Chapter 65Algeria: Constantine — Timgad — El KantaraALGERIEN: KONSTANTINE — TIMGAD — EL KANTARA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Then I travelled, unfortunately past the “Kroumirie1,” to Constantine in Algeria. Very interesting is the old Arab town, and especially the Jewish quarter. But singularly wild and eerie, the narrow rock ravine along which the town is glued on above like a nest in the cliff.
After that it went southward to Batna. It was bitingly cold in December, so that in the hotel I sat right up against the spitting stove. Early the next day I drove out by carriage, by way of the old praetorian camp of Lambese2 with its giant Roman barracks, to Timgad. And here I found once again one of the very great impressions of all my travelling. In an enormous dull-green hollow spreads the all but endless, wholly well-preserved, antique Roman city. Distant, long-drawn snow mountains close this hollow in. From the topmost rows of seats in the theatre the view over these endless runs of street, these countless temples, forums and triumphal arches is nothing short of overwhelming. A ground about four times as large and far better preserved than the ruin-field of Pompeii, in this spacious landscape, as though made and stylised expressly for it. The director of the most interesting and richly furnished museum, in which quite matchless mosaics are to be seen, was so good as to lead me about Timgad for many hours with words of explanation. My enthusiasm knew no bounds, and if I had had my luggage with me I would have stayed longer in the idyllic French hotel with the full view over the ruins. It could not be done, unfortunately, and yet I do regret not having contrived it. Wonderful was a library built in the shape of an ellipse. Very strange on the forum I found a row of white marble latrines. They have remained, across all the ages. But where is the people they were built for?
And on it went, always further south. At the oasis of El Kantara the sand mountains form a kind of desert gate. Here I meant to rest a few days. The view from the terraces of the very good hotel was strange beyond all measure. Tropical splendour and the most rigid rock formations and sand mountains, glowing orange at sunset. An Arab in a white burnous offered me his services as a guide. I made a few remarkable desert excursions with him, and he took me too into the “white village” and the “red village,” in which all the huts are built of red clay. He showed me his cave, in which he had, with his mother and his wife, a broad sleeping-alcove spread with home-woven Arab carpets. This man spoke French and English fluently. (He had been seven years batman to a French captain at Batna and a year in Birmingham, but there, he said, his master had wanted to murder him3.) He implored me to take him to Berlin with me as a servant. Mabronk ben Messand4 was his name. I said that I would think the matter over.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Kroumirie — The Khroumir country of north-west Tunisia, which she is sorry to have missed. Its cork-oak forests were the scenic draw; its name reached Europe as the pretext for taking Tunisia. Meyers, in the edition of her own decade, gives the Khroumirs as a people of some 5,500 in the mountains of north-west Tunisia against the Algerian border, three Arab tribes and one Berber, in a country rich in lead, copper, iron, rock salt, hot springs and magnificent forests, with Aïn Draham and its French garrison as the chief place. It ends the entry flatly: the Khroumirs stood under the Bey of Tunis in name only, and their raids into Algerian territory “gave the pretext in 1881 for the occupation of Tunis by France.” She has spent three chapters travelling through what that occupation produced, and passes the place it started without stopping. (Khroumirie)
- ↑the old praetorian camp of Lambese — Lambaesis was not a praetorian camp. It was the standing fortress of the Third Augustan Legion — but the great building still standing there is called the praetorium, and that is almost certainly where her word comes from. Meyers in her own decade: Lambessa stands on the ruins of ancient Lambaesis, the military capital of Roman Numidia, of which there remain the grand wreckage of the Roman praetorium, now the antiquities museum, and further a temple of Aesculapius, an amphitheatre, triumphal gates, a capitol and a forum; from Trajan to AD 238 it was the headquarters of the Third Augustan Legion and afterwards the civil capital of the province, and it lay uninhabited from the fifth century until Delamare found it again in 1844. The Praetorian Guard was in Rome and never garrisoned Africa. Her giant Roman barracks, on the other hand, are exact — the camp held a full legion. The French had put a convict establishment beside the ruins, which she does not mention. (Lambaesis)
- ↑there, he said, his master had wanted to murder him — The German turns to reported speech at exactly this point — habe ... wollen, not hatte — so that the whole Birmingham story is marked as his and not hers. It is a distinction English makes only by adding words, and she is careful about it inside a parenthesis she could have left out. The subjunctive of indirect speech is one of the few tools German gives a writer for holding a statement at arm's length without arguing with it, and she uses it here on a man she is about to hire. Everything else in the parenthesis stands in the plain indicative: he was seven years a batman, he was a year in Birmingham. Only the attempted murder shifts. She neither endorses it nor calls it a lie, and the reader is told precisely how much of it is testimony.
- ↑Mabronk ben Messand — Probably Mabrouk ben Messaoud, in her spelling. He agrees to come, and seven chapters later he has one of his own. This is his entrance, and it is easy to read past: a guide at an oasis who wants a job. He gets the answer she gives everyone at first, that she will think it over. Chapter 72 of this memoir is called Mabronk, and it is the only chapter in the book named for a servant — she takes him out of the Aurès, and he is with her when the war comes down. Nothing in this project's record shows him under any other name, and no independent trace of him has been looked for yet.