Setif—The Chabet pass—A fishless river—A lovely coast—Bougie—Khabylia—Greek types—Fort National.

He who returns by motor-car from Biskra to Algiers may avoid the detour via Constantine by taking the new direct road from Batna to SÉtif, a distance of 132 kilometres. It ascends to an altitude of over 5000 feet, and in winter is sometimes blocked by snow. But this is not likely to be a frequent trouble. Whichever way he comes, direct or roundabout, by road or rail, the traveller must make SÉtif his point. If he omits to take the road from SÉtif to Bougie, through the Chabet pass, a distance of 113 kilometres, he will have no idea of what Algeria is capable of in the way of mountain scenery.

There is a distinct tendency among Englishmen to-day to revolt against the domination of the guide-book. With our ancient constitution in the melting-pot, and our most cherished national convictions openly contested, it is hardly surprising that even the revered name of Murray has failed to maintain its authority. There are abandoned men who openly flout it, who want to see nothing of the things that ought to be seen, to know none of the things that ought to be known. The reaction was inevitable. Murray and Baedeker and the like set poor human weakness an impossible ideal. They direct us as if we were an army of invasion; they map out our operations day by day and hour by hour with a ruthless precision. Has anyone ever carried through the programme of How to spend ten days in Rome, and survived to boast of it?

Wherefore in our iconoclastic age there are men to whom the guide-book’s double star is but a danger signal. Let me implore them to waive their prejudices as far at least as the Chabet pass is concerned. If much be-praised it is still quite un-hackneyed; and it is magnificent. And they may steal a march on the enemy. The guide-books, as far as Algeria is concerned, have not discovered the motor-car. They direct you to hire a carriage at SÉtif, to sleep at a roadside inn, and to lumber into Bougie at the close of the second day. We have changed all that. We take a car at SÉtif after dejeuner, and loitering by the way we yet reach Bougie in time to stroll round the town before dinner. So we have a day in hand. But let us haste to do it before a revised edition comes out.

The plateau of which SÉtif may be considered the centre lies at a high altitude, and as the sea is no great distance off, we may perceive from a glance at the map that there must be a more or less rapid landfall towards it. Such conditions commonly produce a picturesque coast-line. Here we have more than this. The plain is supported by a very abrupt range of mountains rising to twice its height,—the peaks to 6000 and 7000 feet. Such a range must either be crossed by a high pass, or it may be that we may find an outlet where a mountain stream, taking advantage perhaps of a rift caused by a natural convulsion, has worn for itself a passage. Such a passage is the gorge of Chabet-el-Akhira.

From SÉtif, most hideous of modern French towns, the road leads northward for some distance through an uninteresting corn-growing country. After a few miles the surface becomes more broken, Khabyle villages begin to appear on neighbouring hill-tops, and Khabyle gardens are rich in apricot blossom. We cross a chain of hills running east and west, from the summit of which we obtain a splendid view of the mountain range which we are about to penetrate. We descend rapidly to the stream which is to be our companion, and at a distance of fifty-three kilometres from SÉtif reach Kherrata, at the mouth of the pass. Here is the half-way house where the carriage-folk of former days were wont to pass the night. It lies in a cool upland valley at the foot of bare stony hills which might be in Wales or Cumberland. It is market-day in the village, and the street is crowded with Khabyles,—as ragged and dirty a crowd as you may see in county Galway. Their Arab dress looks curiously incongruous with such very northern surroundings.

Immediately beyond Kherrata the road enters the gorge with a dramatic suddenness. It descends rapidly by the side of the stream which here becomes a torrent. The valley contracts and soon grows so narrow that the road has to be bored, as it were, through overhanging cliffs, or borne on arches above the river. There are many kinds of gorges; the least interesting perhaps are those which run directly between unbroken cliffs. This is of the finest kind. Its turns are rapid. It has numerous lateral valleys which break its almost perpendicular sides into seeming pinnacles of rock. One looks almost directly upwards to peaks five and six thousand feet high. Even where the road is carried several hundred feet above the river you may toss a stone and strike the opposite cliff. It is said that before the French road-makers came not even an Arab could pass the gorge on foot. Great caves appear on the mountain sides, the haunt of innumerable pigeons; monkeys are generally to be seen, but on market-days the exceptional traffic scares them to seclusion. Here and there waterfalls descend from the tributary gorges, and rapidly swell the turbid stream.

Even the all-pervading Roman seems to have found this gorge too much for him. Yet it is not easy to discover an endroit which has not echoed to the tramp of the legions. Mr. Belloc^[12] tells a delightful story of a French general who, filled with pride at having conducted his troops through an almost impossible defile, sent a party to inscribe a record of the achievement on the face of a cliff. The men came back to say that there appeared to be lettering on the cliff already. On examination this proved to be “Legio III Augusta.”

The actual gorge is about four miles long. The valley then gradually widens, the hills become rather less abrupt, their sides are clothed with ample vegetation, chiefly forests of cork and oak trees, and the lateral valleys grow larger, in due proportion to the general scheme. We pass from the thrilling sensations of the unique defile into a mountain valley of great beauty, but less unusual in character.

It happened that I offered a seat in my car to a gentleman whose party were inconveniently crowded in their own. I began by doing the unpardonable thing; deceived by certain guttural syllables, I said, “Are you a German?” He replied: “No! thank God, I am Dutch.” And my heart was glad within me, for the Dutchman is our brother, and our friend; perhaps because we have fought him over and over again, and sometimes we have beaten him, and sometimes he us. We have had, as far as I am aware, no such pleasant relations with the German; perhaps if we had fought him for a century or two we should appreciate his good qualities. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, I soon found points in common with my chance companion. We both knew many lands; especially we both knew the same places and the same men in Norway. My Dutchman loved Norway as I love it, and knew it better. Our points of view were different. His to range far and wide, to sip as a bee winging from flower to flower the varied beauties of fjord and fell, of fond and brae; mine to mark the rise and fall of one much-studied river, chained as a galley-slave to my angle.

So we played the pretty and seductive game of resemblances. Here in this fierce African landscape we contrived to see Bratlandsdal, here Sundal, here the smoothened rock-faces of Naerodalsosen. Lower down where a vast amphitheatre of hills guarded the meeting of two waters we saw the Pyrenees. But the while I was hugging to myself a secret study of which my comrade recked nothing. Even as a man may travel by train, and mark a country, and consider within himself how he would ride over it to hounds;—so was I noting the pools and streams of the river, muddy as a glacier-fed river may be in a hot July, and judging where the fish would be like to lie, and how I should put the fly to them. A very pretty pastime, but clouded by the knowledge that no fish that is a fish, not even a wee trout, may live in these waters. They contain calcareous salts, or something unpleasant, which no fish of the royal race will stand. There are hopes of acclimatizing tench; but who can wax warm at the prospect? Yet was this to look upon a real river, the finest river (with all respect to the Nile and the Zambesi; I speak as an angler) that I have seen in Africa; a fair succession of pool and stream,—of pools running swiftly beneath steep banks and shelving shores, of streams just steep enough to make the pools holding. The pity of it! From end to end Africa has an air of being unfinished and ill-designed; there is always something wanting to its completeness; in some ways it is too big, in others too small; it lacks water, or it has too much; and things are seldom what they seem,—when you descry a distant lake it is generally the mirage; wherefore a salmon river without salmon falls quite within the natural order of African things.

So on through the broadening valley, with glimpses of azure sea ahead, and soaring mountains, clad with primeval forest, all around. The road, well engineered,—that goes without saying,—is much cut up by the heavy traffic to and from certain mining enterprises in the hills. One iron-ore mine,—the property of an English company, I hear with national pride,—on the opposite side of the valley has a little railway and a little port of its own; and two vessels, hovering suspiciously in the offing, are not corsairs, but intent on a lawful freight. But here, as everywhere, the authorities are busy in making the road smooth for the motor-car, and the repairers and a steam-roller are at work. The car is not yet a familiar object to man and beast. A mule bearing a native bolts at our approach, and unseats its rider. We call to the chauffeur to stop. He replies, “Mais, ce n’est qu’un Khabyle”; in which I recognize a common colonial note. We look round to see the mule caught and the rider up again, and go on happily.

The long descent comes to an end at length, and at a point about twenty-three miles short of Bougie we reach the sea. The coast-lands here consist of a series of semicircular plains, divided by great spurs which run northward from the main range, and form capes. Across these flat and highly cultivated plains our road lies where it may with Algerian directness, but rises to dizzy heights by zigzags to surmount the precipitous headlands which once or twice bar its progress. The contour of this variable and rocky coast is eminently picturesque, the views of sea and mountain of infinite variety. And afar the dazzling whiteness of Bougie stretching upwards from its harbour among the olive groves invites us. The level lands appear to be of great fertility; amid great fields of corn and vine pleasant and prosperous-looking country houses stand, girt about with fruit trees,—figs, apricots and peaches. In some places the cultivation is carried almost to high-water mark, in others a sward of fine turf seems to meet the sand.

Bougie, rising on the steep hill-side behind its protecting cape, looks almost southward, and its bay appears to it as a land-locked lake. On the southern shore stand the majestic mountains through which we have bored our way from SÉtif, with plenty of snow on this, their northern face, crowning their copious forests of cedar and pine. Few seaports have such a romantic outlook. It cannot be doubted that this coast is destined some day to be a second and grander Riviera, and if another Lord Brougham sets to work to create another Cannes, it is perhaps in the neighbourhood of Bougie that he will place it. Apart from its own abounding attractions, it is surrounded east and south and west by incomparable scenery. Its charms are already beginning to be known. It is a meeting-place of excellent roads, and the motor-car has rendered it easy of access. Its comfortable hotel is always full, and is making haste to enlarge itself. Let Bougie start a casino and band, and it will begin to have a season. And in my mind’s eye I can see golf-links along the shore of the bay, para thina thalasses, where the sea-sand meets the verdure.

There is something theatrical about Bougie’s scenery. Stand on the shore in front of the old Saracen gateway and look upwards at the background of the town rising tier on tier, a town of brilliant white houses gay with the dazzling purple of the bougainvillea, with the bastions of an apparently cardboard fort to the right, and a suggestion of ruined castles to the left, and you may fancy that you are in the stalls at the Opera, and that a chorus of fisher-girls will shortly appear and point to a pirate in the offing.

Bougie, exporter of wax, is said to have given its name to the candle. And it has other historical associations. Its story is not very dissimilar from that of many ports on this coast. Phoenician traders, Roman colonists, Vandal invaders, Byzantines, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards and Turks,—all have had their day, and many of them have left their impress. Traces of the Roman wall exist; the Saracenic enceinte, enclosing a space seven times the size of that which lies within the present fortifications, is still marked by ruined towers which rise picturesquely among the olive trees. In the matter of piracy Bougie followed the example set by Algiers with great zeal and success. So troublesome were its corsairs to Spain that in 1508 Ferdinand V was goaded to action, and sent a fleet of fourteen ships under Don Pedro Navarro to take possession of it; and the Spaniards held it for nearly forty years. But the failure of the expedition of Charles V against Algiers in 1545 put great courage into the Algerians. They attacked the castle on the harbour and the citadel on the heights with an overwhelming force. The governor, Don Alonzo de Peralta, seeing resistance hopeless, and anxious to save the lives of his garrison and its women and children, surrendered the town on condition that all the Spaniards within the walls should be allowed to depart, and that ships should be furnished to carry them to Spain. The Emperor, doubtless still smarting under his defeat, did not take this fresh reverse in good part and condemned the unfortunate governor to lose his head. Thenceforth until the French invasion Bougie was held by a small Turkish garrison, and the town, which is said to have contained in its palmy days a population of 100,000, fell into decay. It is now once again on the up-grade of prosperity.

From Bougie it is possible to proceed to Algiers by steamer, or by train, but the traveller who has reached it by motor-car from SÉtif should on no account miss the opportunity to drive through Khabylia, the beautiful and interesting mountain district which lies between the snowy Djurjura and the sea. The distance via Fort National to Tizi-Ouzou, on the western side of the upland country, whence Algiers may be reached by train in three hours, is about 150 miles. A magnificent new road breasts the mountain wall which confines the valley above Bougie, and leads with interminable curves and zigzags through forest and cultivated land, through heath and downland turf, to a chilly height of nearly 5000 feet.

The configuration of this country, the foot-hills of the Djurjura, is peculiar. A series of slopes confines a wealth of valleys great and small, into which project knife-edges, commonly crowned at their termination with castle-like rocks. The Djurjura range protects these valleys from the hot and drying winds of the desert, and its snows supply copious torrents and a moist atmosphere. The country affords a very striking contrast to the typical arid upland of Algeria. In such conditions we naturally find a very luxuriant vegetation. Cedars, oaks, olives, figs and vines flourish exceedingly, and beneath them the sward suggests a more northern land. Africa maintains its character as the continent of surprises.

On every vantage-point which offers possibilities of defence, especially on the narrow ridges near their final crests, stand Khabyle villages, commanding both slopes. In such a situation there is seldom water to be found; and it is the perpetual task of the women (who are unveiled) to carry it to their homes from the cascades on the neighbouring hills. The villages are composed of small stone houses densely crowded together, roofed with tiles, the lines of the roofs being generally parallel, which gives them a curiously symmetrical appearance. Their dirt and squalor is indescribable.

A strange people these Khabyles:—a white race, or at least not more tanned than many dwellers on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and recalling in physique an Italian type; ardent cultivators and determined fighters in defence; with a long-established and intelligent system of local self-government, and elaborate institutions, public and domestic; yet confessing the faith, and wearing the garb of the Arab, with whom they have nothing else in common. Till the French came they had never owned a master. Before 1871 they had maintained and been permitted a modified independence; but to their own undoing they took a leading part in the rising of that year, and committed many savage murders and outrages on helpless French colonists. Their subjugation followed as a matter of course; many of their lands were forfeited, and they became the servants of the new lords.

There is quite a large and serious literature dealing with the peculiar habits and customs of the Khabyles after the thorough and logical, if somewhat dull, manner of French writers. From an artistic point of view an Englishman, Mr. Edgar Barclay, has made Khabylia his own. His “Mountain Life in Algeria” (London, 1882) is a description of the country as it appears to an artist and a scholar. The common eye is filled with the non-essential details of personal uncleanliness and the squalor of seldom-washed garments; the artist looks below these to the inherent qualities of form. In the troops of girls filling their pitchers at the waterfall or bearing them in line to their village, in the wood-cutter and the shepherd, Mr. Barclay has seen again the types of ancient Greece when the world was young.

Fort National crowns a common ridge running east and west between the two chief valleys of Khabylia. It looks southward to the great snowy rampart of the Djurjura, here evident in all its glory. The road westward follows the ridge to its extremity and then descends to the vale in a series of abrupt and, to the motorist, rather alarming zigzags. And so we come to Tizi-Ouzou and Algiers.

The magic carpet of our day has borne us in a brief space through landscapes of astonishing contrast; through territories which are a storehouse of conflicting yet commingled human interests; across the vast cornfields which suggest man’s taming of a newly discovered continent, to the siege-scarred cliffs of Constantine, the awe-inspiring immensity of the Sahara, the speaking ruins of the Roman marches, the Alpine gorges and sylvan sweetness of the Mediterranean shore. Perhaps nowhere within so small a compass is the history of twenty centuries writ so large, nowhere the evidence of man’s struggles, and especially of his failures, more plain for him who runs to read.