The Professor’s History

The journey was long. Wakened before dawn by the call of the village muezzin, the professor performed his ablutions separately from the Muslims and busied himself with his notebooks while they prayed. In the city, despite the subjects of his research, he was conscious of these rituals only as a charming Oriental flavour to his adopted land. He found it at once embarrassing and miraculous to be at their centre, among the men and their families and their prayers in a guttural language, as if he had stumbled upon a naked woman for the first time and could not define his response to her shimmering flesh.

The mules were loaded as the sun rose. The professor was to sit upon one, while the other bore his case and the supplies. He was surprised at the pace set by Mustafa and Ibrahim, who walked behind and flicked, intermittently, at the baggage mule with a switch. There was no sound but this, their steps and the ticking of insects. None of them spoke. The route they followed was along the foothills, the mountains rising always alongside them. The terrain, although unsteady and, for the professor– whose back ached already from the night before–uncomfortable, was not difficult. The mules were dogged and unfaltering in their progress, but Mustafa and Ibrahim seemed to find them too slow. They yelled at the blinking beasts, who merely flicked their ears and did not change their pace. In the course of the day, the troupe paused only for prayers and a hasty casse-croute, consumed in the paltry shade of a wild-limbed shrub.

Twilight hovered as they glimpsed the cluster of houses that was Necmaria. In the gloom, the red dirt walls of the habitation glowed like embers. The professor's eyes were heavy-lidded, his glasses, unwiped, so smeared with dust that he could barely see. But the proximity of rest, of the long-imagined destination, revived him, and he straightened his frame as best he could. He made an unspoken effort to reassert his European authority, remembering that he commanded the two Arabs and not they him, a fact which their progress had served to deny. But it was Mustafa who approached the first fire they came upon and asked for the caid's house; and Ibrahim who helped the professor, bent to the shape of his mule, to dismount.

In so small a village, the caid's house was not difficult to find. Two storeys high, it loomed over the others, its heavy wooden doors studded and bolted to the street, and the high slivers in the walls that were its windows unlit.

Mustafa and Ibrahim had called four times before they heard the bolts shifting angrily on the far side of the door. It opened just a little, revealing a boy younger than Ibrahim, unbearded, bearing a torch. Alarmed, he proceeded anyway with the formal greetings in a tremulous tone.

'We wish to see the caid,' explained Mustafa. 'This man has business with the caid.'

The professor stepped forward, into the pool of light. He spoke in French, and the boy did not understand. He tried again, his Arabic slow and careful. 'I am a historian. I am here to discuss history with the caid.'

'The caid is not here,' said the boy. 'He is from home on a journey of some weeks. His steward, my father, is with him. You are welcome, but I can offer you little.' He opened the door wide to the gloomy passage, at the end of which spread the courtyard, where a small fire was visible. 'Come in.'

Ibrahim handed the professor his case, and the two men from Cassaigne made as if to withdraw. The professor was suddenly uneasy: he had not expected to be in the hands of a child, and he feared both that the expedition would prove fruitless, and that he would not find a way back from Necmaria. The city seemed very far away, and his worth in this bare world slight. Elsewhere, he remembered, there was war.

Mustafa sensed his confusion, and for a moment drew close enough to touch him. 'We will sleep by the first fire, on the edge of the village. If you need me, send the boy.' Then they were gone.

'Who remains, in the absence of the caid?' asked the professor, as the youth slid the iron bolts between them and the street.

'I do.' The boy coughed. 'My name is Menouira.' The cough was an ellipsis that the professor understood: now within the walls, he could hear the sounds of living, the muffled ring of voices and occasional laughter. The women–the caid's wife, perhaps, and daughters; the boy's mother; the servant girls–were in residence, but the professor would not see them.

The courtyard was encircled by arcades, and a dead fountain squatted at its centre, a mosaic trough that shone dry beneath the stars. There were doorways in the cloistered corridors, but all were shut. The boy stoked the fire and crouched down beside it.

'This is a house with many rooms,' he said, 'but I fear you will have to sleep by the fire with me. The caid, in his wisdom, does not leave me the keys. I cannot open any of the doors.'

Even Menouira's food, it transpired, came not from the house stores but from his cousins in the village. The women were locked in their quarters like penned sheep, with food and water and lamplight enough for the duration of the caid's absence.

'But what if something should delay his return?' asked the professor, amazed, picking at his meagre half of Menouira's supper and thinking of Mustafa and Ibrahim, warm and plentifully fed, on the edge of the village. 'Surely this is a dangerous way for the caid to leave his affairs?'

The boy's face registered nothing. 'The caid, in his wisdom ...' he began again. There was a circle of laughter in the walls, as if the women had heard and made mock.

'What sort of man is the caid?' the professor asked.

'He is a very learned man. A wealthy man. A just man.'

'Of what age?'

'His beard is white, but he is not so old.'

'And did he build this house?'

'His grandfather built this house.'

'And his grandfather also owned the land?'

'He was given the land,' said the boy, 'by your government. By the government of France. It is a line of caids, always on good terms with the French. The land belongs to him on all sides, as far as you can see on a bright day.'

'And can you see to the cave–the cave of the Ouled Riah, in the Dahra?' asked the professor.

Menouira was suddenly wary. 'You can see to the cave, although you cannot distinguish it from here,' he said, and was quiet.

'Were the caid's people in the cave?' persisted the Frenchman, knowing the answer was everything.

'No,' said the boy, sullen now. 'The Ouled Riah are not the caid's people.'

'And the people of Necmaria?' continued the professor.

'They are of the Ouled Riah, perhaps half of them.'

'And yourself?'

'My mother's family, yes. But not my father. Nor I.' The boy poked angrily at the flames with a stick, and turned his body sideways.

This was the story of the caves of Dahra, as the professor knew it: on 19 June 1845, around a thousand people–men, women and children–concealed themselves from the French troops in the cave, along with their animals and belongings. It was a cave the Ouled Riah had used for generations, father to son: a resting place, a hiding place.

The times, a mere fifteen years since the end of the nation's occupation by the Turks, were uncertain; and the French were as jumpy as the tribes were hostile. The Maréchal Pelissier–a brutal, straightforward, awkward man–found that his men, on approaching the refuge, were fired upon by the Ouled Riah. And in his anger, Pelissier ordered that the entrance to their hideout be blocked by fire, and burning torches thrown inside.

The troops stood by in the moonlight, while the screams of the families and animals echoed in the caverns like the laughter of the caid's womenfolk in the house walls, and the rocks burst in the heat. For a long time, they did nothing. At dawn, as the anguish abated, Pelissier deemed his military goal accomplished. The soldiers–not hastily–doused the conflagration and removed the debris from the mouth of the cave. Under Pelissier's orders, the men then helped the choking survivors to safety, a mere hundred or so, those who had lain closest to the ground and hoarded the air from the dying. Their skin was blackened with smoke, and their eyes were streaming, their wails of mourning trapped in their lungs for lack of oxygen. Battered and humbled, these survivors stayed in Necmaria, making their lives in the shadow of their deaths, bearing their children before the monument of their holocaust.

The caves harboured another story too: Pelissier and his men had been seeking the tribe of the Ouled Riah, to conquer and adopt them in the name of France. But they could not discover their encampment. Nor would they have, not knowing about the existence of the cave, which was as well hidden as that of the Forty Thieves. But Pelissier unearthed, in the form of the khalifa of another tribe, his open Sesame. Feuding with the Ouled Riah, this khalifa cleaved to the French. He clearly explained the location of the hiding place (this knowledge had been passed on, father to son, for generations); and when the troops still could not find it, the khalifa dispatched his attendants. These loyal men revealed the cave to Pelissier and his battalion, leading them to it from above so that they could approach undisclosed.

The khalifa was well rewarded for his pains: he was named caid of Necmaria, and given the land around the village as far as the eye could see, for his own benefit and that of his descendants. A stone's throw from the site of his treachery, the caid raised his family in prosperity and ease, in the warmth of the French embrace; he ruled, and his offspring ruled, over the tattered remnants of his enemies.

'Will you take me to the cave tomorrow?' asked the professor.

'If you wish.' Menouira did not look at him: he was pacing the arcades in search of an extra blanket for the professor. As he handed it to him, he said: 'You are the first Frenchman in my lifetime to want to visit the cave. You shouldn't have come. It is better left buried.'

The women's laughter carilloned in the walls.