“WAKE up, Monsieur Ker, wake up! In another moment we shall be on the brink of the worst precipice in all North Africa!”
This cheering announcement (made by the French officer who sits facing me) recalls to my mind how a nervous old gentleman once awoke me just at the height of a furious gale in the Atlantic, to ask whether I thought he would have time to put on his clothes before the ship went down! Captain D—’s encouraging remark (and more especially the ominous word “precipice”) causes a visible sensation among our fellow-passengers, and draws a faint shriek from a timid old lady in the farther corner of the car. But before any one can speak or move, the locomotive answers M. G—’s cry with a scream like the death-cries of a thousand pigs, and there comes a lurch and a rattle and a roar, and we find ourselves hanging in mid air above a black and frightful abyss, worthy of Dante himself.
Well may the pious Mohammedans of the Sahara Desert, when they flit across this air-hung arch for the first time in the “smoke-breathing chariots of the unbeliever,” think of their own fabled Bridge of Al-Sirat, spanning the gulf between this world and the next with a pathway as narrow as the edge of a scimitar, over which the souls of all mankind must pass into the presence of Allah (God) at the last day. As the cloudless African moonlight streams down into the black depths of the abyss in a flood of glory, the jutting crags that start out of the darkness below, and the gaunt, distorted, skeleton trees that cling to them with clawed, twisted roots, might well pass for demons breaking forth from the regions of eternal night; and the shadowy towers and battlements of the town of Constantine itself, seen thus amid the gloom and silence of midnight, far up against the moonlit sky, perched like an eagle’s nest on the lonely crag, cut off by this awful chasm from the living world of men, look so weird and ghost-like beneath that cold unearthly splendor, that it is quite a relief to hear our French conductor’s cheery voice come echoing through the darkness:
“Vos billets, Messieurs, s’il vous plaît—nous voilà arrivés!” (“Tickets, please, gentlemen—we’ve arrived.”)
But when viewed at daybreak next morning from a projecting angle of the ramparts (which zigzag along the very brink of the tremendous chasm that severs this outlawed town from the solid earth), the “City in the Air,” as its Arab inhabitants poetically term it, loses all these supernatural terrors, and assumes its true character of the grandest and most picturesque among the many splendid views in the magnificent panorama of North Africa. See how the long lines of houses along those wooded ridges stand up bright and clear against the sky, while the morning mist rolls away on either side like the smoke of a battle. Already yonder highest peak has caught the first glow of sunrise, and now hilltop after hilltop deepens from gray to crimson, and then flashes suddenly into living fire. As the light grows stronger, the last wreaths of hovering mist flit away like belated ghosts from the valley below, and rock and river, field and wood, start forth in their beauty. Turning to watch a bare-limbed Arab goat-herd among the cliffs below, who is leaping from crag to crag as nimbly as the black dwarfish goats that he tends, I catch a momentary glimpse of the far-off sea, as a shining streak along the northern horizon.
Suddenly a shrill bugle-call echoes along the silent ramparts, and then the roll of a drum and a measured tramp of many feet tell that the day has begun. Cee! there is a sudden stir in the encampment of that native caravan beneath the walls, which came up last night just to rest for a few hours in this miniature Gibraltar that shuts its gates at sunset, and does not open them till dawn. Watch how lazily the camels raise their long necks and huge gaunt limbs from the dusty earth on which they have lain all night, while to and fro around them, in bustling preparation for the early market, flit the wild forms of their masters, whose dark, bony faces and flapping white mantles give them the look of having risen from the dead in such a hurry as to have not even thrown off their winding-sheets.
On the flat roof of a tall white house beside me, a stately Mohammedan is standing like a bronze statue, with his face turned toward Mecca, repeating his morning prayer. Luckily for him, he is too high up to run any risk of sharing the fate of that ill-starred Brahmin who, while standing immovable on the bank of the Ganges, deep in silent prayer for the repose of the great North African saints, was espied by a short-sighted English tourist, who, mistaking his motionless brown body for the stump of a tree, came up and began to carve his name on him; and as it would have been a deadly sin to move before the prayer was finished, it was “rough on” that Brahmin!
The approach to this extraordinary place from the edge of the great North African table-land is as striking as itself; and as we wind our way through these lonely pine woods among the countless zigzags traced by the dark-gray steam of the railway, over the long succession of bold rocky ridges that tower between us and the sea, we are at once reminded of the famous “road of seventy-three twists” along which we rode up the “Black Mountain” into Montenegro. In truth, were one to write a book upon “Strange Railways of the World,” the Constantine-Philippeville line—that steep little iron stair that climbs at once from the sea to the desert—would certainly have a chapter to itself. It would, indeed, rival the eccentricities of the Entre Rios Railway in Southern Brazil (upon which I counted seven tunnels in three and a half miles) nor those of the Pietermaritzburg-Durban Railroad in South Africa, where the train simply trundles down the whole seventy-two miles by its own weight, without any steam at all, merely putting on the brake at one or two awkward corners. Nor does it, like the Colombo-Kandy line in Ceylon, run along the brink of a sheer precipice of more than a thousand feet—nor (like the Darjeeling track in the Eastern Himalaya) make at one point so sharp a curve that the passengers in the foreman car can exchange looks with those in the hindmost, across an unfathomable gulf. But, nevertheless, this queer little connecting link between two different regions and two perfectly distinct climates has one advantage peculiar to itself, which sets it high above them all.
With a touch of unconscious poetry hardly to be expected from a railway company, this one afternoon train has been timed so as to pass through the rich and fertile region below while the sun is still high in the sky, and all is bright and beautiful, whereas the bleak, craggy mountains, among which this strange journey ends, are seen beneath the cold gray dimness of evening or the deepening gloom of night. In fact, the whole ascent might serve a poet or a painter as the emblem of human life itself—bright and joyous at the outset, darker and drearier toward the close. All the soft and voluptuous beauty of an Italian landscape surrounds us as we glide along the sunny valley of Stora, with its clustering palms and dainty white villas, and trim plantations, just behind which—nestling like a shy child in the shadow of a projecting bluff—the charming little town of Philippeville lifts the reflection of its own beauty in the blue shining sea. But as we ascend, a grim and ghastly change begins to creep over that fair landscape. Little by little, all its freshness, and brightness, and beauty fall away, like life withering at the approach of death. The smooth green plains, the flourishing vegetation, the countless tokens of man’s presence and man’s industry, are one by one left behind; and the fast-falling shadows of night and enfold dreariness to the gloomy desolation of the bare stony uplands, and dark moors, and craggy ridges, among which our course now bears to wind. Upward, ever upward, while the gloom and chilliness of the grave seem to close around us, and the jagged rocks that start out on either side like monstrous and unearthly shapes in the fitful lamp-light as we flit by, till all culminates at length in one vast, black, broken ridge which surges upward into the pale moonlight like a mighty wave, crested with the ghostly whiteness of the newly-fallen snow.
“Fancy taking four hours and a half to fifty-seven miles!” growls a dashing young French subaltern, who has all but overstayed his leave of absence. “It is like your tale of the wooden-legged soldier who refused a lift from the engine-driver because he was ‘in a great hurry.'”
“Well,” answered I, “I took four hours to forty-seven miles on the Isthmus of Panama, and there were no hills to climb there. Besides, Constantine itself is well worth the trouble, after all.”
It certainly is. Meissonier himself might have loved to paint its gray, crumbling ramparts; its quaint, flat-roofed houses; its queer little three-cornered market-place; its graceful palms and frowning precipices; its headlong, ladder-like streets, where (as in Siloam, Abu-Gosh, and other mountain villages of Palestine) you step off one man’s door-sill right down another man’s chimney. Nor are the people themselves less picturesque than their town. Slim, black-eyed Kabyles; bulky, woolly-headed negroes; gaunt, fierce-eyed Moors; dapper little French soldiers in jaunty scarlet pants and snow-white gaiters; veiled women in long blue robes; white-collared Arabs, desert camels, Barbary horses, Moorish goats, and Egyptian donkeys—all moving together as gay as an operatic procession all day long; and a New York boot-black would stare to see the familiar box and brushes in the hands of bare-limbed little brown fellows in red Turkish caps, who call each other “Hussein Ali” and “Baba Abdallah.”
But the most striking feature of this outlawed city is the terrible chasm that severs it from the surrounding hills (encircling it like the moat of a Norman castle), far down in the black depths of which you dimly descry a gray, sullen stream creeping amid vast masses of fallen rock like a serpent shrinking from the light. If you explore its gloomy windings—which is only possible from one point, where a narrow isthmus of rocky ground links this airy island to the world of men—you will find yourself groping your way in a cheerless twilight betwixt two damp, green, slimy walls of rock, between which you can just see far overhead a tiny ribbon of pale blue sky. Presently even this disappears, the narrowing walls seem to shut you in, and from the black tunnel that yawns before you comes the hollow roar of an unseen waterfall, and the crash of falling stones. There is nothing for it but to retreat, for to press on till a stone knocks out your brains will only prove conclusively that you have every few to be knocked out.
So completely does this ghostly abyss encircle the isolated crag on which the town stands, that only this one narrow neck of land connects it with the surrounding country. This strange natural bridge is famous in the traditions of French camp-fires as the scene of one of the many gallant deeds that cast a halo of glory around the checkered life of one of the bravest men and greatest scoundrels that ever lived. When the place was assaulted by the French during the Algerian war, the storming column, jammed together on that narrow isthmus, and blasted back again and again by the murderous fire that poured from every window and housetop, had just recoiled for the third time, strewing each step of its retreat with the dying and the dead. Already the day seemed lost, and lost it would indeed have been but for the presence of one man, then known as “Colonel Leroy,” but one day to call himself “Marshal St. Arnaud.” Just as the French, mown down by roses and cut-throats out of every nation from Britain to Transylvania, politely called “the British Legion,” from the predominance of English over foreign rascals in its ranks, The Colonel, a skillful mimic, sprang forth with a “hurrah!” of true British ring, instantly echoed by the hoarse hungry roar of countless throats, as the human tigers of the Legion, fired by the well-known battle-cry, came bursting through the deadly gateway, like a mighty wave, and hacked and slaughtered their way into the town over the corpses of half their own men and all the Arabs still left alive.
But this African Montenegro has its memories of ancient as well as modern warfare. On the rock where the trim white houses of Constantine are now perched in mid-air, stood, in the first century B.C., Cirta, the capital of Numidia, where the fierce King Jugurtha—having assassinated one of his brothers, and put the other to death by slow tortures, according to the kindly family customs of the period—held his ground against the best soldiers of Rome for six years, and was only overmatched at last by a rough, unwashed, harsh-featured colonel of Roman infantry, named Caius Marius, that dreadful man who has sat like a nightmare “amid the ruins of Carthage” upon the weary souls of sixty unoffending generations.
This great tragedy is now a mere shadow of the far past. A massive railway bridge of stone and iron spans the gulf across which the Libyan bowmen showered their fire-tipped shafts upon the doomed fortress. A snug little hotel stands on the spot where Jugurtha glowed over his brother’s dying agonies; and upon the plain on which the grim Numidian fought his last battle for crown and life, French officers now swagger, cigarette in mouth, along the trim boulevards of the neat little garrison town of Batna.
But time has spared one memento of those evil days, which might be studied with advantage by many who now scurry past it along the new railway from Constantine to Batna—a vast improvement upon the breakneck Arab road over which I stumbled all night long when I was last here ten years ago. A six-mile tramp along a flat, dusty road (rendered more rather than less dismal by an endless row of stunted, bilious-looking trees on either side) brings you to the quaint old French fortress of Lambessa, clustering white houses like a motherly teapot in a ring of cups and saucers. Just beyond it stands a noble Roman gateway, in perfect preservation, though the brushwood grows thick and high around it. The two smaller passages for the soldiers, the great central arch for the chariots, the smooth, even masonry in which Rome’s stern discipline seems embodied—all are there; and there are even traces of an inscription, now as illegible as Carlyle’s plainest handwriting.
Time has not been so merciful to the fortified camp itself as to its splendid vestibule. Where the long lines of symmetrical intrenchment once stretched from gate to gate, there is now nothing to be seen but an indistinguishable chaos of broken pillars, crumbling foundation-stones, and shapeless mounds of dust. But to this universal ruin there is one startling exception. Within the gateway, and almost in a direct line with its great central arch, rises a small Roman altar, still as perfect as when the white-robed augurs stood beside it twenty centuries ago, searching with their keen black eyes the entrails of the slaughtered victim, to see whether “the omens were favorable” or not.And around it stand secure in the “irresistible might of weakness,” the tiny images of Roman gods, relics of a dead religion, lingering here in the midst of a dead world. This was once the sacred “Praetorium,” and here the grim General Marius sat in his tent planning new campaigns, while his bearded veterans outside, as they fought their Numidian battles over again around the watchfires kindled to scare the hyena and the lion, little dreamed that on this spot the Numidians of the nineteenth century would grapple to the death with warriors from the sunny plains of Gaul, and amid strange fire-breathing weapons, as swift and deadly as the thunderbolts of their own fabled Jupiter.
Those who have read in the French history of that famous struggle, low, on this plain, less than fifty years ago, Christian generals were destroying at one blow the flower of a whole nation, and stifling with smoke hundreds of helpless men, women and children, in the caves whither they had fled for refuge, will doubtless think that in some remote, iron age, civilization had made so little way among them after all. But this place of fearful memories is like the shadow of another tragedy, gloomier even than these. When that bleak December night, in which Victor Hugo’s fiery words have branded with eternal shame, gave a crown to the imperial usurper who throttled France in her sleep, many of the “rebels,” who had dared to defend their liberties, and had remained unconvinced, even by the cogent Bonapartist logic of grapeshot and musketry, were sent hither to return no more; and the stony African hills, which had seen so many brave men die in battle, looked down upon the lingering agony of other men, braver even than they. But the cry of that innocent blood, though drowned upon earth by the applause of bribed journalists and fawning courtiers, was not unheard by Him who, “when He maketh inquisition for blood, forgetteth not the cry of the humble”; and His vengeance came in full measure upon guilty France, nineteen years later, when the butchery of Gravelotte and the shame of Sedan told to a startled world that the Second Empire had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
