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Updated: May 1, 2025
With daybreak we find the town of Chellata preparing to play its rôle as a mart or place of industry. The labor seems at first sight, however, to be confined to the children and the women: the former lead the flocks out at sunrise to pasture in the mountain, the women make the town ring with their busy work, whether of grinding at the mill, weaving stuff or making graceful vases in pottery.
By the white light of day-dawn we quit Chellata, with the naked crests of the Djurjura printing themselves on the starry vault behind us and the valley below bathed in clouds. As we descend we seem to waken the white, red-roofed villages with our steps. The plateaus are gradually enlivened with spreading herds and men going forth to labor.
Every impression of Chellata is silvered over, as with a moonlight of beneficence, by the attentions of Ben-Ali's house-steward, who rains upon our appetites a shower of most delicious kouskoussu, soothes us with Moorish coffee, and finishes by the politeness of lighting and taking the first whiff of our cigarette a bit of courtesy that might be spared, but common here as in parts of Spain.
The ancestors of Ben-Ali-Cherif, remotely descended from Mohammed through one of his sisters, were of Kabylian race, and one of them, settled in Chellata, near Akbou, founded there a prosperous college of the Oriental style.
Truly the Oriental idea of hospitality has its advantages on the side of the obliged party. This haughty ruler, on the simple stress of a letter from a French commandant, has made himself our servant and teased his brain for devices to amuse us. His chief cook precedes us to his birthplace at Chellata, to arrange a sumptuous Arab supper.
Chellata, white and silent, sleeps in the gigantic shadow of the rock Tisibert, and in its graveyard, among the tombs of sacred marabouts, walk the small bald-headed students reciting passages of law or of the Koran.
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