“God will send me others,” said young Abd-el-Kader.

[Illustration:  AN AGHA OF KABYLIA HUNTING WITH THE FALCON.]

The tourist remembers the trinity-portrait of him, by Maxime David, in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, where his face, framed in its white hood, is seen in full, in profile and in three-quarters view.  The visage is aquiline, olive-tinted, refined; but we can describe it more authentically in the terms of one of his enemies, Lieutenant de France, who became his prisoner in 1836, and who followed his movements for five months, taking down his daily talk and habits like a Boswell, but leaving nothing in his narrative that is not to the sultan’s credit.  Of Abd-el-Kader at twenty-eight the lieutenant says:  “His face is long and deadly pale, his large black eyes are soft and languishing, his mouth small and delicate, and his nose rather aquiline:  his beard is thin, but jet-black, and he wears a small moustache, which gives a martial character to his soft, delicate face, and becomes him vastly.  His hands are small and exquisitely formed, and his feet equally beautiful.”  Every interlocutor leaves a similar portrait, impressing upon the mind the image of some warrior-saint of the Middle Ages, born too late, and beating out his noble fanaticism against our century of machines and chicanery.

[Illustration:  THE DISCIPLES OF TOFAIL.]

Himself, according to some accounts, a Berber, the young marabout early saw the importance of inducing the Kabyles to join with him and his Arabs in expelling the French.  He affiliated himself with the religious order of Ben-abd-er-Rhaman, a saint whose tomb is one of the sacred places of Kabylia; and it is certain that the college of this order furnished him succor in men and money.  He visited the Kabyles in their rock-built villages, casting aside his military pomp and coming among them as a simple pilgrim.  If the Kabyles had received him better, he could have shown a stouter front to the enemy.  But the mountain Berbers, utterly unused to co-operation and subordination, met him with surprise and distrust.

[Illustration:  A KOUBBA, OR MARABOUT’S TOMB.]

At least, such is the account of General Daumas:  in this interesting relation we are forced to depend on the French.  Daumas, amply provided with documents, letters and evidence, has arranged in his work on La Grande Kabylie the principal evidence we possess of this epoch of Abd-el-Kader’s life.

The chief appeared in 1836 at Bordj-Boghni and at Si-Ali-ou-Moussa among the mountains.  The Kabyle tribes visited him in multitudes.  He addressed them at the door of his tent, and these rude mountaineers found themselves face to face with that saintly sallow visage, those long gazelle eyes and the prophetic countenance framed in its apostolic beard.  Raising his arms in the attitude of Raphael’s Paul at Lystra, he said simply, “I am the thorn which Allah has placed in the eye of the Franks.  And if you will help me I will send them weeping into the sea.”