Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly, with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab found within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old towns in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman schoolboy, showing an aquarius (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ordinarily enclose the Eastern home or protect the Arab's wife behind their blinded windows.
LION-SHAPED ROCK, HARBOR OF BONA.
If we leave Philippeville in the evening, we find ourselves next morning in the handsome roadstead of Bona. This, for the present, will terminate our examination of the coast, for, however fond we may be of level traveling, we cannot reasonably expect to get over the Atlas Mountains by hugging the shore. The harbor of Bona, though broad and beautiful, is somewhat dangerous, concealing numbers of rocks which lurk at about the surface of the water. Other rocks, standing boldly out at the entrance of the port, offer a singular aspect, being sculptured into strange forms by the sea. One makes a very good statue of a lion, lying before the city as its guard, and looking across the waves for an enemy as the foam caresses its monstrous feet.
Dismounting from shipboard, we become landsmen for the remainder of our journey, and wave adieu to the steamboat which has brought us as we linger a moment on the mole of Bona. This city is named from the ancient Hippo, out of whose ruins, a mile to the southward, it was largely built. The Arabs call it "the city of jujube trees"—Beled-el-Huneb. To the Roumi (or Christian) traveler the interest of the spot concentrates in one historic figure, that of Saint Augustine. In the basilica of Hippo, of which the remains are believed to have been identified in some recent excavations, the sainted bishop shook the air with his learned and penetrating eloquence. Here he exhorted the faithful to defend their religious liberty and their lives, uncertain if the Vandal hordes of Genseric were not about to sweep away the faith and the language of Rome. Here, where the forest of El Edoug spreads a shadow like that of memory over the scene of his walks and labors, he brought his grand life of expiation to a holy close, praying with his last breath for his disciples oppressed by the invaders. We reach the site of Hippo (or Hippone) by a Roman bridge, restored to its former solidity by the French, over whose arches the bishop must have often walked, meditating on his youth of profligacy and vain scholarship, and over the abounding Divine grace which had saved him for the edification of all futurity.
SHOPKEEPER AT BONA.
Bona has a street named Saint Augustine, but it is, by one of the strange paradoxes which history is constantly playing us, owned entirely by Jews, and those of one sole family. This fact indicates how the thrifty race has prospered since the French occupancy. Formerly oppressed and ill-treated, taxed and murdered by the Turks, and only permitted to dress in the mournfulest colors, the Jew of Algeria hid himself as if life were something he had stolen, and for which he must apologize all his days. Now, treated with the same liberality as any other colonist, the Jew indulges in every ostentation of dress except as to the color of the turban, which, in small towns like Bona, still preserves the black hue of former days of oppression. On Saturdays the children of Jacob fairly blaze with gold and gay colors. On their working days they line the principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with a cool, easy indifference, but never losing a chance of business. In Algeria this race is generally thought to present a picture of arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice not equaled on the face of the globe. An English traveler saw an Arab, after maddening himself with opium and absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he drove before him a throng of twenty, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, who allowed themselves to be knocked down with the obedience of ninepins. A Frenchman stopped the maniac after he had killed one Jew and wounded several, none of them making any effort at defence.
A few narrow streets, bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab dress—the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil of ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small booths, the jewelers, blacksmiths and tailors of Bona are found at their work.
Returning to Philippeville by land, and remaining as short a time as possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of this naked rock, like the Stylites on his pillar, stands Constantina. The Arabs used to say that Constantina was a stone in the midst of a flood, and that, according to their Prophet, it would require as many Franks to raise that stone as it would of ants to lift an egg at the bottom of a milk-pot.