The Ship Dwellers Part 5

X

THE DIVERTING STORY OF ALGIERS

This is a voyage of happy mornings. It was morning--just sunrise--when we met the American fleet homeward bound; it was morning when we caught the first glimpse of Madeira and steamed into the harbor of Funchal; the sh.o.r.es of Morocco--our first glimpse of the Orient--came out of the sunrise, and it was just sunrise this morning when I looked out of my port-hole on the blue harbor and terraced architecture of Algiers. And the harbor of Algiers _is_ blue, and the terraced architecture is white, or creamy, and behind it are the hills of vivid green. And there are palms and cypress-trees, and bougainvillea and other climbing vines.

Viewed from the ship it is a picture city, and framed in the port-hole it became a landscape miniature of wondrous radiance and vivid hues.

One of our pa.s.sengers, a happy-hearted, elderly Hebrew soul, came along the promenade just outside my state-room and surveyed the vision through his gla.s.s. Presently he was joined by his comfortable, good-natured wife.

"Vat you get me up so early for, Sol?" she said.

He handed her his gla.s.s, his whole face alive with joy of the moment--fairly radiant it was.

"I yust couldn't help it!" he said. "Dot sunrising and dot harbor and dot city all make such a beautiful sight."

A beautiful sight it was, and it had the added charm of being our first near approach to the Orient. For Algiers is still the Orient, though it has been a French colony for nearly a hundred years. The Orient and the Occident have met here, and the Occident has conquered, but the Orient is the Orient still, and will be so long as a vestige of it remains.

The story of Algiers, like that of every Mediterranean country, has been a motley one, and b.l.o.o.d.y enough, of course. The Romans held it for nearly five hundred years; the Vandals followed them, and these in turn were ousted by the Arabs, about the year 700 A.D. Blood flowed during each of these changes, and betweentimes. There was always blood--rivers of it--lakes of it--this harbor has been red with it time and again.

It did not stop flowing with the Arabian conquest--not by any means.

Those Arabs were barbarians and robbers--Bedouins on land and pirates on the sea. They were the friends of no nation or people, and when business was dull outside, they would break out among themselves and indulge in pillage and slaughter at home for mere pastime. About the time Columbus was discovering America they were joined by the Moors and Jews who were being driven out of Spain and who decided to take up piracy as a regular business.

Piratic industry, combined with slavery, flourished for a matter of four centuries after that; then Commodore Decatur with a handful of little vessels met the Algerian fleet off Carthagena on the 20th of June, 1815. Decatur was a good hand with pirates. He went to work on that fleet and when he got through there wasn't enough of it left to capture a banana-boat. Then he appeared before Algiers and sent a note to the Dey demanding the immediate release of all Americans in slavery. The Dey replied that as a mere matter of form he hoped the American commander would agree to sending a small annual tribute of powder.

"If you take the powder you must take the b.a.l.l.s with it," was Decatur's reply, and thus the young American republic, then only about thirty years old, was first to break down the monstrous inst.i.tutions of piracy and enslavement which for more than a thousand years had furnished Algerian revenues.

One Hussein (history does not mention his other name, but it was probably Ali Ben) was the last Dey of Algiers, and his memory is not a credit to his country's story. He was cruel and insolent; also, careless in his statements.

Piracy under A. B. Hussein flourished with a good deal of its old vigor, though I believe he was rather careful about plundering American vessels. Hussein was also a usurer and the princ.i.p.al creditor of some Jewish merchants who had a claim against France. The claim was in litigation, and Hussein, becoming impatient, demanded payment from the French king. As France had been the princ.i.p.al sufferer from Hussein's pirates, it was not likely that the king would notice this demand. Soon after, in the Dey's palace, the Kasba, at a court function the Dey asked of the French consul why his master had remained silent.

"The King of France does not correspond with the Dey of Algiers," was the haughty reply, whereupon Hussein struck the consul on the cheek with his fan, and said a lot of unpleasant things of both king and consul.

That was the downfall of Algiers. A blockade was established by the French, and three years later the French army of invasion marched in.

Fifteen hundred guns, seventeen ships of war, and fifty million francs fell into the hands of France, as spoil of war. Algiers was no longer the terror of the seas. Over six hundred thousand Christian people had suffered the horrors of Algerian bondage, but with that July day, 1830, came the end of this barbarism, since which time Algiers has acquired a new habit--the habit of jumping at the crack of the French whip.

I may say here in pa.s.sing that we were to hear a good deal of that incident of the Dey, the French consul, and the fan. It was in the guide-books in various forms, and as soon as I got dressed and on deck one of our conductors--himself a former resident of Algiers--approached me with:

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THAT IS THE KASBA"]

"Do you see that tower up there on the hill-top? That is the Kasba. It was in that tower that Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, struck the French consul three times on the cheek with his fan--an act which led to the conquest of Algiers by France."

I looked at the tower with greatly renewed interest, and brought it up close to me with my gla.s.s. Then he pointed out other features of the city, fair and beautiful in the light of morning: the mosque; the governor's palace; the Arab quarter; the villas of wealthy Algerines. He drifted away, then, and the Diplomat approached. He also had been in Algiers once before. He said:

"Do you see that tower there on the hill-top? That is the Kasba. It was in that tower that Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, struck the French consul three times on the cheek with his fan--an act which led to the conquest of Algiers by France."

He went away, and I looked over the ship's side at the piratical-looking boatmen who were gathering to the attack. They were a picturesque lot--their costumes purely Oriental--their bare feet encased in shoes right out of the _Arabian Nights_ pictures. I was just turning to remark these things to one of the Reprobates, the Colonel, when he said:

"Do you see that tower up there on the hill-top?"

"Colonel," I said, "you've been reading your guide-book, and I saw you the other day with a book called _Innocents Abroad_."

He looked a little dazed.

"Well," he said, "what of it?"

"Nothing; only that tower seems to be another 'Queen's Chair.' I've been to it several times in the guide-book myself, and I've already had it twice served up by hand. Let's don't talk about it any more, until we've been ash.o.r.e and had a look at it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT--ONE WAITS ON IT]

XI

WE ENTER THE ORIENT

We went ash.o.r.e, in boats to the dock, then we stepped over some things, and under some things and walked through the custom-house (they don't seem to bother us at these places) and there were our carriages (very grand carriages--quite different from the little cramped jiggle-wagons of Gibraltar) all drawn up and waiting. And forthwith we found ourselves in the midst of the Orient and the Occident--a busy, mult.i.tudinous life, pressing about us, crowding up to our carriages to sell us postal cards and gaudy trinkets, babbling away in mongrel French and other motley and confused tongues.

What a grand exhibition it was to us who had come up out of the Western Ocean, only half believing that such scenes as this--throngs of sun-baked people in fantastic dress--could still exist anywhere in the world! We were willing to sit there and look at them, and I kept my camera going feverishly, being filled with a sort of fear, I suppose, that there were no other such pictures on earth and I must catch them now or never.

We were willing to linger, but not too long. We got our first lesson in Oriental deliberation right there. Guides had been arranged for and we must wait for them before we could start the procession. They did not come promptly. Nothing comes promptly in the Orient. _One does not hurry the Orient--one waits on it._ That is a maxim I struck out on the anvil, white-hot, that first hour in Algiers, and I am satisfied it is not subject to change. The sun poured down on us; the turbaned, burnoused, barefooted selling-men rallied more vociferously; the Reprobates invented new forms of profanity to fit Eastern conditions, and still the guides did not come.

We watched some workmen storing grain in warehouses built under the fine esplanade that flanks the water-front, and the picture they made consoled us for a time. They were Arabs of one tribe or another and they wore a motley dress. All had some kind of what seemed c.u.mbersome head-gear--a turban or a folded shawl, or perhaps an old gunny-sack made into a sort of hood with a long cape that draped down behind. A few of them had on thick European coats over their other paraphernalia.

We wondered why they should dress in this voluminous fashion in such a climate, and then we decided that the wisdom of the East had prompted the protection of that head-gear and general a.s.sortment of wardrobe against the blazing sun. Our guides came drifting in by and by, wholly unexcited and only dreamily interested in our presence, and the procession moved. Then we ascended to the streets above--beautiful streets, and if it were not for the Oriental costumes and faces everywhere we might have been in France.

French soldiers were discoverable all about; French groups were chatting and drinking coffee and other beverages at open-air cafes; fine French equipages rolled by with ladies and gentlemen in fashionable French dress. Being carnival-time, the streets were decorated with banners and festoons in the French colors. But for the intermixture of fezzes and turbans and the long-flowing garments of the East we would have said, "After all, this is not the Orient, it is France."

But French Algiers, "gay, beautiful, and modern as Paris itself" (the guide-book expression), is, after all, only the outer bulwark, or rather the ornate frame of the picture it encloses. That picture when you are fairly in the heart of it is as purely Oriental I believe as anything in the world to-day, and cannot have changed much since Mohammedanism came into power there a thousand years ago. But I am getting ahead too fast.

We did not penetrate the heart of Algiers at once--only the outer edges.

We drove to our first mosque--a typical white-domed affair, plastered on the outside, and we fought our way through the beggars who got in front of us and behind us and about us, demanding "_sou-penny_" at least it sounded like that--a sort of French-English combination, I suppose, which probably has been found to work well enough to warrant its general adoption.

We thought we had seen beggars at Madeira, and had become hardened to them. We _had_ become hardened toward the beggars, but not to our own offerings. One can only stand about so much punishment--then he surrenders. It is easier and quicker to give a sou-penny, or a dozen of them, than it is to be bedevilled and besmirched and bewildered by these tatterdemalion Arabs who grab and cling and obstruct until one doesn't know whether he is in Algiers or Altoona, and wishes only to find relief and sanctuary. Evidently sight-seeing in the East has not become less strenuous since the days when the "Innocents" made their pilgrimage in these waters.

We found temporary sanctuary in the mosque, but it was not such as one would wish to adopt permanently. It was a bare, unkempt place, and they made us put on very objectionable slippers before we could step on their sacred carpets. This is the first mosque we have seen, so of course I am not a purist in the matter of mosques yet, but I am wondering if it takes dirt and tatters to make a rug sacred, and if half a dozen mangy, hungry-looking Arab priests inspire the regular attendants in a place like that with religious fervor.

They inspired me only with a desire to get back to the beggars, where I could pay sou-pennies for the privilege of looking at the variegated humanity and of breathing the open air. The guide-book says this is a poor mosque, but that is gratuitous information; I could have told that myself as soon as I looked at it. Anybody could.

We went through some markets after that, and saw some new kinds of flowers and fruit and fish, but they did not matter. I knew there were better things than these in Algiers, and I was impatient to get to them.

I begrudged the time, too, that we put in on some public buildings, though a down-town palace of Ali Ben Hussein, the final Dey of Algiers--a gaudy wedding-cake affair, all fluting and frosting--was not without interest, especially when we found that the late Hussein had kept his seven wives there. It was a comparatively old building, built in Barbarossa times, the guide said, and now used only on certain official occasions. It is not in good taste, I imagine, even from the Oriental standpoint.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS]

But what we wanted, some of us at least, was to get out of these show-places and into the shops--the native shops that we could see stretching down the little side-streets. We could discover perfectly marvellous baskets and jugs and queer things of every sort fairly stuffing these little native selling-places, and there were always fascinating groups in those side-streets, besides men with big copper water-jars on their shoulders that looked a thousand years old--the jars, I mean--all battered and dented and polished by the mutations of the pa.s.sing years.

I wanted one of those jars. I would have given more for one of those jars than for the mosque, including all the sacred rugs and the holy men, or for the palace of A. B. Hussein, and Hussein himself, with his seven wives thrown in for good measure. No, I withdraw that last item. I would not make a quick decision like that in the matter of the wives. I would like to look them over first. But, dear me, I forgot--they have been dead a long, long time, so let the offer stand. That is to say, I did want the jar and I was willing to do without the other things. There was no good opportunity for investment just then, and when I discussed the situation with Laura, who was in the carriage with me, she did not encourage any side-adventures. She was right, I suppose, for we were mostly on the move. We went clattering away through some pleasing parks, presently, and our drivers, who were French, cracked their whips at the Algerine rabble and would have run them down, I believe, with great willingness, and could have done so, perhaps, without fear of penalty.

Certainly French soldiers are immune to retribution in Algiers. We saw evidence of that, and I would have resented their conduct more, if I had not remembered those days not so long ago of piracy and bondage, and realized that these same people might be murdering and enslaving yet but for the ever-ready whip of France.