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These were like maritime roadsteads where boats might anchor completely concealed from view. There the galleys of the Berbers had often hidden, in order to fall unexpectedly upon a nearby village. In one of these caves, on a rocky pedestal, Ulysses often saw a heap of bundles. "Well, now, what of it!" expostulated the doctor. "Every man must gain his living as best he can."
The Turks are such an inferior race to the Berbers and Arabs that it is no wonder that they are despised by the natives. They appear much more out of place than do the Europeans, who remain, as in Morocco, a class by themselves. To see a Turk side by side with a white-robed native at prayer in a mosque is too ridiculous, and to see him eating like a wild man of the woods!
"I crave your pardon, gallant Captain. In my camp the night before, I prepared my Berbers for the meeting." "By the bones of the saints, Count Corti, thou dost confuse me the more! With such odds against thee, what preparations were at thy command?" "'There was never amulet like a grain of wit in a purse under thy cap. Good Captain, the saying is not worse of having proceeded from a Persian.
Carthage paid, even down to the times of its prosperity, a ground-rent for the space occupied by the city to the native Berbers, the tribe of the Maxyes or Maxitani; and although the sea and the desert sufficiently protected the city from any assault of the eastern powers, Carthage appears to have recognized although but nominally the supremacy of the great- king, and to have paid tribute to him occasionally, in order to secure its commercial communications with Tyre and the East.
These Berbers, the original Barbarians, known to the Romans and Greeks as such before the Arab was heard of outside Arabia, are at once the greatest and the most interesting nation, or rather race, of the whole of Africa.
The fortunes of war vacillated in the following year, till in May, 1837, 'Abd-el-Kādir triumphantly defeated a French army in the plain of the Metija. A fresh expedition of twenty thousand met with no better success, for Arabs and Berbers are hard to trap, and 'Abd-el-Kādir, whose strategy evoked the admiration of the Duke of Wellington, was for a time able to baffle all the marshals of France.
I carried with me a vivid impression of Dár el Baida, of the market-place with its varied goods, and yet more varied people, the white Arabs, the darker Berbers, the black slaves from the Soudan and the Draa.
Assisted by these traits of indigenous manners, we can call to mind ogres and pagans who represent an ancient population, or, more exactly, the sectarians of an ancient religion like the Paganism or the Christianity which was maintained on some points of Northern Africa, with the Berbers, until the eleventh century A.D. Fabulous features from the Arabs have slipped into the descriptions of the Djohala, mingled with the confused souvenirs of mythological beings belonging to paganism before the advent of Christianity.
In the next year the Lagos Company sent a great expedition of twenty-six vessels which discovered the Senegal River and brought back many natives taken in raids thereabout; and by 1448 nearly a thousand captives had been carried to Portugal. Some of these were Moorish Berbers, some negroes, but most were probably Jolofs from the Senegal, a warlike people of mixed ancestry.
The officers, being assured there were no Moors on guard at the batteries, and that the Berbers were wholly occupied in plundering the city, promptly and generously sent off a boat with Mr. Lucas to the rescue of the alarmed and trembling fugitives.
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