Kitabı oku: «In the Land of Mosques & Minarets», sayfa 12

CHAPTER XVIII
CONSTANTINE AND THE GORGE DU RUMMEL

CONSTANTINE is one of the natural citadels of the world. Hitherto we had only known it by name, and that chiefly by the contemplation of Vernet’s “Siége de Constantine,” in that artistic graveyard, the Musée de Versailles.

The bizarre splendour of the site now occupied by the bustling Algerian metropolis of Constantine struck us very forcibly as we rolled over its great gorge just at sundown on a ruddy autumn evening. It is all grandly theatrical, but it is very real nevertheless. A great deal more real than one would believe as he viewed that hodge-podge painting of Vernet’s.

The town sits high on a ravine-surrounded peak of bare rock, and were it to undergo a siege to-day, not even modern war-engines could reduce it till the dwellers had been starved out.

The original settlement was very ancient long before the Romans of the time of Scipio, who gave it its present name. Romans, Arabs, Vandals, and Turks all held it in turn until General Valée came in 1836 and drove the latter out by strategy. Not by siege, as the painter has tried to make us believe.

The great rock of Constantine is only attached to the surrounding country by a slim neck of land. Below lies the Rummel, still cutting its bed deeper and deeper each year, until now a very cañon is gouged out of the city’s rock foundation. The only communication between the city and the surrounding plateau is by the Bridge of El Kantara, spectacularly picturesque, though not artistically beautiful, the successor of an old Roman bridge on the same site.

Any who have marvelled at the Bridge of Ronda in Spain, and at the natural rock-bound fortress to which it leads, will observe its similarity to Constantine. Its rocky walls are impregnable, though not untakable. Nothing but a continuous dynamite performance could blow up Constantine; to accomplish it would be to blow up a mountain. Nevertheless, the French captured the Mohammedan fortress at the time of the occupation – albeit at a great expenditure of time and loss of men.

Centuries earlier than this, in Roman days, Sallust, governor of the province under Cæsar, was a property owner here, and fortified the city that it might best protect his interests. With what success is seen by the fact that, though the fortress was besieged and taken eighty times, its garrison was always starved out; it was never blown up or battered down.

The first glimpse of Constantine is confusing. It is difficult to separate its component parts; its historic picturesqueness from its matter-of-fact hurly-burly of commercial affairs. The houses seen from the railway appear commonplace and uninteresting, only saved from sheer ugliness by their remarkable situation. The great gorge of the Rummel flows beneath the ugly iron bridge, – the successor of that more splendid work of the Romans, – and ugly trams, omnibuses, and carts rumble along where one pictures troops of camels and parti-coloured Arabs. Arabs there are at Constantine, of all shades, and Turks and Jews, of all sects, and when one is actually settled down in his hotel and starts out on a wandering, with the intention of focussing all these things into some definite impression, they begin to grow upon him, and Constantine begins to take rank with the liveliest of his imaginings and memories. Constantine is a wonder, there is no doubt about that; but one must become acquainted with it intimately in order to love it. Constantine’s streets are running rivers of as mixed a crew of humanity as one may see out of Cairo, Constantinople, or Port Saïd. Tunis is its nearest approach in the Moghreb.

The main artery of the Arab town is the Rue Perrégaux. Here are the Moorish cafés, the mosques, the shops of the sweetmeat sellers, the vegetable dealers, the embroiderers, and the jewellers. The Cirta of Jugurtha has become the Constantine of to-day, but its mediævalism still lives in spite of the contrast of a gaudy opera house, a bank, and an “hôtel-de-ville.” The native quarter keeps well to itself, however; and modern improvements do not encroach upon its picturesque primitiveness as they do at Algiers.

Beside its site and its bridge, Constantine’s monuments are not many or great. The chief one is the Mosque of Salah Bey, with its marble decorations chiselled out by the hand of the slave of an olden time. The cathedral of to-day is built up out of a transformed mosque, but shows, undefiled, its ancient Mauresque arcades and faïences. On the broidered mihrab, with inscriptions from the Koran woven in the woof, some well-meaning Christian has added a bleeding heart. Is this treating the original Mussulman owner right? It seems enough to make a Christian church out of a Mohammedan mosque, without trying to incorporate two opposing religious symbols in a mural decoration.

The ancient palace of the Bey, – the last Bey of Constantine, Hadj-Ahmed, – though comparatively modern, is a very interesting building. This terrible Turk, the Bey, was a very terrible potentate indeed. He massacred and pillaged his own subjects. He would nail the hands and feet of a fancied offender to a tree, leaving him to die, and would sew up the mouths and manacle the hands of those who spoke ill of him. He held a big club always uplifted, and many other murderous implements besides were ever in the air ready to fall. This palace of the Bey’s was in course of construction at the time the Turkish domination fell. It had been built of porphyry and marble columns, and fine old tiles and sculptured balustrades, brought by rich merchants as presents to the Bey, under pain of imprisonment should they default. It is a miniature Alhambra of courts within courts, and is really extraordinarily beautiful. It covers an area of over five thousand square metres. Under the guidance of a zouave with baggy red trousers and a fez dangling on the back of his head, we walked and circumnavigated all of the paved and orange-planted quadrangles, and quite believed we were living in the days gone by, in spite of the fact that tram-cars were passing by the door, and inconsiderate, un-churchly chimes were ringing out ribald airs from the neighbouring cathedral tower.

On the whole the old Beylical palace of Constantine is far more elaborate and interesting than the Dar-el-Bey at Tunis – or the Bardo, usually reckoned the chief tourist sights of their class. It all depends on the mood, of course, but then we had the mood.

Some of the frescoes of this palace of Turkish dominion are most curious. One of them, painted in the most crude and infantile manner, is inexplicable except for the following legend.

A “dog of a Christian slave” – as his Turkish master called him – was set at the task. He knew nothing of art, but that did not matter to the domineering Turk, who said that “all Frenchmen were born artists.” The frieze was completed, as it may be seen to-day, and the artist (?) stood before his workmanship in fear and trembling, dreading his master’s wrath. The wrath was not forthcoming. His Beyship liked the frieze of birds as big as houses, of ships and frogs all of a size, of cows the size of mosques, and all the other fantasies of an untrained hand and brain. “I told you,” said the Bey, “all these dogs of Frenchmen know how to paint;” and with that he set him free. All potentates have their vagaries. Hadj-Ahmed’s were no greater and no worse than the present German Emperor’s, which have permitted, if not commanded, political portraits to be sculptured on the portals of a Christian church.

Constantine is unique. It is a city as live and bustling as any of its size on earth. It is undergoing a great development. Everybody is prosperous and contented. And, above all, it is historic, and its native quarter unspoiled in spite of the city’s great attempts to become a commercial metropolis.

Constantine is the gateway to a vast and wealthy grain-growing region, and it sits high and proud on the great central plateau of Algeria between the desert and the sea. Practically it is the sole gateway or means of communication through which passes a great proportion of all the life and movement of the great province of which it is the capital. Contrastingly Constantine’s magnificently theatrical site gives entirely another view-point for the stranger within its gates. The great gorge of the Rummel cuts the city entirely off from the surrounding plateau by a thousand foot chasm, where the gathered waters of the plain roll and thunder with such regularity and force that the steep sides are cut sheer as if by the quarryman’s drill. Constantine’s Arab town, too, is entirely a unique thing. It is complete, unspoiled, and genuine. It sits off at one side of the European town, sloping down towards the steep brink of the gorge, and is entirely uncontaminated with the contemporary life of the French. Its colouring is marvellous; and the comings and goings, and the daily affairs, of its Arab merchants and traders lend a charm of antiquity which not even the realization of the fact that we are living in the twentieth century can wholly spoil. The Kabyle with his skins of oil, the Berber with his wool and leathers, and the town-bred Arab – half Turk, half Jew – occupying himself with all sorts of trading, give a local colour rich and unmixed, such as one finds nowhere else in the East, – either at Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, or Constantinople. What is lacking is mere size and grandeur, – the rest is all there. And the Moorish cafés and the sweetmeat and pastry sellers’ shops of Constantine’s Arab town, visited on the eve of Ramadan, give such a variety of surprises that no one who has once seen them can ever forget them.

To return to the great scenic charm of Constantine; it must be seen and familiarized. As a mere gorge it is no more wonderful than dozens of others, – in the Rockies in America; in the Tarn, or the Gorges du Loup, in the Maures. What the Gorge du Rummel stands for is that it is, and has been for ages, the chief defence of the great city of Constantine, and for that reason it appeals more strongly than any other of its kind.

Before entering the narrow chasm which renders the position of Constantine, “la ville aérienne,” well-nigh impregnable, the Rummel, or Rivière des Sables, has joined forces with the Boumezou, the river which fertilizes.

The change is sudden from the sunny valley to the dark Passage des Roches. The torrent, suddenly narrowed, passes close to a hot spring spurting forth from a cleft in the rock, then flowing through the arch of the Devil’s Bridge and tumbling in cascades through the winding chasm or ravine.

From the edge of the abyss one cannot see the stream which is hidden by the curves of the ravine; the projecting strata of rock furrowed at frequent intervals by vertical water-worn clefts even prevent one from seeing the bottom.

Just below the rock bridge of El Kantara (that of to-day being a reconstruction of the Roman work), the Rummel disappears beneath a vault of rock. The ravine here is only a narrow trench, torn and pierced by underground passages, from the bottom of which rises the sound of rushing waters. Three hundred metres beyond, the torrent emerges from these dark galleries and on both sides the cliffs rise vertically. A single isolated arch, naturally ogival and singularly regular in form, still uniting the two walls of rock.

Here the irregularities and rents in the earth’s surface are the most imposing; the walls of variously coloured rock here and there overhang and rise to a height of over 200 metres, giving a perilous foothold to the buildings of the town above. At this apex of the island city above is the Kef Cnecora or Rocher du Lac, from which an old-time pacha threw down his recalcitrant wives sewn up in sacks, quite after the conventional manner of the day, one thinks. Yes, but here they had an awful drop, and fell not always on the soft watery bed of the river, but on the pointed, jagged rocks of the rapids. Theirs must have been an awful death!

Years ago access to the ravine was entirely impracticable; but since an intrepid engineer with a ninety-nine year concession has built rock ladders and bridges along its whole length – and charges two francs to cross them – the experience of making this semisubterranean tour of Constantine is within reach of everybody.

One day at Constantine a discordant rumbling of voices in the street below attracted us to the windows of our hotel. A strange, conglomerate procession of Mussulman faithful was marching by. Hundreds of brown Arab folk, Kabyles, Moors, and nomads from the south, were marching hand in hand, each with a flower behind his right ear, and all shouting at the top of their voices. A funeral procession had passed but a few moments before, and we thought it a part of the same ceremony, though indeed, as we learned later, it was something quite different.

The few straggling hundreds of the head of the procession soon grew into thousands, all chanting verses of the Koran. Following close came the gaily coloured green, white, and red flag of the Prophet.

We followed in the wake of the procession and at the end of the town came to the Mussulman cemetery. There is no remarkable sadness or sentiment about the Arab cemetery at Constantine, at least not such as one associates with a Christian burial-place. It sits on the sunny slope of a hill, with a silhouette of mountains for a background, and a foreground strewn, helter-skelter, with little tombs and koubas in crazy building-block fashion. There is no symmetry about anything, and tiny headstones crop up here and there through a tangle of weeds and wild flowers. Frequently there is a more imposing slab, and occasionally a tomb or kouba tinted blue or pink, with perhaps its dome gilded. The whole impression, however, is of an indiscriminate mixture of things that just “happened in place,” and were not set out on any preconceived plan.

One imposing domed kouba has a bit of shade from an overgrowing tree and is surrounded by a little level grass-plot which gives it a certain distinction of dignity such as a religious shrine should have.

Beyond the cemetery was a great open plot upon which was to be held the Mussulman fête, which was the real objective of the fast-growing procession, and which by this time had gathered into its fold all of Constantine’s available Mussulman population, – some twenty-five thousand souls who habitually say their prayers to Allah.

Here at the fête the thousands of Arabs, their yellow, red, or green burnouses flowing in the breeze like flags and pennants, grouped themselves first of all around the khaouadji, or open-air cafés, the drinking of coffee being the preliminary to every social function with the Arab.

At the further end of the open ground were set up the tents of the great chiefs, – the Caïds and Cadis of the surrounding tribes, and along one side were grouped cook-shops and fruit-sellers. There were no “hurdy-gurdies,” “Aunt Sallies,” or “shooting galleries.” The Arab takes his pleasures and makes his rejoicings less violently, preferring to squat on his heels, or lie on a straw mat, and drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, or munch a handful of dates or a honey-cake boiled in oil.

One general cook-shop occupied a prominent place. Here were great copper cauldrons where the couscous was being prepared. This indigenous Algerian dish is about the only one containing meat which the temperate Arab eats. Even then he eats mostly of the semoule and bread and gravy, leaving the fragments of mutton or lamb, or chicken (if by chance one wandered aimlessly into the pot) to be boiled down again for another brew.

The Arab eats his couscous out of a great wooden platter, and disdains knife or fork or spoon. A dozen Arabs sit around this shallow bowl of wood and dip their fingers into it, each in his proper turn. It is a sort of game of grab. One may get a choice morsel, or he may not. If not as cleanly a method of eating as that of the Chinaman’s chopsticks, at any rate one’s appetite is sooner satisfied. The Arab has the true spirit of camaraderie in his eating and drinking. The most cultivated and fastidious will mingle with the hoi-polloi, and eat from the same dish and drink from the same merdjil as the most miserable one among the crowd.

The fête, for such it was, seemed to have little religious significance, beyond the marching in procession and chanting, and the fact that it was being held in proximity to holy ground. After the feast there was something like a demonstration, when two score or more Arabs did a sort of a fanatical dance or swirl, which reminded one of the combination of an Indian war-dance and the gyrations of the dervishes of Cairo. Shrill cries and dislocating leaps and bounds brought some of the participants, in time, to a state of inanimation and convulsions; but still the others kept on. One by one a dancer would drop out, this evidently being the way the game was played. When we finally came away, half of them were still bounding about in a frenzy of delirium.

We learned later they were a sect of Islam, called the Aïssaouas, whose principal tenet of faith is the mortification of the flesh. There are various ways of doing this: the hair shirt, flagellation, and crawling about on the hands and knees; but the way of the Aïssaouas is certainly the most violent. Some of them even go so far as to pierce the cheeks and nose with great pins and needles; but if one can swirl and gyrate himself into an epileptic state, his chances of grace and entrance into that Paradise of Houris promised by Mahomet are just as good.

The fête finally came to an end sometime during the night. Then the cook-shops and khaouadjis piled up their belongings in a donkey cart, or on camel-back, and the Arabs folded their tents and silently stole away after the manner set forth in the fable.

The marabout in whose honour all this came about was then left in peace to sleep his long sleep undisturbed until the same orgie should be repeated the following year.

The environs of Constantine are marvellously beautiful. Northward towards Philippeville by road or rail one rises to the Col des Oliviers by zigzags and sharp turns, to descend eventually – a matter of a couple of thousand feet or more – to the brilliant blue Mediterranean. Nearer at hand, rising high above Constantine itself, are the hills of Mansourah and Sidi-M’cid, and to the west the fertile valley of the Hamma.

Philippeville is interesting only because of its site, which lies on the beautiful Gulf of Stora, an ancient port of the Romans. The monuments of Philippeville are nearly nil. There are some few fragments of the arcades of an old amphitheatre, and the modern mosque, though in no way an ambitious monument, is picturesquely perched above the town. The great square, or place, opposite the port is a modern improvement which is commendable enough, but not in the least in keeping with Africa. It is more like a cheap imitation of Monte Carlo’s terrace.

The Italian influence is strong in all these parts. The village of Stora, about four kilometres from Philippeville, is practically peopled by Italians. And one hears as much Italian as he does French in the streets of Philippeville. The little house-corner shrines to be found all over the older part of the town are also frankly reminiscent of Italy.

In the bay, too, the little lateen-rigged, clipper-prowed fishing-boats are Italian in design, and are manned by Italians. Right here one recalls that the “sunny Italian” in a foreign land is almost invariably a “digger of dirt,” a worker on a railway or canal cutting, or a fisherman.

Philippeville has a decided colour of its own, but it is not Arab, and the French is so blended with the Italian that its colouring is decidedly mixed.

CHAPTER XIX
BETWEEN THE DESERT AND THE SOWN

SOUTH from Constantine to Biskra at the desert’s edge is two hundred kilometres as the crow flies. As the humble apology of an express-train goes, the distance is covered in eight hours, and that’s almost fifteen miles an hour. Delightful, isn’t it? At the same time this snail’s-pace gives one a chance to observe things as he goes along, and there is much to observe.

The high plateau on which sits Constantine, surrounded by its grain fields and its grazing-grounds, is a vastly productive region, and prosperity for the European and the indigène comes easily enough. The conditions of life here are more comfortable than elsewhere in the Algerian countryside, save perhaps in the Mitidja around Blida.

This great plateau of the Tell, the granary of Africa and one of the finest wheat-growing belts of the old world, knows well the rigours of winter; but the summer is long and hot, and crops push out from the ground with an abundance known nowhere else in these parts.

The mountains of “Grande Kabylie” bound it on the west and north, and the Aures on the east and south. Beyond is the desert and its oases. The contrast of topography and climate between the desert and the “sown” is remarkable. All changes in the twinkling of an eye as one passes through the rocky gorge of El Kantara, – one of those mythological marvels accomplished by the hand or heel of Hercules. At any rate, the cleft in the rock wall is there, and in a hundred yards one leaves the winds and chilly atmosphere of a late autumn or early winter’s day behind, and plunges into the still, burning atmosphere of the desert, with palm-tree oases scattered here and there. The same phenomenon may be observed elsewhere, but not in so forcible a fashion. At Batna in winter you may see an occasional bear-skin coat, with the “fur side out,” and at Biskra, sixty odd miles away, you will find a temperature of say 30 degrees centigrade – 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

En route from Constantine by railway no towns or cities of note are passed until the great military post of Batna is reached. Here one may break his journey and get an aspect of the mingling life of the desert and the town Arab, which is astonishing in its complexity. The town Arab lives much as we do ourselves, – at least some of his species do, – wears, sometimes, a Norfolk jacket and shoes, which he calls “forme Américaine,” and travels first-class on the railway when he takes his promenades abroad. The other still clings to his burnous and takes off his shoes at every opportunity, travelling by camel caravan, as did his ancestors of a thousand years ago.

Batna itself possesses no monuments of note. It is, however, the starting-point for Lambessa and Timgad, the finest ancient Roman ruined cities left standing above ground to-day, – not excepting Pompeii. A résumé of the delights of these fascinating Roman relics is given in another chapter of this book.

Batna possesses a remarkably well-kept commercial hotel, the “Hôtel des Étrangers et Continentals.” It is not a tourist hotel, which is all the better for it. Moreover it has electric lights in the bedrooms, and a very distinctive and excellent menu on the table. What more could one want – in what people are wont to think of as savage Africa?

We took a likely looking Arab for a guide at Batna, though indeed there was nothing special in the immediate neighbourhood for him to guide us to. He wore a “Touring Club de France” badge in his turban, and read religiously each month the T. C. F. “Revue,” and accordingly he appropriated every stranger as his right, whether one would or no. He was useful, however, in keeping off other importunate Arabs in the great market as we strolled between the stalls.

Batna’s negro village is curiously interesting, though squalid and in ill repute among the authorities.

“Ici le village nègre;” says your Arab guide after you have trudged a couple of kilometres over a real desert trail. There are only a few of these “black blocks” in North Africa, the negroes usually mingling with the Arabs.

At night, in Batna’s village nègre, one might think he was in some head-centre of voodooism, so quaint and discordant are the sights and sounds. Negroes are much the same the world over, whenever they herd together, whether they come from the Soudan, Guinea, or Alabama.

Here in Algeria the negro café is a coffee-shop only a shade more murky than the other coffee-shops. And the faces of those squatting round about, though they glisten in the smoky atmosphere, – ineffectually penetrated by a dim light radiating from a swinging lamp in the centre, – are more dusky.

A tumultuous, raucous chant breaks out above a murmur now and then, though most of the time the sound is a mysterious crooning wail, the genuine negro wail, which is not at all like the banshee’s, but quite as penetrating.

It might be a prison cell or the hold of a slave-ship, this negro café, for all one can distinguish of its appointments. There is nothing luxurious here; it is not classy or exclusive in the least. A sou a cup is the price the negro pays for his coffee. And since he hasn’t the Arabs’ prejudices against strong drink, he can get beet-root and turnip-top cognac and chemically made absinthe at cut-rate prices, which appeal largely to his pocket, if not his taste.

This symphony in dusk, and in thin, shrill so-called music, is impressive. There are negro musicians, negro dancing-women, and a negro proprietor. It’s the real, unadulterated “coontown” drama, where the players are the real thing, and not the coffee-coloured “In-Dahomey” kind.

One touch of white only was to be seen in Batna’s negro café. This was an Arab of the Hauts-Plateaux, with a long, aquiline profile and a flowing burnous and haïk, most probably the lover of one of the trio of dancing-women. His emotions were passive. He might have been at home under his own vine and fig-tree. Still he was out of place, and looked it. The most he would do was to give a sickly smile at some rude pleasantry of his black companions, – and we did that ourselves.

What of this negro company were not drinking thick, muddy coffee or “caravan” tea were smoking kif. The odour of opium, mint, and kerosene was abominable. A negro of the Soudan might stand it, but not a white man; at least none whiter than the lone Arab. So we passed on our way, the dancing-women shrieking, the shrill trumpet or chalumeau squealing, the tambourine jangling, and the oil-lamp smoking. It was not heavenly.

Batna has a very excellent French school for Arab children, and it is there that the young idea learns how to “parler Français.” The French schools are doing good work, no doubt, but they are spoiling the simplicity of the native.

At Batna we saw a school “prize-giving,” which was conducted as follows:

“Premier prix d’application,” called out a black-coated preceptor, “Abdurhaman-ben-Mohammed, Arachin-el-Oumach.” “Boum! Boum!” shouted the rest of the class.

Second prize, third prize, and so on; and all the little rag-tag brown and black population came up in a long file, – they all got prizes apparently, – and the whole thing wound up, as all French functions do, even if they are in the heart of Africa, with the singing of the “Marseillaise.”

The next objective point, going south from Batna, is El Kantara and its gorge.

If ever Longfellow’s poetic lines were applicable, they are here.

 
“Suddenly the pathway ends,
Sheer the precipice descends,
Loud the torrent roars unseen;
Thirty feet from side to side,
Yawns the chasm; on air must ride
He who crosses this ravine.”
 

El Kantara is easily the most remarkable “sight” of all Algeria. Its Hotel Bertrand is a most excellently verandaed establishment, – almost the only house in the place, – and one may sit on its gallery and watch a continual stream of camels, horses, mules, and donkeys going by its dooryard all the livelong day. The trail of other days has now become a “Route Nationale,” and is the only means of highway communication, for a hundred miles east or west, between the plateau lands of the north and the desert of the south. Here all roads and tracks coming from a wide area in the north converge to a narrow thread of a road which squeezes itself between the uprights of the rocky walls of the Gorge of El Kantara.

The Romans knew this cleft in the rocky wall, and built a fine old Roman bridge to clear the rushing torrent below. The bridge is still there, an enduring monument to the Roman builder, but a new road and a railway bridge now overhang it; so it remains simply as a milestone in the march of progress.

The red curtain-rocks of the mountain chain at El Kantara form the dividing-line between the north and the south. Suddenly, as one clears the threshold, he comes upon a smiling oasis of a hundred thousand date-palms, where a kilometre back was a sterile, pebbly plateau-plain. Three little baked-mud villages, the “Village Rouge,” the “Village Blanc,” and the “Village Noir,” huddle about the banks of the Oued Kantara with waving palms overhead and a rushing, gurgling torrent at their feet.

There are mouflons and gazelles in the mountains on either side, and “the chase” is one of the inducements held out by the hotel and Messaoud-ben-Ghebana to prolong your stay. They don’t guarantee you either a mouflon (which is the “Barbary sheep” the novelists write about) or a gazelle; but Messaoud-ben-Ghebana will find them if any one can, and charge you only five francs a day for his services, – including a donkey to carry the traps.

There are three classic excursions to be made at El Kantara, – always, of course, with Messaoud as guide. To the Gorges de Tilatou, to the Gorges de Maafa, and to Beni-Ferah. You may get a gazelle on the way, or you may not, but you will experience mountain exploration in all its primitiveness. If you like it, you can keep it up for a week or a month, for El Kantara is a much finer centre for making excursions from, or indeed for spending the winter in, than Biskra and its overrated attractions of great hotels, afternoon tea, Quaker Oats, Huntley & Palmer’s, and “Dundee,” – what the French call orange marmalade, – with which the grocers fill their shop-windows to catch visitors from across the seas.