The Romans conquered the shores and the plains. You find none of their ruins among the mountains, where the Berbers, from the Roman occupation to the French, have preserved an independence never completely subdued.
The Kabyle villages are united into federations. If these federations engage in quarrels—which is by no means rare—or if a village is menaced by an enemy, signals are placed in the minarets to appeal to the towns of the same party. These are easily seen, for all the villages are on hilly crests and visible from a distance. From the summit of Taourit el Embrank we can count more than twenty of these Kabyle towns, perched on the peaks around us, and separated by profound chasms.
Every trait points out the distinction between the Kabyles and the surrounding Arabs. The Arabs seek laziness as a sovereign good; the Kabyles are great artificers. The Arabs imprison their wives; the Kabyle women are almost as free as our own. The Kabylian adherence to the Mohammedan faith is but partial, and is variegated by a quantity of superstitions and articles of belief indicating quite another origin. While the Koran proclaims the law of retaliation, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, the more humane Kabyle law simply exiles the criminal for ever, confiscating his goods to the community. It is true, the family of a murdered person are expected to pursue the homicide with all the tenacity of a Corsican vendetta, but the tribal laws are kept singularly clean from the ferocity of individual habits. A strange thing, indicating probably a derivation from times at least as early as Augustine, is that the Kabyle code (a mixture, like all primitive codes, of law and religion) is called by the Greek term canon (kanoun). An institution of great protective use, in practice, is the safe-conduct, or anaya, a token given to a guest, traveler or prescript, and which protects the bearer as far as the acquaintance of the giver extends: it may be a gun, a stick, a bornouse or a letter. The anaya is the sultan of the Kabyles, doing charity and raising no taxes—"the finest sultan in the world," says the native proverb. The Kabyles press into all the towns and seaports for employment with the same independence as if they were a neighboring nationality. They build houses, they work in carpentry, they forge weapons, gun-barrels and locks, swords, knives, pickaxes, cards for wool, ploughshares, gun-stocks, shovels, wooden shoes, and frames for weaving. They weave neatly, and their earthenware is renowned. In addition, they are expert and shameless counterfeiters. Yes, the fact must be admitted: these rugged mountaineers, so proud, and, according to their own code, so honorable, never blush to prepare imitations of the circulating medium, which they only know as an appurtenance and invention of their civilized conquerors. In his rude hovel, with all the sublimities of Nature around him, this child of the wilderness looks up to the summits of the Atlas, "with peaky tops engrailed," and immediately thereafter looks down again to attend to the engrailing of his neat five-franc pieces, which can hardly be told from the genuine. This multiplication of finance was punished under the beys with death. The bey of Constantina arrested in one day the men of three tribes notorious for counterfeiting, and decapitated a hundred of them. There was lately to be seen at Constantina the executioner who was charged with this punishment, the very individual who cut off the ingenious heads of all these poor money-makers, and did not "cut them off with a shilling." He appeared to modern visitors as a modest coffee-house keeper in the Arab quarters, who would serve you, for two cents, a cup of coffee with the hand that had wielded the yataghan. He was an old Turk, with wide gray moustaches, dressed in a remarkable and theatrical fashion. He wore a yellow turban of colossal size, and an ample orange girdle over a dress of light green. Poor Tobriz—that was his name—was violently opposed to the introduction of the guillotine in Algeria. In the days of his prosperity an enormous sabre was passed through his flaming girdle. In the early years of the French conquest Tobriz was employed in the decapitations, which were executed with a saw, and must have been a horrible spectacle. He remembered well the execution of the hundred counterfeiters in one night, and their heads exposed in the market.
A rapid descent from Bou-Kteun to the bed of a river of the same name, and a pursuit of the latter to its confluence with the river Biban, lead through impressive ravines to the Iron Gates. The waters of the Biban, impregnated with magnesia, leave their white traces on the bottoms of the precipices which enclose them. The mules pick their way over paths of terrible inclination. At length, at a turn in the overhanging reddish cliffs, where a hundred men could hold in check an entire army, we find ourselves in front of the first gate. It is a round arch four yards in width, pierced by Nature between the rocks. The second is at twenty paces off, and two others are found at a short distance. Between the first and second we observe, chiseled in the stone above the reach of the water, "L'Armée Française, 1839," engraved by the sappers attached to the army of the duke of Orleans on the passage of the expedition.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
A CHINESE STORY.
None are so wise as they who make pretence