THE LATEST IMPROVED REAPER.
What a strange landscape! And what a race, brooding over its nests in the eagles' crags! Where on earth can be found so peculiar a people, guarding their individuality from the hoariest antiquity, and snatching the arts into the clefts of the mountains, to cover the languid races of the plains with luxuries borrowed from the clouds! The jewelry and the tissues, the bornouses and haiks, the blacksmith-work and ammunition, which fill the markets of Morocco, Tunis and the countries toward the desert, are scattered from off these crags, which Nature has forbidden to man by her very strongest prohibitions.
We are now in the midst of what is known as Grand Kabylia. The coast from Algiers eastward toward Philippeville, and the relations of some of the towns through which we have passed, may be understood from the following sketch:
The scale of distances may be imagined from the fact that it is eighty-seven and a half miles by sea from Algiers to Bougie. The country known as Grand Kabylia, or Kabylia par excellence, is that part of Algeria forming the great square whose corners are Dellys, Aumale, Setif and Bougie. Though these are fictitious and not geographical limits, they are the nearest approach that can be made to fixing the nation on a map. Besides their Grand Kabylia, the ramifications of the tribe are rooted in all the habitable parts of the Atlas Mountains between Morocco and Tunis, controlling an irregular portion of Africa which it is impossible to define. It will be seen that the country of the tribe is not deprived of seaboard nor completely mountainous. The two ports of Dellys and Bougie were their sea-cities, and gave the French infinite trouble: the plain between the two is the great wheat-growing country, where the Kabyle farmer reaps a painful crop with his saw-edged sickle.
In this trapezoid the fire of rebellion never sleeps long. As we write comes the report of seven hundred French troops surrounded by ten thousand natives in the southernmost or Atlas region of Algeria. The bloody lessons of last year have not taught the Kabyle submission. It seems that his nature is quite untamable. He can die, but he is in his very marrow a republican.