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Constantine Journal
Sept. - Dec. 1976
Apologies to Algerians at the end of the poem.
September
comes clatter of stones in the street
once called La Rue Damrémont
shattered children, streams of shrieking
wrecked automobiles driven so mad
their women wear black,
female Dominicans spectral in white veils flowing
what’s still called La Rue des Arcades
a stone’s throw from what was once
Le Boulevard de l’Abime
the abandoned architectural wreck of
le Victoire de Constantine
post-colonial Numidia
* * * * *
first new French phrase acquired in Constantine:
J’en ai mar de Constantine.
Johnny Marr, Melville’s sailor
between Biskra and Batna
north of el Oued
the awkward camels of longing
appear and disappear
Roger sd, that woman (Susan) has a chipped tooth in her head.
* * * * *
In the 1880s Maupassant crossing the Magreb--La vie errant, d’Alger à Tunis, Tunis, vers Kairouan--saw camels in the streets of Constantine--des chameaux lents et majestueux.
Constantine, la cité phénomène, Constantine l'étrange, gardée, comme par un serpent que se roulerait a ses pieds, par le Roumel, le fantastique Roumel, fleuve de poème qu’on croirait rêvé par Dante, fleuve d’enfer coulant au fond d’un abîme rouge comme se les flammes éternelles l’avaient brûlé.
Look unto the rock when ye are hewn,
And to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.
* * * * *
Letter to Kansas:
Nor had I any conception of what sort of country Algeria would be, beyond some ideas of the mystique of North African sunlight picked up from reading Camus and Bowles; but I decided to come here because, naively, I figured any place that had once been part of the Roman Empire would feed my aesthete’s soul.
Pour L’enfant amoreux de cartes et d’estampes
L’univers est egal a son vaste appetite
Ah que le monde est grand a la clairité des lampes
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit.
So a taste for Latin brought me to Constantine, which despite its name, and its historical importance as the capital of Roman Numidia, abides now in the insistent public demand that this is an Arab country, has always been Arab, and must become still more Arab by suppressing not only every foreign influence but every memory of a foreign presence. (The street signs are now in Arabic, leaving me dis-oriented but relieved not to have to walk through the Place Marechal Valée and see something called the Palace de Justice.) Even the great civilizing presence of Rome. This is the thinking of the gang of Arabizers who run the Algerian government, for whom Constantine is the Algerian Mecca.
Constantine, ancient Cirta, prehistoric refuge, royal Numidian capital, refounded in 44 BE as a Roman provincial capital. Nothing of its history left on view apart from the site itself, perched high on the tall table of rock carved out by the Oued Rhumel gorge. The Musée de Cirta, however, filled w/ Roman artifacts. "Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite" (above), detail of a vast Roman mosaic from Cirta, now in the Louvre.
au dessus le pont du Chute, un palais hellénistique ou fut trouvée une magnifique mosaïque...le palais est sans doute celui de Juba Ire...
The major artifacts lie outdoors, the climate has conserved whole cities largely intact, Camus’s Timgad and closer by, Tiddis, one of the fortified satellite towns that ringed Constantine. Everything Roman and movable in Constantine, however, has been tossed on the post-colonial dump, either demolished to salvage the stones (when they were not so large that the local technology couldn’t move them) or built-over. The bridge that the Antonines built has fallen into the Rhumel, the great gorge that cuts Constantine whole out of the African stone upon which it stands like a broken statue on a pedestal.
Though Constantine has a museum, which includes a rich collection of Punic stelae and such Roman statuary as had not been shattered by the time the French army conquered in 1837, the best Roman things, and almost the only ones visible, are in the Rhumel. But the Gorge is a horror. Pious Pater Aeneaus could not have descended into Hades with any more dread than the visitor feels upon stepping onto the broken and ordured staircase that descends the cliff-face of the Rhumel underneath its oldest remaining bridge, el Kantara.
Maupassant was impressed by the bridges: « Eight bridges used to cross this ravine. Six of these bridges are in ruins today. » One, of roman origin, still gives us an idea of what it was. Today the most important bridges are: the « suspension bridge » also named Sidi-M'Cid (1912) (168m long), the El-Kantara bridge which leads toward north, the Sidi Rached bridge (1912), a long viaduct of 447ms and 27 arches, built by Paul Séjourné, the Devil's bridge, the Falls bridge, the Perregaux bridge. Six of ‘em.
Who knows the history of the Rhumel? Lybians, Berbers, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Arabs, and French alike exploited it as a defensive perimeter but also as a convenient shambles and mass grave. You could march whole regiments of undesirables over the ledge, a 100 meter fall. The French made the Rhumel into a monument to the 19th century picturesque, running a Chemin de Touristes halfway down into the gorge along one wall, a distance of some two kilometers. Take a walk through time—see Roman bridges and cenotaphs. During the recent War of Independence, the Chemin was blown systematically to bits, and since then the Rhumel has been steadfastly ignored except by those who use it as an bottomless garbage dump.
Because so much of the Chemin de Touristes rested on natural ledges hard to destroy, the path is still traversable for about half its distance, despite the vertiginous absence of handrails or paving stones. Toward the bottom of the gorge on either side, the buttresses of three Roman bridges still stand. The most striking are under el Kantara, where new bridges have been built above the older ones. As you descend the staircase, picking your way through the thick excremental litter, you are reminded of one of those Jungian dreams that transpire in an ancient house, where you descend stairway after stairway through levels of construction increasingly ancient until at last you enter a region so dark confined and reeking of decay that you know you have reached the primeval slime. You should find the philosopher’s stone there, but Jung never got to Constantine.
From the street level of El Kantara, you descend first past the new bridge put up by the French in 1929, which in its middle arches rests on an older construction but has its own pilings at either end, driven down into the rock outside the older buttressing. Continuing your descent, the second level you pass is also French, and consists now of great drain and cistern pipes and a walkway, all resting on arches which take advantage of the Roman arches. If you look around long enough at this level. you can find a plaque which proclaims in majuscule that this is the Pont de Napoleon III, 1871.
Finally, you descend to the muck at the bottom of el Kantara—which is a false bottom because here the river’s sump-oil flows underground—among man-high vegetation luxuriant with the nutrition of the perpetual sewage and gray with a thick layer of sludge that seems to be a miasma precipitated from the very air. (But, to my imagining, less from the air than from the infection of Tanit’s ruined tophet which the pilgrim will find if he keeps walking all the way to the east end. Tophet: precinct of Tanit. Smell of burned flesh.)
“They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire” (Jer. 7:31).The dream I had after Trish had her abortion and went back to England: from the sea I netted a child in his casket.
Cf. Flaubert’s Moloch in Salammbo: The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"
Flaubert’s point here being that these Carthaginians are a rotten lot, and therefore Napoleon III’s bloody outrages against the peoples of Indo-China and Algeria are justifiable.
Standing there in the muck, I started to say, admiring the dressed faces of the Roman stone, you glance up by accident and see, wholly incomprehensible at first like a vision from the Isle of Patmos worked in bas-relief on a mammoth block of stone, the elephants of Carthage, locked tusk to tusk in combat. CARTHAGO DELENDA EST.
Given the general ruin, the deliberate ruin into which the Europeanized façade of the city is falling even before it was ever completed, and the ruin into which the “ruins” preserved by the French have been allowed by the current administration to fall back, the visiting pilgrim stops at the inscription at the base of the broken-armed statue of Constantine which still stands in front of the railroad station:
A
CONSTANTIN LE GRAND
QUI RELEVA DES RUINES
CIRTA DETRUITE PAR MAXENCE
ET LUI DONNA SON NOM
313
inscription
on a broken sta-
tue
* * * * *
OUED EL HAD
Fear of crossing the rope over the filthy river
The excrement-laden oily Sunday river--
The gymnast of words
Halts, stammers, at the brink.
Dung beetle rolls his ball
Around the basin. The baptism awaits,
Oil slither and liquid dung.
No backing away from the trial
That examines and finds us wanting.
* * * * *
INDE TORO PATER AENEAS SIC ORBUS AB ALTO
INFANDUM REGINAE JUBES RENOVARE DELOREM
* * * * *
One of the principal pleasures of being here in Constantine will be knowing Robert Tate, an innately kind man to whom one instinctively responds. He confesses that it is unfair that we should come into a world we don’t wish to inhabit, witness our bawling when first we draw breath, which he ascribes to deeper causes than the fanny slap which puts the lungs into gear. I suggested that, after all, we didn’t choose to be born. He replied, “Didn’t we?”
* * * * *
E. F. Gautier speaks of la disparition de l’elephant et l’apparition du chameau during North Africa’s six centuries of Roman rule. The apparitional camel. Na’adja: the Arabic word in the Maghreb for the female cobra.
the Roman invasion of North Africa
the European invasion of N. America
the elephant disappeared like the buffalo
Herodotus: in the Persian wars Arabs loaded camels with water to supply Cambyses’ army. Camel riders kept at the rear army to avoid frightening the cavalry’s horses. Persians roasted and ate them.
1200 BC, first camel saddles
500-100 BC, Bactrian camels in military use
camels used in combat to scare off horses--
thus Achaemenid Persians fighting Lydia.
In Aristotle’s mind the elephant linked East & West, such as he knew those extremes: India and Morocco.
tell the camel to go humph itself
sd Hannibal, or was it Hamilar Barca
2 October
Constantine, day of God’s wrath, human horde endlessly walking its rock-strewn streets and byways.
Melville on the stones of Judea: We read a good deal about stones in Scriptures. Monuments and stumps of the memorials are set up of stones; men are stoned to death; the figurative seed falls in stoney places; and no wonder.
Here existence has looked us over, laughed once without amusement, and turned away. Constantine twists the bowels in knots, petrifying them to rock-salt—impenetrable to the usual remedies of visiting hospitals, bringing up funeral processions, or contemplating cenotaphs.
3 October
Yesterday found the lost De Viribus,
read this morning by window light--
squalid walls shoved close and wet rags hanging on wire
canyon light falls down the wet beige of the stucco
screams of alien children
dreariness will endure
shut in
brightness only sporadic between now and April
Among the few books brought with me, Kierkegaard’s Journals. “And when God wishes to bind a man to him he calls his most faithful servant, his most trustworthy messenger, and it is sorrow, and says to him: hasten after him, overtake him, do not leave his side.” 1841
. . . ils étaient des érudits, des rats de bibliothèque, says Gautier of certain 13th and 14th century Arab historians.
with Pieter drive 150 clicks to Batna for wine
intoxication / tox (poison)
finding what will suffice
in Constantine’s petrified pissoir
a Neolithic urinal
a monument to the endurance of ordure
order / ordure / endure
at Oued el Had barbwire-topped cyclone fencing protects
our pied noire privileges
the illusionary hills hovering close
how long it took until I realized that of two black blots
one was a man sitting and its neighbor a donkey
rocks look like sheep, sheep like rocks
* * * * *
Fever aches last night, bright hallucinatory rings at the edges of vision. Pieter woke me at 8 pm, gone to sleep watching the melting imagery on the eyelid versos. Scared that I was in for typhus (spelling death’s business for the delicate prey in a Bowles story) & the local hospital w/ its reputation for carnage. The groan of the pot of water heating for the morning wash-up, the flies constant buzzing in the room.
* * * * *
D’abord connue sous le nom de <Sarim Batim>, qui lui est donné par les Carthaginois, Constantine est longtemps, sous celui de Cirta, la capitale des rois numides, puis une colonie romaine.
Carthaginians > Phoenicians. Oldest history, that of Sanchuniathon, Byblos? c. 1300. Translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos, fragmentary text found in Eusebius. Sanchuniathon used records of Hierobalus, priest of Ieuo (“Yeh-woh”). Skipping the theogony we arrive at Kronos / ‘El:
‘El built a wall / around his house
Byblos in Phoenicia / the first city
When the plague came
and death:
‘El offered Adam
his only son (monogenes)
burnt whole
to his father Uranos
he cut off the tip of his penis
forcing the ‘Elohim
to do the same
In Carthage, Ba’al-hammon / El honored down to 3rd century ad domino with children sacrificed as burnt offerings.
Sarim Batim--in Phoenician
"city carved into the rock”--
carved by the circling El Rhumel
La vieille medina et l’ancient quarier europeen situés sur «le Rocher»...
Taken over by Numidia when the Berbers whipped the Phoenicians in the 3rd Punic and called it Cirta. Early second century BCE, twice taken by Jugurtha before serving as base for Quintus Numidicus and Gaius Marius in their war against Jugurtha.
Ruinée par une insurrection en 311, reconstruite par Constantin... saccagé par les Vandales, plusieurs fois prise et reprise . . .
429 Vandals from Spain occupying Carthage
the Berber bishop Augustine in Bône / Hippo / Hippone
now called Annaba
dying the next year
to which decease I can testify
having traveled to Annaba and viewed with my own eyes
his shinbone
533 Justinian’s generals defeating the Vandals
bringing on an Indian summer for the seven provinces of the diocese
then Arab pressure from the east
642 Cyrenaica falling
688 Oqba ibn Nafi camping at Kairouan
then marching across the Maghreb
Ifriqiya now an Arab country إفريقيا ifrīqīyā
Arabs the true North African nomads
tho it took another 500 years to get rid of les chrétiens
prise et reprise
prise le 13 Octobre 1837 par le Général Valée.…
bringing the Xians back in
and just about then
1875 au lieu-dit El-Hofra
un tophet punique a rendu de nombreuse stèles
dédiées a Baal Hammon et Tanit . . .
1950 excavated some 700 stelae from the end of the 3rd century BC to beginning of the 2nd century AD . . . making El-Hofra the second largest Punic sanctuary of North Africa after Carthage. . . . dans la banlieue. . . consacré, sur la colline d'El Hofra, à Baal Hammon et Tanit . . . une chapelle centrale et une fauissa où s'entassaient plus de 700 stèles. C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar… En 1958 le Général de Gaulle avait annoncé a Constantine la mise en route d’un plan de modernisation de l'Algérie. . . . Dans la banlieue ….
* * * * *
fevered and flat in Constantine
down to the Sunday river through the Rhumel Gorge
down the beautiful rock faces of old granite time stained
slicked over with the casual heave of figskin shit
offered down to scarab the holy shit beetle
out the backwindow for centuries
now tin cans mark modernity
between the black banks
sunlight prisms into kaleidoscopes
flame leaps from sundisk in wheelspokes
getting out of his flat barge
Stone Splitter laughs seven times
Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha
oil barge petroleum muck
sliding surface
Oued el Had.
Melville on petrified Judea: Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape--bleached--leprosy--encrustation of curses . . . . bones of rocks,--crunched gnawed, and mumbled--mere refuse & rubbish of creation. . . . You see the anatomy--compares with ordinary regions as skeleton with living & rosy man.
les gorges du Rhumel--Maupassant writing--
telles q'un "Abîme rouge
comme si les flammes éternelles l'avaient brûlé."
* * * * *
Letter to Kansas
The U. of Constantine is not a university but a technical institute aimed at boosting Algeria into the march of progress--gives not a damn that peoples other than themselves have lived here. Given the general ruin, the ruin into which the Europeanized façade of the city is falling even before it could be completed, and the ruin into which the remains so carefully preserved by the French have now fallen back. At the base of the broken-armed statue of Constantine which still stands in front of the railroad station, the Latin inscription reads:
to
constantine the great
who raised from the ruins
cirta destroyed by maxentius
and gave it his name
313
* * * * *
Returning from Algiers to Constantine, jarring cold long night’s ride, the bus tossing from side to side along the winding chug-holed one-lane, somehow I alone of all the occupants of the isle seats which have no carside to brace against, relaxing my grip as sleep descends, get tossed out of my seat. The second time I climb back into my seat, the old man next to me, dressed in his white holiday jellaba--old man with whom I had not exchanged one word—how could we speak? we were four languages apart: the old man was Berber and hardly spoke Arabic, I was American and spoke college French—in a fussy but kindly way, with sharp monosyllables and little tapping plucking gestures of his beautifully patinated old brown hands--hands whose self-possessed interlaced calm placement on his old man’s lap I had contemplated during the daylight first leg of the trip—the old man drew me over to his side, so that our weights wedged together and mutually upheld each other like beveled arch stones. At last, in fraternal or paternal-filial mutual rest, I slept w/o falling out of the seat.
October 31
In the Rhumel Gorge again, the second time. Watch out for children throwing rocks from the bridge above. (To them, we outlanders are all French, thus the enemy.) A stone panel in carved relief: elephants in combat, one recoiling, one advancing. Fragments of a gone epic. A carved fish with the broken inscription LIPA. A gist. Was it Uncle Ezra who sent me to North Africa, via the Roman Empire and the Latin language? The fish, if whole, would be ten feet long. Constantine, the Pit; Rhumel, the pit within the Pit. A dark place where time has run out. Le Pont d’Antonin, then the Pont RO… (broken signs here below still in French). Algerianized citizenry don’t come down here, express their feelings for Roman ruins by dumping garbage on top of them. And why not? What was Rome to them or they to Rome? Throw the empire in the garbage dump.
Am I infected with Pound’s arrogance, inability to comprehend the fact of the masses, that it’s their world and that their business is not to provide Roman props for the tourist-aesthete to contemplate. Should remember my father was a farmer.
Pit was first and Night
the first goddess
Tophet thence, says Milton,
And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell.
A long ways from Kansas to Constantine.
Two levels of the old Chemin de Touristes, one high, not more than twenty feet below the present roadway, and the one I’m on, another hundred feet further down. All along, but especially by el Kantara, the sides of the rock are worked with stairs, Piranesi profusion of partial walls, ladders of twisted steel, arches going nowhere, sealed exits and entrances.
From below a house hard by the bridge, water pours out. Gravity is greatest at the gorge’s lip (the gorgeous lip). Ubiquitous refuse and ordure, a dank film over all, the vegetation rendered rank and menacing: rubbery octopi cacti, strong as tree limbs, glistening elephant ears, varieties of moss and fern making fillets of bright green in the dark wet backdrops, scrub locust and stunted junipers, willow, elm, olive—and unknown plants that rise high and thick on a single-headed stems like Martian phalluses. This is the jungle; to meet someone here would be as dangerous as any midnight back-alley inside the medina. Animals live here and are hunted; flocks of pigeons make nests in the intricate honeycombs of the rockface where falling water has washed out holes. An imperceptible disturbance may cause a them to suddenly fill the gorge’s (gorgeous) emptiness with their winging flurry and beat between the bright sky and the mottled dark-honey face of the cliff.
Now and then a solitary white dove navigates the currents of the confined air, sailing serene like a sunfish in the sea. And occasionally a single small red hawk gliding solitary along, high up between the canyon walls, like a blessed spirit over the damned.
Today hiked west from el Kantara underneath the Passerelle all the way to Pont Sidi Rachel, where a crucial thirty yard stretch of trail is missing from the convex wall. There where the trail breaks off the wall bellies outward and hangs the traveler out over the black water. Black as Dante has it, as Poe has it in Pym: so black it’s purple.
A visitor spent some hours elegantly working her name and the year into the rockface above the trail—well etched, elegant Gallic script: Josephine Auguste Gustave. And the date, 1909.
Amar savoir, celui qu’on tire du voyage.
* * * * *
the weary bus halts and
the yellow-backed donkeys are out on the hill
their eyes are out like Mars
flies inhabit the softboiled craters
the dogs that dot hillside
they won’t die
sheep and men by two and three
on the distant incline
the camels’ intricate spasm
dromedary desire
against the marmalade night
* * * * *
early November
Letter to Kansas:
With a casualness I don’t recommend to others in the restless cadre of the unemployed and who may be interrogating the world map, it never occurred to me to ask myself what sort of place I was going to. Such reading as I did never took me beyond the idea of the Romans in North Africa. It is one thing, sitting by the elm-shaded barbecue grill on Connecticut Street during long summer evenings in Lawrence, to read some volume of travels in which our author--Albert Camus, Paul Bowles--regales us with landscapes powerful as drugs. It is another thing to be afoot in the Rhumel Gorge.
Comfort of certain familiar lineaments--re-emergence-- by which I am able to recognize myself: a copy of Virgil, a Phoenician ivory of a negro attacked by a lion, recalling the Henri Rousseau that hung above my piano.
Consider the English teacher. Across the gorge from our compound sits the University of Constantine, unfinished shell of concrete, steel and glass, bare walls resonant as a diving bell. Students: 12,000 clamorous appetites craving. My best course is four hours of poetry. We will soon begin Whitman. An Everyman edition of Leaves is one of the few books available in sufficient quantity to assign to a class of thirty-five. For the rest, in lieu of books, I write poems on the blackboard, and all is received alike with turbulent enthusiasm. The other class I teach is composition, also without a text. I ask them to write about the Rhumel Gorge, the geological cleavage that chops Constantine sheer from the timeless stone. This geography has determined their whole history, yet they want to write about the problem of transportation in Algeria. So we go at it, a brutal dragooning of the hungry horde.
Friend and fellow exile Pierre Joris translating Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues into demotic French. Both of us looking for a job somewhere outside Algeria, we subscribe to the MLA Job List and the TOEFL Newsletter. After two months, neither of us feels any ties, have received neither contract nor salary.
The most remarkable thing about my experience of Algeria may be my refusal to be changed by it. There is nothing so so dialectic as despair. SK: “The inquiry is thus a never ending approximation, whose sum total is indecisiveness.” How did a country boy’s fate ever get so Kierkegaardian?
Bowles’ version of the “Song of the Swallow” from the 1001 Nights:
To my way of thinking,
there is nothing more delightful than to be a stranger.
And so I mingle with human beings
because they are not of my kind,
and precisely in order to be a stranger among them.
naught to eat but bitumen & ashes, said Melville
with desert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.
A guidebook mentions the ruins of the Antonian Roman aqueduct, the Roman city of Tiddis
and the megalithic monuments and burial grounds at Djebel Mazala Salluste. “Constantine merits a two-day stay.”
late November
E. F. Gautier on the camel : la structure et psychologie de la bête, massive et apathique, permette la tactique militaire de la muraille des chameaux. And horses fear them, Herodotus said, a fear exploited by Cyrus in his victory over Croesus’ Lydians. Gautier denies the Arab introduction of the camel, citing the 14th century historian Ibn-Khaldoun.
A tant de bienfaits Rome en a ajouté un dernier: elle a introduit le chameau, permettant la mise en valeur d’immenses territories inutilisés. Et ce dernier bienfait a rendu vains tous les autres. Il a amené, ou du moins largement contributé à amener la ruine totale de l’édifice latin. . . . L’Islam a ruiné et dépeuplé le Maghreb, mais par cela meme il a vécu au relenti; il a duré.
Ibn-Khaldoun, no admirer of Arab civ: Autant la vie sédentaire est favorable au progress de la civilization, autant la vie nomade lui est contraire. Si les Arabes ont besoin de pierres pour server à l’appui de leurs marmiles, ils dégradent les bâtiments afin de s’en procurer. And in Constantine they build their houses leaning against blocks of Roman stone so massive they can’t move ‘em.
The word arab:
earliest documented use from the 9th century BC by Assyrians
one Arab account holds that the word came from an eponymous father
called Yarab, the first to speak Arabic.
Al-Hamdani had another view
that Arabs were called GhArab (Semitic “West”) by Mesopotamians
because they inhabited Western Mesopotamia.
Al-Masudi held that the word initially applied to Ishmaelites of the "'Arabah" valley.
The word has many rootstalks in Semitic languages including
"west / sunset"
"desert"
"mingle"
"merchant"
"raven"
also possible that some forms were metathetical
from ʿ-B-R "moving around" (Arabic ʿ-B-R "traverse"),
hence, "nomadic"
arab / scarab / Scarabaeus sacer
عرب
* * * * *
Tanit, Carthaginian lunar goddess / mother goddess and symbol of fertility / consort of Baal Hammon / Patron of Carthage.May have been related to the Phoenician Astarte (Ishtar). Phoenicians, who brought us the alphabet and (from Egypt acc. to Herodotus) circumcision.
Her symbol found on stone carvings, a trapezium closed by horizontal line at top and surmounted by a circle. Horizontal arm often terminated either by two short upright lines at right angles to it or by hooks.
The brazen arms were working more quickly . . . . paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him . . . . "They are not children but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!"
Later, the trapezium frequently replaced by an isosceles triangle. A woman raising her hands? Significant (albeit disputed) evidence, both archaeological and within ancient written sources, pointing towards child sacrifice forming part of Tanit's worship. In Egyptian, her name means Land of Neith, Neith the goddess of war.
In North Africa I was still a tireless walker;
Camel-gaited, coursed the gorge of unpurgeable Rhumel,
Chasm whose lip eats unwary travelers.
I crossed Constantine by boot sole, dust sucking at the heel.
Lacklove in Biskra, I walked Skikda to the coast,
Calcined ground upheaved in ferment.
I found crescent-hooved cattle on Tamana beach,
Stood with moon-startled cattle Aeneas knew.
Now in this port where solders of the Legion died,
I sit waiting for sunup, butted in with camelless nomads.
The meaty jowl there, dark eye rolled under,
I knew him in Oklahoma.
We sweated together in car lots, kindred and unkind.
Hardshod bastard, apparitional father! Ever
This walking whetting us lean,
Meeting and missing each other.
* * * * *
Bunyan’s Pilgrim: “Because I fear this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave and I shall fall into Tophet.” SK speaks of “the Copernican revolution that is effected in the soul of every man when he [realizes] that it is not so much he that cross-examines existence, as existence that cross-examines him.”
* * * * *
A child enamored of maps and stamps,
Johnny Mar the delicate prey--
A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Sources for the Poem
Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan
Berthier, Le Sanctuaire Punique d’el Hofra à Constantine
Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Émile-Félix Gautier, Le passé de l'Afrique du Nord: les siècles obscurs
Flaubert, Salammbo
Grand Larousse
Ibn Khaldoun, Muqaddimah
Kierkegaard, Journals
Maupassant, Au Soleil: La vie errant, d’Alger à Tunis, Tunis, vers Kairouan
Melville, Journals
Virgil, Aeneid
Apologies to Algerian readers. Apart from Vietnam, this was my first time overseas. I had a bad case of cultural shock and did not even have a name for it. I thought I was losing my mind. The present note is written in Tokyo 2023.
