The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873, by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873

Author: Various

Release Date: August 26, 2007 [EBook #22402]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

MARCH, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. B.
LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

[Illustration: ALGIERS FROM THE SEA.]

A fact need not be a fixed fact to be a very positive one; and Kabylia,
a region to whose outline no geographer could give precision, has long
existed as the most uncomfortable reality in colonial France.
Irreconcilable Kabylia, hovering as a sort of thunderous cloudland among
the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, is respected for a capacity it has of
rolling out storms of desperate warriors. These troops disgust and
confound the French by making every hut and house a fortress: like the
clansmen of Roderick Dhu, they lurk behind the bushes, animating each
tree or shrub with a preposterous gun charged with a badly-moulded
bullet. The Kabyle, when excited to battle, goes to his death as
carelessly as to his breakfast: his saint or marabout has promised him
an immediate heaven, without the critical formality of a judgment-day.
He fights with more than feudal faithfulness and with undiverted
tenacity. He is in his nature unconquerable. So that the French, though
they have riddled this thunder-cloud of a Kabylia with their shot,
seamed it through and through with military roads, and established a
beautiful _fort national_ right in the middle of it, on the plateau of
Souk-el-Arba, possess it to-day about as thoroughly as we Americans