The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins. Griffiths Arthur
old homes. Each seems for the moment while you are in it just a dream in pure marble.
I am aware that to describe a true Moorish villa is like describing the flavor of a strawberry; the one must be tasted, the other seen. But still, as the difficulty of a task gives zest to the attempt at surmounting it, I will try my hand at a dangerous word-picture. Most of the Mustapha houses have an outer entrance-court, to which you obtain admission from the road by a plain, and often rather heavy, archway. But, once you have reached the first atrium, or uncovered central court, you have no reason to complain of heaviness or want of decoration. The court-yard is generally paved with parti-colored marble, and contains in its center a Pompeian-looking fountain, whose cool water bubbles over into a shallow tank beneath it. Here reeds and tall arums lift their stately green foliage, and bright pond-blossoms rear on high their crimson heads of bloom. Round the quadrangle runs a covered arcade (one might almost say a cloister) of horse-shoe arches, supported by marble columns, sometimes Græco-Roman antiques, sometimes a little later in date, but admirably imitated from the originals. This outer court is often the most charming feature of the whole house. Here, on sultry days, the ladies of the family sit with their books or their fancy-work; here the lord of the estate smokes his afternoon cigar; here the children play in the shade during the hottest African noon-day. It is the place for the siesta, for the afternoon tea, for the lounge in the cool of the evening, for the joyous sense of the delight of mere living.
From the court-yard a second corridor leads into the house itself, whose center is always occupied by a large square court, like the first in ground-plan, but two-storied and glass-covered. This is the hall, or first reception room, often the principal apartment of the whole house, from which the other rooms open out in every direction. Usually the ground-floor of the hall has an open arcade, supporting a sort of balcony or gallery above, which runs right round the first floor on top of it. This balcony is itself arcaded; but instead of the arches being left open the whole way up, they are filled in for the first few feet from the floor with a charming balustrade of carved Cairene woodwork. Imagine such a court, ringed round with string-courses of old Oriental tiles, and decorated with a profusion of fine pottery and native brasswork, and you may form to yourself some faint mental picture of the common remodeled Algerian villa. It makes one envious again to remember how many happy days one has spent in some such charming retreats, homes where all the culture and artistic taste of the West have been added to all the exquisite decorative instinct and insight of the Oriental architect.
Nor are fair outlooks wanting. From many points of view on the Mustapha Hill the prospect is among the most charming in the western Mediterranean. Sir Lambert Playfair, indeed, the learned and genial British Consul-General whose admirable works on Algeria have been the delight of every tourist who visits that beautiful country, is fond of saying that the two finest views on the Inland Sea are, first, that from the Greek Theater at Taormina, and, second, that from his own dining-room windows on the hill-top at El Biar. This is very strong praise, and it comes from the author of a handbook to the Mediterranean who has seen that sea in all aspects, from Gibralta to Syria; yet I fancy it is too high, especially when one considers that among the excluded scenes must be put Naples, Sorrento, Amalfi, Palermo, and the long stretch of Venice as seen from the Lido. I would myself even rank the outlook on Monaco from the slopes of Cap Martin, and the glorious panorama of Nice and the Maritime Alps from the Lighthouse Hill at Antibes, above any picture to be seen from the northern spurs of the Sahel. Let us be just to Piræus before we are generous to El Biar. But all this is, after all, a mere matter of taste, and no lover of the picturesque would at any rate deny that the Bay of Algiers, as viewed from the Mustapha Hill, ranks deservedly high among the most beautiful sights of the Mediterranean. And when the sunset lights up in rosy tints the white mole and the marble town, the resulting scene is sometimes one of almost fairy-like splendor.
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