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y been its culture and occupancy, all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains--melancholy tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant sun--edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them--temples, courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph, theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant detail, as on the sea--or like animal life in nature, indifferent.

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediaeval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, crisscrossed with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin--with a cemetery; it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable--it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and d?bris--the eternal potter's field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons.

Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality--with an omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man's domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach; where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized, isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land wind; or olive groves--silvery gleams--on the hillsides, clumps of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be; or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps, beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same recurring simplicity--a man leading a spirited horse in the street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at long intervals is a monochord--a point of dazzling white far off, dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm rise and unite it to heaven--to the fire-veined evening sky, deep and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning bloom of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent; by the Moorish caf? lie or sit or crouch motionless figures, sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes or gazing at checkers, or vacant--always somnolent, statuesque, sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere--only a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the eternal and the ruined in their first aspect; as of things left by the tide, derelicts of life all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow, kaleidoscopic combination of these things, a reiteration without new meaning--the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the plain, the fields, camels and sheep, and herdboys--horizons, somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on the sea at Monastir and Mahdia--such a homeless sea! There may be boats with bending sails, the fisher's life, suggesting those strange outlying islands they touch at, exile islands from long ago, where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world--still the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia, once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is a famous battle name in Mohammedan and crusading and corsair annals; it stood many a great siege on its rocky peninsula, in Norman and other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror of tempest on this dangerous coast--shallow waters and inhospitable shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it, and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring coast-line before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll, to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea holds--so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I remembered the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories, stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns to the land--and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile.

So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and by garden and grove, into the ever-enveloping plain that opened before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense commanding power and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is a great ruin--a colosseum; arches still in heaven, and piled and fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque; it still keeps its massive and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast down in the waste, its monumental splendor--a hoar and solemn token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud, unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside it is hardly perceptible, like a mole-hill, a mere trace of human life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold, starry sky, Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still--the vast heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights--till after some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul, I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove, and drew up at Sfax.

Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold, and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the sponge. In the early morning light the open spaces about the market were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side--the vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory for years--the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.

Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals, as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with nothing to break the expanse--only millions of olive-trees regularly planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like an endless spider's web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape, is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.

I seek in vain the secret of the charm that Tunis lays upon me. Coming back to it, one feels something intimate in the city, such as there is in places long lived in and cherished, impregnated with memories, subtilized by forgotten life and feeling. It has sunk deeper into the senses, the affections. Can the charm be merely its soothing air, its weather, which, after all, is our physical element? It has a marvellous sky; all hues that are celestial and live in heaven are there. What clarity! Its changeable blues excite and call the eye from hour to hour; and on rainy days its grays are soft, enveloping mantles for the sight. Its peculiar trait is a greenish tint in the blue, pervasive but not defined, an infusion of clear emerald, translucent, such as one sees in winter sunsets in New England; but here in early summer you will distinguish it at high noon, after the rainless days of late spring. Tradition associates heat with this coast, as with the Mediterranean generally; but that is an illusion of the foreigner. Tunis is often chilly, bitterly cold at times, though without the fall of snow; it lies under the heights of the Atlas, and the winds bring down the snow-chill on their wings. I remember one February when there were no trains from Algiers for five days, the snow blocking the road; it lay, at some places on the line, nine feet deep. But whatever may be the weather, the atmospheric charm remains; it is soothing, and has narcotic quality.

A fine landscape in fine weather is always captivating and assimilates the traveller to the land. One is always at home in the sun; and a noble view finds a friend in every eye. One or two such experiences will make the fortune of a whole journey and after a while be its whole memory. But in some regions, some cities, the spell is perpetual; it is so at Tunis. The prospect is broad, and wherever one turns the eye wanders off delightfully. The most complete view is from the western hill, where is a beautiful great park of rolling land with woods whence you will see the white city southward; it lies like a great lily on its pads of green background, with its motionless blue waters round about--a lake-country scene; level waters like a flood, all floored and streaked with purple and blue bands and reaches--a water prairie--to where Carthage gleams white on its own green hill, amid an horizon of snowy villages dazzling in the sun; and between, nearer, isolated roofs that flash emerging from their obscure green gardens and tree-clumps, here and there; farther still to the southeast, as the eye travels out over the long lake into the gulf and the sea, rises a mass of mountain blues that bound the entrance to the land and its harbors. It is a view fit for a Greek amphitheatre.

Wherever you go, you are always coming out on these massive, spacious, beautifully colored prospects, white strips of city or village amid the spring, set in the master tone of blue that envelopes and combines them--sky, and lake, and sea, themselves infinitely changeable with the light and the distance and the hour. Even in the most unexpected places Heaven will open these far-off ways over a new land. I remember going into an obscure and blind street, in the Arab quarter, among buildings in all stages of apparent decay. I lifted the knocker at the lovely, nail-studded door of an ancient-looking house, and passed at once into an inner court with a fountain, beautifully decorated, cool, shadowy, exquisite in repose and the sense of luxury; and I was led on through a maze of stairways and passages till I came out on a large room below the roof with a balcony; and stepping forward, I saw unrolled as if by enchantment the whole sea-view. There must be many such commanding points of vantage in the houses on the crest of the thickly built hill--old Tunis, where the Arabs live. From this station I overlooked the lower city with all its roofs and streets. The multitude of green-tiled roofs on different levels made the color-ground, whence rose the numerous low, white domes, the slender minarets also touched with green or tipped with golden balls, the greater domes of the mosques, the mass of the citadel; broad French faubourgs and avenues were enclosing and defining lines, with irregular masses of foliage, and deep, narrow streets sank in the near scene, full of their native life. It was an architectural wilderness of form and color, arresting, vivifying, oriental in mass, feeling and detail, with the suggestion of a dream, of evanescence, and round it was poured on all sides the still blue element--sky, ocean, air. In Tunis, I noticed, everything seemed to end thus, in something beyond, in a mood; life constantly distilled its dream, and it was a dream of the senses.

To a mind with a historical background it is odd to find Tunis so completely a modern city. The Andalusian tradition is unconcentrated, and slight in its elements of reality, in things; its full experience is rather an imaginative memory; and of the times before that there is nothing left. In the suburban country there are more, though few, relics of past ages, but there the memory works more freely. One recalls, looking off to the sea-towering Mountain of the Two Horns, that on one of those peaks rose the ancient temple of Baal. The harbors of Carthage are fascinating to the eye of the imagination; but the specific remains there are scanty and mediocre; they arouse no reaction deeper than thought; and in the museum of Carthage one dwells most on the curious fact that what little has come down to us of that far-off life has found its way only by the grave itself; here, as in so many places, the tomb has been the chief conservator of life in its material aspects and what may be inferred from them of the soul of dead populations. It is rather in the neighborhood of the Cathedral that memory expands, for beside the near home of the White Brothers, who have spread their mantles and left their bones throughout the Sahara, a noble mission nobly done, here survives the only recorded anecdote of the history of this ridge, that must have been the place of innumerable tragedies--the marvellously vivid Christian story of Saint Louis's death. The narrative is as fresh and poignant as if it were written yesterday; and on the spot one likes to remember that the chivalrous and good French crusader and king is a Moslem as well as a Christian saint. It is a symbol of peace and conciliation. The past, however, is here a barren field. Antiquity is felt, not in the survival of its monuments, but in the sense of the utter waste, the annihilation of the past, the extinction that has overtaken all that human life and its glory and struggle--Punic, Roman, Visigothic--the emptiness of the place of their battles, religions, pleasures, buildings, and tombs. It is all d?bris; it is of the slightest--little archaeological heaps and pits in a vast horizon of silent sky and sea. The mind becomes merely pessimistic, surveying the scene; the mood of fatalism invades it--the mood of the frozen moon and the solar catastrophe--floods of the eternal nothingness--a mood of the pure intellect; and one is glad to come back to some nook like Ariana, a village midway between Carthage and Tunis, where ruin becomes again romantic and human. The very roses bloom there as in a deserted garden of long ago. It was there that the Hafsides, the rulers of the golden age of Tunis in the thirteenth century, had their country-seats--fair as the paradise at Roccada, where one "was gay without cause and smiled without a reason"--surrounded by gardens, with great lakes shadowed by pine and cypress, and gleaming with kiosks lined with marble and faience, with ceilings of sculptured wood gilded and painted, and cooled by the fresh waters of many fountains. The love of the country was always a trait here--an Arab trait--the rich like to get out of the city to some place of quiet, privacy and repose, such as La Marsa to-day by the sea near Carthage. The sense of the reposeful country mingles with that of the beautiful city in the past as well as now; and the Hafsides were great civilizers, builders, favorers of trade, patrons of the arts and of science. Their works and their gardens are gone alike. Time drives his ploughshare often and deep in an African city; and it is not alone on the green and shining levels of the suburban country, with its great spaces and imperial memories, where every maritime and migratory race has written some half-obliterated line of history, that the mountains look on the sea, and there is a great silence; but ruin is a near neighbor in the city as well. How many nooks and corners, full of the romance of places left to decay! That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die, and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.

What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to withdraw and enjoy? or is it a new world, a new mode of human life, with its own perceptions and intuitions and valuations, a new form of the protean existence of men on the earth, with another memory, psychology, experience? Whatever it be it is a spell that grows.

I like to pass my afternoons in the shop of the perfumer in old Tunis. I come by covered ways, where the sunlight sifts through old rafters on stained walls and worn stones, and soon discern in the softened darkness the low, small columns wound with alternate stripes of red and green--bright clustered colors; down the winding way of dimmed light in the narrow street opens on either side the row of shallow shops, shadowy alcoves of bright merchandise; and there in the heart of old Tunis, each in his niche, canopied by his trade and seeming an emanation of the things he sells, sit the perfumers. A throng passes by, now dense, now thin--passes forever, in crowds, in groups, in solitude, rarely speaking; and over against the silent movement sit the merchants--tranquil figures in perfumed boxes--whose business seems one long repose. A languid scent loads the dusky air.

Just opposite the venerable Mosque of the Olive, an isle of sanctity still uncrossed by the heathen Frankish sea, right under the shadow of its silence-guarded doors, stands and has stood for centuries the shop where I love to lounge away hours that have no attribute of time. My host--I may well call him so, we are old acquaintances now--salutes me, his robe of fading hues detaching the figure from the background as he rises; his serene face lightens with a smile, his stately form softens with a gesture, he speaks a word, and I sit down on the narrow bench at the side, and light the cigarette he has proffered, while his only son quickly commands coffee. How well I remember years ago when the child's soft Arab eyes first looked into mine! He is taller now, beautifully garbed in an embroidered burnoose; and he sits by me, and talks in low tones. What a relief it is, just to be here! What an ablution! The very air is courtesy. There is no need to talk; and we sit, we three, and smoke our cigarettes, and sip our coffee, with now and then a word, and regard the street.

A motley street, like the bridge at Stamboul--a provincial form of that unfathomable sea of human faces; and, here as there, an unknown world in miniature, diverse, novel, brilliant--the African world. The native predominates, with here and there a flash of foreign blood, round-faced Sicilians, Spaniards whose faces seem in arms, French in uniforms; but always the native--every strain of the littoral and the highland, every tint of the desert sun: black-bearded Moors of Morocco, vindictive visages; fat Jews of Djerba laughing; negroes--boys of Fezzan or black giants of the Soudan; Arabs of every skin, hints of Gothic and Vandal blood and the old blond race long before all, resolute Kabyles, fair Chaouia, Touaregs with white-wrapped faces, caravan men, Berber and Bedouin of all the land; women, too, veiled or with children at the open breast. That group of Tunisian dandies--how they stroll! olive faces, inexpressive, with the jonquil stuck over the ear, swinging little canes, clad in fine burnooses of pale blues or dying greens or ashy rose! Those bare-legged Bedouins, lean shoulders looped in earth-brown folds--how they walk! Every moment brings a new challenge to the eye. What life histories! what unspeaking faces! how closed a world! and my eyes rest on the shut gates of the ancient Mosque of the Olive over against me; I feel the spell of the unknown sealed in that faith, this life--the spell of a new life of the spirit of man, the mystery of a new earth-life of his body.

I love better to sit here, flanked by the huge wax tapers, overhung by the five-fingered groups of colored candles, amid the curiously shaped glasses and mysterious boxes, the gold filagree, the facets, the ivory eggs--and to breathe, only to breathe, diffused hidden scents of the rose and the violet--jasmine, geranium--essences of all flowers, all gardens, all odorous things, till life itself might seem the perfumed essence of existence and the sensual world only an outer dusk. Oh, the delightful narcotism! I was ever too much the Occidental not to think even in my dream--I am conscious of the feeling through all--"What am I, an alien, here?" But it is sweet to be here, to have peace, and gentleness, and courtesy, young trust and brave respect, and breeding; it is balm. The darkness falls; the passer-by grows rare; it is closing time. There is a drop for my hand now, for good-by. The boy companions me to the limit of old Tunis. It is good night. It is a departure--as if some shore were left behind. It is a nostalgia--a shadowy perception that something more of life has escaped, of the irretrievable thing, gone, like something flown from the hand. And as I come under the Gate of France into the lights of the brilliant avenue, I find again him I had eluded, whom I heard as the voice of one standing without, saying: "What am I, an alien, here?"--I am again the old European.

Quick music comes down the evening street--the clatter of cavalry--the beautiful rhythm of horses' backs--flash of French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting--spahis, tirailleurs, guns--a gallant and lively scene in the massed avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night, for this is an annual f?te-day, and their march commemorates the entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks at the faces of the natives in the crowds--impassible. But the old European cannot but feel a thrill at the sight of France, the leader of our civilization, again taking charge of the untamed and reluctant land and its intractable people to which every mastering empire of the North, from the dawn of our history, has brought in vain the force of its arms and the light of its intelligence. The hour has come again, and one feels the presence of the Napoleonic idea, clad, as of old, in the French arms; for it is from Napoleon, that star of enlightenment--Napoleon as he was in his Egyptian campaigns--that the French empire in Africa derives; and if, as the heir of the Crusades, France was through centuries the protector of Christians in the East, and that r?le is now done, it is a greater r?le that she inherits from Napoleon as the friend of Islam, with the centuries before her. Force, demonstrated in the army, is the basis of order in all civilized lands; that is why the presence of the French uniform delights me; but it is not by brute force that France moves in the essential conquest, nor is it military lust that her empire in Africa represents and embodies. It is, rather, a striking instance of fatality in human events that her advancing career in North Africa presents to the historical mind; a slight incident--a bey struck one of her ambassadors with a fan--forced on her the occupation of Algiers, and in the course of years she found herself saddled with a burden of colonial empire as awkwardly and reluctantly as was the case with us and the Philippines. There were anticolonialists in her experiences, as there were antiimperialists with us; and the arguments were about the same, essentially, in both cases--the rights of man, a new frontier, an alien people, with various economic considerations of revenue, tariff, exploitation. That obscure element of reality, however, which we call fate, worked on continuously, linking situation with event, difficulty with remedy, what was done with what had to be done, till the occupation spread from Algiers into the mountains, along the seaboard, over the Atlas, into the desert, absorbing the neighboring land of Tunis, skirting the dangerous frontier of Morocco--and now the vitalizing and beneficent power of French civilization, as it might almost seem against the will of its masters, dominates a vast tract of doubtful empire whose issues are among the most interesting contingencies of the future of humanity. It is a great work that has been accomplished, but is greater in the tasks it opens than in those already achieved.

Peaceful penetration does not mean merely that the railroad has entered the Sahara, and the wire gone far beyond into its heart, and the express messenger crossed the great waste; nor that the school and, with it, the language are everywhere, subduing and informing the mind; nor that agricultural science, engineering skill, economic initiative, and even philanthropic endeavor, hospitals, hygiene, are at work, or beginning, or in contemplation; but it means the restoration of a great and almost forsaken tract of the earth--from the Mediterranean and Lake Tchad to the Niger and the Atlantic--with its populations, to the benefits of peaceful culture, safe commerce, humane conditions, and to fraternity with the rest of mankind. It is not the brilliant military scene that holds my eye in the packed avenue, with its double rows of trees shadowy in the air, lined with brilliant shops and stately urban buildings, opera, cathedral, residence--the familiar modern metropolitan scene in the electric glare; but I see the work of France all over the darkened land from the thousand miles of seacoast, up over the impenetrable Atlas ranges, down endless desert routes--carrying civilizing power, like a radiating force, through a new world.

The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with a broader strait, off Sicily--with a southward wall overlooking the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic, whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies, valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts--a formidable country for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands, runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco, lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.

Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable, poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain, overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam; the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away; the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood, and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it persisted--a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring, untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil, and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and ways. And now it is the turn of France--that is to say, of dominant Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.

How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness, of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect; the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad, and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper, gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely, silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched backward, and the train sped on.

TLEMCEN

TLEMCEN

Snow in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like a broken hillside--it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room, bare, narrow, but clean, which reminded me curiously of such accommodation as one used to find in western Kansas towns thirty years ago, fit for the seasoned traveller, but without superfluities,--frontier-like, a border lodging; and the impression was deepened and vivified when I descended the rude and confused stairway and found the private-family dining-room, with the only fire--olive-knots burning reluctantly on a small hearth. A French officer, hanging over it, made room for me, and in a moment two other officers appeared, heavily clothed with leather and capes, prepared, as I gathered, for a long ride in the country. It might have been a hunting scene in Colorado, in the early morning, except for the military color, the foreign physiognomy and the French coffee we were drinking; it had the traits of rude vigor, hardihood and weather that belong to an outdoor life.

It seemed more natural to go out into the snow than not, and so I found an Arab and went. Our path led us a short way through streets of Sunday quiet, and soon broke by a city gate into irregular country, picturesque from the beginning with ruined masses of old ramparts. The road was bordered with trees and hedges, a lovely road even in the snow, and soon it was apparent that we were passing through the midst of an old and extensive cemetery with cypresses, cactus, fig-trees, here and there an immense carob-tree, and olives and locusts, diversifying the uneven lines of the slopes; and everywhere, as far as one looked, neglected graves, shrines in ruins, koubbas--small, square, dome-covered memorials of the saints--dilapidated and with broken arches, the d?bris of centuries of devotion and mortality. It was quite in keeping; for I was myself on pilgrimage, where for seven centuries the faithful Moslem of the land had preceded me, to the holy tomb of Sidi bou-M?dyen, the patron saint of the little city. As he ended his earthly travels on one of these neighboring slopes--and he had wandered through the Arab world--he exclaimed: "How good it were to sleep in this blessed soil the eternal slumber!" and so they buried him there. It was a place of immemorial consecration; in early times of the faith a body of pious Moslems had been cloistered near by, and already in that age in these fields the "men of God" had their resting-places about which the Moslems liked to be buried, as old Christians used to wish to lie in holy ground about the church. It was even then a place of pilgrimage, and a village grew up about it, and ruins of minarets and mosques still lie there; and later, about Sidi bou-M?dyen's shrine, another village was built among the encumbering graves, for he was a famous saint and many pilgrims came there, and now the inhabitants say pleasantly: "We have the dead in our houses." The landscape is thus a place of tombs; but it is enchanting, and one sees at a little distance terraced mountain edges, thick gardens of olive, the pomegranates, the ancient fig-trees, masses of foliage and vines, abounding fertility and freshness, green and flowering with spring; and sown all along the tree-sheltered road the low and humble ruins of mortality.

I entered the village--the road ran a mile or more through such a scene--and climbed the steep way to the wooden door through which one comes into the precincts of the saint's tomb with its attendant mosque and school. I did not anticipate a mausoleum; I was familiar with such shrines and knew what I should see; but the square koubbas, with their white domes, which one sees everywhere in the fields, on the hilltops, all over this lonely country, give a grave and solemn accent to the landscape, and I felt the reverence of the place, remote and solitary, where so many thousand men had warmed their life-worn hearts in the glow of the faith. In the antechamber, adjoining the shrine, Moorish arches fell on four small onyx columns of beautiful purity, resting on the tiled floor, and just at my feet was an ancient holy well whose onyx edge was deeply cut by the wearing of the chain that had given water to twenty generations of those who thirsted for God. As I turned, the room of the shrine was open before me--heavy with shadows, almost dark, while the light struggled through vivid, dull spots of colored glass, blue, green, red, on the obscurity where I saw the raised coffin, swathed with silken stuffs and gold-wrought work and thick with hanging standards; another coffin, with the body of the companion and disciple of the saint, stood beside, more humbly covered, and there were candles, chandeliers, suspended ostrich eggs, lanterns, and banal European objects, the common furnishings of shrines. I lingered a while with the sombre and thoughtful respect natural before a sight so very human, so impregnated with humanity. I noted the votive offerings on the door, bits of silk and tangled threads, which attested the humility of the estate of multitudes of these poor people--remnants of fetichism; and the strips of painted wood upon the walls of the antechamber, with ordinary Mohammedan designs, rude scrawls of art.

I issued into the court, in the raw snowy air, and crossed the narrow space to the mosque. It was a magnificent portal that rose before me through the falling flakes, raised on its broad steps as on a base, and lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe arch more than twenty feet in air; a high entablature expanded above. The whole surface of the gateway was covered with arabesque work in mosaic faience to the architrave, bearing its dedicatory inscription in beautiful architectural script, and with enamelled tiles above--all in sober colors of white, brown, yellow, and green--and finely wrought in Moorish designs; it was a noble entrance. I passed within its shadows, and found myself in a stately porch, richly ornamented, the lateral walls overlaid, from a lower space left bare and severe, by delicately arcaded work in stucco as far as to the springing of the stalactite ceiling of the cupola, whose central points gave back the reflected snow-lights from below; massive bronze doors, sombre, rich in shadowy tones, filled the fourth side--their plates, riveted to the wood, chiselled and overspread with large, many-pointed stars engaged in an infinite lineal network of that old art, in whose subtility and intricacy and illusory freedom of control the Moorish decorative genius delighted to work. The momentary sight, as my eyes rounded out the full impression of the porch I stood in, was, as it were, a seizure; the novelty--for I had never before seen this art in its own home--the refinement, the harmony relieved on the sense of mass and space, the seclusion, the winter lights without, the cool and sombre peace, combined to make a moment in which memory concentrates itself. It was an Alhambra chamber in which I stood; and the first realizing sight of a new art, like that of a new land, is a vivifying moment, full of infinite possibility, almost of a new life for the artistic instincts. I shall never forget the moment nor the place where the spell of the Andalusian craftsmen first thus seized me in the slowly falling snow.

The way led me on into the arcaded court, and then the hall of prayer, under the arches of its crossing naves, to the ornamented recess sunk in the further wall, the mihrab, which is the Moslem altar and guides the hearts of the people, as they pray, toward Mecca. Its arch rested on two small onyx columns, with high, foliated capitals, exquisite in their romantic kind; and above and about ran the arabesque decoration in plaster and all over the walls of the mosque and the surface of the Moorish arches, whose intervening roofs were ceiled with sunken panels of cognate but diverse design--a beautiful garniture of wandering lineal relief, like the veining of a leaf, netted in geometrical forms, emboldened with lines of cursive script, flowing with conventionalized floral branch and palms, varied, repeated, interlaced. The architectural masses and spaces defined themselves with firmness and breadth in contrast with this richly elaborated surface; there seemed a natural unity between the design and the decoration, as of the forest with its foliage; through all one felt the effect that belongs unfailingly to the mosque--a grand simplicity. I wandered about, for a mosque charms me more than a church; and then I turned to the m?dersah, or college, adjoining its precinct, with its central court lined with scholars' cells and its hall for lectures and prayer beyond. It was pleasing to find a college under the protection of the saint. Sidi bou-M?dyen was himself a scholar, bred at the schools of Seville and Fez; he retired to the anchorite's life on these hills while yet a youth, and being perfected in the friendship of God, admitted to ecstasy and invested with the power of miracle, preached at Baghdat, professed theology, rhetoric, and law at Seville and Cordova, and opened a college of his own on the African shore at Bougie, then a hearth of liberal studies, where his tall figure, his resonant, melodious voice and flowery and fiery eloquence gained him a great name; it was thence he was summoned by the reigning prince of Tlemcen on that last journey on which, nearing the city's "blessed soil," where his divine youth was passed, he died. It was quite fit that a college, as well as a mosque, should be raised and perpetuate his name near his tomb. I left its portal and passed down by the stairway to the court, and gazed up at the minaret, decorated above and wreathed with a frieze of mosaic faience, that lifted its three copper balls at its culmination, dominating the little group of sacred buildings on this hill, so characteristic of the Moslem faith and past; and its slender and guarding beauty was the last sight I saw as I went down through the narrow way and issued into the village road. A tall, grave Arab youth, standing in the snow, offered me a great bunch of violets, which I took; and in the clearing weather I began my walk back through that broad orchard cemetery, with its endless human d?bris under the light fall of snow--arch and mound and wall among the trees, while brief glints of sunshine lightened over it. Cemeteries are usually ugly; but this is one of the very few that I remember with fondness, perhaps because here there was no effort to delay the natural decay of human memory. Death is as natural as life, and here it seemed so; there was no antithesis of the fallen ruin and the blossom springing in the snow, but a tranquil harmony. It is so that I remember it.

Later in the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove with a French gentleman--we were mutually unknown--to the cascades lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a spacious prospect; and the near view in which we drove by a rising serpentine road was finely mountainous--dolomitic crags on the right, and on the left a deep ravine denting the plain whose gently sloping plateau had many a time been a chosen battle-ground. Birds flew about the heights and verdure clothed the scene. The geological formation lends itself to numerous living springs; the upper limestone rests on sandstone, which in turn lies on marl and clay, and the mountain rainfall is thus caught in natural reservoirs, which issue in innumerable outlets in the porous surface. These successive ranges of the extreme North African shore are, in fact, a continuation of the hills of Grenada, with which they form a great half circle, centred at Gibraltar, and with its hollow turned toward the Mediterranean; it is the country of the Moroccan Riff, and the character of the landscape on the African side is precisely the same as in Spain--it is Andalusian scenery. As we drew near our goal, the rocks took on more distinctly the picturesqueness of outline, due to long erosion; they had a look like natural ruins high in air, and opposite, just beyond the cascades, a superb cliff mountain filled the lower sky.

We went by an upper path to the high viaduct of a railroad that crosses the deep glen at that point, and thence commanded the broad expanse of the seaward plain with its near amphitheatre of mountain ranges, and Tlemcen lying below on its headland among its orchards. The reason why it grew up, and stood for centuries, was plain; it is the key of the country. It seemed, and is, a garden city; and as we walked or scrambled down the looped pathway over the terraced face of the hill on that side, and drove on round the circuitous road and back on our track to the city, I was most struck by the endless orchards lying beneath us on the bottom-lands at the foot of the ravine, and others through which we passed; and during all my stay I saw them--orchards of orange, lemon, almond, peach, and pear, and apple trees, and olives, and especially cherries, in profusion everywhere, and among them the constant sound of running waters from the springs.

The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town, was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated, their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above, tipped with a stork's nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful as English abbeys.

I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing, tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering combination of gardens and tanneries--a dilapidated, ruinous way it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of Sidi'l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children, and the touch of a child's story hangs about his legend. When the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian's nightly call for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from the outer darkness: "Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without except the wretched Saint Bonbon." The repeated miracle found the ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall, which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in the shelter of another of those secular trees--a carob, this time; and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal, partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes with the translucent onyx columns of the nave--low columns with Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages ago of the lamp of art.

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the interest of the weekly holiday in town--a rough, hard people, not at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn, smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives, and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone, some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population; the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and children along with it and the people who were necessary to its subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town; and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering, had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however, was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.

The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism, whether classical or heathen, without a violent disturbance of the primeval roots of old religion with its annual flowering of f?tes, its local worships, its sheltering thoughts of protection in the human task-work, its adumbrations of the world of spirits, its ritual toward the good and evil powers; and the religion of Mohammed, sweeping over Africa on the swords of Arab raiders and hordes, subdued the country to the only God, but the Berber soul remained much as it had been, a barbarian soul, still deeply engaged in fetichism, magic, diabolism, primitive emotions, and ancestral tribal practices--superstition; nor was this the first time that the Berber soul had encountered the religion of the foreigner, for pagan temples and Christian churches already stood upon the soil. The faith of Mohammed was more fiercely proselytizing; it was, moreover, of desert and tribal kin; and it imposed its formulas and exterior observance more widely and thoroughly than its predecessors.

The Berber race, nevertheless, was hard-bitted, obstinate, independent; it was scattered over deserts and in mountain fastnesses; its conversion was slow and remained imperfect in spite of much missionary work on the part of the pious proselytizers from the schools of Seville and Fez, who in later generations followed the fiery conquerors to "Koranize" the rude mountaineers, such as those of Kabylie, and settled beside them as daily guides and teachers. Long after the first conquest Christianized Berbers and other dissident groups were to be found here and there, and were tolerated. The elements of primitive savagery held their own in the life of the people at large, just as pagan practice and thought survived in southern Italy, and in the last century were easily to be observed there; the Riff, in particular, was a stronghold of magic; and everywhere beneath the thin Moslem veneer was the old substratum of superstition embedded in an unchanging savage heredity of mood, belief, and social custom. Fetichism persisted in the mental habit of the people, and still shows in their addiction to holy places, magical rites and modes of healing, charms and amulets, and the whole rosary of primitive superstition.

The Berbers were also by nature a Protestant race; their independent spirit quickly availed itself of every sectarian difference, reform or pretension, to make a core of revolt, inside the pale of the religion, against their foreign orthodox masters. It was their way of asserting their nationalism against the Arab domination; it was, essentially, a political manoeuvre. The first great Moslem heresy, Kharedjism, instituted by the followers of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, found the Berber tribes an army flocking to its banners; and, afterward, wherever schism broke out or a pretender arose, there were the Berbers gathered together. In that world they were the opposition. Islam itself, by the example of Mohammed, had shown the way; every tribe had its inspired prophet, sooner or later; and one, at least, among them, the Berghouaia, once most powerful in this region, had its own Koran, specially received in the Berber tongue from the only God, whose prophet in this instance was Saleh. The expectation of the Mahdi, too--the last imam, who, having mysteriously disappeared, shall come again to bring justice on the earth--a tradition that mounted to Mohammed himself, was an incentive to his appearance; and inasmuch as the prediction circulated under the popular form--"the sun shall arise in the west"--the Berbers regarded themselves as the chosen people among whom the Mahdi should arise. Under these conditions there was no lack of Mahdis. One of them, the greatest, Ob??d Allah, the Fat?mide, built that lonely seaport of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, whence he extended his sovereignty over the Moslem dominions from the Egyptian border to the Atlantic, including Sicily, and warred on Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia; but his son had to contend with a prophet pretender, "the man with the ass," who with a great following from the tribes maintained himself for a while, until between his own new-found taste for fine horses and the desire of the tribesmen to return to their own country, his authority and the army melted away together, like snow in the desert. It was a characteristic incident in Berber history.

The natural and various course of such events had ample illustration in the Morocco country about Tlemcen. Edris, the last alleged descendant of Ali, found refuge in this quarter on the Atlantic edge of the Mohammedan world; the Berbers, after their custom of rallying about a promising dissenter, soon had him at their head; his son founded Fez, and the dynasty was prosperous and glorious. Then a cloud appeared in the far south, a cloud of horsemen with the veil--I suppose the blue veil that I associate with the Touaregs, themselves doubtless the best living type of that old horde of desert raiders. They mounted up from the borders of Senegal, gathering masses of foot-followers as they went, preaching a reform of faith and manners, breaking all musical instruments, and cleansing the land; they were fighting Puritans of their age and religion, establishing an austere life and a pure form of the faith. So the princely Edrisides gave place to the princely Almoravides, and their dynasty, too, was prosperous and glorious, and extended its realm into Spain. Then rose the Mahdi. In this instance he was Ibn Toumert, a Berber, lame and ugly, small, copper-colored, sunken-eyed, who had schooled himself at Cordova, and then, like Sidi bou-M?dyen, warmed his enthusiastic and mystic temperament in the oriental fires of Baghdat and Mecca, and had returned along the cities of the African seaboard a reformer, breaking winecasks and violins, and publicly reproaching devout dignitaries for corruption of manners, even the reigning prince of the Almoravides. He was soon the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains; but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion, and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty, like its predecessors prosperous and glorious; and it was he who drove the Normans out of their last stronghold at Mahdia, having extended his power so far, and with his conquering arms brought the Andalusian arts to Tunis. In the four centuries of this brief historic survey--from the eighth to the twelfth--a sectary, a reformation, and a Mahdi were the initial points on which the great changes of the government of the country turned.

It might seem that in this civilization politics was only another form of religion; but, deeply engaged as political changes were in religious phenomena, this is perhaps a superficial view. It may also be maintained that the Berbers took no metaphysical interest in dogma, and found in divergent sects and the incessant agitation of unbridled religious enthusiasm only modes of partisanship and levers of political ambition; their religion was, at least, compatible with a vigorous secular life. On the theatre of history religious events gave to politics their dramatic form, at moments of crisis; but the religious life of the community is not to be found in them, but rather in facts of more usual nature and daily occurrence. The cardinal fact, and one that swallowed up all the others, from this point of view, was the extraordinary development of saint worship; its mortal efflorescence and fossilized deposit, so to speak, was this strata of tombs, koubbas, which cover the region. The Marabout, to give the saint his peculiar designation, was a man bound to religion, and was called the "friend of God"; he was revered in his life, and in his death he became the protector of the locality of his tomb, the intermediary of prayer to Allah, whose personality he obscured and tended to displace in practice. It was natural that the cult of saints should flourish in such a superstitious population; and the country itself, by its inaccessible character--desert and wilderness--lent itself to hermit lives, to types of the religious brooder and mystic, the solitary, with his dreams, illusions, and trances. Religious consecration was also a protection in a country of rapine and disorder, and a source of profit among a credulous people. There was, indeed, in the circumstances everything to favor such an order of men. It appears, also, that in the time of the great exodus of the Moors from Spain, a considerable body of fugitives, learned men, found refuge in the Zaou?a of Saguiet-el-Hamra, a famous monastery in Morocco; and the labor of these "men of God," pious and ardent, who seemed to be almost of another order of beings between mankind and the divinity, is sometimes assigned as the original source of the magnitude of the development of saint worship in these regions. It was they who "Koranized" the tribes, a body of missionary monks, educated, devoted, with the traits of apostolic zeal and ascetic temperament. There were Marabouts long before their day, but to them and their example may be due the fact that the tombs, the holy koubbas, increase toward the west, beyond Algiers and in Morocco, where they "star" the earth.

The lives of the Algerian saints, of which many may be read, do not differ materially from that kind of biography in any religion. Every village has its patron saint, its "master of the country," as he was called, and, as at Tlemcen, one may oust another with the lapse of time. The koubba was a shrine, a local hearth of religious life and practice, and the worship of the shrine was the near and warm fact in daily experience; the veneration of the Marabout appears to hold that place in the hearts of the people where religion is most human. The Marabout himself was of many types, ranging from plain idiocy, as was the case of Sidi bou-Djemaa on the hill above Mansourah, to the mystic height, the "pole of being," as was the case of Sidi bou-M?dyen on the hill above Agadir. He was miracle-worker, thaumaturgist, medicine-man, and might be consulted for all human events, from cattle disease to thief hunting; he was a preacher, a doctor of the law, an agitator, a recluse, a madman, anything out of the common; and the story of the legends runs the whole gamut of friar, anchorite, and fanatic in all religious history. Women, in particular, gathered about him and his shrine. In a region and civilization where there was no effective mastery of authority or reason, given over to individual initiative in a half-barbarized mental condition, such a development was entirely natural; and the landscape itself is the history and mark of it--there is a koubba on every hilltop, in the beds of the streams, on the slopes of the plains--sometimes clumps of them; in every prospect emerges the shining white cube of the holy tomb.

The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmor?sen Ben Zeiy?n, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-W?d, who, with their cousins, the Beni-M?rin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country; they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political state. Yarmor?sen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber, he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy: everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection; the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that Yarmor?sen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and established order such as was known to that civilization. He was a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood the interests of his people, political administration, and the art and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war; he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them back to their own land under escort.

Yarmor?sen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor. Tlemcen was then a double city--Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow's flight between them. Tagrart had been the "camp" of the invading Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the city of the functionaries and government, while the people--the old inhabitants--continued to live in Agadir. Yarmor?sen cared for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon them, saying: "It is enough that God knows." He built other public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand, but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmor?sen made him the first secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory--the magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose, the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved, the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great, Emir of the Moslems, Yarmor?sen Ben Zeiy?n.

He left a line of strong and brilliant rulers who were warriors first of all, for the glorious age of Tlemcen was a period of intense life, and the little city had often to battle for its existence. It suffered reverses; not long after the death of Yarmor?sen a contemporary Arabian traveller thus depicts it: "This city is very beautiful to see, and contains magnificent things; but they are houses without inhabitants, estates without owners, places that no one visits. The clouds with their showers weep for the misfortunes of the town, and the doves on the trees deplore its destiny with their moaning cry." Its recovery, however, must have been rapid, for in the next reign Tachfin found time in the intervals of war to build the Great Basin and a beautiful college, and he reared also the minaret of the great mosque at Algiers. These were the years of the life-and-death struggle with the Beni-M?rin, of which Mansourah is the monument. The great siege had been sustained and the peril beaten back; but now the enemy returned, and from a new Mansourah on the same site they directed their attack so well that they took Tagrart, old Tlemcen--Tachfin, the king, falling in battle. The victor, Abou'l-Hasen, was a worthy conqueror and the founder of the artistic Mansourah, that I have described, with its palace, its mosque, and its columns; he made the new city his royal residence, over against Tagrart as Tagrart had stood over against Agadir, and he adorned the suburbs of the old city; he built the mosque and college of Sidi bou-M?dyen, and his son the mosque of our good Saint Bonbon; he was an art-loving prince and a wide victor, magnificent in royal presents which he exchanged with the Sultan of Egypt, and in all ways glorious; but I remember him best as the conqueror who, after he had swept the coast of Africa to the desert limit, returning, stood on that solitary beach at Mahdia, that so impressed me, and "reflected on the lot of those who had preceded him, men still greater and more powerful on the earth." But this domination of the Beni-M?rin, who after all were cousins, lasted only a score of years; and the line of Yarmor?sen came to its own again, in the person of Abou-Hammou, of the younger branch. He had been born and bred in Andalusia, and was an accomplished prince. He wrote a book upon the art of government for the education of his son, which may be read now in Spanish, and he was a great patron of learning; he built a beautiful college, adorned with marble columns, trees and fountains, for his friend, the sage Abou-ben-Ahmed, attended the first lecture and endowed the institution with sufficient property for its maintenance. He, too, labored in war; but the remarkable trait of these princes of the rude Berber stock is that, notwithstanding the state of instant and long-continued warfare in which they held their lives and power, they were as great builders as warriors, and unceasing in their patronage of learning and the arts. This was the great age of the city in the reigns I have touched on. A score of descendants carried on the rule through another century to the scene of trade, war, and study that Leo the African portrays in the city. He describes the various aspects of this great market of the desert, its buildings, and especially its four classes of citizens, merchants, artisans, soldiers, and students. Of these last he says: "The scholars are very poor and live in colleges in very great wretchedness; but when they come to be doctors, they are given some reader's or notary's office, or they become priests." Alas, the scholar's life! Doubtless it was the same in Yarmor?sen's time. It is a pathetic thing to me to think of those thousands of poor free scholars, through generations, seeking the light as best they could in this university city, for such it was--what a record of self-denial and deprivation, of belief in the highest, of living on the bread of hope! But it was all to end--the old Tlemcen--with the coming of the Turk; he came in the peculiarly atrocious form of the pirate, Aroudj, master of Algiers, who gathered all the young princes of the old blood royal, a numerous band, and drowned them in the Great Basin.

Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times; but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is "a forest of columns" of antique make, and in this it is an example of a general practice. Original building came slowly into being, and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called, the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself, was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out; for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez, Marr?keck, and other points still await thorough examination and study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-M?rin prince in his reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.

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