Chapter 69Tlemcen — Mansourah — Oran — Blida — Cherchell — TipasaTLEMCEN — MANSOURIA — ORAN — BLIDAH — CHERCHELL — TIPAZA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Then I travelled to Tlemcen on the Moroccan border. It was only 24 hours by railway, there and back. I wanted to study there the flowering of old Arab art in the mosques, badly decayed as they are. And at the place of pilgrimage Sidi Bou Said1. Glorious remains are everywhere there, wonderful onyx columns and onyx stairs, finely ornamented bronze doors and magnificently stuccoed kiblas, prayer niches.
But the crown of everything is the abandoned residence of Mansourah with its well-preserved battlemented walls, against which everywhere the pink flowering almond trees stood out. I took great trouble in Tlemcen to get hold of a bamboo desert pipe for Mabronk.
On the way back I was also in Oran, a splendidly flourishing French city with old remains of mosques. Finest of all is the situation of the city and the gulf with its wonderful woods.
On the way back I got out at Blida as well, famous for its roses and for the monkeys in the Grotte des Singes.
Then I was at Cherchell, the old Caesarea, with its wonderful museum, which houses the statues found on the spot. The famous Venus of Cherchell I had admired in the fine museum of Algiers.
And then I drove to neighbouring Tipasa, the ancient bathing place.
Everywhere along the sea mosaics have been found. A large museum at Tipasa holds very fine pieces. The position of these ancient villas on the sea must have been uniquely beautiful.
From a distance I saw the mysterious “Tomb of the Christian Woman,”2 an unexplored giant tumulus with spiral passages inside. It is supposed to be the tomb of Cleopatra's daughter, the wife of King Tubal of Caesarea.
How infinitely much I found to explore and to get to the bottom of.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Sidi Bou Said — The wrong saint. The pilgrimage place at Tlemcen is Sidi Bou Medine; Sidi Bou Saïd is the village above Carthage, in Tunisia, which she had passed weeks earlier. Everything she describes belongs to the sanctuary of Sidi Bou Medine at El Eubbad above Tlemcen, built around the tomb of the Andalusian mystic Abu Madyan who died in 1198: the mosque of 1339, the medersa beside it, the onyx, and above all the bronze-plated doors, which are exactly what a traveller went there to see. Sidi Bou Saïd is a saint of the Tunisian coast and gives his name to the blue and white village on the cliff by Carthage. She had been in Tunisia in the autumn, and two Sidi Bou somethings, both pilgrimage places, ran together. This project has found no Sidi Bou Saïd at Tlemcen; the identification of what she saw rests on her own description, which fits Sidi Bou Medine and nothing else. (Sidi Bou Medine, Tlemcen)
- ↑“Tomb of the Christian Woman,” — Kbor er Roumia, the royal mausoleum of Mauretania — and the identification she reports is the right one, under a king's name that has come out wrong. The stone drum sixty metres across on the ridge above the coast west of Algiers has been called the Tomb of the Christian Woman since the Middle Ages, from a misread ornament, and it is now generally taken for the mausoleum of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene II — the daughter of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony, married to Juba by Augustus and queen of Mauretania at Caesarea. So her account of it is the standard one of her day and of ours. The king's name, though, stands in the book as Tubal, which is not a form of Juba in any language; both witnesses of the text have it, so it is the printer's or hers, and it is left as set. Unerforscht was also fair in 1914: the first proper excavation of the interior spiral came later. (The Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania)