Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/406

398 Kabyle farms and houses near the point of departure; but beyond it stretched along narrow paths, winding around the brow of hills, up towards the mountains, which form an extended amphitheater. The horse furnished me by the proprietor of the hotel was a phenomenally wretched steed, by no means boasting of Arab blood.

After a couple of hours' march, we passed a 'douar' or Berber village on our left, a little off the path, partially hidden among the scrubby mastic trees. The little houses were built of stone and mud, with thatched roofs. Three villagers came out to meet us, one of them armed with a gun, and the question arose in my mind whether these good people were honest or had no reputation to lose; but soon the gunner left us, perhaps on the quest for partridges, while our beturbaned Moors in their ragged burnooses spent the rest of the day with us and seemed mild and inoffensive, receiving our parting salutations and backsheesh with kindly glances.

In another half-hour we reached the site of the necropolis. The vast cemetery is finely situated on the brow of a hill, or range of hills, facing west and overlooking the village of Roknia at its foot. This hillside or plateau itself is a spur of the Diebel-Debar range, somewhat elevated, being about 2,000 feet above the Mediterranean, and surrounded to the west, northwest and north by an amphitheater of distant mountains. The tombs themselves mostly occur in openings among the low trees or shrubs, which are scattered over the plains, or form dense thickets concealing the ruins of the dolmens. Scattered about the vicinity of this once sacred ground are the farms of the little hill villages, or 'douars' of the natives.

The material for the rock structures crops out here and there, the soil being thin—a pale gray, moderately hard limestone of cretaceous age, not containing any fossils and evidently weathering somewhat rapidly, as it is naturally somewhat porous and cavernous. The rock was not jointed, and evidently was not easily quarried; hence the blocks are very irregular and were never hammered.

The guide led us to the best preserved and most typical dolmen, which was smaller than we expected, being much less than half as large as those we had some years previously visited in Brittany. It is built of three rude slabs of limestone, one on each side, and a shorter stone at the end, the opposite end of the enclosure being open and facing the east. The enclosure thus walled in was covered by a single large slab, about six feet long, irregularly triangular in shape, the ends of which projected beyond the enclosure. Another less perfect tomb was built of two side-stones and an oblong slab on top, about five feet long and two feet wide. The space thus enclosed averaged about four by two feet. A still larger dolmen consisted of two side-slabs and one at the end, covered by an irregular slab, about six feet long and four