So Vast the Prison (16 page)

In December 1815 Count Borgia and Humbert decide to make an excursion to study the origins of the aqueduct of Carthage in the Zaghouan plateau. Together they make discoveries that escaped several travelers and explorers of the previous century (Peysonnel, Shaw, Bruce, and so on). Not long after, when his Dutch friend manages to join the entourage of Mohammed Khodja, one of the bey’s ministers, Count Borgia undertakes a journey to Le Kef with them. On their return he stops and spends four days in Dougga.

Was he, like the Provençal slave before him, struck with passionate amazement so that he spent his days there drawing everything in sight? As soon as he is back in Tunis, he writes a long letter describing everything he saw, specifically the strange three-story mausoleum. While there, he made numerous pencil sketches, some of which he later traces over with ink. He methodically reproduces each of the monument’s façades as well as numerous plans of the inner chambers on all three levels. Finally, he copies down the bilingual inscription—in the notes he wrote in Italian to accompany the reproduction he mentions two types of lettering, mistakenly referring to them as
punico e punico-ispanico
.

Thus it is not the mystery of the unknown writing that strikes him, although he senses something strange about the cenotaph, which he attributes to its architectural style, a mixture of Hellenistic inspiration and oriental archaism. He reproduces the Ionic columns with their capitals whose volutes are in the shape of lotus blossoms, and on each level the horizontal stone layer with the architrave and an Egyptian neck. He asks himself questions about the funerary functions of the whole: Had there been small funeral urns in the empty niches of the inner chambers?

Borgia spends all of 1816 exploring other sites in coastal and
northern Tunisia; his accounts are regularly sent to the countess, where they are read to a circle of scholars and enthusiasts. In Naples, Borgia the military man is forgotten in favor of Borgia the archeologist. He finally returns to his country in January 1817 with the intention of publishing as quickly as possible the chronicle of his wonderful journey that so inspired him. A well-known engraver is already at work on a series of plates based on Borgia’s wash drawings; among them is an engraving of the Libyco-Punic mausoleum of Dougga.

Alas, Borgia dies suddenly at the end of 1817. His widow assembles all his papers, the
Borgiana
(harvest of her husband’s travels), and sells them to a French enthusiast, who promises to publish them quickly, but he in turn sells them to the national museum in Leyden, which also acquires Humbert’s papers. This entire unpublished body of work will remain dormant, unpublished, until … 1959.

Meanwhile, in a scholarly review in 1867 the traveler’s son will lament the fact that the Dutch government did not keep its promise to make known his father’s work. Meanwhile, luckily, several scholars will go to copy from this voluminous file at least the mysterious writing of the bilingual inscription of Dougga.

Years go by after Borgia: The strange alphabet keeps its mystery and the mausoleum stands intact—how long?—in the space and ruins of ex-Thugga.

3
THE ARCHEOLOGIST LORD
 

AT THE BEGINNING
of the summer of 1832 in Algiers, the painter Delacroix, returning from a visit to Morocco, stops and spends three days painting at the home of a former
raïs
. On June 22 he departs once more, carrying in his sketches and in his memory the elements of the composition that several years later will become the masterpiece
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment—
a lighthouse on the outposts of the colonial darkness represented by Algerian history. Thus placed so suddenly and prominently on display for the public to see, the feminine Algeria will henceforth make itself invisible in its heart of darkness and iridescence for generations to come.

Delacroix left at the end of June, and on July 5 a British lord, Sir Granville Temple, who is a fanatic about archeology, lands in Algiers. Accompanied by his wife, his sister, a couple of English friends, and a young French artist, whose job it is to draw views and landscapes, Lord Temple stays with the English consul, St. John, who had witnessed the capture of Algiers by the French.

They launch into a fashionable social life “with the charming daughters of the duchess of Rovigo,” and they attend the very brilliant ball given by the governor on July 29 (at which the former bey of Médéa appears, dazzling the foreigners with his oriental elegance). Ecstatic over the beauty of the countryside, which he explores from Algiers to Bouzareah, Sir Temple also has time to visit the American consul, discover the city, and note the price of merchandise at the market of Algiers, as well the number of schools (twenty-six Koranic, three Christian, and eight Jewish).

He leaves Algiers to return to the city of Bône, which, on March 28 of that same year, had been conquered by Colonel Yousouf. From there he sets off again by sea and has his presence announced to the English consul in Tunis when he arrives there on August 19.

The consul, Sir Thomas Reade, greets Lord Granville Temple and his family and friends at their boat and accompanies them to La Goulette; from there he takes them to his property at La Marsa. But Granville is dying to do just one thing.

The next morning I was going to walk on the site of great Carthage
, he writes. It is the ultimate goal of his
Excursions en Méditerranée
, the collection that he will publish shortly after his return to London.

In it he recounts how, after having visited Monastir, Mahdia, and Jem, he wants to travel farther into the interior but is kept in Tunis by the incessant rains of January 1833. Finally, on the first day of Ramadan, he sets out on his ride eastward, which will take him, in four days, to the site of Dougga.

The next day at dawn Granville Temple begins to look around the area. He remarks that Doctor Shaw, who in the middle of the preceding century left a description of his travels in this region as well as in Algeria, never visited this city, although it must have been “remarkable
and thriving with many beautiful buildings.” The first of these that he admires is a temple of Jupiter with a dedication allowing him to date it back to the reign of Hadrian.

Lord Temple is drawn above all by how beautiful and well preserved the mausoleum standing in the center of an olive grove is. He notes its dimensions and describes the two stories and what remains of a third, the stepped foundations of the pyramid where a beautiful statue and other ornaments remain—one of them a quadriga with a warrior and a chariot driver. He also notes a statue of a draped woman, already damaged by bad weather.

On the east face a double inscription catches his eye and he is fascinated by it: One of the scripts is Punic—he quickly recognizes it. The other has unknown letters, probably “some form of old African,” he says to himself. He supposes therefore that this mausoleum dates from the last years of Punic Carthage—shortly before its disappearance, in 146
B.C.E.
—or after?

He in turn copies down the double inscription and in all good faith believes himself the first foreigner to do so. In any event, when his account,
Excursions en Méditerranée
, appears in London in 1835, this version of the bilingual inscription will be reproduced by the scholar Gésénius. Learned researchers will follow him in attempting to decipher the mysterious writing: Honneger,
Étienne Quatremère
(who had already published work on Punic inscriptions), but also de Saulcy and A. C. Judas (a specialist in the study of the Libyan language).

Lord Temple presses on with his journey into the regency of Tunis, where he takes notes both about the ancient past and its stones and about everyday life in the present. Before leaving the country he makes friends with a Dane, Falbe, who has lived near Tunis for eleven years and who has just published a topographical map of the ruins of Carthage.

These two amateurs will meet up again in Paris in 1837 in an archeological association established by eighteen members of high society (among them a prince, a duke, two counts, but also the painter Chassériau) to undertake “digs at Carthage and other ancient cities in the regencies of Barbary.” Sir Temple and Falbe, because of their shared passion and their knowledge of the region, agree to go to the area themselves as volunteers in charge of directing the first excavations.

Summer 1837: To make up for the stinging failure of the siege of Constantine the previous autumn, the French government is actively preparing its revenge against the Algerians with the son of the king, the duke de Nemours, as one of the leaders of this campaign.

They decide on a military landing in Bône, attempting once again to take Constantine, where the bey Ahmed still rules.

Following behind the French army, Sir Temple and Falbe meet in Bône in September, where General Valée has promised to help the two archeologists by creating a scientific commission. The two take advantage of the occasion by identifying the ruins of Hippone, and they hope soon to locate those of Cirta, once the city has been captured.

Thus our two friends become witnesses, from an unexpected—apparently “scholarly”—perspective, to the siege and capture of Constantine in all its dramatic and murderous detail. Cirta, an eagle’s nest that only on rare occasions over the centuries had been made to submit!

The siege begins 6 October 1837. It will be trying for both armies: Torrential rain falls without break until 12 October and Lord Temple is already dreaming a little less ardently of discovering the tomb of Masinissa! For six nights in succession it is the work of the
engineer corps to move the artillery cannons, which sometimes tip over into the ravines despite all the efforts of sappers and zouaves. They flounder in the mud and the sticky earth clings to the feet of both men and horses.

Everything is told from the point of view of those laying siege, sometimes in vividly realistic detail: “happy were the men who had tents!” to rest in, says the narrator with a sigh. In the cemeteries of Koudier Aly, soldiers break open the sides of tombs and “took out the remains of the dead so that they could lie down in their place.”

On the morning of the twelfth, good weather returns. Making a tour of inspection on horseback to study the area with his telescope, Damremont, head of the command post, is struck down by a cannon. He dies on the spot and is followed in turn by General Perrégaux, also fatally shot.

That very day the city is surrounded. The bey Ahmed, who thought it was impregnable (“nature has made it a second Gibraltar,” writes Lord Temple) had only provided for weak fortifications. On the evening of the two French generals’ death, the city is breached. On 13 October, at four in the morning, the attack is on, led by the Lamoricière’s column.

Hand-to-hand combat, house by house, street by street, alley by alley; the battle is made even more relentless by the explosion of a munitions depot belonging to the resistants, many of whom are killed there. The defenders begin to withdraw into the Casbah. Lord Temple gives a rather brief account of one episode: the death of hundreds upon hundreds of the people of the city as they try to flee through the ravine of el-Medjerday. “They descend the precipice using ropes” that give way under the weight; “they are all dragged down onto each other as they fall.” The next day, hundreds of bodies that have not been removed will be counted.

At the end of the morning of the fourteenth (“the night of 13–14 October there is a total eclipse of the moon between nine in the evening and two in the morning,” adds the witness), the Casbah is taken: the tricolor flag floats over the city.

During the night, thanks to this eclipse perhaps, the bey Ahmed and most of his cavalry are able to reach the nearby mountains. As for the survivors, the civilian population either unable to or not wishing to flee, almost sixteen thousand of them remain, holed up in their tile-roofed houses. They begin the experience of French occupation: provisions of wheat and barley are requisitioned from each home to fill the needs of the conquering army. The city dwellers huddle over their memory, their patios, the invisibility of their women.

Gustave Flaubert, who will visit the city almost twenty years later—before heading east, like our archeologists, to Carthage—will have as his guide the grandson of the great Salah Bey (a legendary figure from the beginning of the century, a hero of the resistance, and martyred by the Turkish rulers). And now his descendent is a mere secretary of some French officer! Going down into the Rummel Gorge, the great writer recalls the fall of hundreds of unfortunate people attempting to flee—a scene from the past that was now the subject of a currently popular painting. At the bridge of el-Kantara, the great novelist muses over the wild scene: “this is a place that is both enchanting and satanic.” Flaubert concludes magnificently: “I think of Jugurtha; the place resembles him. Constantine, moreover, is a true city in the ancient sense.”

Let us return to October 1837 and to our two friends, Sir Temple and Falbe, living in the captured city. Doctor Shaw’s English account in hand, they list the ancient monuments still in good repair twenty years earlier. Many have been demolished, but the underground
cisterns are there; the fountain of Aïn el-Safsaf (“the poplar spring”) described by Leon the African at the beginning of the sixteenth century is still there, but without the hieroglyphic characters, no trace of which remains.