MYSTERIOUS ALGIERS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 11 May 1912, Page 10

MYSTERIOUS ALGIERS.

No foreigner knows what the Arab does; to few has it been given to understand what he thinks; within his house he is as much master in Algiers as he is in Mecca, so long as he avoids the appearance of what the infidel calls evil, and so long as he complies with certain demands, equally foolish and outrageous to him, in respect of registration, vaccination, sanitation, and the like. There is no sharp boundary between the two communities; if you follow a street far enough you pass the imperceptible frontier. "After so many years," says M. Fromentin, "there are no barriers between the two cities except those of suspicion and antipathy existing between the two races, but those suffice to separate them. They touch one another, they live in the closest companionship, but neither meet nor mingle except in the worst of each—the dirt of their gutters and their vices." To anyone who has ever seen for a moment behind the veil of native life there is something almost terrifying about the impenetrable mystery of those silent houses. Things happen there and human nature assumes aspects there, of which the Western world never dreams. I confess to being uneasy when I see careless and ignorant "Westerners—certainly when I see Western women—waJking alone in the native quarters' of Eastern towns. Suppose one of those dark doors should open suddenly, the stranger be dragged quietly within, and the door shut? That stranger might disappear for ever without leaving a single trace. It would be useless to search, unless the authorities were prepared to ransack every house, to its most private apartments, in a whole district, amd to do that would be, if not to provoke a revolt, at least to stir up such dangerous unrest and hostility as to make it impossible. What might happen to that stranger is best not considered. If his or her captors so chose, there would be no more trace than marks the spot where a stone has fallen into the sea. Such an event is of course, very unlikely, but it has horribly happened, and might happen again.—Sir Henry Norman in Scribner.