Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Volume 11, No. 27, June, 1873 by Various
page 20 of 266 (07%)
page 20 of 266 (07%)
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enforced quiet in Palestine how his early scenes of African experience
must have flooded his mind!--his birth, sixty-six years ago, in a family group of Moslem saints; the teachings of his beautiful mother Leila and of his marabout father; his pilgrimage when eight years old to Mecca, and his education in Italy; his visions among the tombs, and the crown of magic light which was seen on his brows when he began to taste the enchanted apple; then, with adolescence, the burning sense of infidel tyranny that made his home at Mascara seem only a cage, barred upon him by the unclean Franks; and soon, while still a youth, his amazing election as emir of Mascara and sultan of Oran, at a moment when the prophet-chief had just four _oukias_ (half-dimes) tied into the corner of his bornouse! "God will send me others," said young Abd-el-Kader. [Illustration: AN AGHA OF KABYLIA HUNTING WITH THE FALCON.] The tourist remembers the trinity-portrait of him, by Maxime David, in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, where his face, framed in its white hood, is seen in full, in profile and in three-quarters view. The visage is aquiline, olive-tinted, refined; but we can describe it more authentically in the terms of one of his enemies, Lieutenant de France, who became his prisoner in 1836, and who followed his movements for five months, taking down his daily talk and habits like a Boswell, but leaving nothing in his narrative that is not to the sultan's credit. Of Abd-el-Kader at twenty-eight the lieutenant says: "His face is long and deadly pale, his large black eyes are soft and languishing, his mouth small and delicate, and his nose rather aquiline: his beard is thin, but jet-black, and he wears a small moustache, which gives a martial character to his soft, delicate face, |
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