Chapter 67Kerrata — Chabet el Akhra — Bougie — Djurdjura (Atlas)KERRATA — CHABET EL AKRA — BOUGIE — DJURDJURA (ATLAS)
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
I now travelled north again. At El Kantara Mabronk came springing into the train nimble as a monkey and handed me a little parcel of oranges and dates from his own trees.
Toward evening I passed through the country where Saint Augustine was born1. It could have looked just the same then. Bleak, rolling high-mountain steppe with salt lakes, in which the rose-coloured evening clouds were mirrored. I spent the night in a little town, so as to take the mail coach at four the next morning through the rock pass of Chabet el Akhra — in the “Grande Kabylie.” At first snow still lay everywhere. I sat on the front seat beside the French driver, who showed me everything. At Kerrata, at the entrance to the pass, I broke the journey for a day, to go on through the ravine the next. But that afternoon I walked half way through it on foot. So dreadfully wild is it that it has few equals. Kerrata itself is a genuine Kabyle nest for all its many French buildings. The drive was wild and magnificent beyond all conception. Whenever we stopped I went a stretch on foot. We left the gulf of Djidjelli on our right and turned left, always hard along the sea, on a magnificent engineered road blasted into the rock. In the evening we came to Bougie (after which light is called bougie in French2). I had a glorious view from the window of my room right on the sea. Here at Bougie I stayed some days and took splendid walks on the cliff roads round the winding shores. With Cape Carbon, the last of the many pointed headlands with its galleries and caves blasted through the rock, the high point of this wild romantic nature is surely reached. But I also made mountain trips, to the Col des Singes among others. Unfortunately the season was still far too early to travel further in Kabylia. So I went along the wild high peak of the Djurdjura in the Atlas straight to Algiers, and saved up all the mountain tours for later.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the country where Saint Augustine was born — Augustine was born at Thagaste, now Souk Ahras, which is some two hundred kilometres east of any line she can have been on. She is gesturing at Numidia rather than pointing at a town. The route she describes runs north from Biskra through El Kantara and across the high plateau — the sebkhas around Aïn M'lila and El Guerrah are the salt lakes with the rose clouds in them — and then west toward Sétif for the pass to Bougie. Thagaste lies well to the east of all of it, on the Constantine–Tunis line she is not taking. Augustine's Numidia, on the other hand, is exactly this landscape, and she is not really making a claim about a birthplace: the sentence that follows it is the one she wanted, that the country could have looked the same then. The memoir gives no station names, so the route cannot be pinned down here any closer than that. (Thagaste, now Souk Ahras)
- ↑light is called bougie in French — She is right, and it is the kind of thing she is usually wrong about: French bougie, a candle, is named after Bougie, now Béjaïa, which shipped the wax that Europe made candles from. The town supplied wax to Mediterranean Europe through the Middle Ages in such quantity that the name went with the goods, and the French word for a candle — and then, by extension, for the spark plug of a motor car — is the name of this port. She notes it in a parenthesis with no fuss, which is how she notes everything she happens to know. It is worth flagging because the memoir gets so many derivations and dates wrong: this one is exact. (Béjaïa)