at our bedside.  Bou-Kteun, situated halfway up the “Red Plateau,” guards the pass called the Gates of Iron.  It is an uninteresting village, the official house being alone respectable amidst a town of huts.  As the amin accompanies us a little way outside the burgh, we remark, among the young orchards, stumps of olive and fig trees sawn away at the base.  The amin shows them with sad satire, saying in explanation, “French Roumi:”  it was the Christian French.

That is the term, meaning no compliment, which the Kabyle fits to all Europeans alike.  In vain the Frenchman, writhing with intellectual repugnance, explains that he is not a Christian—­that he is a Voltairean, a creature of reason, an illumine.  The Kabyle continues to call him a Roumi, which will bear to be translated Romanist, being imitated from the word Rome and applied to all Catholics.  These same tribes doubtless called Saint Augustine a Roumi, and he returned the epithet Barbari or Berbers—­a name which the emperors applied with vast contempt to the hordes and mongrel population of exiles and convicts that peopled Mauritania, and which the natives retained until the Arab invasion, when they changed Berber for Kebaile.

The Romans conquered the shores and the plains.  You find none of their ruins among the mountains, where the Berbers, from the Roman occupation to the French, have preserved an independence never completely subdued.

The Kabyle villages are united into federations.  If these federations engage in quarrels—­which is by no means rare—­or if a village is menaced by an enemy, signals are placed in the minarets to appeal to the towns of the same party.  These are easily seen, for all the villages are on hilly crests and visible from a distance.  From the summit of Taourit el Embrank we can count more than twenty of these Kabyle towns, perched on the peaks around us, and separated by profound chasms.

[Illustration:  TOBRIZ, AN ENEMY OF THE GUILLOTINE.]

Every trait points out the distinction between the Kabyles and the surrounding Arabs.  The Arabs seek laziness as a sovereign good; the Kabyles are great artificers.  The Arabs imprison their wives; the Kabyle women are almost as free as our own.  The Kabylian adherence to the Mohammedan faith is but partial, and is variegated by a quantity of superstitions and articles of belief indicating quite another origin.  While the Koran proclaims the law of retaliation, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, the more humane Kabyle law simply exiles the criminal for ever, confiscating his goods to the community.  It is true, the family of a murdered person are expected to pursue the homicide with all the tenacity of a Corsican vendetta, but the tribal laws are kept singularly clean from the ferocity of individual habits.  A strange thing, indicating probably a derivation from times at least as early as Augustine, is that the Kabyle code (a mixture, like all primitive codes, of law and religion) is called