CHERCHELL, WHICH IS CÆSAREA

I have heard all my life that if you find a good thing you should keep it to yourself, and I have heard that piece of advice particularly emphasised in the matter of places. I have found it to be false. Other people do not believe you when you sing the praises of a place, or if they believe you they do not take the trouble to follow in your footsteps. Or if they do, they ate of that kind which is worthy of the place and does not spoil it. At any rate, I will praise Cherchell. I did not know that in this strange land of Africa, with its meeting of burning desert and snow, its high lands and its too biting sun, there could be so charming, so secluded, so recollected a corner of foliage and sea.

From the first time I saw it years ago (and I did not on that occasion go into the town itself) until my visit of the other day, the memory of that coast has remained with me. When you get out of the suburbs of Algiers (less sordid on this eastern side than are commonly the suburbs of a great town) you follow the road along the coast, having upon your left the hills of the coast range and upon your right the shining of the Mediterranean.

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It is a belt of great wealth; its habitations dotted here and there, few villages and no towns; the road excellent and well served. Some half-way along it there rises upon your left on one of the hills that huge mausoleum of which no man knows the origin, but which may well be the tomb of the Numidian kings before the Romans came. The Arabs call it by a strange name: ‘The Tomb of the Christian Woman.’ As you reach its neighbourhood there rises up before you, projecting into the sea, a mountain which had upon either side of it two very ancient and famous towns, Tipasa and Cæsarea, both of them great merchant towns, with harbours built by the Romans, each of them playing its great part in history; each of them wholly extinguished through the irruption of the Mohammedan conquest; each of them re-erected as modern, carefully laid-out, large villages rather than towns, after the re-entry of Europe during the last eighty years.

Of the two Cæsarea (the name of which has changed into Cherchell) is the more remarkable. It is here that the last of the half-Nubian kings built his court, with that queen of his who was called ‘The Moon,’ Selene. She was the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra.

In its great days the town covered a mile on every side. Its walls ran up almost to the summit of the hills and down to the sea-coast, to the east and west of the great haven; it was a white mass of porticoes and noble courts, temples, colonnades, statues and palaces of marble; the chief town of Africa, and loaded with all that the revenue of a nation could purchase from the artists of the Eastern Sea, from the Greeks of the Islands and of Egypt. One cannot approach a site of that kind without some movement of the heart.

The last of the way lies through a broad and very fertile valley, with that high seaward mountain looking down upon it from the east, and with another high line of peaks enclosing it upon the west. The valley floor is a garden of vines and wheat and olive, and the great French road goes through it, ruled straight after the French fashion, and with its avenue of trees on either side. But until one is quite close to Cherchell there is no sign of the place, for it lies hidden behind a lesser promontory round which the road turns, immediately before entering the western gate of the place.

CHURCH.

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The first sign that one is coming to what was the capital of all that wealthy land is the high ruin of a gateway which a man with the same name as my own (I was pleased to see!) had put up, something less than two thousand years ago, to be the monument of his wealth and an introduction to his country house. The villa has gone for ever and its mansion; but this gateway remains with its inscription. Next, as one comes still nearer Cherchell there appear upon the left of the hills the ruined arches of the great aqueduct which nourished the town. Lastly, one turns sharply round the corner of a low promontory and one sees the simple modern houses of the place and some trees in the field outside the walls.

The natural charm of it lies in that marriage of trees with salt water, which is so rare in landscape, and which, when one can find it, has an effect like nothing else; perhaps from its strangeness. Everywhere in and near Cherchell you look down upon the sea through a vista of trees. The _Mail_, or French Central place, of the village is a deep grove of trees which look astonishingly old, seeing that the French could not have planted them more than a long lifetime ago. They are gnarled thick trunks of the Bellombra, and you look through, under their branches, at the sea beyond—as you might look through the columns of a temple with doors wide open at the end. When you go through this grove and come at the end to the edge of the steep overlooking the harbour—where everything is neat, orderly and clean (for Cherchell is a little model of what such places should be)—and when you look down on the transparent water below, you see sundry stones drowned therein, outside the port; in the shape of one of these, at least, I thought to recognise a column rolled down from some temple or portico. But what was more remarkable was a long, darkish line standing out from the shore, and this when I had carefully noted it, I found to be the foundation of the great breakwater which antiquity had built for the harbour of so packed and wealthy a city. The modern harbour is but a fraction of what that great haven was, and it is strange to consider how completely so much greatness has disappeared, and to note the hint of it in that dark line—out seawards.

Here, as everywhere, the French have set themselves to impress upon Africa the memory of its high Roman past and to call back the dead to life.

The ruins of the theatre they have not, indeed, restored as they have restored those of Guelma; but they have disembarrassed the ruins of the rubbish which covered them, and they have displayed the monument to the passer-by. There can one stand, upon the square stones of the highest circle, and comprise in the same glance Rome and Islam. Right opposite the line of the stage the Arab baths mark their violent contrast with the Corinthian columns.

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It is so throughout the little town. The columns have been set up again upon their base (the chief of them in the midst of the market-place), and a whole wealth of portrait busts, inscriptions, trophies, statues of the gods, has been collected and is being added to yearly from the fields around.

What most moved me in this was the fine mutilated, headless statue of some Emperor, still standing one-legged to rebuke the decay of the world which he had ruled. But, indeed, Cherchell is so full of the past that a man might spend a month there learning more and more of that silent doom whereby states far nobler and greater than our own must go to sleep at last, and die in their sleep.

I trust that I may return to Cherchell and fulfil that mood, looking from its vineyards, through its groves, down to its unchanging sea.