So Vast the Prison (17 page)

In the Casbah, an old Byzantine church is almost intact. As for the famous bridge, when one enters through Bab el-Kantara, it is visible with its two rows of vaults and the “remarkable structure,” about which Edrisi had already exclaimed. Our two tourists resume their calculations, locating various sites, then Sir Temple admires a statue of a woman with two elephants that Shaw had drawn. With two hands she lifts up to her belt the cape that she is wrapped in; the dress underneath fits closely. She is nodding her head—the features of her face are erased—to one side: her braided hair is down to her shoulders. At her feet there are little elephants that have lost their trunks.

The beautiful unknown woman in stone materializes: an immutable pagan idol, preserved because it was placed down low, set way down against the ravine. Although rage and death on the move spread out now above her head in these October days, the two foreigners, the Englishman and the Dane, have come only for the past. These men are only concerned with her, the unknown woman whose face has been eroded by the centuries, foreshadowing for them what if not destruction from now on?

4
DESTRUCTION
 

THE DESTRUCTION OF
Cirta’s freedom sounded the deathknell for Algerian independence, for any last bursts it made after 1830.

The bey Ahmed, who took the resistance off into the Aurès Mountains, becomes the head of an underground movement and will hold on for ten years more. To the west the emir Abd el-Kader continues to wage war; he will not be conquered until nine years later.

The year of Constantine’s fall, the son of Hamdane Khodja, an important dignitary from Algiers, is in Paris. His reaction to the news of the disaster is to write an account of a journey he made earlier with his father who had to cross Kabylia—still undefeated—to meet with the bey Ahmed. During the negotiations with the tribal chiefs that were necessary in order to gain
anaia
, that is, the host’s protection—the young Ali Effendi served as interpreter for his father in the Berber language.

Ali ben Hamdane Khodja had his text translated into French, and printed, by the orientalist de Saulcy. The latter had known Hamdane
Khodja, who spoke English and French fluently as well as Arabic and Turkish and had correspondents in several capitals of Europe. Hamdane Khodja tried in vain, after the surrender of the
dey
of Algiers, to save what could be saved, but rapidly became the leader of a peaceful opposition—a position that was hardly tenable. He was attacked for his wealth; he was pushed to the limit.

He came to Paris, where he had plenty of friends who supported a French presence that would respect individual Algerian freedoms. He wrote a book,
Le Miroir
, in which he denounced the encroachments by French soldiers in Algiers, thus becoming the first essayist on the subject of this servitude now beginning.

In 1836 he throws in the towel. Leaving his son in Paris and escorted by sixty friends and relations, he takes the road to Constantinople, where the sultan provides him with a pension. There he hopes to use Ottoman power to sway the politics of the Maghreb, not abandoning Ahmed Bey to his own forces alone. He corresponds with the latter in the name of the sultan, writing in code.

After his defeat and the conquest of his city, Ahmed Bey, in a letter to the sultan demanded that cannons and four thousand soldiers be sent. Now here in Constantinople, faced with the unrest breaking out in the Tripolitaine, Ahmed Bey is expected to be named the pasha of Libya. But the Turkish powers go back and forth for a long time, despite the warnings of Hamdane Khodja: “The French,” he said, “are going to occupy Constantine; next they will infiltrate Tunis and Tripoli and carry their ambitions all the way into Egypt, I have no doubts. Tomorrow it will be too late!”

The statue of the Constantine woman prefigured another destruction for Lord Temple and Falbe—in such a rush were they to get to the ruins of Carthage, there was so much to do in this year of 1837!

Of course, ever since Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt, there had been treasure there, inexhaustible treasure, giving rise to trafficking, theft and irreparable loss: Ancient objects (including mummies and papyruses) are easily negotiable and enrich the intermediaries. Rivalries become intense among states and consular agents in Cairo.

The consul general of England in Tunis, Thomas Reade, the same man who welcomed Lord Temple and his friends in 1833, sees by Temple’s second trip that there is increased interest in Carthaginian archeology. Knowing the extent to which his colleagues from every nation are rivals in this lucrative commerce in Egypt, he goes for the bilingual stele at Dougga. He decides to take it and sell it to the British Museum. He counts on getting at least fifteen hundred pounds for it.

In 1842 he goes to Dougga and hires there a team of workers to pull down the monument and bring back the stele! He has probably obtained some authorization from an official of the bey’s government, it being a well-known fact that the bureaucracies of Muslim countries are more often than not indifferent to this remembering of antiquity … Reade has the entire façade bearing the engraved stele demolished, and the stele is sawed in two to make it easier to transport.

The local workers hired on the spot lack the technical means to detach this stele carefully. The other blocks of stone stacked on each other should have been pulled away to get to the block on which the inscription fit. They throw down the top blocks by lifting them with heavy levers. Thus the bilingual stele carried off to Tunis leaves a field full of ruins behind it!

A French visitor, Victor Guérin, who was there more than ten years later, described the scene: “In the jumbled heap I caught sight of the trunk of a statue of a winged woman (but with no head, arms or legs). On one of the remaining blocks a chariot pulled by four horses can be seen; the driver of it is mutilated, as is a second statue of a winged woman …”

Earlier an Englishman, Nathan Davis, had even more fiercely denounced “the shameless demolition” resulting from “the avarice of Europeans driven only by money matters.” He, too, described this mausoleum broken apart “barbarously,” and called his compatriot’s plundering a “crime.”

In a sad irony he reports that the consul indeed sold the stele to the British Museum, but not for the fifteen hundred pounds he had counted on—for a mere five pounds!

Time goes by and Tunisia is now a protectorate of French.

The field of ruins, Punic as well as Roman, becomes an area reserved for French archeologists. One of them, C. L. Poinsot, attempts to reconstruct the cenotaph of Dougga, making use of the sketches made in 1765 by J. Bruce in his travels.

Shortly after 1900 they begin the careful work of reconstructing the monument, making initial use of the stones still there, reconstituting the sculptures of the winged women, the quadriga, and the chariot driver. In 1910, with the exception of the bilingual inscription, which is still in London, the mausoleum is once again standing, almost intact, but stripped of its double writing.

Fifty years later C. L. Poinsot will devote himself to studying the papers of Count Borgia, forgotten in Leyden. Reconstituting a portion of the stele’s secret, he will prove that at Dougga there were, in fact, two steles, and that the second—probably the most important—of these had been partially erased.

Thus, even if the funerary monument has regained its hybrid—half Greek, half oriental—elegance, some mystery still seems to hang over Dougga, over the lapidary writing, the words in stone that were desecrated and carried off but also those words, victims of erosion, that have almost entirely vanished.

5
THE SECRET
 

THE WRITING AT DOUGGA
began to raise interesting questions starting with the scholar Gésénius, who outlines several conjectures after learning about it through the copy published in 1835 by Lord Temple. In Paris, de Saulcy does detailed research, then Honegger visits the site, but it is Célestin Judas, especially, who, during the years from 1846 through the 1860s, clarifies the meaning of the seven lines in Libyan and succeeds in listing the twenty-three characters of the alphabet.

A work begun at the end of the preceding century had just appeared. The author, Venture de Paradis, had compiled a French-Berber dictionary that was published, with a preface by Champollion, in 1838. Célestin Judas will base his work on numerous remarks made by Venture de Paradis, who had persistently questioned the Kabylians of Algeria about the structure of their dialect.

Throughout the nineteenth century all the questions asked about the stele of Dougga focused on some vanished alphabet, some lost
language—one as ancient as the elegant figures of African princes who paid visits to the pharaohs and were melancholically rendered on Egyptian frescos.

Paleographers, following the example of Champollian, felt they were penetrating into a cavern of images and scripts that were indeed exciting but from the past.

Now comes a trickle of doubt: What if this “old African,” which in North Africa the indigenous people themselves consider to be merely an oral dialect, what if this “barbarous” speech, before being accepted as “Berber,” used to be written? What if it was a written language, was the same as Libyan, whose shadows loom throughout the seven centuries of Carthaginian power, yes, what if this archaic alphabet had preceded the Phoenician culture and survived long after it?

Then suppose this strange writing came alive, was a voice in the present, was spoken out loud, was sung. Suppose this so-called dialect of men who spoke by turn Punic with Carthage, Latin with the Romans and the romanized until Augustine’s time, and Greek, then Arab for thirteen centuries, continued, generation after generation, kept alive for endogamic use (mainly with their mothers, their wives, and their daughters). Suppose this speech, this language—the one in which Jugurtha expressed his insurmountable energy as he fought and died, the very one Masinissa spoke throughout his sixty-year reign—went back even farther! Suppose, even longer ago, the Barbarians/Berbers, the great pharaohs’ guests and sometimes their friends or rivals, mentioned by Herodotus of Halicarnassus—suppose those ancestors, who apparently sometimes surrendered to peoples from the east or north and sometimes rose up, struggling until they were put down—yes, suppose these first men and these first women had written this alphabet on skins, shards, stone, on their horses’ and camels’ flanks—same signs, same symbols—which then
became indecipherable until the mid-nineteenth century, in short until a stele with seven lines on it was carried to the British Museum, leaving in its wake a field of broken statues and felled columns.

And leaving scholars in their studies to seek and study and listen and suppose … always with the thought that they are on a quest for some lost meaning—underground echoes.

And yet the writing was alive. Its sonority, its music, its rhythms still reeled on around them, around the travelers and their followers going back and forth between Dougga and Cirta. It traveled into conquered Constantine and onto the Kabylian mountains, still rebellious fifteen years after the fall of Constantine, and then, beyond the dunes and sands of the Sahara, it went all the way to the heart of the desert itself! For there, from the Fezzan to Mauritania, among the nomads who thought they had forgotten the Numidians, Libyan letters from earlier times have stealthily slipped in ever since. Perhaps they came in the days of the Garamantes—who gave up their horses for the newly introduced camels, who let the herds of ostriches disappear from their lands until only their silhouettes, in a dancing, animated crowd, remained, engraved on the walls of caves a thousand years old.

The Libyan letters, however they did it, escaped all together, curled up as far away as possible in the reddish dunes as if propelled by some immobile god. They went off to hide in the palms of noble women—the queens, the wives, the lovers of the Veiled Men.

The writing of the sun, fertile secret of the past!

This lost writing was resurrected in various stages over the course of several decades and once more with an Anglo-French rivalry as their basis.