TYPE OF ALGERIAN ARAB.
It must be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then, have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements of compassion? There are respectable authorities who consider them, with emotion, as feeble gleams of the great Christian light which formerly, at its purest period, illuminated Northern Africa.
It is the opinion of some who have long been conversant with the Kabyles that the deeper you dive into their social mysteries the more traces you find of their having once been a Christian people. They observe, for instance, a set of statutes derived from their ancestors, and which, on points like suppression of thefts and murders, do not agree with the Koran. We have spoken of their name for the law—kanoun: evidently the resemblance of this to [Greek: chanôn] must be more than accidental. Another sign is the mark of the cross, tattooed on the women of many of the tribes. These fleshly inscriptions are an incarnate evidence of the Christian past of some of the Kabyles, particularly such as are probably of Vandal origin. They are found especially among the tribes of the Gouraya, are probably a result of the Vandal invasion, and consist in the mark or sign of the cross, half an inch in dimension, on their forehead, cheeks and the palms of their hands. It appears that all the natives who were found to be Christians were freed from certain taxes by their Aryan conquerors; and it was arranged that they should profess their faith by making the cross on their persons, which practice was thus universalized. The tattooing is of a beautiful blue color, and is more ornamental than the patches worn by our grandmothers.
Our final inference, then, is, that the Kabyles preserve strong traces of certain primitive customs, which in certain cases are attributable to a Christian origin.
A true city of romance, a Venice isolated by waves of mountains, and built upon piles whose beams are of living crystal, Kalaa, all but inaccessible, attracts the tourist as the roc's egg attracted Aladdin's wife. For ages it has been a city of refuge, a sanctuary for person and property in a land of anarchy. Nowhere else are the proud Kabyles so skillful and industrious—nowhere else are their women so much like Western women in beauty and freedom.
KABYLE WOMEN
The Kabyle woman preserves the liberty which the female of the Orient possessed in the old times, before the jealousy of Mohammed made her a bird in a cage, or, as the Arab poet says, "an attar which must not be given to the winds." In Kabylia the women talk and gossip with the men: their villages present pretty spectacles at sunset, when groups of workers and gossipers mingled are seen laughing, chatting and singing to the accompaniment of the drum. Some of these women are really handsome, and are freely decorated, even in public, with the singular enamels which are their peculiar manufacture, and with threads of gold in their graceful cheloukas or tunics.
But Kalaa, like the picturesque "Peasant's Nest" described by Cowper in his Task, pays one natural penalty for the rare beauty of its site. It pants on a rock whose gorges of lime are the seat of a perpetual thirst. In vain have the suffering natives sunk seven basins in one alley of the town, the cleft separating the quarter of the Son of David from that of the children of Jesus (Aissa). The water only trickles by drops, and, though plentiful in winter, deserts them altogether in the season when their air-hung gardens, planted in earth brought up from the plains, need it the most. As the mellowing of the season brings with it its plague of aridity, recourse is had to the river at the bottom of the ravine, the Oued-Hamadouch. Then from morning to night perpendicular chains of diminutive, shrewd donkeys are seen descending and ascending the precipice with great jars slung in network.