CONSTANTINE

Constantine is, perhaps, the most deeply stamped city of the West. It is certainly the one which, in site and relief, stands out most strongly of all those that I have seen between the Russian plains and the Atlantic.

Many towns have one great hill or rock to mark them, for most towns have risen round the nucleus of a stronghold; and an isolated rock, if only it has water, is the best choice for early defence. Many towns are peninsular in shape; built on a loop of river and only to be approached by a narrow neck of land. Such are Angoulême, Luxemburg, Poitiers; and many of these peninsular towns have something of a cliff or steep bank defending them for some part of their circuit.

But Constantine is like nothing else on earth that ever I saw. And from the first moment that I saw it, it has stood vividly fixed in my mind, as, I suppose, it will stand in the mind of any man who comes upon it from any side.

To face page 111.]

For the note of Constantine is this: that it is a considerable city, standing quite alone, upon a platform wholly isolated save for the narrowest isthmus-neck of approach. On every side beyond that very narrow neck of approach there fall away from its walls not steep or common cliffs, but tremendous precipices. It is, as it were, one rock as big as a mountain; but a mountain sufficiently levelled upon its upper side against the sky to give foundation for a large town. Fifty or sixty thousand human beings may have lived crowded upon that strange table. Upon the one side the prodigious overhanging rocks look down on a broad valley, I know not how many hundred feet below; upon the other, they plunge into, and equally overhang, a gorge so deep that when you look down into it you think you have seen the river bed at the bottom, when really you have only caught sight of a ledge and a track running half-way between the height and the stream. That stream is the tumbling, yellow torrent which has been called since the Mohammedan conquest ‘El Rhummel,’ that is, ‘The Tawny’; and I think it will give some conception of the gorge and of its depth when I say that the noise of its waters, even in spate, are hardly heard in the night by a man upon the city walls so high above them.

Segovia is of this character—a town on a rock, and so is Castro Giovanni. But neither of them can compare for magnitude of impression with Constantine.

To face page 112.]

The neck, or isthmus, by which the plateau of Constantine is reached, is much narrower than in the parallel instances of the other, similar towns. The rocks which bound Constantine’s almost isolated plateau are everywhere mote precipitous and the plunge to the water-level more profound; and the approach also rises steeply, and the keep of the stronghold, the Kasbah, the Castle, is on the frontier point of it. The prow of that ship rises in a high forecastle, the poop is low.

Enemies storming Constantine have not only had for so many centuries to approach by a very narrow pass; but having once mastered that unique neck of land, they had the task imposed upon them of still fighting uphill all the way, till they came to the last fortification—the heart of the place—at the very extreme of the lifting plateau.

Nevertheless, Constantine (like nearly all these seemingly impregnable places) has been stormed time after time. Indeed, the cities that have boasted many centuries of immunity, or even complete immunity, from conquest, have never been cities apparently inexpugnable. Cities which seem made for eternal defence, these, by the very fact of their challenge, lure armies on: and Constantine, which still looks to the eye all but impregnable, has fallen with every new conquest of Barbary; the last not a century ago; the next to be we know not when.

The city was originally called Cirta—a word which some men think means ‘the Rock’ in a Punic dialect. And Cirta it remained up to the conversion of the West from paganism 1600 years ago, and in popular speech long after that. But the official name was changed by the great Constantine when he had conquered the world with his French and English forces against the Southern and Levantine troops of his pagan rivals; and the new name had so far taken root when the Mohammedan desert men came swarming over all this land that they kept it in a corrupted form, and that its inhabitants call it ‘Ksantina’ to this day. Nevertheless, I know not why, it is always as Cirta that it returns to my mind; perhaps because one sees the word so often in modern works upon ancient North Africa; perhaps because that which most profoundly moved me when I first saw the place, the old tombs, have that name upon them—coming as they do long before the final revolution which established the Catholic faith upon the ruins of the Roman world. Of those old inscriptions above the dead, one still haunts me. I put it into my writing upon North Africa many years ago. It is upon the tomb of a woodland priestess who died young, and for whom her friends thus wrote upon the stone: ‘The Dryads wept.’

To face page 114.]

It will never be Cirta again officially, for the Punic language is dead. And even the Berber language, from which, perhaps, the name derived, still older than the Syrian merchants of Carthage, only carries on a painful life, and will not here oust again (one may surely say) the Semitic or the Latin speech. But it was to Cirta that the Kings of the Berbers returned from before the beginning of history to triumph after victory, or to stand a siege after defeat. It was in Cirta that the great tragedy of Jugurtha was accomplished. It was back to Cirta that the host of native cavalry retired, when Cæsar threatened to achieve, and achieved, his final victory, near the Tunisian shore.

If there is one place in which I could regret the recovery to Roman land and the return of Europe to North Africa (which is justly but a province to Europe) that place is Cirta: Constantine. For it seems to have a sort of savage right to independence, and its tremendous cliffs challenge order and the domination of universal government. It is a great chieftain’s town.

The birds of the air are not yet accustomed to think that Constantine is a human capital, though it has been so now for longer than any man can remember. The vultures love to poise in mid-heaven above the abysses around the city, flying on a level with its highest roofs; and I have known days when, the mist covering the lower ground of the broad valleys to the left and of the gorge to the right, all Constantine seemed like a thing of the air; a city setting out to navigate between earth and sky.

The French have done with such a site what might be predicted of their energy, their bureaucracy, their order; also their itch for change. Upon that narrow neck of approach which the Roman, the Arab, the Turk, the Vandal, the Byzantine generals had forced in turn, they have put up their monument to the great Lamoricière—but I very much prefer his noble tomb in Nantes, although it be but a translation from the Italian. Upon the pedestal of this statue they have the words of the trooper who shouted to his general through the dusk after the first repulse, on the eve of victory: ‘To-morrow the town will be yours, or I shall be dead.’ The French have also put up a statue of Constantine himself, the August, the Victorious. He is just outside the railway station on the far side of the town, on the edge of the gorge whence you look across the deep to the ramparts of the city. But the most characteristic thing they have done is to emphasise this unique isolation and dominance and height in two ways: first by building flying bridges which span the gulf and show its dizziness, next by driving a road of the most fantastic sort all round the circuit of those unclimbable rocks. It should not be so, perhaps, but so it is, that this new highway, cut into the precipice (in some places driven in tunnels and arches through huge boulders, and in other places so poised that from its parapet you look sheer down into the gorge) does not detract from the fearfulness of the place, not even from its majesty. It enhances both.

To face page 116.]

I have, in speaking of other parts of Barbary, asked the question: What will happen? Can it endure? But of Constantine, on the rock of Cirta, I have little doubt. These things are greater than man, and even should man abandon them, it will stand as mighty as ever. What a stone!