It doesn’t surprise me that UNESCO has named the casbah a World Heritage Site. It is undeniably atmospheric. The buildings crowd in on one another. Some of them, judging by their elaborately detailed stone doorways and patches of decorative tiling embedded in cracked white plaster, must be substantial inside. Many houses have upper storeys cantilevered out over the alley and supported by rows of wooden poles, so they almost touch at the top. They have mains water and electricity now, but some houses still rely on the old system of collecting rainwater on the rooftops. Litter drifts about and there is a pungent smell of wet plaster and drains. Said confirms my suspicion that everything is going on the other side of the walls.
‘It’s overpopulated. Sometimes you find six families in the same house. It’s too much people.’
‘How many?’
‘Sixty people sometimes.’
The house where Ali La Pointe and three other resistance heroes chose to be blown apart by the paras rather than surrender (a story powerfully told in the film The Battle of Algiers) has been rebuilt. On the wall an Arabic inscription details the circumstances of their deaths on 8 October 1957.
I can understand now what made the casbah such a superb defensive position and why the resistance, the ‘freedom fighters’ as Said always calls them, were able to hold out for so long against crack French paratroops. Sophisticated weapons and modern vehicles are useless in streets the width of a loaded donkey, or on roofs which act as another thoroughfare for those who know their way around them.
As we near the main road at the lower end of the casbah there is a milling throng. Eamonn walks beside me, casting wary looks, but everyone seems to be either friendly or preoccupied.
I feel that we have barely touched the real world of the casbah, which, as in all Arab communities, is private and inward-looking, so Said takes me round to the shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane, a holy man of great powers who lived here in the sixteenth century. The sound of female voices rises from inside as we approach the domed building surmounted by a tall balconied minaret.
This is traditionally a place for the women to come and invoke the help of the saint in childbirth or with problems of infertility, but the imam is happy for us to join them. Remove my shoes and enter in reverent silence. I needn’t have bothered. The small chamber is less like an English parish church than a kindergarten at collection time. Small children sit and play as their mothers worship in their own way. Nothing is formal. One woman hugs the side of the tomb, singing plaintively, another bows to Mecca, another has brought her new-born baby to touch the wooden casket that contains the saint’s remains. It’s the first place, she declares proudly, that he’s ever been taken to. Brightly coloured texts run round the walls, heavy cut-glass lamps hang, undusted, from the ceiling, and in one corner is a heavy-duty industrial safe, with a slit for offerings. Said tells me that the poorer women sometimes stuff chewing gum in the slit and come back later to collect money that hasn’t gone down.
By now I’ve completely forgotten that I might be a target. The cordon sanitaire has been discreet to the point of invisibility and the people of Algiers as cordial and curious as anywhere in the Sahara.
Day Ninety-Six
ALGIERS TO ORAN
A peerless morning. The only cloud in the sky is caused by an enormous flock of small birds, which plunges us into shadow as we wait in the hotel courtyard for transport to the station. More and more birds seem to join all the time, crying and calling, until their numbers reach a critical mass and, as if on a given signal, they execute a dizzyingly precise banking turn and disappear southwards. Our coach driver tells me they’re swallows, migrating from Europe to winter in the Sahara. They regroup here on the mountainous shoreline before starting the final leg of their journey.
We who are migrating the other way, out of the Sahara and into Europe, are also on the last leg of a journey. Today we catch the train to Oran, second city of Algeria, which is less than 300 miles from where we set out all those months ago.
Eamonn is anxious. Travelling from Algiers to Oran by train is, in security terms, an out of the frying pan into the fire situation. He has trawled his dictionary of doom this morning. Over the last ten years this has been the most bombed railway line in the world; it passes through an area known as the Triangle of Death (not mentioned in the timetable) and terrorists have been known to board the train and kill people ‘in awful circumstances’.
It all sounds theatrically exaggerated on this brilliant, lifeenhancing morning, as we drive down through the city for the last time, past the grand arcades, the long straight thoroughfares, the great domed Post Office - built by the French in 1913, but so Moorish in its inspiration that it looks like a mosque - and the long white walls of the apartment blocks, flecked with the bright colours of a thousand sun blinds.
Our train was once the romantically named Algiers - Casablanca Express, but the land border with Morocco has been closed since 1995, after disagreements over security, and it’s now terminated at Oran, 300 miles and five hours away. The silver-ribbed aluminium shell of our coach is studded with small holes, and I’m just about to bring these to Eamonn’s attention when a group from Algerian Railways arrives to welcome us aboard and generally look after all our filming needs. One of them is a dark-haired lady with long, lustrous hair and a brisk, efficient manner which barely conceals a palpable nervousness.
She dismisses any current problems on the line.
‘It’s all much better now,’ she assures me confidently, rather spoiling the effect by adding, ‘touche bois’. Touch wood. Inshallah would have been more appropriate.
The train rolls out on time and I push aside the flimsy green curtain to take a last look at Alger La Blanche, which I doubt I shall see again for a long, long time. The morning sun catches the roofs of the casbah and the city finally slips away behind a succession of tunnels and flyovers.
The railway runs through a poor area consisting of cheap new housing blocks, separated from the line by a corridor of concrete walls and steel fences which rise on either side of the train. This grim barricade continues into open countryside, where fields, apple orchards and vineyards stretch away towards the grey-green foothills of the Atlas Mountains. The fields around Blida were once renowned for their roses; now the town is part of the aforementioned ‘Triangle of Death’, which is marked by Blida in the west, Bouira in the east and Algiers in the north. It was in this deceptively benign landscape that the GIA used to stop trains by putting an accomplice on board to pull the communication cord. As the train came to a halt they would board and either kill their victims there and then or take them away and murder them. There are no communication cords on the trains any more. Even the nice friendly PR team from the railway cannot disguise the problems here. The woman with the lustrous hair lost her voice for three years after seeing some soldiers, who were guarding one of her stations, murdered. Like many other victims of the GIA their throats had been cut.
Once beyond Blida, the continuous protective wall stops, but heavy security remains in place, with block-houses and pillboxes at strategic points like bridges or tunnel entrances.