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Updated: May 11, 2025
It was market-day there, and the long street was so full of Kabyles dressed apparently in low-necked woollen bags, of soldiers in uniform, of bold-eyed, scantily-clad children, and of dyed sheep and goats, that the car had to pass at a walk. Nevill bought a good deal of Kabyle jewellery, necklaces and long earrings, or boxes enamelled in crude greens and reds, blues and yellows.
I had the satisfaction of receiving the consul and his belongings on board my ship, and of transferring them to the English frigate Warspite, which had been present as a spectator during all our operations. It was none too soon, for the Arabs and Kabyles from the neighbouring country were already pouring into the town to sack and plunder it.
Two ruined towers are pointed out, called by the Kabyles the Bull's Horns, which in 1847 poured down from their battlements a cataract of fire on Bugeaud's chasseurs d'Orléans, who climbed to take them, singing their favorite army-catch as well as they could for want of breath: As-tu vu la casquette, la casquette, As-tu vu la casquette du Père Bugeaud?
An officer inquired of the man in my presence about Captain Joliette, but he pretended to know nothing, saying he had never heard the name, yet his eyes betrayed his treachery oh, these Kabyles are all desperate fellows, scoundrels of the worst description." "Did you communicate your opinion to the officer?" inquired the count.
The traceable pedigree of any given community becomes very short indeed, and the inquirer contents himself with conceding that the Thibetan sept which arrogates descent from Alexander's Greeks may do so with truth say as much truth as there was in the descent of certain straw-colored Creeks and Choctaws from the followers of De Soto. Unlike the Thibetans, the Kabyles repudiate classic origin.
The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth. It subsists still in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or Kabyles of Africa.
It is repeatedly asserted that the Arabs of Algeria never took a blockhouse. An authentic anecdote was recently related to me of a French civilian keeping a whole tribe in check for two days, by fortifying his house and firing from loop-holes which he made in its walls. Not so the Kabyles. Their genius is defending their little forts, often constructed of loose stones, in their mountain homes.
After the Tafna Treaty he had received a magnificent present of arms from Louis Philippe, King of the French, and, as a man who had subdued, either by arms or by persuasive eloquence, the hardy, high-spirited Kabyles he stood high in the estimation of his Moslem fellow-rulers in Morocco and Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis, and of the ulemas, or bodies of learned doctors in divinity and law, at Alexandria and Mecca, who watched with joy, and with ardent expectation of yet higher things, the career of one who seemed destined to revive the pristine glories of Islam.
A preference for peaceful industry may be said to have always prevailed among the Kabyles when left to themselves. The chronic passion for fighting was rather localized: particular villages were affected by it. That of Taka, for instance, commandingly posted on a height thirty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea, has always been the terror of its neighbors.
There was nothing that did not suggest the East, city or desert, or mountain village of the Kabyles; and the air was loaded with Eastern perfumes, ambergris and musk that blended with each other, and the scent of the black incense sticks brought by caravan from Tombouctou. "Why doesn't some one come in and steal?" asked Stephen, in surprise at seeing the place deserted.
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