The lives led by the Kabyles of the mountains are but little different from those led by their remote ancestors, the original inhabitants of North Africa, untold centuries ago. They till their fields with plows identical with those depicted in the drawings of ancient Egypt. Grain is trodden out by oxen to be stored in osier baskets or in curiously shaped granaries of clay. The wheat is ground, as in Old-Testament times, between an upper and a nether millstone, turned by blindfolded donkeys plodding patiently round and round. The mountaineers extract the oil from their olives by means of clumsy presses of a model which was old when Moses was a boy. Fires are kindled by the aid of flint and steel. Their foot-gear is made from home-tanned cowhide. The cloth from which their garments are made is woven by hand, the manufacture of woolen stuffs being one of the chief occupations of the women when they are not milking the cows and goats, hoeing the gardens, cooking the meals, bringing water on their heads from the nearest stream, or helping to cultivate the rocky hillsides while yoked with a donkey or an ox to the plow. As might be expected, the life these people lead has set its imprint on their faces; there is something in the isolation, the loneliness, the drudgery, the unending struggle for existence, that makes them grave and melancholy and taciturn. In Kabylia one has the feeling that somehow he is very far from modern civilization, not merely in miles but in years—that he has dropped back through the ages to the very Dawn of Time. CHAPTER XVI THE CAPITAL OF THE CORSAIRS If you are of an imaginative and romantic turn of mind, if you have thought of Algiers as the Pirate City, the haunt of the Barbary rovers and the capital of the deys, rather than as a pleasant winter-resort, an African edition of Nice or Cannes, then you should by all means approach it for the first time from the sea, preferably at dawn, when the sun comes up like thunder from behind the purple mountains beyond the bright blue bay, gilding the spires and minarets and turning to mellowed ivory the crowded whitewashed buildings which rise, tier on tier, from the water’s edge to the citadel which crowns the lofty hill on which the city stands. Seen thus, the Algerine capital is but little changed from those distant days when the red-bearded sea-rover whom we call Barbarossa came sailing out of the east to make it the seat of pirate power; when its harbor sheltered the swift galleys of the corsair fleet; when thousands of Christian slaves labored in chains within its walls; and when its very name spelled terror to the seamen of every country in Christendom.