Indeed, the country round Mustapha is a district of singular charm and manifold beauty. The walks and drives are delicious. Great masses of pale white clematis hang in sheets from the trees, cactus and aloe run riot among the glens, sweet scents of oleander float around the deep ravines, delicious perfumes of violets are wafted on every breeze from unseen and unsuspected gardens. Nowhere do I know a landscape so dotted with houses, and nowhere are the houses themselves so individually interesting. The outlook over the bay, the green dells of the foreground, the town on its steep acclivity, the points and headlands, and away above all, in the opposite direction, the snow-clad peaks of the Djurjura, make up a picture that, after all, has few equals or superiors on our latter-day planet.
One of the sights of Mustapha is the Arab cemetery, where once a week the women go to pray and wail, with true Eastern hyperbole, over the graves of their dead relations. By the custom of Islam they are excluded from the mosques and from all overt participation in the public exercises of religion; but these open-air temples not made with hands, even the Prophet himself has never dared to close to them. Ancestor-worship and the veneration of the kindred dead have always borne a large part in the domestic creed of the less civilized Semites, and, like many other traces of heathenism, this antique cult still peeps sturdily through the thin veil of Mohammedan monotheism. Every hillock in the Atlas outliers is crowned by the tiny domed tomb, or koubba, of some local saint; every sacred grove overshadows the relics of some reverend Marabout. Nay, the very oldest forms of Semitic idolatry, the cult of standing stones, of holy trees, and of special high places on the mountain-tops, survive to this day even in the midst of Islam. It is the women in particular who keep alive these last relics of pre-Moslem faith; it is the women that one may see weeping over the narrow graves of their loved ones, praying for the great desire of the Semitic heart, a man-child from Allah, before the sacred tree of their pagan ancestors, or hanging rags and dolls as offerings about the holy grove which encloses the divine spring of pure and hallowed water.
Algiers is thus in many ways a most picturesque winter resort. But it has one great drawback: the climate is moist and the rainfall excessive. Those who go there must not expect the dry desert breeze that renders Luxor and Assiout so wholesome and so unpleasant. Beautiful vegetation means rain and heat. You will get both in Algiers, and a fine Mediterranean tossing on your journey to impress it on your memory.
III
MALAGA
A nearly perfect climate – Continuous existence of thirty centuries – Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra – Systems of irrigation – Vineyards the chief source of wealth – Esparto grass – The famous Cape de Gatt – The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada – Last view of Granada.
Malaga has been very differently described and appreciated. The Arab chroniclers who knew it in the palmy days of the Moorish domination considered it “a most beautiful city, densely peopled, large and most excellent.” Some rose to poetical rhapsody in describing it; they praised it as “the central jewel of a necklace, a land of paradise, the pole star, the diadem of the moon, the forehead of a bewitching beauty unveiled.” A Spanish poet was not less eloquent, and sang of Malaga as “the enchantress, the home of eternal spring, bathed by the soft sea, nestling amidst flowers.” Ford, on the other hand, that prince of guide-book makers, who knew the Spain of his day intimately from end to end, rather despised Malaga. He thought it a fine but purely commercial city, having “few attractions beyond climate, almonds and raisins, and sweet wine.” Malaga has made great strides nevertheless in the fifty-odd years since Ford so wrote of it. While preserving many of the charming characteristics which evoked such high-flown encomiums in the past, it has developed considerably in trade, population, and importance. It grows daily; building is constantly in progress, new streets are added year after year to the town. Its commerce flourishes; its port is filled with shipping which carry off its many manufactures: chocolate, liquorice, porous jars, and clay figures, the iron ores that are smelted on the spot; the multifarious products of its fertile soil, which grows in rich profusion the choicest fruits of the earth: grapes, melons, plantains, guava, quince, Japanese medlars, oranges, lemons, and prickly pears. All the appliances and luxurious aids to comfort known to our latter-day civilization are to be found in Malaga: several theaters, one of them an opera house, clubs, grand hotels, bankers, English doctors, cabs. It rejoices too in an indefeasible and priceless gift, a nearly perfect climate, the driest and balmiest in Southern Europe. Rain falls in Malaga but half a dozen days in the year, and its winter sun would shame that of an English summer. It has a southern aspect, and is sheltered from the north by an imposing range of mountains; its only trouble is the terral or north-west wind, the same disagreeable visitor as that known on the Italian Riviera as the Tramontana, and in the south of France as the Mistral. These climatic advantages have long recommended Malaga as a winter health resort for delicate and consumptive invalids, and an increasingly successful rival to Madeira, Malta, and Algiers. The general view of this city of sunshine, looking westward, to which point it lies open, is pleasing and varied; luxuriant southern vegetation, aloes, palmetto, and palms, fill up the foreground; in the middle distance are the dazzling white façades and towers of the town, the great amphitheater of the bull ring, the tall spire of the Cathedral a very conspicuous object, the whole set off by the dark blue Mediterranean, and the reddish-purple background of the Sierra Bermeja or Vermilion Hills.
There is active enjoyment to be got in and near Malaga as well as the mere negative pleasure of a calm, lazy life amid beautiful scenes. It is an excellent point of departure for interesting excursions. Malaga lies on the fringe of a country full of great memories, and preserving many curious antiquarian remains. It is within easy reach by rail of Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra, whence the ascent of the great southern snowy range, the Sierra Nevada, may be made with pleasurable excitement and a minimum of discomfort. Other towns closely associated with great events may also be visited: Alhama, the mountain key of Granada, whose capture preluded that of the Moorish capital and is enshrined in Byron’s beautiful verse; Ronda, the wildly picturesque town lying in the heart of its own savage hills; Almeria, Antequera, Archidona, all old Moorish towns. By the coast road westward, a two days’ ride, through Estepona and Marbella, little seaside towns bathed by the tideless Mediterranean, Gibraltar may be reached. Inland, a day’s journey, are the baths of Caratraca, delightfully situated in a narrow mountain valley, a cleft of the rugged hill, and famous throughout Spain. The waters are akin to those of Harrogate, and are largely patronized by crowds of the bluest-blooded hidalgos, the most fashionable people, Spaniards from La Corte (Madrid), and all parts of the Peninsula. Yet another series of riding excursions may be made into the wild Alpujarras, a desolate and uncultivated district gemmed with bright oases of verdure, which are best reached by the coast road leading from Malaga through Velez Malaga, Motril to Adra, and which is perhaps the pleasantest route to Granada itself. On one side is the dark-blue sea; on the other, vine-clad hills: this is a land, to use Ford’s words, “overflowing with oil and wine; here is the palm without the desert, the sugar-cane without the slave;” old Moorish castles perched like eagles’ eyries crown the hills; below cluster the spires and towers of churches and convents, hemmed in by the richest vegetation. The whole of this long strip of coast is rich with the alluvial deposits brought down by the mountain torrents from the snowy Sierras above; in spring time, before the summer heats have parched the land, everything flourishes here, the sweet potato, indigo, sugar-cane and vine; masses of wild flowers in innumerable gay colors, the blue iris, the crimson oleander, geraniums, and luxuriant festoons of maidenhair ferns bedeck the landscape around. It is impossible to exaggerate the delights of these riding trips; the traveller relying upon his horse, which carries a modest kit, enjoys a strange sense of independence: he can go on or stop, as he chooses, lengthen or shorten his day’s journey, which takes him perpetually and at the leisurely pace which permits ample observation of the varied views. The scene changes constantly: now he threads a half-dried watercourse, thick with palmetto and gum cistus; now he