4-23
This morning, after breakfast, I took a short walk around Batna. The weather was cloudy and cool, with waves of drizzle that moistened the facades of faded colonial buildings. Twice, as shopkeepers threw buckets of soapy water over the sidewalk, I nearly had my feet soaked.
The police escort was with us again, and would be with us – as it proved – for as long as we remained in eastern Algeria. Every time we switched jurisdictions, and a new escort replaced the last, a little ritual was placed out. An officer would ask to see our driver’s papers. He would provide them, and they would be perfunctorily scrutinized. Then the papers would be returned, the officer would confer with his predecessor, and off we would go again. “The French left,” Rochdi observed, “but their bureaucracy stayed.” I had been noticing how many other French legacies there were in Algeria – when he spoke with the driver, Rochdi’s Arabic was peppered with French words and phrases. “C’est bon” was especially popular.
Even by the standards of this trip, the drive was long. Thanks to sheer distance and the inefficiencies of our police escort, it took us more than four hours to reach our first destination. To break the tedium, Rochdi played some Algerian music for us. After one dramatic ballad, he noted quietly that the singer had been murdered during the Black Decade. On and on the drive went, broken only by occasional stops at the squat toilets of gas stations. The landscape was obviously fertile, its gentle hills carpeted with wheat. Villages, however, were few and far between. “Few people live here,” Rochdi said, “and there are no jobs.”
We came at last to Madaurus, set beside a desolate-looking village in endless fields of wheat. This was the birthplace of Apuleius, and the place where the young St. Augustine received his primary education. Today, however, the site is almost completely unvisited. As we made our around the ruins, we accumulated an entourage of bored security guards, intrigued by our presence.
After a quick box lunch, devoured while sitting on a Roman tombstone, I hurried ahead of the group to Madaurus’ imposing Byzantine castle, built – like its counterpart in Timgad – by the Byzantine general Solomon. Though never completed, the structure was impressively well-preserved, down to a tunnel connecting the interior of the fort with a nearby well. I clambered through, caking my pant legs with dust, then hurried to rejoin the group.
As usual, Rochdi and I shared guiding duties. He talked about the particulars of the site, and I covered the general context. There was plenty for me to say, whether about Roman education, Roman civic government, or bathing culture. But as the group left the forum, I stayed on to record a detailed video of the castle, which struck me as eminently worthy of YouTube.
A mass of brooding storm clouds was approaching from the west, carried by a cold wind. Near the site exit, as Rochdi explained the workings of a well-preserved olive press, a steady rain began to fall. We hurried back to the van, narrowly avoiding a soaking.
The sun had emerged again by the time we reached Khamissa, ancient Thubursicum. Here, as at Tiddis, I was surprised by the extent and beauty of the site. Beyond the well-preserved theater, we stopped next to a sacred spring, where fish swam in the clear waters of the pool. Then, at the top of a long and steep hill, we were treated to a panorama, swept with shafts of sunlight, over a sea of green hills. The air was heavy with the aroma of lavender. In the valley below, where a herd of cows was grazing, two policemen from our escort were dejectedly following us up the path.
Perhaps the most evocative part of the site was the newer of the city’s two forums, which featured a broken monumental arch and massive bath complex. I lingered there after the rest of the group had left, shooting a video against the setting sun of the ruins and hills beyond. Sunset poured through empty doors and windows, filling the dead city with light. The wind had fallen, and my steps were quiet on the grass.
We drove away through an imposing mountain range, twisting and turning up switchbacks and over passes. As we drove, I talked with Isaiah, who was – I discovered – a rabid fan of sumo wrestling. Among much else, I learned that the sport is now dominated by Mongolians, to the chagrin of purists.
At last, after another long drive behind the lights of our police escort, we reached Annaba. After a glimpse of the basilica of St. Augustine rising through the rain, we followed an avenue bordered by palms (every trunk, in the French fashion, painted white) to our hotel. There, we were astonished to discover the lobby filled with men in suits and women in formal evening wear, being recorded by a full film crew. The Mediterranean Film Festival was in town; and we seemed to be sharing our hotel with half the celebrities in Algeria. “Some of these people,” Rochdi whispered, “are very famous.” We were very briefly mistaken for foreign actors. But when it became clear that we were nothing of the kind, we were shunted into a corner, and remained there for a half-hour as the beautiful people checked in ahead of us.
Eventually, we decided to get dinner in the 14th floor restaurant. The service was reluctant, but the food was excellent. So was the Algerian wine, named for St. Augustine. As we ate, Mary regaled us with tales of the cannibal emperor of the Central African Republic (where she had worked as a state department employee). “During the coup that overthrew him, you never saw so many guns…” When we finished our meal, we discovered that the hotel had issued us the wrong keys. I opened my room’s door to find a very confused man already lying on the bed.
4-24
After a quick breakfast (and a trip to the reception to finally receive the right key for my room), I joined the rest of the group in the rain-lashed parking lot. As the downpour beat on the van windows, we made our way through the colonial port district and out into hills beyond. Rochdi talked about the fate of the Pieds-Noirs – the million French settlers who dominated the country before 1962. With independence, almost all emigrated to France, but a few stayed in the large cities. Some, very elderly now, still remained, or returned as tourists to their former homes. Rochdi recalled bringing a man in his nineties around Annaba, and being told stories of life there in the 1950’s. As the van climbed higher into the hills, he talked about the names of Algeria’s mountains. One range, very evocatively, is known as the Mountains of Mystery. Another peak glories in the name of Monster Mountain.
The rain had stopped by the time we reached Hammam Maskhoutine. The name, Rochdi said, means “Baths of the Damned,” and refers to a local legend about a man who married his sister, and was turned – together with his incestuous bride and the whole wedding party – to stone. The conical travertine mounds that inspired this story, actually formed by percolating hot springs, stand near the entrance of the modern bath complex. At the center is a smoking travertine terrace, reminiscent of Hierapolis in Turkey or Yellowstone’s Mammoth Springs. These springs, the caretaker informed us, deposit up to 10 cm of stone each month.
We walked to the top of the terrace, where the spring water – a few degrees below boiling – ran in smoking rivulets over the white stone. The reek of sulfur filled the air. A few members of our group cooked eggs in the water (eight minutes for a soft boil, ten minutes for hard). A short distance away was a small sauna, filled with the rumble of compressed steam. Light shot through perforated stone skylights, brightening and dimming as steam swirled through the room.
After lunch (where I was introduced to the joys of Algerian Sprite and “Moment” chocolate bars), we continued to Guelma. Although almost all of the town’s Roman remains were levelled by the French during the nineteenth century, a later generation of colonizers rebuilt the ancient theater as a museum of antiquities. It still serves that function today; stele are displayed along the rim of the cavea, and dozens of statues and reliefs in the rooms beside the stage. I was especially intrigued by two images of Atlas, straining to hold up the heavens.
Our police escort on the way back to Annaba was especially assertive, running red lights and forcing vehicles off the road. We had no choice but to follow, a bit sheepishly. On the outskirts of Annaba, we wound up a 900-meter hill to the village Seraidi, poised on the summit of a bluff overlooking the sea. From the whitewashed terraces of the El Mountazah hotel, we were treated to a panorama of rugged hills, hazed by the setting sun. The view over Annaba, on the way back down, was even more striking – the windows of the city flashing, and a storm far out over the sea.
At dinner that evening, back in the 14th floor restaurant, Philip talked about twice following the Hippie Trail from India to Istanbul across Afghanistan and Iran in the early 70’s. Jerry reminisced about pre-Revolutionary Iran, where he stared down the barrel of a loaded gun after a misunderstanding in a bank. Mary, for her part, knew some of the State Department employees taken prisoner during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
4-25
We began the day at Annaba’s Basilica of St. Augustine, built on a hill overlooking the ruins of Hippo at the end of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, the church is still consecrated. We walked through the cool neo-Byzantine interior, passing votive plaques set up by American servicemen after World War II. Behind the altar was an elaborate reliquary, which enshrined one of the saint’s arm bones.
Walking back to the van beneath rustling olive trees, we drove to a lighthouse with sweeping views of Annaba and the sea. The water was a brilliant Aegean turquoise. Then, on to the city center. Rochdi had been perhaps unwisely candid about the crime rate in Annaba – “they stab people here, and rub the knives with garlic to make the cuts scar” – but we encountered no trouble as we walked the twisting streets of the medieval center. We stopped in a tenth-century mosque with dozens of columns from the ruins of Hippo, then continued into the French colonial district, the grand neoclassical buildings sprouting satellite dishes and bird nests of power lines.
After a brief tour of the imposing and slightly dilapidated town hall, we continued to a café, run by a French-Algerian artist whose paintings covered the walls. The owner appeared toward the end of our meal, wearing sunglasses despite the dim inside light, and showed us a few of his favorites.
We spent the afternoon in the ruins of Hippo. The site – marshy and windswept – is sadly neglected. Large-scale excavation ended many decades ago, and most of the visible ruins are being steadily reclaimed by nature. In many buildings, fine mosaic floors are protected only by rotting burlap, and loose tesserae rasp underfoot. Over the desolation loomed the basilica of St. Augustine, high on its hill, outlined by the afternoon sun.
Near the site entrance, we paused next to two elaborate seaside villas, still protected by a half-buried sea wall. (Thanks to silting, the coast is now nearly a mile away.) We stopped again in a large late antique church believed, without any definitive evidence, to have been the basilica in which St. Augustine preached. Perhaps the most evocative ruins were those of the forum, the largest in North Africa after that of Carthage itself. Sheep grazed beneath the colonnades. The marble pavement, almost intact, still bore the proud inscription of the benefactor who paid for its installation.
After some hasty filming, I rejoined the group in the museum. The highlights here are a unique bronze trophy, set up to commemorate Caesar’s victory at Thapsus; and a spectacular late antique mosaic depicting the capture of animals for the arena. I had been especially enthusiastic about the mosaic, and was disappointed to find the evening sun beaming directly onto it through the second-story windows, ruining my pictures.
As the museum closed, we returned to the van and were driven to Annaba’s small airport. Our flight to Algiers was badly delayed, but we passed the time with a convivial box dinner in the terminal. At last, after many security checks and pat-downs, we boarded our flight under a golden full moon.
4-26
I was sick. For the past two days, I had been dealing with a puzzling combination of sore throat, diarrhea, and fever. This morning, all three were worse than ever. But I had a trip to lead, so I forced myself out of bed, drank a liter of water, and joined the group outside the hotel. The weather was sunny and warm – far warmer than anything we had encountered in the mountainous east. Although my fever had fallen, I found myself sweating.
Our first destination was the Royal Mausoleum of Mauritania. Essentially a plus-sized version of the Medrecen, this seems to have been the tomb of Juba II, the Romanized client king who governed what are now western Algeria and coastal Morocco for Augustus. The monument’s scale was impressive, though the effect was somewhat compromised by the arrival of a large group of grade school students.
Onward, then, to Cherchell, Roman Caesarea, Juba’s capital and the political center of Mauritania. The town, little changed since the French left, could easily be in Provence. The main square, with its pollarded, white-trunked trees, felt especially European. We began in the museum, probably the richest (and certainly the best-maintained) collection of antiquities in Algeria. The extensive collection of marble statues (many collected in the baths, museum-style, in late antiquity) included several masterpieces. I was especially impressed by the torso of a cuirassed imperial statue, its breastplate bearing a dazzying array of allegorical reliefs. Less accomplished, but equally interesting, was a famous mosaic showing workers toiling in a vineyard. I also liked a richly-carved marble pilaster, where a tiny spider was carved crawling up between the wreaths of acanthus.
The Roman ruins of Cherchell are scattered and poorly maintained. We stopped at the Roman theater – later converted into an amphitheater – but were unable to take pictures, since a military installation had been built along the edge of the cavea. A short distance away, we visited the Great West Baths. The complex, surrounded by a century-old concrete fence that was itself a ruin, had all the usual components of a large provincial bath. Every part, however, was disintegrating from neglect. The mosaics on the floors were dissolving into scatters of tesserae, and grass had rooted deep into the powdery mortar of the walls. We wandered in ones and twos; and although the roar of traffic was never far away, there was a stillness to the place, half-swallowed by blue of the sea and cloudless sky.
Our final site was Tipasa. While waiting for a table at the restaurant, we visited the small museum, dominated by a mosaic showing a captive Berber family. Lunch was seafood – steaming plates of delicious-looking fish and shrimp that I was too nauseous to eat. When we continued to the ruins, we found that – despite limited work by the French – most of the city remained unexcavated. Overgrown olive groves blanketed the site.
We walked down to the coast, where a stiff wind was driving waves onto the shore and clouds of dust down the paths. The site was crowded with families, strolling along the ancient streets as their children sprinted up and down the colonnades. We explored a series of buildings – the forum, a Christian basilica, a large villa – but everything seemed to blend into the background of fluttering olive leaves and hazy hills. Maybe I was just tired.
I had no semblance of an appetite, and wanted desperately to sleep. But Jerry had arranged for the group to meet Karima, the woman who runs Rochdi’s travel agency for dinner; and I could hardly refuse the invitation. So I looked on, half-asleep, as we drove to embassy row. A tall steel gate opened to admit the van onto a private drive adjoined by artfully-backlit mansions. We were motioned into one of these – a palatial residence with orientalist paintings and a prominent liquor cabinet. The owner, a middle-aged doctor with a slightly dissipated look, welcomed us, and we were greeted warmly by Karima and one of her daughters.
All of us were offered wine. I couldn’t stomach anything besides water, but Philip partook. Perhaps as a result, he was especially animated at dinner (an excellent vegetable soup, followed by an equally accomplished chicken and vegetable dish). Among other things, we learned that he had built a Roman temple in his backyard, and that he swam with a crocodile knife. On the other side of the table, our host and the other guests were speaking among themselves, mostly in French. At one point, the host laughed, talking to one of his friends. “After all,” he said, “aren’t we both French?” The colonized, I thought, had become the colonizers.