commanding the wall which surrounds it.  The Moors did not destroy this.  When Bourmont landed with the French, unlike Charles V., that general disembarked to the westward of Algiers, and at the mouth of a small river; he then marched into the interior, and, fetching a circuit, presented himself on the northern side of the town.  Here the Moors had laid a simple stratagem for the destruction of the invading army.  The natives had conceived they would rush at once to the fort of the Emperor, which they therefore mined, and expected to destroy a number of the enemy by its explosion.  This obvious device of war was easily avoided, and General Bourmont, in possession of the heights, from which Algiers is commanded, had no difficulty in making himself master of the place.  The French are said now to hold their conquests with difficulty, owing to a general commotion among the Moorish chiefs, of whom the Bey was the nominal sovereign.  To make war on these wild tribes would be to incur the disaster of the Emperor Julian; to neglect their aggressions is scarcely possible.

Algiers has at first an air of diminutiveness inferior to its fame in ancient and modern times.  It rises up from the shore like a wedge, composed of a large mass of close-packed white houses, piled as thick on each other as they can stand; white-terraced roofs, and without windows, so the number of its inhabitants must be immense, in comparison to the ground the buildings occupy—­not less, perhaps, than 30,000 men.  Even from the distance we view it, the place has a singular Oriental look, very dear to the imagination.  The country around Algiers is [of] the same hilly description with the ground on which the town is situated—­a bold hilly tract.  The shores of the bay are studded with villas, and exhibit enclosures:  some used for agriculture, some for gardens, one for a mosque, with a cemetery around it.  It is said they are extremely fertile; the first example we have seen of the exuberance of the African soil.  The villas, we are told, belong to the Consular Establishment.  We saw our own, who, if at home, put no remembrance upon us.  Like the Cambridge Professor and the elephant, “We were a paltry beast,” and he would not see us, though we drew within cannon [shot], and our fifty 36-pounders might have attracted some attention.  The Moors showed their old cruelty on a late occasion.  The crews of two foreign vessels having fallen into their hands by shipwreck, they murdered two-thirds of them in cold blood.  There are reports of a large body of French cavalry having shown itself without the town.  It is also reported by Lieutenant Walker,[488] that the Consul hoisted, comme de raison, a British flag at his country house, so our vanity is safe.

We leave Algiers and run along the same kind of heathy, cliffy, barren reach of hills, terminating in high lines of serrated ridges, and scarce showing an atom of cultivation, but where the mouth of a river or a sheltering bay has encouraged the Moors to some species of fortification.