We pass along a sterile country, with chalky rocks cropping from the
ground and making our way increasingly difficult. All is dry as a
lime-basket. The climate here, completely wanting in the sense of a
just medium, knows no resource between the utter desiccation of all
the water-courses in summer and an outpouring in winter which carries
away trees, crops and arable earth, presenting the farmer with a
result of boulders and sand. The rocks sound beneath our animals' feet
for an hour or two: we dip into a ravine and attain Bou-Kteun, our
first Kabylian town.

It is night, and we invoke the hospitality of the village chief,
called by the Kabyles the amin. Our prayers are not refused. The
amin receives the strangers, not so much from a feeling of social
etiquette, of which he knows little, as from his religion, which
commands him to receive the guest as the messenger of God. He comes
to the threshold, kisses our hands without servility, waits on us at a
supper which he is too polite to share, and presents us with a prayer
at our bedside. Bou-Kteun, situated halfway up the "Red Plateau,"
guards the pass called the Gates of Iron. It is an uninteresting
village, the official house being alone respectable amidst a town of
huts. As the amin accompanies us a little way outside the burgh, we
remark, among the young orchards, stumps of olive and fig trees sawn
away at the base. The amin shows them with sad satire, saying in
explanation, "French Roumi:" it was the Christian French.

That is the term, meaning no compliment, which the Kabyle fits to all
Europeans alike. In vain the Frenchman, writhing with intellectual
repugnance, explains that he is not a Christian--that he is a
Voltairean, a creature of reason, an _illuminé_. The Kabyle continues
to call him a Roumi, which will bear to be translated Romanist, being