Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in style, square, flat-roofed boxes; all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible to insert a pin’s head between them. From within, to him that enters, sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of streets or rows on the general coup d’œil from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in picturesqueness. A spacious port has been constructed, with massive mole and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do honor to Marseilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers. Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways en plein Orient. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs, Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; muffled women in loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped straight out of the “Arabian Nights,” chaffer for centimes at the shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous; all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every instance the old mosques and palaces. The principal square, a broad place lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie. Hard by stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within doors its old Mohammedan mimbar and many curious remains of quaint Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Græco-Roman antiques is oddly installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure white marble are unsurpassed in the Moslem world for their quaintness, their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars. Decoration there is none; the mosque depends for effect entirely on its architectural features and its noble proportions. But the long perspective of these endless aisles, opening out to right and left perpetually as you proceed, strikes the imagination of the beholder with a solemn sense of vastness and mystery. As you pick your way, shoeless, among the loose mats on the floor, through those empty long corridors, between those buttress-like pillars, the soul shrinks within you, awe-struck. The very absence of images or shrines, the simplicity and severity, gives one the true Semitic religious thrill. No gauds or gewgaws here. You feel at once you are in the unseen presence of the Infinite and the Incomprehensible.
The very first time I went into the Great Mosque happened, by good luck, to be the day of a Mohammedan religious festival. Rows and rows of Arabs in white robes filled up the interspaces of the columns, and rose and fell with one accord at certain points of the service. From the dim depths by the niche that looks towards Mecca a voice of some unseen ministrant droned slowly forth loud Arabic prayers or long verses from the Koran. At some invisible signal, now and again, the vast throng of worshippers, all ranged in straight lines at even distances between the endless pillars, prostrated themselves automatically on their faces before Allah, and wailed aloud as if in conscious confession of their own utter unworthiness. The effect was extraordinary, electrical, contagious. No religious service I have ever seen elsewhere seemed to me to possess such a profundity of earnest humiliation, as of man before the actual presence of his Maker. It appeared to one like a chapter of Nehemiah come true again in our epoch. We few intrusive Westerns, standing awe-struck by the door, slunk away, all abashed, from this scene of deep abasement. We had no right to thrust ourselves upon the devotions of these intense Orientals. We felt ourselves out of place. We had put off our shoes, for the place we stood upon was holy ground. But we slunk back to the porch, and put them on again in silence. Outside, we emerged upon the nineteenth century and the world. Yet even so, we had walked some way down the Place de la Régence, among the chattering negro pedlers, before one of us dared to exchange a single word with the other.
If the new town of Algiers is interesting, however, the old town is unique, indescribable, incomprehensible. No map could reproduce it; no clue could unravel it. It climbs and clambers by tortuous lanes and steep staircases up the sheer side of a high hill to the old fortress of the Deys that crowns the summit. Not one gleam of sunshine ever penetrates down those narrow slits between the houses, where two people can just pass abreast, brushing their elbows against the walls, and treading with their feet in the poached filth of the gutter. The dirt that chokes the sides is to the dirt of Italy as the dirt of Italy is to the dirt of Whitechapel. And yet so quaint, so picturesque, so interesting is it all, that even delicate ladies, with the fear of typhoid fever for ever before their eyes, cannot refuse themselves the tremulous joy of visiting it and exploring it over and over again; nay, more, of standing to bargain for old brass-work or Algerian embroidery with keen Arab shopkeepers in its sunless labyrinths. Except the Mooskee at Cairo, indeed, I know no place yet left where you can see Oriental life in perfection as well as the old town of Algiers. For are there not tramways nowadays even in the streets of Damascus? Has not a railway station penetrated the charmed heart of Stamboul? The Frank has done his worst for the lower town of his own building, but the upper town still remains as picturesque, as mysterious, and as insanitary as ever. No Pasteur could clean out those Augean stables.
In those malodorous little alleys, where every prospect pleases and every scent is vile, nobody really walks; veiled figures glide softly as if to inaudible music; ladies, muffled up to their eyes, use those solitary features with great effect upon the casual passer-by; old Moors, in stately robes, emerge with stealthy tread from half-unseen doorways;