Every impression of Chellata is silvered over, as with a moonlight of beneficence, by the attentions of Ben-Ali’s house-steward, who rains upon our appetites a shower of most delicious kouskoussu, soothes us with Moorish coffee, and finishes by the politeness of lighting and taking the first whiff of our cigarette—­a bit of courtesy that might be spared, but common here as in parts of Spain.

With daybreak we find the town of Chellata preparing to play its role as a mart or place of industry.  The labor seems at first sight, however, to be confined to the children and the women:  the former lead the flocks out at sunrise to pasture in the mountain, the women make the town ring with their busy work, whether of grinding at the mill, weaving stuff or making graceful vases in pottery.  The men are at work in the fields, from which they return at nightfall, sullen, hardy and silent, in their tattered haiks.  These are never changed among the poor working-people, for the scars of a bornouse are as dignified as those of the body, and are confided with the garment by a father to his son.  The women, as we have remarked before, are in a state of far greater liberty than are the female Arabs, but it is more than anything else the liberty to toil.  Among these mountaineers the wife is a chattel from whom it is permissible to extract all the usefulness possible, and whom it is allowable to sell when a bargain can be struck.  The Kabyle woman’s sole recreation is her errand to the fountain.  This is sometimes situated in the valley, far from the nodding pillar or precipice on which the town is built.  There the traveler finds the good wives talking and laughing together, bending their lively—­sometimes blonde and blue-eyed—­faces together over their jars, and gossiping as in Naples or as in the streets around Notre Dame in Paris.  The Kabyles—­differing therein from the Arabs—­provide a fountain for either sex; and a visit by a man to the women’s fountain is charged, in their singular code of penal fines, “inspired by Allah,” a sum equal to five dollars, or half as much as the theft of an ox.

By the white light of day-dawn we quit Chellata, with the naked crests of the Djurjura printing themselves on the starry vault behind us and the valley below bathed in clouds.  As we descend we seem to waken the white, red-roofed villages with our steps.  The plateaus are gradually enlivened with spreading herds and men going forth to labor.  We skirt the precipice of Azrou-n’hour, crowned with its marabout’s tomb.  The plains at our feet are green and glorious, pearled with white, distant villages.  Opposite the precipice the granite rocks open to let us pass by a narrow portal where formerly the Kabyles used to stand and levy a toll on all travelers.  This straitened gorge, where snow abounds in winter, and which has various narrow fissures, is named the Defile of Thifilkoult:  it connects the highways of several tribes, but is impassable from December