The dam, perfidious thing,
Precipitated his muddy Legions,
With loud growlings.
No bank so strong as to hold him in check.
"He spurred to the right,
The bridges which could not sustain his shock fell
Under his added weight;
His fury filled the country with fear, and he
Crushed the barrier that would retain him."
As to the class of declamatory poems, one in particular is popular in Algiers, for it celebrates the conquest of the Maghreb in the eleventh century by the divers branches of the Beni-Hilal, from whom descend almost the whole of the Arabs who now are living in the northwest of Africa. This veritable poem is old enough, perhaps under its present form, for the historian, Ten Khaldoun, who wrote at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, has preserved the resumé of the episode of Djazza, the heroine who abandoned her children and husband to follow her brothers to the conquest of Thrgya Hajoute. To him are attributed verses which do not lack regularity, nor a certain rhythm, and also a facility of expression, but which abound in interpolations and faults of grammar. The city people could not bear to hear them nor to read them. In our days, for their taste has changed--at least in that which touches the masses--the recital of the deeds of the Helals is much liked in the Arab cafés in Algeria and also in Tunis. Still more, these recitals have penetrated to the Berbers, and if they have not preserved the indigenous songs of the second Arab invasion, they have borrowed the traditions of their conquerors, as we can see in the episode of Ali el Hilalien and of Er-Redah.