even without leaving the modernised part of Algiers, we encounter the most curious varieties of population. On our road from the mole, we have fought our way through a motley crowd of French soldiers, miscellaneous tradesmen, negro women, and half-naked Arabs. We have received our English letters at a window, whose slender marble shafts recall a state of society which is utterly at variance with all associations of the Post-office; we have looked at the unfinished Cathedral, which is so ugly that it deserves nothing more than a look; we have entered another church, which was formerly a mosque, and there a priest was saying mass with a congregation of Maltese, and the suisse, walking about with his hat on, made us feel that we were in the atmosphere of the Romanism of Paris. Other mosques remain what they were under the Turks, except that they may now be visited by Christians with impunity. As the traveller enters, he hears in French from the Mohamedan worshippers the laconic admonition sans souliers,' and, on taking off his boots, he may sit down, if he pleases, cross-legged on the mats, and read his translation of the Koran without fear of interruption, while the monotonous perspective of pillars and arches in all directions invites him to dream over the great days of the Arabian power, when it extended unbroken from Mecca to Cordova. From the mosque we go to present our introduction to the governor, and we find Cavaignac engaged with military and political business in a palace of the Deys, which retains unaltered its cool staircases and porcelain pavement, its large open court in the centre, and its horseshoe arches supported on wreathed marble columns. As we saunter up the street, a young Mohamedan gamin runs up to us, all eagerness to clean our boots. We look into a shop, and there a dark-eyed girl with long ringlets is selling gloves to a young officer of dragoons. We turn into a bazaar, and watch a Moor and a Jew playing chess. The relative positions of these two elements of population are now strangely altered; the Jew has fairly checkmated the Moor in Algiers. If we inquire about education, we are directed to a college which was formerly a barrack of Janissaries. We pass another large building, which is a noble hospital, and there we see Sisters of Charity calmly moving on their errands of mercy. At the next turn our eye is arrested by an omnibus full of closely-veiled Mohamedan females, on the point of starting for the Moustapha suburb. What a crowd of thoughts are immediately suggested by such an antithesis between woman raised to the highest place by becoming a servant unto all, and woman in her lowest state of slavery and degradation! But how varied, when evening comes on, are the groups which fill the great square round round Marochetti's statue of the Duke of Orleans! Jewish dandies, with blue turbans and gay embroidered coats, and rings covering half the fingers of both hands; Jewesses, whose headdress, however tempting to the pencil, is too singular to be described by the pen; the red sashes and dark contented faces of Minorcan labourers, coming in after their day's work from the gardens round the city; here a negro and a Kabyle, carrying a barrel on a pole between them; there, the clean white apron and the handkerchief round the head, which none but a French woman knows how to wear; Zouaves, with wide red pantaloons and blue jackets; Indigènes, distinguished from the former only by wearing black instead of yellow gaiters; Spahis, with red jackets, and boots over blue pantaloons; Chasseurs d'Afrique, Chasseurs de Vincennes, and representatives of other parts of the army which keeps Algeria in subjection to France: this is only an imperfect analysis of the lively masquerade which surrounds us. We might add some circumstances peculiar to the year 1848-such as the magic words Propriété Nationale, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, inscribed in large letters even on the mosques-and squads of National Guards, in singular varieties of dress, some with shoes, some with yellow slippers, drawn up on parade near the trees of liberty. But these scenes were temporary. While the lower part of the town is as full of busy life as any European city, the upper part of it, as we have already stated, reposes in the calm and impassive state of its former Oriental existence. This broad contrast of light and shade must be recognised in the picture, besides the chequered alternations in that half of it, which we have hitherto been considering. If we examine the other half, if we climb up the hill and enter the old town, we come upon a scene as Moorish as Tetuan, and far more picturesque. The streets are all narrow and steep, more like staircases than roads, winding this way and that without any purpose or plan. The houses are very high, their upper and projecting parts being supported by beams slanting outwards. All is delightfully cool. The few turbaned men whom you meet seem engaged rather in contemplation than in work. The few women are like living bales of flannel, with only one eye visible. Here you may wander long and lose yourself in a silent labyrinth, till at last you emerge unexpectedly on the Casbah at the summit. This is the site of the principal palace of the Turkish Deys; and here is preserved (like the windmill at Potsdam, or like the house of Peter the Great at Saardam) the kiosk where that insult *The Chasseurs d'Afrique are cavalry. The Chasseurs de Vincennes, an infantry force, bore the name of Chasseurs d'Orléans after the death of the Duke of Orleans till 1848. was was offered to the French Consul, which has led to the subjugation of the whole Turkish territory between Morocco and Tunis. If now we wish to obtain a general view of the tract of country which acknowledges French Algiers as its capital, let us ascend the steep winding road constructed by the Duc de Rovigo, till we stand on one of the higher ridges of the range of hills on which the city is partly built, and which extend several miles along the seaboard in each direction. This range is called the Sahel; and it is the first feature of the physical geography of the neighbourhood which demands our attention. However bare and hot the aspect of the city may be when we approach it from the water, we should be much mistaken if we were to imagine that its immediate vicinity is of that torrid and tawny character which we are apt to suppose characteristic of Africa. The Sahel, or Massif d'Alger, exhibits as pleasant and luxuriant a vegetation as the district round any European capital. Not only are country-houses and gardens numerous in every direction, but the ground is charmingly diversified with all the elements of picturesque beauty. There is strict truth in what Campbell says in his 'Letters from the South,' of the wild-flowers and sea-coast views, and 'streams worthy of a Scottish glen.' Here, too, the same combinations which we have observed in the streets of the city are reproduced, and attended with no painful feelings. The vegetation of the East and West-or rather, if we are to write correctly, the vegetation of the North and South-meet together. The banana and the English hawthorn are seen side by side, the olive grows with the elm, and you may gather honeysuckle in a thicket of fig-trees, brambles, and aloes. The depth of the Sahel range towards the interior reaches only a few miles, and then succeeds the extensive plain of the Metidja, about ninety miles in length, and fifteen miles in breadth, which, sweeping round along the base of the Lesser Atlas, and opening on the sea at each extremity, is the second great feature of the neighbourhood of Algiers. Its first aspect, as seen from the Sahel, is very impressive. Like the Roman Campagna, it stretches in an unbroken level, while the mountainwall, rising high and abrupt on the further side, may fitly be compared to the line of the Sabine hills. Now, unhappily the Metidja resembles the Campagna in desolation as well as in impressiveness. But it was not always so. Shaw says that in his time (about a hundred and thirty years ago) it was a rich and delightful plain, watered in every part by a number of springs and rivulets;' that it was full of the country-seats and farms of the principal inhabitants of Algiers; that it supplied the city with provisions, and produced flax and al henna, roots and potherbs, z 2 herbs, rice, fruit, and grain of all kinds.' And this was after the bad government of the Turks had cast a blight on what had flourished under the Arabs, and begun the decay which the French war turned into utter desolation. General Daumas acknowledges that it is now a pestilential desert; that men go there, not to live, but to die; and that a generation must be sacrificed before it can become what it was. It is, indeed, true that as we quit the Sahel we leave all efficient and prosperous vegetation behind. On reaching the level ground we travel at first through the same kind of low shrubby vegetation which is seen near Civita Vecchia, except that the palmetto grows among the broom and dwarf ilex, and flowering rush. But all the central portion of the plain is a reach of uncultivated desolation, with here and there a Moorish village, and here and there a fortified camp. The only other signs of human life, in their European and Mohamedan aspects, are such as these: long rows of labourers engaged in making the hopeless government drains; a long string of mules endeavouring to drag a load of corn imported for the use of the army; a solitary marabout, with a few green shrubs; and Bedouins with flocks of sheep and tents of black camels' hair. Across the breadth of this waste you have probably travelled the five leagues by an indifferent road, in a diligence so clumsy that you can hardly help believing that the old vehicles of the Messageries Impériales in France have been sent over in their decrepitude to serve for the Messageries Africaines. And now we are at the base of Mount Atlas, about thirty miles south of Algiers. The town of Blidah, which is immediately under the mountain-range, used formerly to be famous for its charming orange-groves; and Abd-el-Kader remembers its appearance when its beauty was a proverb, like that of Broussa, his own later residence, or of Damascus, his present home. But the traveller will be disappointed now, if he expects to find at Blidah an African Damascus or Broussa, with Atlas for Lebanon or the Mysian Olympus. It is true that some scanty orange-groves on the further edge of the Metidja are still fragrant; but Blidah is sadly changed, partly by an earthquake, but still more in consequence of the dreadful fighting which took place here in 1830, and the following years, when the French were making their way, with smoke and bloodshed, through the first passes of Mount Atlas. Through these passes we must now penetrate, that we may reach a higher point, from whence to take a general survey of the whole country included under the name of French Algeria. It must be remembered that the true Atlas of the poets, ' with his head in the clouds, and his feet in the sand,' is not in French Algeria at all, but far to the west, within the dominions of the Sultan of Morocco. But connected with those celebrated heights, a vast mountain-system extends continuously, in a direction on the whole parallel to the Mediterranean, eastwards through Algeria to the regency of Tunis. The range of what is called the Lesser Atlas, running W.S.W. towards the ocean, divides the whole country between the Greater Atlas and the Mediterranean into two long halves. The southernmost of these halves is the Sahara, a region of rugged defiles and broad upland pastures; the other is the Tell, or cultivated district near the coast, intersected more or less by spurs projecting irregularly from the mountains. The fortified camp of Boghar is a convenient point of geographical reference, not only for the Tell and the Sahara, but for the whole country, eastwards and westwards, which is now reduced to the condition of a French province. Two marked physical features may be the guides of our survey in these opposite directions. Towards the east we follow a mountain region called Kabylia, which extends continuously from the point where we stand to the sea and along its shore, and which has been the scene of the greatest difficulties yet encountered by the French. Towards the west we follow the river Scheliff, a stream famous in Arabic legends, which rises under the heights where the fort of Boghar stands, and flows through many windings towards Tlemcen, the early home of Abd-el-Kader. When we make use of the term Kabylia, it must not be supposed that this is the only district of Algeria which is inhabited by those who are called Kabyles as opposed to the Arabs. But this is the region in which these fierce and sturdy mountaineers have maintained the most determined resistance to successive occupants of Northern Africa. The Turks never subdued them. The French have not been perfectly successful.* From this circumstance and also because of the formidable physical peculiarities of the country it is emphatically called Great Kabylia. It is difficult to determine the exact boundaries of Great Kabylia. But we should not be much in error if we were to give 150 miles for the length of its whole coast line, reckoning eastwards from Algiers. The same distance of 150 miles again repeated would bring us to the extreme limit of Algeria in that direction. In the interior of this eastern part of the French possessions, is the city of Cirta or Constantina, remarkable alike In 1848 the inhabitants of Great Kabylia paid a tribute, and were responsible for the safe conduct of travellers, but otherwise they were independent. On the excellent map in the Itinéraire de l'Algerie (1855), the words 'Kabilie Indépendante' are marked across the Jurjura Mountains, and the words 'Sahel Insoumis' follow in the direction of Bona. for |