In front, all along the shore, towered with confident effrontery a
massive line of buildings many stories high, great cubes of brick and
stone, having elaborate balconies that shadowed swarming offices with
dark, gaping vaults below. Along the broad, stone-paved street clanged
electric tramcars. There was a constant coming and going of men. Cloaked
and hooded white forms, or half-clad apparitions wrapped in what looked
like dirty bagging, mingled with commonplace figures in Western dress.
But huddled in elbow-high with this busy town of modern France (which
might have been Marseilles or Bordeaux) was something alien, something
remote in spirit; a ghostly band of white buildings, silent and pale in
the midst of colour and noise. Low houses with flat roofs or miniature
domes, small, secret doorways, tiny windows like eyes narrowed for
spying, and overhanging upper stories supported on close-set, projecting
sticks of mellow brown which meant great age. Minarets sprang up in mute
protest against the infidel, appealing to the sky. All that was left of
old Algiers tried to boast, in forced dumbness, of past glories, of
every charm the beautiful, fierce city of pirates must have possessed
before the French came to push it slowly but with deadly sureness back
from the sea. Now, silent and proud in the tragedy of failure, it stood
masked behind pretentious French houses, blocklike in ugliness, or
flauntingly ornate as many buildings in the Rue de Rivoli or Boulevard
Haussmann.

In those low-browed dwellings which thickly enamelled the hill with a
mosaic of pink and pearly whiteness, all the way up to the old fortress
castle, the Kasbah, the true life of African Algiers hid and whispered.
The modern French front along the fine street was but a gay veneer
concealing realities, an incrusted civilization imposed upon one
incredibly ancient, unspeakably different and ever unchanging.

Stephen remembered now that he had heard people decry Algiers,
pronouncing it spoiled and "completely Frenchified." But it occurred to
him that in this very process of spoiling, an impression of tragic
romance had been created which less "spoiled" towns might lack. Here
were clashing contrasts which, even at a glance, made the strangest
picture he had ever seen; and already he began to feel more and more
keenly, though not yet to understand, something of the magic of the
East. For this place, though not the East according to geographers, held
all the