A City by Starlight

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

How subtly interwoven, yet how contradictory, are expectations and realizations ! The Algiers of my “ inward eye “ was one of those fantastic places possible only in the mind of a child, with airy domes of Kubla Khan and blazing with the jewels of the Arabian Nights. A little girl, I watched a beautiful bride draw a quaint cloak over her shining hair, explaining, “ It is a burnous ; it came from Algiers ; ” and the child, hungry for beauty, silently resolved (as children are always resolving), When I am a woman, I will go to Algiers, I will have a burnous, I will be lovely as she is.

I am a woman, I have been to Algiers, but — need I say ? — the burnous of beauty is still as elusive as the flying garment of Daphne to the eager fingers of Apollo.

All through the seasickness and weariness of the long voyage my childish purpose was a staying staff. Even the lovely Azores, stately Gibraltar, and the blue Kabyl mountains were only a prelude for my eager mind. The ship reached Algiers after the night had fallen, and as we steamed across the dark, smooth waves, a broad belt of flashing, sea-reflected lights was the bright sign of a city of magic mystery. Down below the steamer twinkled the lanterns of scores of little, shifting, rocking rowboats, plied by dark Charons who vociferated in a strange tongue and contended for their prey, bumping their crafts into one another, wellnigh swamping the miniature fleet of swinging light and swarthy boatmen.

Venturing into the realm of the unknown, I crept down the ladder-like descent of the ship’s side and sank into a fluctuating barge which was rowed away by two demons of Doré’s Inferno ; and as we floated off, leaving the high white ship, a towering friendly refuge of safety and civilization, we seemed to be floating down to obscure and perilous adventure, for our sombre rowers, when addressed in the tongues of Europe, muttered, “ Turco, Turco,” and swore and cursed in a rabidly strange speech as we bowed our heads to pass under the cordage of other ships in the shadow, and jarred roughly into a great lonely buoy bobbing up and down on the black sheen of the waves. But at last, after strange curves, we touched the pier, and stepped uncertainly ashore to pay our fare to a burly Turkish receiver, who, with the most innocent air, nimbly exchanged my twenty-franc gold piece for a ten-franc one, and then as nimbly forgot the English and French he had been glibly speaking before, to present a stolid Eastern front of dumb incomprehension.

Then came a swift drive up a long curving road to the city set upon a hill, and a chill of disappointment fell upon me at sight of the tall arcades, the cheap cafés, the flaring gas of an ordinary French or Italian town. Where was my visionary city ? But at that moment we dashed past a gleaming white mosque with a great group of gigantic feathery palms, and Bedouins in loose white garments glided noiselessly by, felt-shod like Silence in Ariosto’s fabled Cavern of Sleep. Other shades flitted past in dark vestments wound about their persons in the fashion of the old family-Bible folk. As we climbed the narrow streets there were glimpses into dark interiors, places of Turkish coffee, of bread-making and sweetmeats; disclosing groups of Arabs, dark browed, impassible, contemptuous of childish Western curiosity. In the archway of a lovely Moorish building stood a stately Arab in soft white woolen robes, who led us into a marble gallery crusted with iridescent tiles and glistening mosaics and mystical Arabic inscriptions, where other figures in their allenveloping garments reclined on the pavement, resting after the bath, never even raising the head to note the idle intruders. Two bazaars, goaded to activity by news of the foreign ship in port, were thrown open to reveal recesses rich as the cave of Aladdin.

I was told that in the darkness on the heights was the old Moorish quarter, with dim, crooked ways, and that in the shadows away to the east of the city were hanging gardens, fanned by palm and tamarisk, luxuriant with orange and fig and pomegranate. I might not see them, but as we rowed back through the night the perfume of the words fell upon my fancy, and wrought a sensuous loveliness rarer than any sung by Persian poet ; for the suggestions of closed gates, of unsung songs, of veiled beauty, have a charmed potency beyond that vouchsafed to any actual experience. As we floated away from this city seen only by starlight, memory and imagination worked together and blended what I had dreamed with what I had seen, into a beautiful whole.