab-a-Zoun and Bab-el-Oued, towards the village of St. Eugène, and breasts the winding road that, with many an elbow and bend, heading a deep gorge that runs up from the sea to the church-foot, leads him within her portals. The congregation is sparse—a few peasants, a blue and red Zouave, and several inevitable English. Now and again a woman, clad in humble black that tells of prayers in vain, goes up with her thin candle, and, lighting it, sticks it in its sconce among the others that burn before the altar. For awhile Burgoyne finds it pleasant after his climb to sit and watch her, and speculate pityingly with what hope of still possible good to herself she is setting her slender taper alight—now that her treasure has all too obviously gone down beneath the waves; to sit and speculate, and smell the heady incense, and listen to the murmur of chanted supplication; but presently, growing weary of the uncomprehended service, he slips outside to the little plateau, with its view straight out—no importunate land-object intervening—towards the sea, across which a little steamer is cutting her way; and on the horizon two tiny shining sails are lying.
Here, on this bold headland, it seems as if one were one's self in mid-ocean; and one has to lean far over the low wall in order to realize that there is some solid earth between us and it; that two full cities of the dead—a Jewish and a Christian—lie below. From the land-cemeteries to the vast sea-cemetery—for read by the light of that plain inscription upon which his eyes are resting, what is even the azure Mediterranean but a grave? For the matter of that, what is all life but a grave?