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Fountains in the Sand: Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia

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Title: Fountains in the Sand: Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia

Author: Norman Douglas


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8185]
                Most recently updated: June 15, 2013

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, S. R. Ellison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND: RAMBLES AMONG THE OASES OF TUNISIA ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, S. R. Ellison and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.











[Illustration: Photo Portrait--Girl in Shawl]

           FOUNTAINS
          IN THE SAND

RAMBLES AMONG THE OASES OF TUNISIA

    _By Norman Douglas_



CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    I. EN ROUTE

   II. BY THE OUED BAIESH

  III. THE TERMID

   IV. STONES OF GAFSA

    V. SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG

   VI. AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY

  VII. AT THE CAFÉ

 VIII. POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS

   IX. SOME OF OUR GUESTS

    X. THE OASIS OF LEILA

   XI. A HAVEN OF REFUGE

  XII. THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT

 XIII. TO METLAOUI

  XIV. PHOSPHATES

   XV. THE SELDJA GORGE

  XVI. AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS

 XVII. ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE

XVIII. THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS

  XIX. OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR

   XX. A WATERY LABYRINTH

  XXI. OLD TISOUROS

 XXII. THE DISMAL CHOTT

XXIII. THE GARDENS OF NEFTA

 XXIV. NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


GAFSA AND JEBEL ORBATA

ENTRANCE TO THE TERMID

AT THE TERMID

A STREET IN GAFSA

HADRIAN'S INSCRIPTION

THE LAST PALMS

CAFÉ BY THE MULBERRY-TREE

MY FRIEND SILENUS

NATIVES OF GAFSA

THE ROMAN WALL

OLIVES IN THE OASIS

TOZEUR AND ITS OASIS

THE WATERS OF TOZEUR

THE SHRINE ON THE CHOTT

MARABOUT IN THE NEFTA GARDENS

A BEGGAR



_FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND_



_Chapter I_

_EN ROUTE_


Likely enough, I would not have remained in Gafsa more than a couple of
days. For it was my intention to go from England straight down to the
oases of the Djerid, Tozeur and Nefta, a corner of Tunisia left unexplored
during my last visit to that country--there, where the inland regions
shelve down towards those mysterious depressions, the Chotts, dried-up
oceans, they say, where in olden days the fleets of Atlantis rode at
anchor....

But there fell into my hands, by the way, a volume that deals exclusively
with Gafsa--Pierre Bordereau's "La Capsa ancienne: La Gafsa moderne"--and,
glancing over its pages as the train wound southwards along sterile
river-beds and across dusty highlands, I became interested in this place
of Gafsa, which seems to have had such a long and eventful history. Even
before arriving at the spot, I had come to the correct conclusion that it
must be worth more than a two days' visit.

The book opens thus: _One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax._ Undoubtedly,
this was the right thing to do; all my fellow-travellers were agreed upon
that point; leaving Sfax by a night train, you arrive at Gafsa in the
early hours of the following morning.

One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax....

But a fine spirit of northern independence prompted me to try an
alternative route. The time-table marked a newly opened line of railway
which runs directly inland from the port of Sousse; the distance to Gafsa
seemed shorter; the country was no doubt new and interesting. There was
the station of Feriana, for instance, celebrated for its Roman antiquities
and well worth a visit; I looked at the map and saw a broad road
connecting this place with Gafsa; visions of an evening ride across the
desert arose before my delighted imagination; instead of passing the night
in an uncomfortable train, I should be already ensconced at a luxurious
table d'hôte, and so to bed.

The gods willed otherwise.

In pitch darkness, at the inhuman hour of 5.55 a.m., the train crept out
of Sousse: sixteen miles an hour is its prescribed pace. The weather grew
sensibly colder as we rose into the uplands, a stricken region, tree-less
and water-less, with gaunt brown hills receding into the background; by
midday, when Sbeitla was reached, it was blowing a hurricane. I had hoped
to wander, for half an hour or so, among the ruins of this old city of
Suffetula, but the cold, apart from their distance from the station,
rendered this impossible; in order to reach the shed where luncheon was
served, we were obliged to crawl backwards, crab-wise, to protect our
faces from a storm which raised pebbles, the size of respectable peas,
from the ground, and scattered them in a hail about us. I despair of
giving any idea of that glacial blast: it was as if one stood, deprived of
clothing, of skin and flesh--a jabbering anatomy--upon some drear
Caucasian pinnacle. And I thought upon the gentle rains of London, from
which I had fled to these sunny regions, I remembered the fogs, moist and
warm and caressing: greatly is the English winter maligned! Seeing that
this part of Tunisia is covered with the forsaken cities of the Romans who
were absurdly sensitive in the matter of heat and cold, one is driven to
the conclusion that the climate must indeed have changed since their day.

And my fellow-traveller, who had slept throughout the morning (we were the
only two Europeans in the train), told me that this weather was nothing
out of the common; that at this season it blew in such fashion for weeks
on end; Sbeitla, to be sure, lay at a high point of the line, but the cold
was no better at the present terminus, Henchir Souatir, whither he was
bound on some business connected with the big phosphate company. On such
occasions the natives barricade their doors and cower within over a
warming-pan filled with the glowing embers of desert shrubs; as for
Europeans--a dog's life, he said; in winter we are shrivelled to mummies,
in summer roasted alive.

I spoke of Feriana, and my projected evening ride across a few miles of
desert.

"Gafsa ... Gafsa," he began, in dreamy fashion, as though I had proposed a
trip to Lake Tchad. And then, emphatically:

"_Gafsa?_ Why on earth didn't you go over Sfax?"

"Ah, everybody has been suggesting that route."

"I can well believe it, Monsieur."

In short, my plan was out of the question; utterly out of the question.
The road--a mere track--was over sixty kilometres in length and positively
unsafe on a wintry night; besides, the land lay 800 metres in height, and
a traveller would be frozen to death. I must go as far as Majen, a few
stations beyond Feriana; sleep there in an Arab funduk (caravanserai), and
thank my stars if I found any one willing to supply me with a beast for
the journey onward next morning. There are practically no tourists along
this line, he explained, and consequently no accommodation for them; the
towns that one sees so beautifully marked on the map are railway
stations--that and nothing more; and as to the broad highways crossing the
southern parts of Tunisia in various directions--well, they simply don't
exist, _voilà_!

"That's not very consoling," I said, as we took our seats in the
compartment again. "It begins well."

And my meditations took on a sombre hue. I thought of a little overland
trip I had once undertaken, in India, with the identical object of
avoiding a long circuitous railway journey--from Udaipur to Mount Abu. I
remembered those "few miles of desert."

Decidedly, things were beginning well.

"If you go to Gafsa," he resumed, "--if you really propose going to Gafsa,
pray let me give you a card to a friend of mine, who lives there with his
family and may be useful to you. No trouble, I assure you!"

He scribbled a few lines, addressed to "Monsieur Paul Dufresnoy,
Engineer," for which I thanked him. "We all know each other in Africa," he
said. "It's quite a small place--our Africa, I mean. You could squeeze the
whole of it into the Place de la Concorde.... Nothing but minerals
hereabouts," he went on. "They talk and dream of them, and sometimes their
dreams come true. Did you observe the young proprietor of the restaurant
at Sbeitla? Well, a short time ago some Arabs brought him a handful of
stones from the mountains; he bought the site for two or three hundred
francs, and a company has already offered him eight hundred thousand for
the rights of exploitation. Zinc! He is waiting till they offer a
million."

Majen....

A solitary station upon the wintry plain--three or four shivering Arabs
swathed in rags--desolation all around--the sun setting in an angry cloud.
It was a strong impression; one realized, for the first time, one's
distance from the life of civilized man. Night descended with the rush of
a storm, and as the friendly train disappeared from my view, I seemed to
have taken leave of everything human. This feeling was not lessened by my
reception at the funduk, whose native manager sternly refused to give me
that separate sleeping-room which, I had been assured, was awaiting me and
which, as he truthfully informed me, was even then unoccupied. The
prospect of passing the night with a crowd of Arabs was not pleasing.

Amiability being unavailing, I tried bribery, but found him adamantine.

I then produced a letter from the Resident of the Republic in Tunis,
recommending me to all the _bureaux indigènes_ of the country, my
translation of it being confirmed and even improved upon, at the expense
of veracity, by a spahi (native cavalryman) who happened to be present,
and threatened the man with the torments of the damned if he failed to
comply with the desires of his government.

"The Resident," was the reply, "is plainly a fine fellow. But he is not
the _ponsechossi_."

"Ponsechossi. What's that?"

"THIS," he said, excavating from under a pile of miscellaneous rubbish a
paper whereon was displayed the official stamp of the _Ponts et
Chaussées_--the Department of Public Works for whose servants this choice
apartment is--or rather ought to be--exclusively reserved: the rule is not
always obeyed.

"Bring me THIS"--tapping the document proudly--"and you have the room."

"Could I at least find a horse in the morning--a mule--a donkey--a camel?"

"We shall see!" And he slouched away.

There was nothing to be done with the man. Your incorruptible Oriental is
always disagreeable. Fortunately, he is rather uncommon.

But the excellent spahi, whom my letter from head-quarters had
considerably impressed, busied himself meanwhile on my behalf, and at
seven in the morning a springless, open, two-wheeled Arab cart, drawn by a
moth-eaten old mule, was ready for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this
instrument of torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m.,
memories of that ride being blurred by the physical discomfort endured.
Over a vast plateau framed in distant mountains we were wending in the
direction of a low gap which never came nearer; the road itself was full
of deep ruts that caused exquisite agony as we jolted into them; the
sun--a patch of dazzling light, cold and cheerless. At this hour, I
reflected, the train from Sfax would already have set me down at Gafsa.

Save for a few stunted thorns in the moister places, the whole land, so
far as the eye could reach, was covered with halfa-grass--leagues upon
leagues of this sad grey-green desert reed. We passed a few nomad families
whose children were tearing out the wiry stuff--it is never cut in
Tunisia--which is then loaded on camels and conveyed to the nearest depot
on the railway line, and thence to the seaboard. They were burning it here
and there, to keep themselves warm; this is forbidden by law, but
then--there is so much of it on these uplands, and the wind is so cold!

The last miles were easier travelling, as we had struck the track from
Feriana on our left. Here, at an opening of the arid hills, where the road
begins to descend in a broad, straight ribbon, there arose, suddenly, a
distant glimpse of the oasis of Gafsa--a harmonious line of dark palm
trees, with white houses and minarets in between. A familiar vision, and
often described; yet one that never fails of its effect. A man may weary,
after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque
paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that
his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever
new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the
waste--the miracle of water; and that of fire--the sun.

A low hill near the entrance of the town (it is marked Meda Hill on the
map) had attracted my attention as promising a fine view. Thither, after
settling my concerns at the hotel, I swiftly bent my steps; it was too
late; the wintry sun had gone to rest. The oasis still lay visible,
extended at my feet; on the other side I detected, some three miles away,
a white spot--a house, no doubt--standing by a dusky patch of palms that
rose solitary out of the stones. Some subsidiary oasis, probably; it
looked an interesting place, all alone there, at the foot of those barren
hills.

And still I lingered, my only companion being a dirty brown dog, of the
jackal type, who walked round me suspiciously and barked, or rather
whined, without ceasing. At last I took up a stone, and he ran away. But
the stone remained in my hand; I glanced at it, and saw that it was an
implement of worked flint. Here was a discovery! Who were these carvers of
stones, the aboriginals of Gafsa? How lived they? A prolonged and
melodious whistle from the distant railway station served to remind me of
the gulf of ages that separates these prehistoric men from the life of our
day.

But as if to efface without delay that consoling impression, my downward
path led past a dark cavern before which was lighted a fire that threw
gleams into its recesses; there was a family crouching around it; they
lived in the hollow rock. A high-piled heap of bones near at hand
suggested cannibalistic practices.

These, then, are the primitives of Gafsa. And for how long, I wonder, has
this convenient shelter been inhabited? From time immemorial, perhaps;
ever since the days of those others. And, after all, how little have they
changed in the intervening thousands of years! The wild-eyed young wench,
with her dishevelled hair, ferocious bangle-ornaments, tattooings, and
nondescript blue rags open at the side and revealing charms well fitted to
disquiet some robust savage--what has such a creature in common with the
rest of us? Not even certain raptures, misdeemed primeval; hardly more
than what falls to man and beast alike. On my appearance, she rose up and
eyed me unabashed; then sank to the ground again, amid her naked and
uncouth cubs; the rock, she said, was warmer than the black tents; they
paid no rent; for the rest, her man would return forthwith. And soon there
was a clattering of stones, and a herd of goats scrambled up and vanished
within the opening.

The partner was neither pleased nor displeased at seeing me there; every
day he went to pasture his flock on the slopes of the opposite Jebel
Guetter, returning at nightfall; he tried to be civil but failed, for want
of vocabulary. I gave him the salutation, and passed on in the gloaming.




_Chapter II_

_BY THE OUED BAIESH_


This collecting of flint implements grows upon one at Gafsa; it is in the
air. And I find that quite a number of persons have anticipated me in this
amusement, and even written tomes upon the subject--it is ever thus, when
one thinks to have made a scientific discovery. These stones are scattered
all over the plain, and Monsieur Couillault has traced the site of several
workshops--_ateliers_--of prehistoric weapons near Sidi Mansur, which lies
within half a mile of Gafsa, whence he has extracted--or rather retrieved,
for the flints merely lie upon the ground--quantities of instruments of
every shape; among them, some saws and a miniature spade.

[Illustration: Gafsa and Jebel Orbata]

My collection of these relics, casually picked up here and there, already
numbers two hundred pieces, and illustrates every period of those early
ages--uncouth battle-axes and spear-points; fine needles, apparently used
for sewing skins together; the so-called laurel-leaves, as thin as
card-board; knife-blades; instruments for scraping beast-hides--all of
flint. What interests me most, are certain round throwing-stones; a few
are flat on both sides, but others, evidently the more popular shape, are
flat below and rise to a cone above. Of these latter, I have a series of
various sizes; the largest are for men's hands, but there are smaller
ones, not more than eleven centimetres round, for the use of children: one
thinks of the fierce little hands that wielded them, these many thousand
years ago. Even now the natives will throw by preference with a stone of
this disk-like shape--the cone pointing downwards. But, judging by the
size of their implements, the hands of this prehistoric race can hardly
have been as large as those of their modern descendants.

Then, as now, Gafsa must have been an important site; the number of these
weapons is astonishing. Vast populations have drifted down the stream of
time at this spot, leaving no name or mark behind them, save these relics
fashioned, by the merest of chances, out of a practically imperishable
material; steel and copper would have rotted away long ago, and the
stoutest palaces crumbled to dust under the teeth of the desert air.

The bed of the Oued Baiesh, which flows past Gafsa and is nearly half a
mile broad in some places, is rich in these worked flints which have been
washed out of its steep banks by the floods. Walking here the other day
with a miserable young Arab who, I verily believe, had attached himself to
me out of sheer boredom (since he never asked for a sou), I observed, in
the distance, a solitary individual, a European, pacing slowly along as
though wrapped in meditation; every now and then he bent down to the
ground.

"That's a French gentleman from Gafsa. He collects those stones of yours
all day long."

Another amateur, I thought.

"But not like yourself," he went on. "He picks them up, bad and good, and
when they don't look nice he works at them with iron things; I've seen
them! He makes very pretty stones, much prettier than yours. Then he sends
them away."

"How do you know this?"

"I've looked in at his window."

A modern "atelier" of flints--this was an amusing revelation. Maybe--who
knows?--half the museums of Europe are stocked with these superior
products.

Sages will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of Tübingen, in a
learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the
Mesvinian, Strepyian, Præchellean--to say nothing of the Mousterian,
Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other types. So be it. He further
says, what is more intelligible to the uninitiated, that a bed of hard
conglomerate which crops up at Gafsa on either side of the Oued Baiesh,
has been raised in days of yore; it was raised so slowly that the river
found time to carve itself a bed through it during the process of
elevation; nevertheless, a certain class of these artificial implements,
embedded since God knows when, already formed part of this natural
conglomerate ere it began to uplift itself. This will give some idea of
the abysm of time that lies between us and the skin-clad men that lived
here in olden days.

An abysm of time...

But I remembered the cave-wench of the Meda Hill. And my companion to-day
was of the same grade, a characteristic semi-nomad boy of the poorest
class; an orphan, of course (they are nearly all orphans), and quite
abandoned. His whole vocabulary could not have exceeded one hundred and
fifty words; he had never heard of the Apostle of Allah or his sacred
book; he could only run, and throw stones, and endure, like a beast, those
ceaseless illnesses of which only death, an early death as a rule, is
allowed to cure them. His clothing was an undershirt and the inevitable
burnous, brown with dirt.

"What have you done to-day?" I asked him.

"Nothing."

"And yesterday?"

"Nothing. Why should I do anything?"

"Don't you _ever_ wash?"

"I have nobody to wash me."

Yet they appreciate the use of unguents. The other day a man accidentally
poured a glassful of oil into the dusty street. Within a moment a crowd of
boys were gathered around, dabbling their hands into it and then rubbing
them on their hair; those that possessed boots began by ornamenting them,
and thence conveyed the stuff to their heads--the ground was licked dry in
a twinkling; their faces glistened with the greasy mixture. "That's good,"
they said.

Such, I daresay, were the pastimes of those prehistoric imps of the
throwing-disks, and their clothing must have been much the same.

For what is the burnous save a glorified aboriginal beast-skin? It has the
same principle of construction; the major part covers the human back and
sides; the beast's head forms the hood; where the forefeet meet, the thing
is tied together across the breast, leaving a large open slit below, and a
smaller one above, where the man's head emerges.

The character of the race is summed up in that hopeless garment, which
unfits the wearer for every pleasure and every duty of modern life. An
article of everyday clothing which prevents a man from using his upper
limbs, which swathes them up, like a silkworm in its cocoon--can anything
more insane be imagined? Wrapped therein for nearly all their lives, the
whole race grows round-shouldered; the gastric region, which ought to be
protected in this climate of extremes, is exposed; the heating of their
heads, night and day, with its hood, cannot but injure their brains; their
hands become weak as those of women, with claw-like movements of the
fingers and an inability to open the palm to the full.

No wonder it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their spiritual
life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and design,
following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are practically
atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome, on cold days,
to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding alms! Man has been
described as a tool-making animal, but the burnous effectually counteracts
that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying vesture, a step in the
direction of fossilification. Will the natives ever realize that the
abolition of this sleeveless and buttonless anachronism is one of the
conditions of their betterment? Have _they_ made the burnous, or
vice-versa? No matter. They came together somehow, and suited one another.

The burnous is the epitome of Arab inefficiency.

They call it simple, but like other things that go by that name, it
defeats it own objects of facilitating the common operations of life. It
is amusing to watch them at their laundry-work. Unless a man stand still
and upright, the end of this garment is continually slipping down from his
shoulders; one of the washerman's hands, therefore, is employed in holding
it in its place; the other grasps a stick upon which he leans while
stamping a war-dance with his feet upon the linen. This is only half the
performance, for a friend, holding up _his_ cloak with one hand, must bend
over and ladle the necessary water upon the linen with the other. Thus two
men are requisitioned to wash a shirt--a hand of one, two feet of the
other. No wonder they do not wash them often; the undertaking, thanks to
the burnous, is too complicated.

Yet there is no denying that it adds charm to the landscape; it is highly
decorative; its colour and shape and peculiar texture are as pleasing to
the beholder as must have been the toga of the old Romans (which, by the
way, was a purely ceremonial covering, to be doffed during work: so
Cincinnatus, when the senators found him at the plough, went in to dress
in his toga ere receiving them).

Stalking along on their thin bare shanks, their glittering eyes and hooked
noses shaded within its hood, many adult Arabs assume a strangely
bird-like appearance; while the smooth-faced youths, peering from under
its coquettish folds, remind one of third-rate actresses out for a spree.
In motion, when some half-naked boy sits merrily upon a galloping
stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace
of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age,
crouching at some street-corner in hieratic immobility.

Yes, there is no denying that it looks artistic; the burnous is
picturesque, like many antediluvian things. And of course, where nothing
better can be procured, it will protect you from the cold and the stinging
rays of the sun. But if a European wants a chill in the liver or any other
portion of the culinary or postprandial department, he need only wear one
for a few days on end; raise the hood, and you will have a headache in ten
minutes.

Nevertheless I have bought one, and am wearing it at this very moment. But
not as the poorer Arabs do. Beneath it there is a suit of ordinary winter
clothing, as well as two English ulsters--and this _indoors_. Perhaps this
will give some idea of the cold of Gafsa. There is no heating these bare
rooms with their icy walls and floorings: out of doors a blizzard is
raging that would flay a rhinoceros. And the wind of Gafsa has this
peculiarity, that it is equally bitter from whichever point of the compass
it blows. Let those who contemplate the supreme madness of coming to the
sunny oasis at the present season of the year (January) bring not only
Arctic vestment, eiderdowns, fur cloaks, carpets and foot-warmers, but
also, and chiefly, efficient furnaces and fuel for them.

For such things seem to be unknown hereabouts.




_Chapter III_

_THE TERMID_


The chief attractions of Gafsa, beside the oasis, are the tall minaret
with its prospect over the town and plantations, and the Kasbah or
fortress, a Byzantine construction covering a large expanse of ground and
rebuilt by the French on theatrical lines, with bastions and crenellations
and other warlike pomp; thousands of blocks of Roman masonry have been
wrought into its old walls, which are now smothered under a modern layer
of plaster divided into square fields, to imitate solid stonework. It
looks best in the moonlight, when this childish cardboard effect is toned
down.

One of the two hot springs of Gafsa is enclosed within this Kasbah, while
the other rises near at hand and flows into the celebrated baths--the
_termid_, as the natives, using the old Greek word, still call it. It is a
large and deep stone basin, half full of warm water, in which small
fishes, snakes and tortoises disport themselves; the massive engirdling
walls demonstrate its Roman origin. Thick mists hang over the _termid_ in
the early mornings, when the air is chilly, but later on it becomes a
lively place, full of laughter and splashings. Here, for a sou, you may
get the boys to jump down from the parapet and wallow among the muddy ooze
at the bottom; the liquid, though transparent, is not colourless, but
rather of the blue-green tint of the aquamarine crystal; it flows rapidly,
and all impurities are carried away.

There are always elderly folk idling about these premises, and youngsters
with rods tempting the fish out of the water; day after day the game goes
on, the foolish creatures nibble at the bait and are drawn up on high;
their fellows see the beginning of the tragedy, but never the end, where,
floundering in the street, the victims cover their silvery scales with a
coating of dust and expire ignominiously, as unlike live fishes as if they
came ready cooked out of the kitchen _panés et frits_.

Above this basin is another one, that of the women; and below it, at the
foot of a lurid stairway, a suite of subterranean (Roman) chambers, a kind
of Turkish bath for men, where the water hurries darkly through; the place
is reeking with a steamy heat, and objectionable beyond words; it would
not be easy to describe, in the language of polite society, those features
in which it is most repulsive to Europeans.

[Illustration: Entrance to the Termid]

How easily, as in former days, might now a health-giving wonder be created
out of these waters of Gafsa, that well up in a river of warmth and
purity, only to be hopelessly contaminated! The French tried the
experiment, but the natives objected, and they gave way: these are the
spots on the sunny ideal of "pacific penetration." Any other
nationality--while allowing the Arabs a fair share of the element--would
simply have rebuilt this _termid_ and put it to a decent use, in the name
of cleanliness and civilization; the natives acquiescing, as they always
do when they recognize their masters. Or, if a display of force was
considered inadvisable, why not try the _suaviter in modo_? Had a couple
of local saints been judiciously approached, the population would soon
have discovered that the _termid_ waters are injurious to health and only
fit for unbelievers. What is the use of a _marabout_, if he cannot be
bribed?

I am all for keeping up local colour, even when it entails, as it
generally does, a certain percentage of local smells; yet it seems a pity
that such glorious hot springs, a gift of the gods in a climate like this,
should be converted into a _cloaca maxima_, especially in Gafsa, which
already boasts of a superfluity of open drains.

But my friend the magistrate showed me a special bathing room which has
lately been built for the use of Europeans. We tried the door and found it
locked.

Where was the key?

At the _Ponts et Chaussées_.

Thither I went, and discovered an elderly official of ample proportions
dozing in a trim apartment--the chief of the staff. Great was this
gentleman's condescension; he bade me be seated, opened his eyes wide, and
enquired after my wants.

The key? The key of the _piscine?_ He regretted he could give me no
information as to its whereabouts--no information whatever. He had never
so much as seen the key in question; perhaps it had been lost, perhaps it
never existed. Several tourists, he added, had already come on the same
quest as myself; he also, on one occasion last year, thought he would like
to take a bath, but--what would you? There was no key! If I liked to
bathe, I might go to the tank at the gardens of Sidi Ahmed Zarroung.

I gently insisted, pointing out that I did not care for a walk across the
wind-swept desert only to dip myself into a pool of lukewarm and
pestilentially sulphureous water. But "the key" was evidently a sore
subject.

"There is no key, Monsieur"; and he accompanied the words with a
portentous negative nod that blended the resigned solicitude of an old and
trusted friend with the firmness of a Bismarck. This closed the
discussion; with expressions of undying gratitude, and a few remarks as to
the palpable advantages to be derived from keeping a public bathing-room
permanently locked, I left him to his well-earned slumbers....

It is hard to understand what the guide-books mean when they call the
market of Gafsa "rich and well-appointed": a five-pound note, I calculate,
would buy the entire exhibition. The produce, though varied, is wretched;
but the scenery fine. Over a dusty level, strewn with wares, you look upon
a stretch of waving palms, with the distant summit of Jebel Orbata shining
in the deep blue sky. Here are a few butchers and open-air cooks who fry
suspicious-looking bundles of animal intestines for the epicurean Arabs; a
little saddlery; half a camel-load of corn; a broken cart-wheel and
rickety furniture put up to auction; one or two halfa-mats of admirable
workmanship; grinding-stones; musty pressed dates, onions, huge but
insipid turnips and other green things, red peppers----

Those peppers! An adult Arab will eat two pounds of them a day. I have
seen, native women devouring, alternately, a pepper, then a date, then
another pepper, then another date, and so on, for half an hour. An infant
at the breast, when tired of its natural nourishment, is often given one
of these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer, or by way of change
and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach
troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a cure, if the
people could be induced to do things by halves; but they cannot; it is
"all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with them at
first, they return to their peppers and a painful disease.

It is this lack of measure and reasonableness among them which accounts
for what I believe to be a fact, namely, that there are more reclaimed
drunkards among Arabs than among ourselves. They will break off the
alcohol habit violently, and for ever. And this they do not out of
principle, but from impulse or, as they prefer to call it, inspiration;
indeed, they regard our men of fixed principles as weaklings and cowards,
who stiffen themselves by artificial rules because they cannot trust their
judgments to deal with events as they arise--(the Arab regards terrestrial
life as a chain of accidents)--cowards and infidels, trying to forestall
by human devices the unascertainable decrees of Allah.

Allah wills it! That is why they patiently bear the extremes of hunger,
and why, if fortune smiles, they gorge like Eskimos, like
boa-constrictors.

I have seen them so distended with food as to be literally incapable of
moving. Only yesterday, there swept past these doors a bright procession,
going half-trot to a lively chant of music: the funeral of a woman. I
enquired of a passer-by the cause of her death.

"She ate too much, and burst."

During the summer months, in the fruit-growing districts, quite a number
of children will "burst" in this fashion every day.

_Mektoub_! the parents then exclaim. It was written.

And no doubt there is such a thing as a noble resignation; to defy fate,
even if one cannot rule it. Many of us northerners would be the better for
a little _mektoub_. But this doctrine of referring everything to the will
of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for
apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. A creed of everyday use
which hampers a man's reasoning in the most ordinary matters of life--is
it not like a garment that fetters his hands?

_Mektoub_ is the intellectual _burnous_ of the Arabs....

There is some movement, at least, in this market; often the familiar
story-tellers, surrounded by a circle of charmed listeners; sometimes,
again, a group of Soudanese from Khordofan or Bournu, who parade a black
he-goat, bedizened with gaudy rags because devoted to death; they will
slay him in due course at some shrine; but not just now, because there is
still money to be made out of his ludicrous appearance, with an incidental
dance or song on their own part. Vaguely perturbing, these negro melodies
and thrummings; their reiteration of monotony awakens tremulous echoes on
the human diaphragm and stirs up hazy, primeval mischiefs.

And this morning there arrived a blind singer, or bard; he was led by two
boys, who accompanied his extemporaneous verses--one of them tapping with
a pebble on an empty sardine-tin, while the other belaboured a beer-bottle
with a rusty nail: both solemn as archangels; there was also a
professional accompanist, who screwed his mouth awry and blew sideways
into a tall flute, his eyes half-closed in ecstatic rapture. Arab gravity
never looks better than during inanely grotesque performances of this
kind; in such moments one cannot help loving them, for these are the
little episodes that make life endurable.

[Illustration: At the Termid]

The music was not altogether original; it reminded me, with its mechanical
punctuations, of a concerto by Paderewski which contains an exquisite
movement between the piano and kettledrum--since the flute, which ought to
have supported the voice, was apparently dumb, although the artist puffed
out his cheeks as if his life depended upon it. Only after creeping quite
close to the performers could I discern certain wailful breathings; this
brave instrument, all splotched with variegated colours, gave forth a
succession of anguished and asthmatic whispers, the very phantom of a
song, like the wind sighing through the branches of trees.




_Chapter IV_

_STONES OF GAFSA_


There are interesting walks in the neighbourhood of Gafsa, but I can
imagine nothing more curious than the town itself; a place of some five
thousand inhabitants, about a thousand of whom are Jews, with a sprinkling
of Italian tradespeople and French officials and soldiers. Beyond naming
the streets and putting up a few lamps, the Government has left it in its
Arab condition; the roadways are unpaved, hardly a single wall is plumb;
the houses, mostly one-storied, lean this way and that, and, being built
of earthen-tinted sun-dried brick, have an air of crumbling to pieces
before one's very eyes. A heavy and continuous shower would be the ruin of
Gafsa; the structures would melt away, like that triple wall of defence,
erected in medieval times, of which not a vestige remains. Yet the dirt is
not as remarkable as in many Eastern places, for every morning a band of
minor offenders is marched out of prison by an overseer to sweep the
streets. Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if possible, the
roadway; it is supported on palm-rafters, forming a kind of tunnel
underneath. Everywhere are immense blocks of chiselled stone worked into
the ephemeral Arab clay as doorsteps or lintels, or lying about at random,
or utilized as seats at the house entrance; they date from Roman or
earlier times--columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern,
the majority unpretentious and solid.

[Illustration: A Street in Gafsa]

What do the natives think of these relics of past civilization? Do they
ever wonder whence they came or who made them? "The stones are there,"
they will tell you. Yet the wiser among them will speak of _Ruman_; they
have heard of _Ruman_ moneys and antiquities.

Arabs have a saying that Gafsa was founded by Nimrod's armour-bearer; but
a more reasonable legend, preserved by Orosius and others, attributes its
creation to Melkarth, the Libyan and Tyrian Hercules, hero of
colonization. He surrounded it with a wall pierced by a hundred gates,
whence its presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city of a hundred gates. The
Egyptians ruled it; then the Phoenicians, who called it Kafaz--the walled;
and after the destruction of Carthage it became the retreat and
treasure-house of Numidian kings. Greeks, too, exercised a powerful
influence on the place, and all these civilized peoples had prepared Gafsa
to appreciate the beneficent rule of the Romans.

Then came Vandals and Byzantines, who gradually grew too weak to resist
the floods of plundering Arab nomads; the rich merchants fled, their
palaces fell to ruins; the town became a collection of mud huts inhabited
by poor cultivators who lived in terror of the neighbouring Hammama tribe
of true Arabs, that actually forbade them to walk beyond the limits of the
Jebel Assalah--a couple of miles distant. So the French found them in
1881.

There are, however, a few decent houses, two-storied and spacious; in one
of them, I am told, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom my
fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He is absent at the Metlaoui
mines just now, and his wife and children in Paris.

The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not extend to the native
houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original,
inconceivable squalor--squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago
ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native
secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of
the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast, abandoned
pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks
and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth of
generations--there is hardly a level yard of ground--rags and dust and
decay! Here they live, the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little
sense of home as the wild creatures of the waste. But at night, when the
most villainous objects take on mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand; they assume an air of biblical desolation, as
though the curse of Heaven had fallen upon the life they once witnessed;
and even as you look into them, something stirs on the ground: it is an
Arab, sleeping uneasily in his burnous; he has felt, rather than heard,
your presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and rises out of the dust,
like a sheeted ghost.

It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before you when least
expected; to be ever-present, emerging, one might almost say, out of the
earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and you may
be sure that there is an Arab, brooding among the rocks or in the sand,
within a few yards of you.

_The stones are there_. This is another feature which they have in common
with the beasts of the earth: never to pause before the memorials of their
own past. Goethe says that where men are silent, stones will speak. If
ever they spoke, it is among these crumbling, composite walls of Gafsa.

A Roman inscription of the age of Hadrian, which now forms the step of an
Arab house, will arrest your glance and turn your thoughts awhile in the
direction of this dim, romantic figure. How little we really know of the
Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the monuments
that sprang up in his footsteps! Never since the world began has there
been a traveller in the grandiose style of Hadrian; he perambulated his
world like a god, crowned with a halo of benevolence and omnipotence.

And it occurs to me that there must be other relics of antiquity still
buried under the soil of Gafsa, which is raised on a mound, like an
island, above the surrounding country; particularly in the vicinity of the
_termid_, which we may suppose to have lain near the centre of the old
town. And where are the paving-stones? The painstaking John Leo says that
the streets of Gafsa are "broad and paved, like those of Naples or
Florence." Have they been slowly submerged under the debris of Arabism, or
taken up and worked into the masonry of the Kasbah and other buildings?
Not one is left: so much is certain.

I borrowed Sallust and tried to press some flavour out of his description
of Marius' march to the capture of Gafsa. It was a fine military
performance, without a doubt; he led his troops by unsuspected paths
across the desert, fell upon the palace, sacked and burnt it, and divided
the booty among his soldiers: all this without the loss of a single man.
The natives needed a lesson, and they got it; to this day the name of
Marius is whispered among the black tents as that of some fabulous hero.
But what interests me most is the style of Sallust himself. How
ultra-modern this historian reads! His outlook upon life, his choice of
words, are the note of tomorrow; and when I compare with him certain
writers of the Victorian epoch, I seem to be unrolling a papyrus from
Pharaoh's tomb, or spelling out the elucubrations of some maudlin scribe
of Prester John.

The stones are there. And the quarries whence the Romans drew them have
also been found, by Guerin; they lie in the flanks of the Jebel Assalah,
and are well worth a visit; legions of bats--_tirlils_, the Arabs call
them--hang in noisome clusters from the roof.

Concerning these bats, the following story is told in Gafsa.

Not long ago a rich Englishman came here. He used to go out in the
evenings and shoot bats; then he put them into bottles with spirits of
wine--he was an amateur of bats. On the day of his departure from the
place, he said to the polyglot Arab guide whom he had picked up somewhere
on his wanderings:

"You will rejoin me in Tunis in ten days. Bring me more bats--tirlils:
_comprenni?_--from this country. I will give you fifty centimes apiece."

"Bon, Monsieur," said the guide, and took counsel with the folks of Gafsa,
who, after certain reservations and stipulations, showed him the way into
these quarries.

On the day appointed he entered the rich tourist's hotel in Tunis,
followed by ten porters, each carrying a large sack.

"Hallo!" said the Englishman, "what's all this?"

"Bats, Monsieur."

"Eh? How much?"

"Bats; _tirlils_, _chauve-souris_, _pipistrelli_... They will need much
bottles. Six hundred tirlils in each sack; ten sacks; six thousand
tirlils. Much bottles! Three thousand francs, Monsieur. Shall I open him?"

The tourist cast a dismayed glance over the sacks, gently heaving with
life.

[ILLUSTRATION: Hadrian's Inscription]

"Look here," he said, "I'll give you fifty francs...."

The Arab was surprised and grieved. He thought he was giving a pleasure to
Monsieur, who had asked for bats. He had been obliged to borrow money from
his aged mother to help to pay the nine hundred francs which he had
already disbursed for assistance in catching the tirlils; he had risked
his life; there were the transport expenses, too: very heavy. He had
travelled with many Englishmen and had always found them to be men of
honour--men who kept their word. And in this case there were witnesses to
the bargain, who would be ready, if necessary, to go into the French
tribunals and testify to what they had heard....

"I see. Well, come to-morrow morning, but go away now, quick! before I
break your head. Take your damned tirlils to your damned funduk, and be
off!--clear out!--_comprenni?_"

And he looked so very angry that the Arab, a prudent fellow, walked
backwards out of the room, more surprised and grieved than ever.

Thanks to the disinterested and strenuous exertions of a Jewish
international lawyer, the affair was settled out of court after
all--fifteen hundred francs, plus expenses of transport.




_Chapter V_

_SIDI ARMED ZARROUNG_


Sidi Ahmed Zarroung--that is the name of the miniature oasis visible from
the Meda Hill, at the foot of those barren slopes. It is a pleasant
afternoon's walk from Gafsa.

The intervening plain is encrusted with stones--stones great and small.
Here and there are holes in the ground, where the natives have unearthed
some desert shrub for the sake of its roots which, burnt as fuel, exhale a
pungent odour of ammonia that almost suffocates you. Once the water-zone
of Gafsa is passed, every trace of cultivation vanishes. And yet, to judge
by the number of potsherds lying about, houses must have stood here in
days of old. An Arab geographer of the eleventh century says that there
are over two hundred flourishing villages in the neighbourhood of Gafsa;
and Edrisius, writing a century later, extols its prosperous suburbs, and
pleasure-houses.

Where are they now?

One of these villages, surely, must have lain near this fountain of Sidi
Ahmed Zarroung, which now irrigates a few palms and vegetables and then
loses itself in the sand; a second spring, sulphureous and medicinal, but
destructive to plants, rises near at hand. This is the one which the
gentleman of the _Ponts et Chaussées_ recommended me for bathing purposes.

But I saw no trace of ancient life here; there is only a muddy pond, full
of amorous frogs and tortoises, cold-blooded beasts, but fiery in their
passions; and a few Arabs that live in the large white house, or camp on
the plain around. They told me that the descendants of the holy man who
gave his name to the place are still alive, but they knew nothing of his
history beyond this, that he was very pious indeed.

If you do not mind a little scrambling, you can climb from here up to the
last spur of the Jebel Guettor which overlooks the plain--it is crowned by
a ruined building, once whitewashed, and easily visible from Gafsa. On its
slopes I struck a vein of iron, another of those scientific discoveries,
no doubt, like the flint implements, in which someone else will have
anticipated me. And here I also found iron in a more civilized shape, a
fragment of a shell--relic, perhaps, of the first French expedition
against Gafsa, or of some more recent artillery practice.

From its summit one sees the configuration of the country as on a map; the
high Jebel Orbata, 1170 metres, now covered with snow, coming forward to
meet you on the other side of the wide valley. From this point it is easy
to realize, as did the commander of that French expedition, the
significance of this speck of culture, its strategic value: Gafsa is a
veritable key to the Sahara. I daresay the abundant water-supply of the
town is due to these two chains of hills which almost touch each other and
so force the water to rise from its underground bed.

At this elevation you perceive that Gafsa is truly a hill-oasis, bleak
mountains rising up on all sides save the south. There, where the two
highest ranges converge from east and west, where the broad waterway of
the Oued Baiesh has in olden days, when it wandered with less capricious
flow, carved itself a channel through the opening--there, at the very
narrowest point--sits the oasis. A tangle of palms that sweep southward in
a radiant trail of green, the crenellated walls of the Kasbah gleaming
through the interstices of the foliage--the whole vision swathed in an
orange-tawny frame of desolation, of things non-human....

[ILLUSTRATION: The Last Palms]

I was tempted to think that the sunset view from the Meda eminence was the
finest in the immediate neighbourhood of Gafsa. Not so; that from the low
hills behind Sidi Mansur, with the stony ridge of Jebel Assalah at your
back, surpasses it in some respects. Through a gap you look towards the
distant green plantations, with a shimmering level in the foreground; on
your other side lies the Oued Baiesh, crossed by the track to Kairouan,
where strings of camels are for ever moving to and fro, laden with
merchandise from the north or with desert products from the oases of
Djerid and Souf. The dry bed of the torrent glows in hues of isabel and
cream, while its perpendicular mud-banks, on the further side, gleam like
precipices of amber; the soil at your feet is besprinkled with a profusion
of fair and fragile flowerlets.

Here stand, like sentinels at the end of all things living, the three or
four last, lonely palms--they and their fellows lower down are fed by a
silvery streamlet which is forced upwards, I suppose, by contact with
Professor Koken's conglomerate; above and below this oasis-region the
river-bed is generally dry. It must be a wonderful sight, however, when
the place is in flood--a deluge of liquid ooze careering madly southward
towards the dismal Chotts amid the crashing of stones and palm trees and
the collapse of banks. For the Oued Baiesh can be angry at times; in 1859
it submerged fifty hectares of the Gafsa gardens.

Instead of returning by the main road from Sidi Mansur, one can bend a
little to the right and so pass the military hospital, a large
establishment which looks as if it could be converted into a barrack in
case of need. This is as it should be. Gafsa is a rallying-point, and must
be prepared for emergencies. Here, too, lie the cemeteries: the Jewish,
fronting the main road, with a decent enclosure; that of the Christians,
framed in a wire fence and containing a few wooden crosses, imitation
broken columns and tinsel wreaths; Arab tombs, scattered over a large
undefined tract of brown earth, and clustering thickly about some
white-domed maraboutic monument, whose saintly relics are desirable
companionship for the humbler dead.

The bare ground here is littered with pottery and other fragments of
ancient life testifying to its former populousness: flint implements,
among the rest. Of the interval between the latest of these stone-age
primevals and the first Egyptian invasion of Gafsa we know nothing; they,
the Egyptians, brought with them that plough which is figured in the
hieroglyphics, and has not yet changed its shape. You may see the
venerable instrument any day you like, being carried on a man's back to
his work in the oasis.

Athwart this region there runs an underground (excavated) stream of water,
led from Sidi Mansur to nourish the Gafsa plantations. Through holes in
the ground one looks down upon the element flowing mysteriously below;
figs and other trees are set in these hollows for the sake of the shade
and moisture, and their crowns barely reach the level of the soil. This is
no place to wander about at night--a false step in the darkness and a man
would break his neck. There was talk, at one time, of leading this brook,
which is sweet and non-mineral, into Gafsa for drinking purposes, but the
native garden proprietors raised their inevitable howl of objections, and
the project was abandoned.

If you ask a local white man as to the misdeeds of his administration, be
sure he will mention the affair of the railway station which was built too
far from the town, and this of the Sidi Mansur water. And who, you ask,
was to blame for these follies? Oh, the _controlleur_, as usual; always
the _controlleur!_ It is no sinecure being an official of this kind in
Tunisia, with precise Government instructions in one pocket, and in the
other his countrymen's contrary lamentations and suggestions, often
reasonable enough....

Loaded down with a choice selection of Sidi Mansur flints, which are
singular as having a white patina, I returned to Gafsa in the late
afternoon and entered my favourite Arab café. Here, at all events, if you
do not mind a little native _esprit de corps_, you will be able to thaw
your frozen limbs; all the other rooms of Gafsa, public and private, are
like ice-cellars. There are many of these coffeehouses in the town, and
this is one of the least fashionable of them. Never a European darkens its
door; seldom even a native soldier; it is not good enough for them; they
go to finer resorts.

At its entrance there lie, conveniently arranged as seats, some old Roman
blocks, overshadowed by a mulberry, now gaunt and bare. It must be
delightful, in the spring-time, to sit under its shade and watch the
street-life: the operations at the neighbouring dye-shop where gaudy
cloths of blue and red are hanging out to dry, or, lower down, the
movement at the wood-market--a large tract of "boulevard" encumbered with
the impedimenta of nomadism. There is a ceaseless unloading of fuel here;
bargains are struck about sheep and goats, the hapless quadruped, that
refuses to accompany its new purchaser good-naturedly, being lifted up by
the hind legs and made to walk in undignified fashion on the remaining
two. Fires gleam brightly, each one surrounded by a knot of camels couched
in the dust, their noses converging towards the flame, while old desert
hags, bent double with a life of hardship, bustle about the cooking-pots.
There are brawls, too--Arabs seizing each other by the throat, raising
sticks and uttering wild imprecations....

[ILLUSTRATION: Café by the Mulberry Tree]

But within that windowless chamber, all is peace. Eternal twilight reigns,
and your eyes must become accustomed to the gloom ere you can perceive the
cobwebby ceiling of palm-rafters, smoke-begrimed and upheld by two stone
columns that glisten with the dirt of ages. Here is the hearth, overhung
by a few ancient pots, where the server, his head enveloped in a greasy
towel, officiates like some high priest at the altar. You may have milk,
or the mixture known as coffee, or tea flavoured in Moroccan style with
mint, or with cinnamon, or pepper. The water-vessels stew everlastingly
upon a slow fire fed with the residue of pressed olives. Or, if too poor,
you may take a drink of water out of the large clay tub that stands by the
door. Often a beggar will step within for that purpose, and then the
chubby serving-lad gives a scowl of displeasure and makes pretence to take
away the cup; but the mendicant will not be gainsaid--water is the gift of
Allah! And, if so please you, you may drink nothing at all, but simply
converse with your neighbour, or sit still and dream away the days, the
weeks, the year, sleeping by night upon the floor.

A few of the customers are playing at cards or sedately chatting; others
begin to prepare their favourite smoke of hashish. A board is called for
and the hashish-powder spread out upon it. The operator chops it into
still finer particles by means of a semicircular blade, deftly blowing
away the dust--this brings out its strength. He is in no hurry; it is a
ceremony rather than a task. Slowly he separates the coarser from the
finer grains, his fingers moving with loving deliberation over the smooth
board. Then the cutting process is repeated once more, and yet again.
Maybe he will now add a little of the Soufi stuff, to improve the taste.

At last all is ready, and small pipes are extracted from the folds of the
burnous and filled with half a thimbleful of the precious mixture. Two or
three whiffs, deeply inhaled, stream out at mouth and nostrils; then the
pipe is swiftly passed on to a friend, who drains the last drop of smoke
and knocks out the ashes. Not a word is spoken.

Hand him your pipe, if you are wise, and let him fill it for you. This
_kif_, they say, affects people differently; but I think that, as a
general effect, you will discover a genial warmth stealing through your
limbs, while the things of this world begin to reveal themselves in a more
spiritual perspective.

I thought of the sunset this afternoon, as viewed from Sidi Mansur. They
are fine, these moments of conflagration, of mineral incandescence, when
the sober limestone rocks take on the tints of molten copper, their
convulsed strata standing out like the ribs of some agonized Prometheus,
while the plain, where every little stone casts an inordinate shadow
behind it, clothes itself in demure shades of pearl. Fine, and all too
brief. For even before the descending sun has touched the rim of the world
the colours fade away; only overhead the play of blues and greens
continues--freezing, at last, to pale indigo. Fine, but somewhat trite; a
well-worn subject, these Oriental sunsets. Yet the man who can revel in
such displays with a whole heart is to be envied of a talisman against
many ills. I can conceive the subtlest and profoundest sage desiring
nothing better than to retain, ever undiminished, a childlike capacity for
these simple pleasures....

A spirit of immemorial eld pervades this tavern. Silently the shrouded
figures come and go. They have lighted the lamp yonder, and it glimmers
through the haze like some distant star.

And I remembered London at this sunset hour, a medley of tender
grey-in-grey, save where a glory of many-coloured light hovers about some
street-lantern, or where a carriage, splashing through the river of mud,
leaves a momentary track of silver in its rear. There are the nights, of
course, with their bustle and flare, but nights in a city are apt to grow
wearisome; they fall into two or three categories, whose novelty soon
wears off. How different from the starlit ones of the south, each with its
peculiar moods and aspirations!

Yet the Thames--odd how one's _kif_-reveries always lead to running
water--the Thames, I know, will atone for much. It is even more impressive
at this season than in its summer clarity, and as I walk, in imagination,
along that rolling flood flecked with patches of unwholesome iridescence
and crossed by steamers and barges that steer in ghostly fashion about the
dusky waters, I marvel that so few of our poets have responded to its
beauty and signification. They find it easier, doubtless, to warble a
spring song or two. The fierce pulsations of industry, the shiftings of
gold that make and mar human happiness--these are themes reserved for the
bard of the future who shall strike, bravely, a new chord, extracting from
the sombre facts of city life a throbbing, many-tinted romance, even as
out of that foul coal-tar some, who know the secret, craftily distil most
delicate perfumes and colours exquisite. The bard of the future ... h'm!
Will he ever appear? As an atavism, perhaps. Take away from modern poetry
what appeals to primitive man--the jingle and pathetic fallacy--and the
residue, if any, would be better expressed in prose.

My neighbour, a sensible person, has ceased to take interest in the
proceedings. Perched upright at first, his head drooping within the folds
of his cloak, he has slowly succumbed; he has kicked off his sandals,
stretched himself out, and now slumbers. I, too, am beginning to feel
weary, and no wonder....

Primitive man with those flints of his, that weigh me down at this moment.
This stone-collecting, _par exemple!_ I wonder what induced me to take up
such a hobby. The German Professor, as usual. Ah, Mr. Koken, Mr.
Koken--those light words of yours have borne a heavy fruit. I possess four
hundred implements now, and they will double the weight of my luggage and
ruin my starched shirts, especially those formidable "præchellean"
skull-cleavers. And I know exactly what the customs officer at Marseilles
will say, when he peeps into my bag:

"_Tiens, des cailloux! Monsieur est botaniste?"_

And then a crowd of people will assemble, to whom I must explain
everything, with the result of being arrested for smuggling forbidden
mining samples out of a colony and ending my days in some insanitary
French prison.




_Chapter VI_

_AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY_


Meanwhile, to satiate myself with Gafsa impressions, I linger by the
margin of the pool that lies below the fortress. Hither the camels are
driven to slake their thirst, arriving sometimes in such crowds as almost
to fill up the place. Donkeys and horses are scoured by half-naked lads;
in the clearer parts, a number of tattooed Bedouin girls are everlastingly
washing their household stuffs. Only on rare occasions is the liquid
undisturbed, and then it shines with the steely-blue transparency of those
diamonds that are a class by themselves, superior to "first-water" stones.
At the slightest agitation all the accumulated ooze and filth of
generations--rags and decomposing frogs and things unmentionable--rise to
the surface in turbid clouds. The element wells out hot, from under the
neighbouring Kasbah, with a pestiferous mineral aroma.

Hither comes, at fixed intervals, my friend Silenus, the water-carrier, on
his philosophic donkey; nearly all Gafsa draws its supply of cooking and
drinking water from this fetid and malodorous mere.

A fine example of French inefficiency, this "abreuvoir." Two hundred
francs would suffice to tap the liquid a few yards higher up, by means of
a common cast-iron pipe, whence it would rush out, pure and undefiled, to
fill in a few moments those multitudinous water-skins that are now
laboriously furnished, by hand, out of the often tainted pool below.

And of native inefficiency, likewise. Day after day, age after age, have
these women done their laundry-work at this spot, and yet their clothing,
for purposes of the work, is more hopelessly inadequate than the burnous
of the males. They will arrive wrapped up in twenty rags that are always
falling off their backs and shoulders (they possess no baskets). One by
one these articles are removed, soaped with one little hand, stamped upon
by two little feet, and laid aside. Nothing remains, at last, but a single
covering garment--a loose chemise full of artistic possibilities for the
onlookers. It gives the poor girls endless trouble, for it is continually
slipping off their bodies on one side or the other, and one hand is
engaged, all the time, in counteracting these mischievous movements.
Standing as they do up to their knees in the water, it is tucked up high
and of course tumbles down again every minute. At the end of their washing
they are as wet as drenched poodles.

[ILLUSTRATION: My Friend Silenus]

No harm in this, in summer-time; but with the thermometer below
freezing-point they would suffer considerably were they not inured, like
to other creatures of the desert, to every kind of discomfort.

The chief mental exercise of the Arab, they say, consists in thinking how
to reduce his work to a minimum. Now this being precisely my own ideal of
life, and a most rational one, I would prefer to put it thus: that of many
kinds of simplification they practise only one--_omission_, which does not
always pay. They are imaginative, but incredibly uninventive. How
different from the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost preternatural
sagacity in small practical matters! Scorn of theories is one of their
chief race-characteristics, and that is why they end in becoming
stoics--stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who suffer without knowing
why.

There was one of these girls in particular whom I noticed every day, and
whom, at last, I compassionately supplied with a couple of safety-pins,
after explaining their uses. She was decidedly ugly. But sometimes you may
see others here, with neatly chiselled limbs and elfish eyes of a sultry,
troubling charm into which, if sentimentally disposed, you can read an
ocean of love; these need not be supplied with safety-pins. An
enthusiastic Frenchman at Gabes actually married one of these sphynx-like
creatures--a hazardous and quixotic experiment. As brides for a lifetime
(slaves) they cost from a hundred to six hundred francs apiece, and even
more; and you will do well to _abonner_ yourself with the family
beforehand, in order to be sure of obtaining a sound article, as with the
Tartar girls in Russian Asia and elsewhere. As a general rule, those of
the semi-nomads--the Gourbi people--cost more than those of the true
wanderers. The price varies according to the season and a thousand other
contingencies; it rises, inevitably, in the neighbourhood of settled
places, where employment of one kind (olive-picking, etc.) or
another--chiefly of another--can be found for them.

One of the prettiest I ever saw was offered me for three hundred francs.
It was an uncommon bargain, due to a drought and certain family mishaps.
These little wildlings are troublesome to carry about. They are less
nimble and amiable than the boys, and often require more beating than a
European has time to give them. You can always sell them again, of course;
and sometimes (into the towns) at a good profit.

The Arab woman is the repository of all the accumulated nonsense of the
race, and her influence upon the young brood is retrogressive and malign.
It matters little what happens in the desert where men and women are
necessarily animals, but it does among the middle and upper native classes
of the larger places. Here the French have established their so-called
Arab-French schools, excellent institutions which are largely attended,
and would produce far better results but for the halo of sanctity with
which boys in every country--but particularly in half-civilized ones--are
apt to invest the most flagrantly empty-headed of mothers. In Tunisia, as
soon as the youngsters return home, these women quickly undo all the good
work, by teaching them that what they have learnt at school is dangerous
untruth, and that the Koran and native mode of life are the only sources
of happiness. Then, to keep the son at home, the mother will hasten to
catch a bride for him who shall be, if possible, more incompetent than
herself, in order that she, the mother, may retain her ascendency over
him. The father, meanwhile, shrugs his shoulders: _Mektoub_! There is no
fighting against such heroic perseverance on a woman's part; besides, was
he not brought up on the same lines?

The mischief is done, for Arabs relapse easily; even native officers, who
have served for years in the French army, will, on returning home, don the
burnous, sit at street corners, and become more _arabized_ than ever. So
it comes about that, if the eyes of the former generation were entirely
averse from French rule, the present one is Janus-faced--looking both
ways. Some day, presumably, there will be a further adaptation, and their
eyes, like those of certain flat-fish, will wander round and settle down
definitely on the right side....

This is a favourite month for native weddings. There was one going on last
night. I looked into the courtyard of a ruinous building which was crammed
with spectators. The Aissouyiahs were performing, in honour of the
occasion.

These are the dervish fanatics whom everyone knows. They eat scorpions,
glass, nails, and burning coals; they cut themselves with knives and other
instruments--impostors, for the most part.

It is mere child's play to what you can see further East.

Yet, with the starry night overhead, and the flare of torches lighting up
a seething mass of faces below, of bronzed limbs and bright-tinted rags
dangling at every altitude from the palm rafters and decayed stairway, the
scene was more weirdly fascinating than as one generally sees it--in
mosques or in the open daylight. There were wild strains of music and
song; a wave of disquietude, clearly, was passing over the beholders.
These performances, at such a time, may originally have taken place for
purposes of nuptial excitement or stimulation; but it requires rather an
exotic mentality to be stimulated, otherwise than unpleasantly, by the
spectacle of little boys writhing on the ground in simulated agony with a
long iron skewer thrust through their cheeks. They catch them young; and
these scholars, or aspirants, are indubitably frauds and often worse than
frauds. Mixed with them are a certain proportion of unbalanced, half-crazy
individuals, who really work themselves into a frenzy and give the
semblance of veracity to the entertainment. A judge of native physiognomy
can generally tell the two types apart. There are also a few sensible
men--butchers, porters, and the like--who do not mind a little pain for
the sake of the profit.

For the rest, the ceaseless mandarin-like head-wagglings and mutterings of
the names of Allah would stupefy anyone's brain up to a point. It is not
only Arabs who daze their understandings with godly ejaculations, oft
repeated. The marabout leader, who is a kind of _maître de ballet_,
enfolds each performer in his arms and makes a few passes round him, or
kisses him. The uninitiated then reel off in a trance of hypnotic joy; the
others do the same, in more theatrical fashion. At the end of each one's
trick he de-mesmerizes him once more, and perhaps touches the wound with
his hands. He passes the skewer or sword between his lips as a
disinfectant--a wise precaution.

These lacerations heal quickly. I have spoken to men labouring in the
fields on the day following such excesses, and found them ready to "work"
again the same evening.

It ended up with a beast-dance--two fine negroes, all but naked, depicting
the amorous rages of panthers or some other cat-like feral. This was
really good, of its kind; and if, as regards the earlier part of the
programme, it was still difficult to tell where religion ended and
sensuality began (it sometimes is), there was no doubt about the last
item, which was purely sadistic. Soon there issued the familiar trillings
from the balcony, and the firing-off of guns, to announce that the drama
was terminated.

It is we shrinkingly æsthetic creatures who conjure up by a mere effort of
the imagination what these blunt folks cannot conceive without gross
visual stimulants. That is because they have not enjoyed our advantages;
they are not civilized. Among other things, they have not gone through a
"reformation." Take a northern stock, sound in mind and body; infuse into
it a perverse disrespect for the human frame and other anti-rational
whimsies; muddle the whole, once more, by a condiment of Hellenistic
renaissance and add, as crowning flavour, puritan "conscience" and
"sinfulness"--mix up, in a general way, good nourishment with ascetic
principles--and you will attain to a capacity of luxuriance in certain
matters that may well be the envy and despair of poor primitives like the
Arabs.

Extremes meet. Performances such as these are beyond good and evil. They
are for the wholly savage or the wholly civilized. We complain
considerably just now of the swamping of class distinctions in our lands,
but a man of culture has a prerogative to which the biliously moral middle
classes can never aspire: to be an Arab, when it suits him.




_Chapter VII_

_AT THE CAFÉ_


Whether it be due to the incessant cold and dry winds, that parch the more
genial humours, or to some other cause, there is certainly a tone of
exacerbation, at this moment, among the European residents at Gafsa. I
noticed it very clearly yesterday evening in the little French café--a
soul-withering resort, furnished with a few cast-iron tables and
uncomfortable chairs that repose on a flooring of chill cement
tiles--where, in sheer desperation, two or three of us, muffled up to our
ears, congregate before dinner to exchange gossip and imbibe the
pre-prandial absinthe.

I announced my intention of leaving shortly for Tozeur.

"So you have not yet taken your fill of dirt and discomfort in Tunisia,
Monsieur?" asked one of the clients. He is a wizened old nondescript with
satyr-like beard, a kind of Thersites, who is understood to have
established, from the days of Abdelkader and "for certain reasons," his
headquarters at Gafsa, where he sips absinthes past all computation,
exercising his wit upon everybody and everything with a fluent and rather
diverting pessimism. "You will probably perish on the road to Tozeur, in a
sandstorm."

"Ah, those sandstorms: they interest me. Have you ever been to Tozeur?"

"God forbid! Gafsa is quite bad enough for me. Or you may be strangled by
the Arabs; such things occur every day. You smile? Read the papers! At
some places, like Sfax, there are regular organized bands of assassins,
the police being doubtless in their pay. Be sure to hold your revolver in
readiness--better carry it in your jacket pocket, like this.... No
revolver! (To the company at large) _He has no revolver_! In that case,
don't dream of going out after sunset, here or anywhere else in this
country. And read the papers."

It was always "read the papers."

I mentioned that I had walked home, at midnight on the previous evening,
from the station.

"Then don't do it again, if you value your life. Not long ago a lieutenant
was attacked on that very road, and almost beaten to death. He managed to
crawl back to barracks, and is now a wreck, incapacitated from further
service. By a miracle he was able to identify one of his assailants. They
gave him--what do you think?--two years' imprisonment! Why not the _Legion
d'Honneur_ while we are about it? Then there was the Italian--a
respectable Italian, for a wonder--who went out for a walk and was never
heard of again. The country was scoured for two months, but not so much as
a button was ever found--not a button! They had buried his body in the
sand. That's their usual system, cheap and effective. And the guide-books
say that Tunisia is as safe as the heart of France--ha, ha, ha! I wonder
how much they are paid for making that statement, and who pays it?"

"The hotel proprietors, with an occasional subsidy from the Government."
This from a bloodthirsty young extremist in gaiters and riding-breeches,
who had once been a _colon_, a farmer, but had given it up in disgust. "We
cherish these savages," he went on, "as if they were our uncles and aunts;
everywhere, that is, save in those districts which are still under
military rule. There you should see the natives stand up and salute you! I
am anti-military myself; but I maintain that this salute should be kept
up, as demonstrating the gulf that exists between ourselves and them. But
the moment you leave that zone the gulf is systematically bridged over, to
make it more pleasant for the poor, misused Arab. Let me tell you what I
think. I think that the Sicilians would have managed things better than we
have done. And I also think that our _controlleurs_, they are not
Frenchmen, but Arabs."

"_Voyons, voyons!_" said a clear voice from another table--a new-comer,
apparently. "These are the criticisms to which we are exposed, because we
introduce an enlightened and progressive policy."

"Progressive policy be damned! We have held Gafsa for the last thirty
years, and what have we done to improve the place? Nothing."

"Pardon me! We have planted twenty-seven pepper trees. Tunisia exists for
needy people in search of work. If you can't make it pay, leave it alone.
You have every facility for buying land, for importing this and that--why
don't you settle down and make yourselves at home? A colony, my friend, is
not an orchid."

"And as for those Sicilians," interposed the faun-like wooer of the Green
Fairy, "I think you're all wrong. I admit that they are more flexible than
we are, if you like to put it that way. They will do things that no
Frenchman can do; they will establish themselves in places where no
Frenchman could live; they will eat things which no Frenchman could
swallow; they will oust the very Arabs out of the country in course of
time, by sheer number of progeny and animal vitality. Oh, yes; it's clear
the Sicilians can lower their standard to any extent. But they can never
raise it. They are the cancer of Tunisia. Wherever they go, they bring
their filth, their _mafia_, roguery and corruption. Every Sicilian is a
potential Arab, the difference between them being merely external; the
true African variety wears less clothes and keeps his house cleaner. I
know them! A race of sinister buffoons and cut-throats, incapable of any
ennobling thought, whose highest virtues are other men's vices, whose only
method of reasoning is the knife.... Don't accuse me, Messieurs, of
prejudice, when I am trying to state the case impartially."

You will often hear it put as baldly as that. The alien inhabitants of
Tunisia are well hated by a certain type of Frenchmen. The country has
been compared to a wine-bottle that bears some high-flown label indicative
of fine stuff within--the French administration--but is filled,
unfortunately, with a poisonous mixture from round the corner, the Jews,
Sicilians, Maltese, and Corsicans.

It is as difficult for a tourist to arrive at a just opinion on this
subject as for the average Frenchman. The traveller will not find it easy
to acquire the necessary first-hand data, while the other is warped by his
congenital xenophobia.

In 1900 there were 80,000 Italians, mostly Sicilians, in the Regency, as
opposed to 20,000 Frenchmen, one-half of whom were Government servants.
This great predominance of a foreign stock scared some good folks, and a
"Comité du peuplement français" was organized, to study ways and means of
populating Tunisia with French citizens.

If Sicilians could obtain grants of land under the same conditions as
Frenchmen, large tracts, now waste, would be converted into gardens, to
the profit of the exchequer. Is it worth while? No, thinks the Government;
and with reason. French rule in Northern Africa is a politico-moral
experiment on a large scale, with what might be called an idealistic
background, such as only a civilized nation can conceive. Italians might
improve the land, but they could never improve the Arab; they are
themselves not sufficiently wise, or even well-intentioned.

The Anti-Semitic agitation has died a natural death: you may curse the
Jews, but you cannot crush them. They make good citizens, and are for ever
trying to gain more political influence, which is surely to their credit,
though it annoys a certain class in Tunis. As intermediaries between the
Arab and the white man they are invaluable, their plasticity allowing them
to ascend or descend in either direction, while their broad and active
tolerance, fruit of bitter experience in the past, has honeycombed the
land with freemasonry and scientific charity and liberalism. So far as I
can see, their dirt does not detract from their astuteness--perhaps it
aids it, by removing one source of mental preoccupation, cleanliness. The
old distinction between Livornese and Tunisian Jews is slowly becoming
effaced.

If there is one class of these immigrants whom the ordinary French employé
hates more than another it is his own countrymen, the Corsicans. They have
the gift of climbing into small but lucrative posts of administration, and
there, once established, they sit fast like limpets, to the dismay of
competing French office-seekers. Eject them? You might as well propose to
uproot Atlas or Ararat. Not only can they never be displaced, but from
year to year, by every art, good or evil, they consolidate their position.
That done, they begin to send for their relations. One by one new
Corsicans arrive from over the sea, each forming a centre in his turn,
where he sits tight, with a pertinacious solidarity that borders on the
superhuman.

Cave-hunting savages at heart, and enemy to every man save their own blood
relations, the Corsicans are the nightmare of the Arabs on account of
their irreclaimable avarice and brutality. They would flay the native
alive, if they dared, and sell his skin for boot-leather. They can play at
being _plus arabes que les arabes_, and then, if the game goes against
them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner.
The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his
own compatriots--regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same
primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs his shoulders in
civilized despair.

As for the Maltese, they would be all very well if--if they were not
British subjects. But such being the case, you never know! It is
disheartening to find such babble in the mouth of respectable officials
and writers.

I am well aware that there is a Sicilian _in fabula_ who is not "mafioso";
that the crude banditism which sits in every Corsican's bones has raised
him to the elysium of martyrs and heroes and not, where he ought to have
gone, to the gallows; that the Maltese are not merely cantankerous and
bigoted (Catholic) Arabs, but also sober, industrious, and economical. I
have lived with all these races in their own countries and--apart from a
fatal monkey-like apprehensibility which passes for intelligence but, as a
matter of fact, precludes it--have found chiefly this to admire in them,
that they are prolific and kind to their offspring.

Small praise? Not altogether. The same may apply to cats and dogs, but it
does not always apply to civilized races of men. The Scotchman, for
instance, can produce children, but is often unkind to them (_Read the
papers!_); the Frenchman is kind to children, but often cannot produce
them. It would seem that chiefly in half-cultured people are these two
qualities, twin roots of racial and domestic virtues, to be met with side
by side.

Whatever may be the cause of it--better food, a different legislation or
climate, or contact with other nations--the suggestive fact remains, that
the more objectionable idiosyncrasies of the Maltese, Corsicans and
Sicilians become diluted on African soil. Can it be the mere change from
an island to a continent? There may be some truth in Bourget's "oppression
des îles." _Insulani semper mali_, says an old Latin proverb....

"Do you know," the gaitered young ex-farmer was saying--"do you know how
many French _colons_ there are in the whole regency? Eight or nine
hundred, drowned in an ocean of Arabs, who own the land. And that's what
we call settling a country. The Americans knew better when they cleared
out the redskins! And how do the English manage in India? Why, they shoot
them--_piff-paff_: it's done! That's the way to colonize (looking
approvingly at me)--_supprimez l'indigène_! A nation cannot condescend to
the idealistic ravings of an individual."

I observed that I had never heard of that method being actually adopted in
India.

"You say that, Monsieur, because you fear it sounds a little drastic. But
we are not in Paris or London just now; we can say what we think. Or
better still" (glowing with enthusiasm), "they tie them to the mouth of a
big gun, and then--_Boum ... houpla!! Biftek à la tartare_."

"You are misinformed, my friend," said the voice from the other table.
"That Indian cannon business was merely an administrative experiment."

I looked at the speaker, who was smiling mirthfully to himself. He was a
fair-complexioned man of about forty-five, rather carefully dressed,
blue-eyed, with a short, well-groomed beard--evidently an old acquaintance
of the company.

"It's all right for you," the other retorted, "with your comfortable
offices and your fat, ever-increasing salaries. You are not a harassed
agriculturist, skulking in fear of his life, or a public servant, starving
on four francs a day. Behold!" he went on, extracting a newspaper out of
his pocket, "behold the latest portrait of yourself and your
colleagues--you have an air of revolting prosperity. And your whole
biography, too, in black and white; your wife, your children, your past
career ... what it is to be a capitalist!"

"_Tiens_! I never saw this. And printed in Paris a fortnight ago! But it
may be lying somewhere about the house. I only returned at midday, you
know. Not exactly a flattering likeness...."

The document was handed round. It was a French journal devoted to mining
interests, and contained a long article dealing with the phosphate
industry of Metlaoui, near Gafsa, with views of the works and portraits of
its principal representatives. Beneath that of the speaker were printed
the words--

                "PAUL DUFRESNOY,
                     Ingenieur civil des mines,"

and some other titles.

An odd coincidence, this meeting, on the eve of my departure.

I passed over to his table and mentioned that I possessed an introductory
letter to him.

"How? And you are leaving to-morrow for the Djerid? You are not coming to
see me?"

I replied that I would gladly give myself that pleasure. His family, he
explained, was away just now, but if I could arrange to delay my departure
for a little while he would accompany me as far as Metlaoui, which lies on
the Tozeur route, and show me over the mines. He was to return to his work
there in a week or so. The proposal was too tempting to be refused.

We spoke of the spirit of irritation and discontent that seemed rife among
the Europeans in Gafsa.

"Yes, the wind," he said; "or perhaps Africa generally. I've often noticed
that men, and women too, put on new faces and characters hereabouts. This
contact with an inferior race upsets their nervous equilibrium. The lack
of comfort and the need of abrupt action makes them discard gentleness and
other external husks of civilization. The mildest of us are liable to
become brusque; and harsh ones, brutal. Only the native remains resigned."

Thereupon I propounded my hypothesis of the _Mektoub_ or resignation
doctrine: the intellectual burnous of the Arabs.

The theory, he thought, was so good that there must be something wrong
with it. His work brought him into daily contact with the natives, and, so
far as he could judge, _Mektoub_ was only one aspect of their general way
of looking at things. It was bound up, for instance, with that idea of
impenitence. Unlike ourselves, who approve of self-abasement, the Arab
regards repentance as only fit for slaves. He does not hunt for his own
sins; he hunts for yours, and hits you on the head when he finds them.
There was something in the notion, he thought, for surely remorse was
rather a provincial sensation; it implies that a man has really done
something wrong, or that he thinks he has; in either case, what was there
to boast of? He had little time for studies, nowadays, but it seemed to
him that the trend of feeling was in the direction of Old Testamentary
ideals. Men were growing tired of offering their other cheek to be
smitten; they found it degrading, as do the Arabs. Why not import some of
these sterner conceptions into our morality, as we import their peppery
curries and kouskous and pilaffs into our cuisine?

He was inclined to say amiable things about the English race. The
Anglo-Saxon, he thought, with his "constitutional non-morality," had come
nearest to discovering a sensible working system of conduct--as a nation.
It is his highest racial virtue to lead the Cosmic Life--to take all he
can get, and ask for more. That is why every one, in his heart of hearts,
envies and admires him. His chief defect, he thought, was a disdain of a
knowledge of general principles, justifiable enough in the times of
unsound teleological theorizings, but not nowadays, when we have at last
set foot upon earth.

"And what do you say," I asked, "to our so-called national hypocrisy?"

"Well, we others are apt to stand aside and marvel whether you have
succeeded by reason of it, or in spite of it. Of course it annoys us
beyond words! But there is a form of it which is highly laudable: the
Anglo-Saxon, it seems to me, often acts in apparently hypocritical fashion
out of consideration for what he conceives to be the opinions of the
majority. Profoundly self-respecting, he is equally careful not to impinge
upon the feelings of others, however wrong-headed he may think them. In
such cases, his hypocrisy is only a proof of civilization and genuine
politeness. Hence also that shyness and reserve which I have often noticed
in your countrymen--they are not signs of awkwardness or indecision, but
of strength systematically controlled."

"That is very gratifying. And what of our snobbishness?"

"The English snobbishness," he replied, "may not be beautiful, but its
origins are sufficiently venerable to inspire respect. It testifies to
long political stability; it is rooted in Magna Charta. We foreigners, who
upset our Governments and annihilate our aristocracies every ten years,
will never attain that mellow stage. One may dislike it; one dislikes the
by-products of many excellent institutions. Your Government, for example,
does extraordinarily little to foster art or literature or research. Taken
by itself, that is an evil. But as a by-product of the English cult of the
individual--of that avoidance of pestilential State interference in
everything which is the curse of continental Europe--it may be gladly
endured, if not admired."

He added:

"When one lives out of Europe, Monsieur, one learns to know England
better. To see things at their true perspective one must take up a stand
at a proper distance from them. England only begins to show its true
proportions at a point where other lands cease to be visible. Austria, for
instance, can only be examined on the spot. Once you have crossed the
insignificant Mediterranean, this immense and fertile country, with its
long history of rulers and battles, has already faded into air. _Ça
n'existe plus_. Your Gladstone explained the phenomenon correctly: Austria
has never done good to the world."

I gathered that the Metlaoui phosphate company had modelled its principles
on those of the "Anglo-Saxon." There is little "pestilential State
interference" in its management; the board of directors takes all it can
get, and asks for more. It is a paying concern, and consequently the
shareholders admire it unreservedly--in the rest of mankind, this feeling
is tinctured with a strong dose of envy.




_Chapter VIII_

_POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS_


One dines early in Gafsa, and afterwards there is nothing, absolutely
nothing, to do. Cafés become tedious with their card-games, cowboy
politics and persistent allusions to "la femme," that protean fetich which
dominates and saturates the Gallic mind, oozing out, so to speak, at every
pore of their social and national life. They never seem to grow out of the
_Ewig-weibliche_ stage. If only, like the Maltese, they would talk less
and do more in certain respects, the "comité du peuplement" might close
its doors. But such recklessness would ill comport with the ant-like
hiving quality which paid back, within I forget how few years, the German
war indemnity.

After dinner, therefore, a short promenade about the streets and oasis, to
court that illusive phantom, sleep, and to replenish the mind with new and
peaceful images. I found a cloudless and relatively warm night. The wind
had died down, and there was a brilliant comet (the Johannesburg comet) in
the sky. Knots of natives were gazing at it with disfavour: I listened,
and heard one of them attributing the Franco-Tripolitan frontier incident
to its baleful fires. "And there is more to come," he added, "unless it
goes away." Townspeople, of course; the cultivators are asleep long ago.

Why don't you settle down and make yourselves at home? With those words
Dufresnoy had put his finger on the spot. The same idea must occur to
every one who compares the French method of colonization with that pursued
in English dependencies. Even our most ephemeral civil servants take
pleasure in "settling down"; they acquire local interests in golf, or
native folklore, or butterflies; they manage to surround themselves with
an atmosphere of home. Among the _colons_ of Tunisia you may find a home
establishment of the most comfortable type, but Government employés regard
the Regency in the light of an exile; they never try to make their life
more endurable, as they easily could do, with a little co-operation.

In Gafsa, for example, where the summer temperature is 100, no ice can be
procured unless you drive to fetch it from the station settlement where
the phosphate company has its servants; if you want good vegetables, you
must telegraph _inland_ for them to Metlaoui, whither they are brought
from the sea-coast, via Gafsa, for the consumption of the "company"; fresh
fish, which are caught in fabulous quantities at Sfax, and could be
transported by every over-night train, are hardly ever visible in the
Gafsa market. There is no chemist's shop in the place, not even the
humblest drug-store, where you can procure a pennyworth of boric acid or
court-plaster. So they live on, indulging all the time in a luxury of
lamentation.

There would be better shops in places like Gafsa if foreign commercial
settlers were not discouraged from establishing themselves. French ones,
needless to say, refuse to "settle."

The hotels in the country places, too, would be better. At present they
exist on a system of monopolism and favouritism; it is quite beyond the
ambitions of their managers to collect a clientèle; most of these concerns
are palpably run on the following principle: to keep the guest in such a
state of chattering starvation, that he is _ready to eat anything_. How
often have I yearned, in these "Grand Hotels"--they are all _grand
hotels_--for the material comforts and the decent fare of some little
wayside hostelry in Finland, or a rest-house in the jungle of Ceylon!

Why do French travellers not complain oftener?

Well, the Frenchman is a patriotic creature and congenitally kind-hearted;
the proprietors of these establishments are country-people of his; they
are poor devils who have got stranded, somehow or other, in Tunisia; one
must have patience with them. Sometimes, however, your self-respecting
Gaul is strained beyond the point of patriotic endurance by the
concoctions of these Locustas and Borgias; then he unsheathes that
dagger-like Neanderthal manner which he carries about with him for rare
occasions of self-defence; and it warms the cockles of one's heart to hear
how pertinently he discourses damnation to the cringing host. For we
non-Frenchmen, be it understood, are all "des désequilibrés" who demand
toast, hot water and such-like exotics; our complaints need not be taken
seriously; besides, foreigners are bound to pay in any case. But when a
countryman begins to find fault there is not only a possibility that
something, after all, may not be quite right with the cuisine or drainage,
but even a chance that one or two items will be coldly struck off the
reckoning. And that hurts!

They will tell you that there is nothing to be procured in the market; but
if you proceed to the spot, you will at least see succulent legs of mutton
exposed for sale. The _chef_ of the establishment, however, when making
his morning purchases, passes by these with scorn, and betakes himself to
a little booth whose table is strewn with dubious scraps of skin and
bones, which have already been fingered and contemptuously thrown aside by
fifty dirty Arabs (I speak as an eye-witness); he buys a few handfuls of
these horrors for three or four sous, and forthwith--hey, presto!--they
are transformed into a "ragout à la bretonne" for the famished traveller.
Tunisia is a sheep-rearing country--there are sixty thousand sheep in the
_contrôle_ of Gafsa alone--but you may live there a lifetime before seeing
a leg of mutton at a country table d'hôte. For all the "gigots" that ever
appear at my host's entertainment, one might really think that the muttons
of Africa were a peculiar species, a species without legs: crawling,
maybe, on their bellies, like Nebuchadnezzar.

"Je m'en f--de vot' bon-homme," said one of these gentlemen to me,
referring to Baedeker, with whose sacred pages I had threatened him. "And
as for the tourists, they'll come just the same."

And so they do! But they all end in discovering that even the worm will
turn, when suffering from the torments of _dyspepsia tunesina veridica
sine qua non_ ...

A good deal of amateurish talking is done, in Gafsa, in regard to the
profits that would be gained were the oasis to be given over to Sicilian
cultivators. Apart from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of Gafsa, who is
the chief owner of it, would have something to say on the subject, these
advantages would be limited to pruning the trees and grafting some of
them; introducing, possibly, a few more vegetables, and having the ground
more parsimoniously tended than at present. The magnesia in the water is
hostile to the majority of delicate European growths. Something, no doubt,
could be done in the way of improvement, but as a set-off to a visionary
project of this kind, which is averse to the whole spirit of French rule
in Tunisia, there would be a great rise in prices: Italians would form
their inevitable ring. The extent of the gardens has almost doubled since
1880, without their help.

As to the Arabs----

If the French looked to their prison system they would soon arrive at
better results. For childish thefts and such-like trespasses, committed
nearly always at the instigation of their parents, boys of ten and twelve
are now locked up with hardened criminals, often for considerable periods:
what is this but a State-aided manufacture of crime? Go to the prison of
Sfax, and you will realize that there may be some reason for the
absinthe-drinker's remark as to the "organized bands of assassins" at that
place. I speak of what I have seen with my eyes. I found the prison of
Souk-el-Arba, for instance, so tightly packed with men and young boys that
there was not room for all of them to lie down at night, and such furious
fights used to occur for the possession of places near the wall (the room
was in pitch-darkness) that the warder was obliged to enter, every now and
then, and restore order by beating those nearest the door about the head
with a club.

The Arab boy, they will tell you, is full of guile, and must be repressed.

Granted, but----

A colony, furthermore, is _not an orchid_.

Granted.

Q.E.D.




_Chapter IX_

_SOME OF OUR GUESTS_


I shall be glad to leave for Metlaoui and the Djerid. Gafsa is losing its
flavour; the novelty and pungency are gone. The same old faces, the same
old _bouts de conversation_; quickly, indeed, does one live oneself into a
place and learn, or think to learn, all its little secrets.

The hotel, too, has suddenly become an insufferable menagerie. Mysterious
inspectors come and go, and commercial travellers of unappetizing looks
and habits are far more frequent than formerly. But I shall regret the
earth-convulsing laughter of the Greek doctor, who has latterly taken to
putting in an appearance at meal-time. He is a gruff, jovial personage,
and so huge in bulk that he can barely squeeze into the door of his little
shop in the _souk_ where he sits, surrounded by unguents and embrocations,
to treat the natives for their multifarious distempers. He is quite
straightforward about the business. "You come to this country to spend
money," he tells me, "but I--to make it."

The profession is not all plain sailing, however, for the French
authorities raise every kind of obstacle in his path; they tear his red
advertisements down from the street walls and openly call him a quack.
Were it not for the Greek Consul in Tunis, who happens to be an old friend
of his, who knows how much longer they would allow him to practise in the
land!

I sometimes go to watch his operations, which, so far as I can judge, are
fairly remunerative, thanks to Achmet the interpreter, one of whose many
duties it is to inform himself confidentially of the financial status of
prospective patients. For the richest sheikh will don tattered clothes
when he visits the surgery, and would doubtless be taken for some poor
labourer were it not for Achmet, who sees through the disguise and gives a
discreet sign to Æsculapius, whose services, of course, must be prepaid;
it is _money down_ before he will prescribe or give away a drop of
medicine.

I was much interested in one of his methods as exemplified on the person
of a native youth who was led in the other day. He was an Aissouiyah
dancer, and had evidently overdone his part in the heat of enthusiasm;
there were no less than forty-three sword-cuts across his middle. After
receiving a handsome fee the doctor gave him some liniment which caused
exquisite pain: the patient writhed in agony.

[Illustration: Natives of Gafsa]

"That's good medicine," I heard Achmet telling him, reassuringly; "that's
strong. See how it hurts!"

For a while he bore up bravely, but the pain growing worse instead of
better, the doctor was at last persuaded, out of compassion and in return
for a second fee, to give him something with a more soothing effect.

But eye diseases are his speciality. His _pièce de résistance_ is a Jewish
tradesman whom he has lately supplied with an admirable glass eye--a thing
almost unheard-of in these parts. This man and myself were sitting in the
shop not long ago when a Moroccan happened to be passing who had known him
in his one-eyed days; the stranger gave him a sharp look and then walked
swiftly away, apparently suspecting himself to be the victim of some
absurd hallucination as regards the new eye. But he returned anon, to make
sure of his mistake, I suppose; while the Jew confronted him with a
defiant glance of his two eyes. They stared at each other for some time in
silence. At last the Moroccan enquired:

"Are you the man who sold me that piece of cloth three weeks ago?"

"I am he."

There was another long pause. Then:

"That new eye: how came you by it?"

The Jew, a dreadful scoffer, pointed heavenwards with one finger.

"A thing of God!" he said. "A miracle has been vouchsafed me."

But the man of Mequinez answered nothing. He gazed at him once more, and
then, slowly bending down his head, folded his hands across his breast in
prayer, and walked away....

Then there is the Polish Count, Count Ponomareff, who arrived four days
ago. He is past middle age, with a drooping moustache and large red nose;
a wistful and woebegone figure, but a brilliant conversationalist, when
the mood is upon him. I have not taken very kindly to the man. Among other
things, he disapproves of flint-collecting; he asks, rather scornfully,
"whether one can sell such stones." And yet, for some obscure reason, he
has singled me out among the men as the object of his favourable notice,
affecting rather a distant manner towards the rest of us; the ladies,
however, are charmed by his courtly graces. He wears profuse jewellery, to
set off his title, no doubt. It is understood that he has held high
Government posts, and is now only waiting for some letters before joining
certain friends in a costly caravan expedition further south. Yet he seems
poor--hopelessly poor. I surprised him, soon after his arrival, in a
heated debate with the landlord on the subject of candles and _café au
lait_. Then he enquired if the country was safe.

"Not if you go out with a _machine comme ça_," touching the Count's
gorgeous watch-chain.

He knows, at least, how to handle his knife and fork, which is more than
can be said of all the inmates of this hostelry. A town-dweller,
evidently; he tells me he detests wild life of every kind and has come
here only to oblige his friends; he calls the Arabs "ignoble savages."

Such, however, is not the opinion of another guest, my friend Monsieur
M----. One must be careful how one criticizes the habits of the natives in
his presence; not that he would be angry, for he is too gentle to feel
wrath; or become argumentative--he is too sure of his ground for that; but
he might be wounded on his most sensitive spot, and he would certainly
think you--well, misinformed.


The motley crew of Gafsa have become his favourites ever since his arrival
in the country two weeks ago, and he has a theory that it is a mistake to
endeavour to learn their language--it only leads you astray, it spoils the
"direct impression."

He is a well-known French painter, whom some eye trouble has forced--only
temporarily, let us hope--to abandon the brush. Despite his patriarchal
beard, he is an impenitent romanticist of contagious youthfulness; the
entire universe lies so harmoniously disposed and in such roseate tints
before his mental vision, that no one save Madame M----, a wise lady of
the formal-yet-opulent type, whom Maupassant would have classed as "encore
désirable," is able to drag him to earth again, with a few words of
wholesome cynicism.

Just for the fun of the thing, and to while away his hours of enforced
idleness, he is collecting facts for a book to be entitled "Customs of the
Arabs," as exemplified by the life of Gafsa. The idea came to him quite
suddenly, after reading some descriptions which he considered sadly
misleading. Customs of the Arabs! To tease him, I quote the authority of
Bordereau, who says that there are practically no Arabs in Gafsa; that the
customs of this town are one thing and those of the Arabs another, unless
he applies the word Arab to all the Mohammedan races of these parts.

The objection is brushed aside; one word is as good as another,
_n'est-ce-pas_?

I point out a genuine Arab who happens to be passing; he has come down
from the hills and is leading a camel loaded with halfa; he is gaunt and
ill-clad, but walks with a fine swagger, and is evidently a valuable young
person, to judge by his tattooings.

"That? That's only a young savage from the mountains. How are you to find
out anything about him? And I make a point, you know, of only recording
what I see with my eyes. No theories for me! I mean to see everything and
to set it down; to describe the Arabs as they are--as they _really are_,
in all the circumstances of their daily lives. One must see everything."

As a painter, I urge, he must have discovered how useful it is to restrict
the field of vision now and then; to be deliberately half blind.

"Painting, Monsieur, is one thing, and writing another. It is one of the
few advantages of growing old that things begin to fall, so to speak, into
their proper places. When I go to my studio, I go for distraction; art, it
seems to me, is there to create moods, pleasurable or otherwise; a painter
must seize impressions. But I go to my library for information; the
business of a writer is to collect and arrange facts; a book, as I
apprehend it, should be--a book. That is my quarrel with this Tunisian
literature; many of the things that have been written about the country
are not books at all; while others are full of mistakes. Look at these two
volumes, for instance! Impressionistic realism, I suppose they would call
it, scrawled down by an excitable female journalist who, I am sorry to
say, has created quite a rage for European and American lady tourists
among these Arabs, to the great discredit of our civilization. Read them,
Monsieur, as a warning example, and perhaps you will give me your
Bordereau instead; there may be something in it, after all."

I gladly make the exchange, and regard the transaction in the light of an
omen, an epoch. I have been craving for something different from the facts
of Bordereau, who has been my companion all these days. A solid little
piece of work, by the way, which often set me wondering whether our
British public would care to pay four shillings for a technical account of
the climate, history and natural products of some remote Egyptian oasis.
But perhaps the cost of production has been defrayed by some Government
department.

These two volumes by Isabelle Eberhardt--where have I heard that name
before?--look tempting. I promise myself some hours of pleasant reading.

"And then, for downright misstatement," he continued, "look at this. Here
is a Monsieur Kocher, who passes for an authority, and who, describing the
Arab marriage customs, talks of the 'brutalité du viol dans le
marriage--un drame lugubre.' Now that comes of not examining things with
one's own eyes. Since my arrival here I have already seen several Arab
weddings and something of their married life, and I must say, candidly,
that I find it full of romance. Say what you will, these Arabs are
unconscious poets."

"And if you want still further information," I said, "ask the boy whom I
saw blacking your boots this morning. He will describe to you the minutest
details of his married life with surprising frankness. His father bought
him a wife two weeks ago, under the condition, however, that his little
brother is to be allowed to share in the joys of matrimony. That young
savage from the mountains would blush, if Arabs ever could blush, to hear
their revelations."

"Oh, oh, oh! You appal me! But I would like to make personal enquiries
into the matter; that is, if I can make them understand me. It is my rule,
you know."

"Do, Monsieur; question both the brothers, and write down their answers,
the perusal of which will be a liberal education for our boys at home.
Among other things, they say that whenever----But here is Madame coming!"

"Never mind her! She takes an interest in Arab institutions, as I do....
Only imagine, Amélie, our shoeblack is said to be actually married; and so
is his little brother, and they have one and the same bride! Two husbands
to one wife, or half a wife apiece--what do you think of that?"

"I think it's quite enough to begin with. Remember, _mon cher_, they are
only children."




_Chapter X_

_THE OASIS OF LEILA_


I rode, for a farewell visit, to the small oasis of Leila, or Lalla, which
lies a few miles beyond the railway station. It is one of several
parasitic oases of Gafsa: a collection of mud-houses whose gardens are
watered by a far-famed spring, the fountain of Leila.

The water gushes out, tepid and unpleasant to the taste--but
health-giving, they say, like so many unpleasant things--from under steep
banks of clay through which the railway to Sfax has been cut. It is a
sleepy hollow of palms, a place to dream away one's cares. The picturesque
but old-fashioned well at this spot has just been replaced by a modern
trough of cement. I watched the work from beginning to end, ten or fifteen
Arabs, supervised by a burly Sicilian mason, finishing the job in a few
days.

"These Saracens!"--such was the overseer's constant lament--"these
Saracens! You don't know, dear sir, what fools they are."

In never-ending procession of gaudy rags the village folk come to these
waters, the boys mostly on horseback, the women afoot. Donkeys are loaded
with the heavy black goat-skins of water; there is laundry-work going on,
and a good deal of straightforward love-making under the shade. These
children of nature have a wild beauty of their own, and the young girls
are frolicsome as gazelles and far less timid. They have none of the
pseudo-bashfulness of the townsfolk. For the rest, only the _dessus du
panier_ of womankind goes veiled hereabouts--a few portly dames of Gafsa,
that is, who are none the worse, I suspect, for keeping their features
hidden. Perhaps the good looks of these Leila people are a heritage from
olden days, for this oasis is known to be a race islet, inhabited almost
exclusively by men of the Ellez stock--one of the three races that have
chiefly contributed to the formation of the modern Gafsa type; a
conquering brood of European origin, small but shapely.

But untold ages ere this the waters of Leila were already frequented by
men of another kind, by the flint-artists. Among the relics of their
occupation I picked up, here, an unusually fine implement of the
"amygdaloid" shape.

Not a soul in Gafsa, native or foreign, could tell me who was the lady
Leila that gave her name to this fountain. On the spot, however, I heard
this tale: She was a young girl, madly enamoured of an Arab youth, but
strictly guarded. Her married sister alone knew of their infatuation, and
used to help her by keeping a look-out for him at the water-side; and when
he appeared, she would return home and sing to herself (as if it were a
snatch of some old ditty)--Leila, Leila, your lover comes! But the maiden
understood, and swiftly, under pretence of fetching water, she would run
to meet him at the well, and take her joy. The story has an air of
probability; such things are done every day, at every fountain throughout
the land. This lingering at the well is one of the moments when their hard
life is irradiated by a gleam of romance.

An old man also gave me the following account:--

Ages ago, he said, when Gafsa belonged to the Sultan of Trablus (Tripoli)
there was sad misgovernment in the land. The taxes became quite
unendurable, and the city was half emptied of its inhabitants, who fled
this way and that, rather than submit to the extortions of the Sultan's
officers. And among those who escaped in this fashion was a god-fearing
widow and her children. Her name was Leila. She took up her abode near
this fountain, which was then little frequented. Here she dwelt, doing
good works whenever occasion offered. And here, at length, she was
received into the mercy of Allah and entombed. The country-folk gave her
name to the water, to perpetuate the memory of her pious life....

The depression beyond this fountain is celebrated as the resort of game,
and yesterday a French gentleman of my acquaintance went there, provided
with all the accoutrements of sport, not omitting a copious
luncheon-basket--there might be snipe or partridges, or perhaps a hare, a
gazelle, a leopard--who knows?

He returned in good time for dinner.

"_Voilà ma chasse_!" he said, opening his bag. It contained a bundle of
wild asparagus, for salad, and fourteen frogs, which he had killed with a
rifle.

"You can't get frogs as easily in my part of France," he told me. "If the
sport were not forbidden for seven months out of the twelve, the species
would long ago have become extinct."

I enquired whether the close-season for frogs was officially set down,
like that of hares or wildfowl.

"Frogs," he explained, "are not considered game in the governmental sense
of that word; they fall into the category of fisheries which, as you know,
comes under the jurisdiction of the respective prefects. Hence the
close-time, though officially fixed, varies according to the different
provinces. In my department, for example, it begins on the 15th of
January. At Gafsa, if I may judge by certain indications, it would
probably be arranged to commence still earlier."

Far be it from me to decry the succulent hams of _Rana esculenta_ (or
rather _ridibunda_). I have been offered far more fearful wild-fowl nearer
home--certain ornithological wrecks, I mean, that have been kept beyond
the feather-adhering stage, and then reverently held before a fire, for
two minutes, wrapped in a bag, lest the limbs should drop off.

There is considerable talk at Gafsa of the wild mountain sheep, the
Barbary mouflon. They say that as late as the early nineties it was no
uncommon thing to meet with flocks of over thirty grazing in the
mountains. Although a special permit must now be obtained to be allowed to
shoot them, their numbers have much diminished. But the accounts vary so
wonderfully that one cannot form any idea of their frequency. Some talk of
seventeen being shot in the course of two weeks' camping, others of three
in a whole season. As a rule, they are not stalked, but driven, by an army
of Arabs which the sheikh organizes for that purpose, towards certain
openings in the hills where the sportsman takes up his stand. The desert
lynx is sometimes met with, and hyenas, they say, occur as near to Gafsa
as the Jebel Assalah. Arabs have told me that the fat of the hyena is used
by native thieves and burglars to smear on their bodies when they go
marauding. The dogs, they say, are so terrorized by the smell of it, so
numbed with fear and loathing, that they have not the heart to bark.
(Pliny records an ancient notion to the effect that dogs, on coming in
contact with the hyena's shadow, lose their voice.)

Here, at the Jebel Assalah, I encountered a jackal--a common beast, but
far oftener heard than seen. While resting in a sunny hollow of rock, I
heard a wild cry which came from a shepherd who was driving the jackal
away from his goats. The discomfited brute trotted in my direction, and
only caught sight of me at a few yards' distance. I never saw a jackal
more surprised in my life. When a camel expires in the plain near some
nomads' tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap for jackals near the
carcase--they eat these beasts and sell their skin for a few francs; the
traps are craftily concealed underground, with a little brushwood thrown
over them to aid the deception. It is impossible to be aware of their
existence. But woe betide the wanderer who steps on them!

For the machine closes with the shock of an earthquake, a perfect volcano
of dust and iron teeth leaping into the air. Its force is such that the
jackal's leg is often cut clean off, and he hops away on the remaining
three. For this and other reasons, therefore, it is advisable not to
approach too near a dead camel.

The desert hare is shot or coursed with muzzled greyhounds, _sloughis_,
who strike it down with their paws; unmuzzled, they rend it to pieces.
There are few of them in Gafsa just now, on account of the cold to which
they are sensitive; although muffled in woollen garments they shiver
pitifully. Of falconers, I have only met one riding to the chase. It was
the Kaid of Gafsa, a wealthy man of incalculable political influence both
here and in Tunis. It is even whispered--But no; one must not repeat all
one hears....

With the proprietor's permission I went over a young plantation of trees
and vegetables that has sprung up near the railway line, about halfway
between Gafsa and Leila. Excavating to a depth of six metres at the foot
of the bare Rogib hill, they encountered an apparently unlimited supply of
water, and here, where formerly nothing but a few scorched grasses and
thorns could be seen, is now a luxuriant little oasis. More might be done
with the place, but the owner seems to have lost interest in it; the
locusts, too, have been rather destructive of late.

He had planted quantities of prickly pears, he said, but the Bedouins'
cattle had devoured them. These are useful growths in Tunisia, requiring
hardly any moisture and forming, when full-grown, impenetrable walls of
spiky green. They also bring in a respectable revenue. In the district of
Kairouan, for instance, many families draw their entire income from them.
A few have been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near Gafsa, but they
are unprotected and liable to be trodden down in their early years, or
eaten. Barbed wire, herald of civilization, is almost unknown in these
parts.

Like most tradespeople, this proprietor was rather despondent about the
future of Gafsa. There had certainly been some improvement within the last
twenty years--slight, but steady; the building of the railway station so
far outside the town he considered a disgraceful piece of jobbery, a crime
which had permanently injured the prospects of the place. Merchants, he
said, are entirely dependent on the state of the Metlaoui mines. If, like
last year, these do well, then Gafsa also thrives. If there is a strike or
over-production, as at this moment, Gafsa suffers.

[Illustration: The Roman Wall]

Tourists come to this town, he said, but they leave next day. Nothing is
done to make their stay agreeable.

The natives are not of a kind to take much interest in its welfare. Gafsa
has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches'
cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic
face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the
etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the
lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some
men that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the savage Neanderthal
brood that lived here in prehistoric times, the only pure race-type that
survives is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to which Monsieur
Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa, has already referred. No wonder; since
Egyptian invasions of this region went on for centuries, culminating in
the extended sea-dominion of Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth
century B.C.

A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the place up to the thirteenth
century A.D.

This confusion of blood has done one good thing for them--it has given
them considerable tolerance in matters of religion. They are the least
bigoted Orientals one could wish to meet. Only fifteen in a hundred,
perhaps even less, perform the devotions prescribed by the Prophet. And it
is part of their charming heterodoxy to be dog-eaters. They will catch and
devour each other's dogs; they even breed them for the market, though they
dare not expose the meat publicly, any more than that of swine, which they
eat with relish. But up to a few days ago they had never ventured to touch
the dog of a foreigner. On Wednesday evening, however, a fox-terrier
belonging to a French official was found in the street, dead, with its
throat cut. A stream of blood was traced from that spot to the door of a
native eating-shop, and enquiries from the neighbours elicited the fact
that the cook of the establishment had caught the beast and cut its
throat; that the miserable creature, in its dying struggles, had escaped
from his grasp and run in the direction of home, only to stagger by the
roadside and expire from loss of blood.

There was a wild excitement over this little episode. The dog of a
Frenchman killed, for culinary purposes, by an Arab; it was the _comble_
of temerity! The owner of the animal, on hearing the news, buckled on his
revolver and repaired to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting
his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already conjured into some safe
place of custody. If he is wise he will languish in prison for some days
longer.

Gafsa lies high, and I ask myself whether its fierce shiftings of heat and
cold, its nocturnal radiation that splits the very rocks and renders life
impossible for many plants (outside the cultivated zone, which equalizes
these extremes)--whether all this has not had a numbing and stupefying
influence on the character of the inhabitants. Would not a man, under such
perennial vexations, end in bowing his head and letting things take their
course? I notice the climatic effect upon myself is a growing incapacity
for mental effort. It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun,
they say, still exhales a certain amount of warmth.

Add to this, Arab frugality and the cheapness of native living throughout
the country, which removes all stimulus to work. A middle-class citizen
tells me that he has just returned from Tunis, where a lawsuit had kept
him for two years. He went there with an overland caravan which cost next
to nothing; he slept in a _zaouiah_, where he also obtained a bath gratis;
he spent on his food four sous a day, neither more nor less, and by way of
amusement took coffee with his friends or strolled down to the harbour to
look at the ships. Six pounds in two years! And natives in authority, who
are generally the richest, pay nothing whatever for their nourishment.
Like the Kaid of Gafsa, they simply requisition it in the market; the
sellers grumble, but conform to custom.

How quickly their looks can improve is shown by those who join the army.
In a few months they grow fat, cheerful, and bright-complexioned, thanks
to the hygienic life and better food. As it is, I have noticed single
individuals among the poorest classes who look remarkably well as compared
with their fellows. "They drink milk," was the explanation given me.

There is vitality enough among the young boys who play hockey--these ball
games are non-Arabic, a relic of Berberism--and keep up the sport till
late at night amid a good deal of ill-tempered fighting and pulling about.
Their mothers' milk is still inside them; they have not yet succumbed to
the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits of their elders. But soon
manhood descends upon them like a cataclysm; it tears them with a frenzy
which is anything but divine and thereafter absorbs them, to the exclusion
of every other interest. Hockey-sticks are thrown away....

That witchery of Orientalism, with its immemorial customs, its wondrous
hues of earth and sky--it exists, chiefly, for the delectation of
hyperborean dreamers. The desert life and those many-tinted, mouldering
cities have their charms, but the misery at intermediate places like Gafsa
(and there are hundreds of them) is too great, too irremediable to be
otherwise than an eyesore. They have not solved the problem of the simple
life, these shivering, blear-eyed folk. Their daily routine is the height
of discomfort; they are always ailing in health, often from that disease
of which they plaintively declare that "whoever has not had it, cannot
enter the kingdom of Heaven," and which, unlike ourselves, they contract
by their patriarchal habit of eating and drinking out of a common dish.
They die like flies. Naturally enough; for it is not too much to say, of
the poorer classes, that they eat dirt, and that only once a day. A fresh
shirt in the year is their whole tailor's bill; two or three sous a day
will feed them; sunshine, and the stone floor of a mosque or coffee-house
by night, is all they ask for, and more than they sometimes get.

An old Arab song contains words to this effect: "Kafsa is miserable; its
water is blood; its air is poison; you may live there a hundred years
without making a friend." No doubt the plethoric Sicilian mason at the
Leila fountain would thoroughly endorse this statement with his "Ah,
signore--these Saracens!"... But one learns to like the people none the
less. They are merely depressed; they are not deficient in mother-wit or
kindliness; a little good food would work wonders.

The oasis people are milk-drinkers, and would be healthier than the
townsmen but for the agues, fevers and troublesome "Gafsa boil" to which
they are subject.

I go to these plantations at night-time, after dinner, when the moon plays
wonderful tricks of light and shadow with the over-arching foliage. The
smooth sandy stretches at the outskirts of the gardens shine like water at
rest, on which the leaves of an occasional sparse tuft of palms are etched
with crystalline hardness of delineation.

This untilled region is most artistic, the isolated clumps shooting up
like bamboos out of the bare soil. The whole grove is still wrapped in its
wintry sleep, and one can look through the naked branches of the fruit
trees into its furthest reaches. Only the palm leaves overhead and the
ground at one's feet are green; the middle spaces bleak and brown. But, do
what he will, a man who has lived in the tropics becomes rather _blasé_ in
the matter of palms. Besides, there are no flints to be found here....

[ILLUSTRATION: Olives in the Oasis]

Yet such is the abundance of water that these Gafsa gardens have a
character different from most African plantations. They are more artlessly
furnished, with rough, park-like districts and a not unpleasing impression
of riot and waste--waste in the midst of plenty.

Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of country--the temperate region
at the tail-end of the grove. Only olives grow here; seventy-five thousand
of them. Beside their silvery-grey trunks you may see herds of the small
but brightly-tinted oxen reposing; the ground is pied with daisies and
buttercups, oleanders border the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of
the _djouak_, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound from some hidden
copse.

There will be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the carefully-tended oases
of the Djerid.




_Chapter XI_

_A HAVEN OF REFUGE_


The cold being past all endurance and belief, I was tempted to fulfil my
promise and call upon Monsieur Dufresnoy. What kind of man was this that
managed to survive it?

They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildings of
the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty
walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of
iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle;
only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused--it was
grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment about
the mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might
turn on their rusty hinges.

Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly panic.

M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost ran into me. I tried to explain
the sensations his domicile had aroused in my mind; he laughed at first,
and then admitted that he had often felt the same thing. The house was apt
to look like that, he said, when his wife was away.

The inside appearance, once that portal has been passed, is quite
different, and I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing the place, as
it is one of the surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-houses
that date from better days, being built originally for some Turkish
grandee or governor--for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing widow
to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step through the gate into an open
square patio, surrounded, on the sides not abutting on the street, by an
arched passage that reposes on old Roman columns. This covered loggia,
running round three fronts of the court, is the feature of the house:
wonderful how a few arcades and pillars will impart an air of distinction
and even luxury! Almost nothing has been done to change the old appearance
of this small but well-proportioned patio; the walls have been freshly
whitewashed, the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright
flower-bed set in the centre--nothing more.

The five or six lower rooms to which the loggia gives access must be
delightfully cool in summer, but they are dark and chilly at this season.
Luckily, the mansion possesses an upper story where the family resides
during the winter, in rooms that are actually floored with wood. From
here, looking out of the windows, there is a wondrous view over a
wilderness of decayed Arab dwellings upon the oasis beyond, and the
distant purple mountains.

There is an irresistible air of geniality about this home: can it be the
house itself? For a subtle influence, no doubt, penetrates to the heart of
man from the mere form and disposition of inanimate things. I was prepared
to be smothered in a profusion of local effects; of saddle-cloths, silk
hangings, water-pipes, daggers and match-locks, dim nooks with divans, and
those other decorations that suggest the glamour of the Orient to certain
Western minds. Or again, I said to myself, this European wife will have
imported certain tastes from over the sea; the house will be replete with
trifles carefully disposed in negligent fashion, silver photograph frames
and flower vases reposing on diminutive tables, and such-like indications
of what our novelists call the "tender but indefinable touches of a
woman's hand."

Nothing of the kind. The place is simply comfortable: it appeals to one's
sense of propriety. There are carpets and genuine arm-chairs--unique
phenomena in this part of the world; best of all, fire-places wherein
ample logs of olive-wood glimmer and glister all day long.

And so the last few days have passed. Mentally, too, I am thawing once
more; the hotel life and solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me
disagreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps stimulating in youth
and in the plenitude of health; but there comes a period when one lives
less in future dreamings than in the experiences of the past--unpleasant
company, for the most part; when one craves to see the faces and hear the
opinions of rational fellow-creatures; when one requires, in short, to be
distracted. This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the
significance of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian hotels can
only be inhabited by young hopefuls.

The house contains a considerable library of local literature--mostly
technical and dealing with Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it
intelligible to a simple traveller like myself. From certain books I have
begun to make extracts concerning the places I am likely to visit:
Metlaoui, the Djerid oases, and the Chott country.

Dufresnoy is essentially a mining engineer. He evidently knows his
business thoroughly; he has been employed in various parts of the French
dominions and likes the work; all of which has not prevented him from
becoming a man of the world and keeping his other intellectual pores open.
There is nothing of the professional in his conversation. He is rather
undemonstrative, for a Frenchman.

He told me an odd thing about the native rising in Thala in 1896, when a
marabout preached death to all foreigners, with the result that several
white men were murdered (it was a hastily collected band of Italian
tradesmen who put down the insurrection). They caught him, and in due time
he died (?) in prison--they were probably afraid to execute him: perhaps
he killed himself--and the odd thing is this: that although the necessary
sum has been contributed for erecting a monument to these unhappy victims
of native ferocity, yet the Franco-Tunisian authorities are averse to the
plan, on the ground that such a public monument might offend Arab
susceptibilities. This struck me as overdoing the "pacific penetration"
policy; and he thought so too, more especially as there is a commemorative
stone to some preposterous native bigot at the very place....

I shall be sorry to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui. In him I often admire
that fine trait of his race: the clarifying instinct. He possesses--with
no pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere--an innate rigour of
judgment in every matter of the mind; he avoids crooked thinking by a
process of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear intuitive. Even as
a true collector of antiques has quite a peculiar way of handling some
rare snuff-box or Tanagra statuette and, though unacquainted with that
particular branch of art, yet straightway classes it correctly as to its
merits, so, to him, an idea of whatever kind is an _objet de vertu_, to be
appraised with unfailing accuracy. He is a connoisseur of abstractions.
What the Goth carves out grotesquely after a painful labour of mental
elimination, the right deposited, as residue, after a thousand
wrongs--what the Latin smothers under a deluge of mere words: this your
Frenchman of such a type will nimbly disentangle from all its
unessentials; he presents it to your inspection in reasonable and
convincing shape--purified, clipped, pruned. What is this gift, this
distinguishing mark?

Discipline of the mind, culminating in intellectual chastity--in what may
be called a horror of perverse or futile reasoning.

He mentioned, incidentally, the case of suicides among the natives to
prove that the _Mektoub_ doctrine is not wholly pernicious. Suicides were
quite unusual, he said; the Arabs do not seem to be able to fall in with
the idea, preferring to bear the greatest evils rather than take an active
part in the undoing of themselves. That was _Mektoub_: to bow the head,
dumbly resisting. And were they not right? Did not the great majority of
European cases of suicide imply a neurotic condition--such as when men of
business have suffered reverses on Exchange or lost some trivial
appointment? How easily things could be bridged over, or repaired, or even
endured! The most hopeless invalid could testify to the fact that some
pleasure can still be extracted out of a maimed or crippled existence; a
man, however impoverished, might still live in dignified and fairly
cheerful fashion.

He thought that in the matter of suicides, as in that of remorse, we were
too "spectacular and altruistic"; that we lived in a rather unwholesome
atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas concerning honour and duty;
that the _Mektoub_ practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying
primitive sanity which we would do well to foster within us.




_Chapter XII_

_THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT_


Gafsa, even Gafsa, has its enigmas.

I climbed this afternoon to the summit of the Rogib hill, which lies near
the railway station, on the further side of the Oued Baiesh. This,
presumably, is the site where Marius halted for the last time before
attacking the town; and the spot was also interesting to me on account of
its flint implements....

A sad and barren range of hills. There was no sunshine, for a
scirocco-storm raised clouds of dust and obscured the sky; the wind was
bitterly cold. Finding it impossible to attune my phantasy to the picture
of Marius and his soldiers, I descended once more.

On the station turnpike I overtook a solitary foot-passenger, who plodded
slowly along. It was the Polish Count. He had been absent from the hotel
for several days, and now appeared to be in the gloomiest of humours.

Where had he been?

For a promenade, he said. It was too dreary sitting indoors, all alone. He
had left the hotel. The place was too noisy: the dogs barked incessantly.
He had taken rooms with a Jew, and arranged to have his meals at a small
Italian _trattoria_.

This was a half-truth, I felt sure. The dogs of Gafsa, no doubt, are past
all endurance; they are worse than in any Turkish village where they howl
at least in unison, and so continuously through the night that one ceases
to take note of them; but the man's real reason for this change of
domicile was probably another one.

"You must find that much quieter," I said, "and cheaper as well. These
hotels are rather pretentious."

"Pretentious and dear. Here I am, stranded in an unknown place, without
friends; remittances are due to me, and they never come"--he broke into
the subject without reserve--"and it is hard, I assure you, to deprive
oneself of things, of trifles, if you like to call them so, to which one
is nevertheless accustomed and entitled, so to speak, by birthright. But I
am talking to the winds, no doubt. You, Monsieur, are one of the fortunate
ones; you don't know--you don't know----"

"Yes I do," I replied, trying to think of something to say in the way of
consolation. "I know quite well----"

"How do you know?" he interrupted. And next, with needless vehemence:
"_What_ do you know?"

I was surprised at his sudden change of tone. It was awkward, all this. I
gave utterance to such commonplaces on the instability of human affairs as
occurred to me, and ended up by offering, I hope with sufficient delicacy,
to assist him to the small extent that lay in my power.

"Ah!"

He seemed infinitely relieved by my words: he evidently expected some
answer of quite another import. Turning his back to the wind, and pausing
for a moment to adjust his clothing, he replied, with ambassadorial
deliberation:

"You may be certain, Monsieur, that I would not easily forget a kindness
of this nature; my lot in life has been far too unhappy to make me
undervalue what you, a stranger, have just offered me. But I will decline:
what are a few francs to me? Pray don't think me ungrateful, however. You
have caught me in an almost delirious moment, and your friendly words just
now, when I felt myself so abandoned and in so critical a state of mind,
with this dreadful desert wind moaning and everything, as it seems,
hostile to me: your kind words, I say, touched me more deeply than I can
express." (Here he wiped away a genuine tear.) "But my luck may yet turn,
and then, be sure, I will make you forget all my childish querulousness."

And he went on, almost gaily:

"I never could keep money! And the worst of it is, I hate work; I was not
brought up to it, and you will admit that I am too old to begin life anew.
Yet I object on principle to so-called charity, being intelligent enough
to know that there is only one kind of charity, and Justice is its name.
But what is justice? I suppose we all possess some kind of natural rights,
according to our stations; justice, I take it, would consist in our being
permitted to enjoy those rights. If this is correct, then--ah, Monsieur,
the demoralizing effects of poverty, of non-justice, on a man like myself;
how it lowers your self-respect and makes you capable of actions that you
would reprobate, in your right mind--"

"In your right mind? Is a poor man, then, insane?"

"How can I make you understand? Tell me, is not poverty a kind of madness,
an obsession that haunts you night and day? To puzzle, at every hour, how
to meet this demand and how to shun that one; to deny yourself the
necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you
are yearning to bestow upon them--is it not a mental malady, a fever; is
it not damnation itself? The thousand meannesses: how they degrade you;
how they suck away your strength, your ambition, your faith! To see no
openings before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair! I cannot hope to
make you conceive such a hell: one must have been there oneself. But note
this, Monsieur: never judge an impoverished man by your own standards of
right and wrong--never! For the old-established meanings of things shift
for him--they shift; and his temptations become formidably subtle beyond
belief. When rich, he says calmly _Non; ça ne va pas_. But to forego an
advantage, when poor, is the same as if--let me see ... as if one asked
you to leave lying some fascinating flint in the desert waste."

"That simile, surely, is all wrong, Count. Nobody can be injured by my
flint-mania, whereas----"

"I know, I know; I am not trying to excuse things; I am only explaining
how they happen. But how explain to others? We always talk of putting
ourselves in our neighbours' place; idlest of phrases! since we cannot
possibly avoid bringing our personal apparatus to bear on their problems.
There is a gulf between man and man. You will hardly believe that I used
to take an interest--quite superficial, you know, but none the less
real--in all those questions of the day that absorb the ordinary man of
ease, in politics and art and whatnot; but nowadays all my interests are
centred on one single point. On what point, do you think? On keeping up
the external appearance, and the manners, of well-being. I have no energy
left for anything else; and even this effort quite exhausts me. Art and
politics! What, in the name of heaven, do I care for art and politics,
with the knife at my throat? I only utilize these things; yes, I utilize
them for conversational purposes, in order to deceive others as to my
true, incessant and miserable preoccupations. Laughable, is it not? Why
don't you smile, Monsieur--you, who have never known the bitterness?"

We were crossing the broad Oued Baiesh, a stretch of yellow sand and
stones. To obviate damage by sudden floods, the French have covered this
tract of the road with a coating of asphalt; but the busy life here, the
droves of camels and sheep, the Arab folk laughing over their laundry-work
in the shallow streamlet that trickles through the waste--all these things
were gone for the moment.

But for the torn line of Gafsa palms that confronted us on the other side
of the river-bed, we might have been in the veriest wilderness. Although
the wind was lulled, petulant little pillars of sand still arose here and
there among the boulders, and sank down again, as if exhausted; the
descending sun had emerged, a lurid disk, framed in a sulphureous halo
that melted imperceptibly into the gold of the west.

It was growing chillier than ever, and the Count, shivering with cold,
drew his burnous more closely about him; he had bought one for fifteen
francs, probably in imitation of myself, or because I once jokingly called
it "a garment for millionaires who need not use their hands." He liked to
be taken for a millionaire.

I looked at him awhile, wondering what thoughts were ruling the expression
of his perplexed and sorrowful features, and then tried to turn the
conversation into other channels.

"Are there interesting people at your Italian restaurant?"

"Well, there is Hirsch, the young German: you know him?"

"The police commissaire was talking to me about his case yesterday."

"Ha, was he? Let me tell you that I have investigated it thoroughly, and
find it most instructive. This young fellow is not yet twenty; he ran away
from home for no discoverable reason, then signed on a merchant vessel at
Marseilles and, disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched
port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a night-train, thinking to
reach Tunis. Instead of that, he woke up in the morning and found himself
at Gafsa! Here, you see, are all the elements of wrong-doing, and the
authorities have learnt his history from his papers which they seized. As
a German and a Jew, the French instinctively dislike him; as a Jew and a
foreigner--the Arabs; he is objectionable to look at, dull of wit, and
knows not a word of French or Arabic. But he is poor, and therefore--every
one loads him with kindness."

"And why not?" I asked.

"Why not, indeed? Your friend the magistrate has given him some money out
of his own pocket; the restaurant proprietress refuses to be paid for his
food, while another one, near the station, sends word to say that he can
have a plate of soup there whenever he likes; a young Arab boy--these
Arabs are really incomprehensible--gives him as many cups of tea or coffee
as he can drink; a Jewish lawyer has sent him some clothes; a gentleman in
your hotel a quantity of linen; the Italian barber shaves him gratis; a
certain shopkeeper sends him a bottle of liqueur--of liqueur!--every
second day; the commissaire has given him, free of charge, a decent
unoccupied bedroom in the prison, where he can go in and out as he
pleases; best of all, the _Ponts et Chaussées_ are now employing him at
three francs a day--a princely income, they tell me--at some agricultural
job: pure kindness, inasmuch as he has never handled a spade or pickaxe in
his life. He can have a pleasant time in Gafsa; he can marry an heiress if
so disposed; then, when the place begins to bore him, the German Consul in
Tunis will repatriate him at his Government's expense. 'He's a poor
devil,' they say. Why do I tell you all this? Because--well--I am also
poor--"

Always harping on the old theme!

"The cases are not quite parallel, are they?"

"No. He is young, and fit for work, whereas I am past the middle term of
life. Old age--another horror! Besides, I am a gentleman----"

"Exactly. We should be ashamed to shave you gratis."

"I suppose you're right, Monsieur. I was only trying to explain--to
explain myself--to myself, I mean. Pardon me if I speak too much of my
wretched affairs. But I'll tell you what I think. To endure this revolting
destitution a man must be an Arab. Now, I cannot pretend to be an Arab; I
would not adopt their ideals if I could. And yet, alas! I am beginning to
believe in predestination, as they do; to believe that our faults and our
virtues are distilled beforehand in the silent laboratory of the past. A
sad creed, to think of men born to misfortune; to be obliged to consider
yourself--how do you say in English?--_a stepchild of nature_...."

He was always a good talker, but it is impossible to describe the
intensity of feeling in his speech to-day. He seemed to suffer from some
imperious need of unburdening himself, even to a chance acquaintance like
me; long days of loneliness, maybe, had worked on his nerves and produced
a kind of congestion. But in his words and voice I detected lapses into
other moods, into some other state of being; they gave me the impression
as of two different individuals addressing me. The man did not ring true,
altogether; he was mentally disorganized, disharmonious; those
meretricious reasonings about justice, for example, struck me
disagreeably.

And I could not help contrasting his rambling emotionalism with the
logic--the relentless, diamond-like _justesse_--of the mining engineer. He
is the very antithesis of that pellucid and homogeneous character. The
sanguine temperament ...

What is a man of this type doing in Gafsa?

Mystery!

The rest of us, the cynical Greek doctor, the artist-sage and lover of
Arab institutions, myself (flint-maniac)--to say nothing of men like
Dufresnoy--we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we
have a _raison d'etre_. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how
incongruous a figure against that background of palms and barren
mountains!

An enigmatical creature, and yet not wholly unlovable; he may be unsound
or even unprincipled, he may be deficient in qualities that go to make men
respected and satisfied with the world in general, but he possesses, I
think, certain citizen-virtues unintelligible to the self-centred, rustic
type of mind. He could be stirred to acts of unworldly enthusiasm; he
would share his last crust with some shipwrecked sailor, or shed his blood
gaily for a generous idea. And he is plainly in hard case just now.

_A stepchild of nature_....

"You have a very good English accent, Count."

"We were carefully brought up in languages. Not every one understands
Polish, you know."

"By the way, how does it come about that you, being a Pole, should have a
Russian family name?"

The question seemed to astonish and perplex him. At last he said:

"Oh, it's about the same thing, isn't it? Nowadays, I mean," he added,
with grandiloquent pathos, "ever since the misfortunes of my unhappy
country."

At the entrance to the town we separated, and I watched for some time his
bowed form as it crept along the wood-market in the direction of the
Kairouan road.

This is one of the figures that will persist in my mind very clear and
pathetic, and I shall long remember those plaintive remarks about poverty
that welled up, surely, from the bottom of his heart. How far, I wonder,
is such a man the author of his own calamities, and how far have they
_made him_? Academic questionings, based on out-of-date philosophy! Our
vices, he said, are distilled for us beforehand in the dim laboratory of
the past. His vice, evidently, is to hate work of every kind; his
faculties, therefore, never undergo the rhythmic joy of reaction, for he
is too well nourished to live the _vita minor_ of a starveling, to endure
Arab acquiescence in non-production.

"I am only trying to explain myself--to myself." Half-truth, I imagine. He
is probably conscience-stricken, or at least dissatisfied with his conduct
for one reason or another, and endeavouring to justify some base plan of
action by re-stating ethics in terms of hunger; a specious line of
argument, since hunger is not the rule but the exception.

And then I shall think of his red nose and watery little eyes, his absurd
jewellery--a fine presence, none the less, when he pulls himself together;
there is about him an air of faded distinction that softly symbolizes the
history of his adopted country.

The Count!

Why a count? Because all Poles are counts--those that are not princes. But
why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as
there is something international about a Pole--international, and yet
neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they
all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in
cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know
everybody, and everybody worth knowing is related to them, by marriage or
otherwise, in this or some other century; as men of the world, they are
ready to talk upon any subject with tolerance, geniality and a pleasingly
personal note that withers up the commonplace, smoking, meanwhile,
innumerable cigarettes out of mouthpieces which display a complex
escutcheon contrived in gold and rubies upon the amber surface. Yes, his
choice was good: Poles are gentlemen. But why caricature them? And why,
above all things, select an inappropriate Muscovite name? That argues a
lack of general intelligence and might easily spoil everything; so true it
is, as a legal friend once observed to me, that "it takes a wise man to
handle a lie. A fool had better remain honest."

What can be the meaning of this unlovely comedy? Some defalcation or
forgery? Likely enough. But I think he lacks the cleverness requisite for
a habitual criminal. Perhaps he is only a poor survivor, drifting about in
lonely and distracted fashion while waiting for the inevitable end. Others
may solve the enigma, but not I; for to-morrow we go to Metlaoui.

Yet I know that long after the palms and minarets of Gafsa have faded into
the blurred image of countless other palms and other minarets, I shall be
able to call up the figure of this forlorn and ambiguous fellow-creature,
standing on the asphalt of the river-crossing with his cheap burnous
wrapped around him, sighing, shivering, and setting forth certain views
concerning human life for which there is, after all, a good deal to be
said.




_Chapter XIII_

_TO METLAOUI_


I should be sorry to say how long the train takes to crawl through the
thirty odd kilometres that separate Gafsa from Metlaoui. My companion on
the trip, M. Dufresnoy, tells me that the return journey is still slower,
because the line runs mostly uphill and the trucks, thirty or forty of
them, are loaded with minerals. Fortunately, the car in which we
travelled--each train has only a single passenger carriage--was
comfortable, being built after the fashion of the Swiss "Aussichtswagen,"
with seats on the exterior platform whence one can admire the view.

It gave me some idea of the goods traffic (phosphates) along this line
when he told me that during the past seven days 23,000 tons of mineral had
been conveyed to the port of Sfax alone, to say nothing of those that had
gone further on, to Sousse and Tunis. And not long ago, he said, the
company had an unpleasant surprise: sixteen new engines of a powerful
type, which they had ordered from Winterthur, were suddenly discovered to
be liable to a duty of 1000 francs apiece as "imported articles."

"We can afford it," he said. "Our five hundred-franc shares are standing
at three thousand seven hundred francs."

But he thought that a grave error had been committed in selecting the
narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once
the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would
have to deal with other material, such as tourists, that require fast
services.

They had an accident last year. The couplings of a train, climbing uphill
from Gafsa past the Leila oasis, suddenly broke, with the result that the
rear portion rushed backwards again, careered through the Gafsa station
and up the artificial incline which leads towards the Oued Baiesh, crossed
the bridge, and thundered at a vertiginous pace into the desert beyond. As
luck would have it, another train was just then approaching Gafsa. They
collided with terrific force and, telescoping being out of the question
since both were loaded with minerals, escaladed each other in Eiffel-tower
fashion. Arab eye-witnesses say that the stoker of the up-train was thrown
out by the impact and flew across country "like a bird" for half a mile;
he alighted on his feet, and was found, after a week or so, wandering
about the plain in a dazed condition. The driver was killed outright, and
his widow draws a respectable pension from the company.

Since then two engines are always employed to move the train up the few
miles beyond Gafsa.

The cream-tinted level is speckled with white incrustations and sombre
tufts of desert herbs; here and there, where the winter's rain lingers
underground, are spots of brilliant green; short-lived crops of corn, sown
by the nomads. The hills to the right of the line are bare and torn into
wild ravines; lilac-hued patches, ever changing and fair to see, move
among their warm complexities: cloud-shadows. Here, if anywhere, one
learns that shadows are not always grey or black; even those cast in
moonlight have a certain ghostly coloration.

It was a marvellously clear day, and not many miles before reaching our
destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far
as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly
twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible--white buildings piercing a dusky
line of palms--an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed in the brushwood a
couple of bustards, their heads peering above the herbage. These birds are
rather rare hereabouts, and shy of approach. Arabs say that the bustard is
like the camel: once it begins to run, you never know when it will stop.
They surround them therefore cautiously, and gradually close the circle to
within shooting distance.

Metlaoui is the name of two distinct villages which have been conjured out
of the waste by the discovery of its phosphate deposits--the station
village and, a mile or so further on, Metlaoui proper, with its big
establishments for working the minerals.

Here already, at the station settlement, there is more life than in Gafsa,
though the surroundings are decidedly unpropitious--a waterless plain,
with low hills in the foreground, phosphate-bearing, and wondrously tinted
in rose and heliotrope. There are respectable stores here, very different
from the shops of Gafsa. I entered a large Italian warehouse which
contained an assortment of goods--clothing, jams, boots, writing-paper,
sealing-wax, nails, agricultural implements, guns, bedding, mouse-traps,
wire, seeds, tinned foods--and vainly endeavoured to think of some article
which a _colon_ might require and not find here. The only drawback is that
there are no "colons" in the district.

While waiting for a conveyance to take me to the industrial settlement, I
strolled about and found my way across a sad stretch of ground littered
with tin cans, bottles, and other refuse, to a slight eminence whereon lay
a cemetery. In this forlorn square are about twenty tombs, already
crumbling to dust, although not one of those I saw was five years old.
Humble victims for the most part--Italians in the prime of life who had
come to these regions to gain a little money; or little children, carried
off by the harsh climate (yet the climate of this place is preferred to
that of Gafsa). The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the
inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered
friend or parent, is soon effaced by winds and rain.

One is wholly unprepared for the appearance of Metlaoui proper. In ten
years' time a village has sprung up here, partly of factories and smoky
chimneys, but chiefly of trim bungalows, with white walls and red roofs,
that are dotted over the uneven surface of the ground. The whole site is
owned by the company, and inhabited by its officials and overseers. It has
its own church, shops, schools, hospital, workmen's clubs, bakeries, and
its air of neatness and well-being contrasts pleasingly with the forsaken
landscape all around.

The higher posts are reserved for Frenchmen, but among the lower grades
you may find a number of other nationalities; Spaniards and
Sardinians--hardiest of white Mediterranean races--as well as some
Italians, and not a few Greeks. The manual labour in the mines is
performed by Africans.

Not along ago nearly every drop of water for this settlement had to be
conveyed from Gafsa on the backs of camels. But the company has now
captured a spring at the head of the Seldja gorge, about eight miles
distant, which brings a copious flow of water into the place. Thus they
have been enabled to plant a great number of trees, but I wish they could
be persuaded to adopt a little more variety in their choice of them. One
grows tired of the eucalyptus, that doleful and dismal growth, and even of
the eternal pepper trees, green as they are; and the results, in a few
years' time, would be far more charming if they would take the trouble to
copy some of the Algerian municipalities in this respect, or--better
still--obtain professional advice from the Agricultural Institute at
Tunis, which could furnish them with a large list of ornamental timber and
shrubs that would thrive equally well, and convert Metlaoui into a
veritable garden city. The plants suffer at first from the strong winds,
but they acclimatize themselves by degrees.

Remembering what had been told me of the unsuccessful attempt of the
French to appropriate the water springs of Sidi Mansur, near Gafsa, I
asked Dufresnoy whether the Arabs had not contested the action of his
company at Seldja.

"I should think so!" he said. "They raised the devil. But we are not civil
servants here, who must humour the caprices of half a dozen savages: the
health of the settlement was dependent on our getting this water, and we
took it, _voilà!_ The great ambition of the company is to fix its people
on the spot; to make life here so pleasant for them that they don't want
to leave."

"You must find it difficult. The Arabs, I suspect, run back to the desert
as soon as they have earned a few francs; and as for the European
tradesmen, no doubt they get rich quickly, and then return to their homes
again as soon as possible."

"That is exactly what the company manages to avoid. Let them prosper, we
say; but slowly. And we succeed."

"How so?"

"By manipulating the rates of merchandise transport. The railway to Sfax
belongs to us, and we can regulate prices as it suits us; if we liked, we
could choke off all trade. Ah, the company knows its business! Of course,
that makes us many enemies; they call it high-handedness and brutality--a
concern like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks--_we_ call it
common sense. If the railway were not ours, if we were not practically
dictators of the country, those Americans, with their immense phosphate
importation into Europe, would eat us up; and then these local merchants
would lose everything. That is the justification of our so-called tyranny.
Are we to have nothing for our risks? Look at this installation of
machinery--all built, too, with a view to future aggrandizement: does it
strike you as a half-hearted speculation?"

Daring, on the contrary. Here are gargantuan sheds, capable of holding
thirty thousand tons of mineral apiece; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for
drying them artificially in winter-time, when the sun's heat is
insufficient; all around you a gehenna of mad industrial life, smoke and
steam, a throbbing agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons; there
are chains of buckets, filled with phosphates, wandering overhead in
endless progression or disappearing sullenly into the bowels of the earth;
passionate electric motors; mountains of coal and iron contrivances;
railway engines snorting and whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down
from the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them out of the cars to
dry, amid clouds of tawny dust. One might well grow crazy at the idea of
the primary difficulties involved in grafting upon the desert soil this
ordered mechanical efflorescence, this frenzied blossoming of human
activity.

What is happening?

They are separating the crude phosphate from its natural impurities;
drying, pounding, and loading it upon trains for removal to the sea-board.
That is all.




_Chapter XIV_

_PHOSPHATES_


A light railway leads up to the hills where the phosphates lie. Here you
may see the fiends at work. A legion of wild-eyed, swart and nearly nude
creatures are disembowelling the hoary mountain: visions such as this must
have floated before Milton's eye when he drew his picture of Mammon, who,
with his horde of demons, opened in the hill a spacious wound--

  Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
  Rifled the bowels of our mother Earth
  For treasure better hid....

The workers are chiefly of three races: Tripolitan, Khabyle (Algerian),
and Moroccan; they live in separate clusters among the rocks, each with
their peculiar national traits and mode of building; there is hardly a
woman among them all.

Besides these tribes a certain proportion of Tunisian Arabs are employed,
but they are too weak or timorous to relish underground work; a sprinkling
of negroes, as well as some of the hillfolk from the district surrounding
Metlaoui, who go by the quaint name of Boujaja.

"Good fellows," said Dufresnoy. "They will slit your throat for a you."

The surface phosphates having already become exhausted, the mineral is now
pursued into the dim recesses of the earth. Tunnels are excavated, whence
smaller ones radiate in definite directions--all of them sustained by
wooden beams; the amount of material to be extracted from a given spot is
scientifically fixed; it is shattered by minute blasts of dynamite and,
once the trolley cars have carried it away, the wooden supports are
removed and these cavities filled up by the collapse of the roof. By this
means accidents are forestalled such as that which took place some years
ago when, owing to an oversight of some subordinate left in charge, an
immense mass of mountain fell in, entombing about three hundred miners,
whose bodies are not yet recovered. The ill-fated engineer who was legally
responsible for the mishap was in Paris at the time; he returned in all
haste. After seeing the mischief, he tried to throw himself into an Arab
well, and, baulked of this, lay down at night under a passing train and
was decapitated.

They showed me a map of this subterranean world, variously tinted
according to the regions already exploited and those yet virgin. It
reminded me, with its regular streets and blocks, of some model city in
the Far West.

The underground workings here are about thirty kilometres in length.
Beside these Metlaoui deposits, the company has begun to attack those of
Redeyeff, and will shortly open an assault upon the others at Ain
Moulares, which lie near Henchir Souatir, the present terminus of the
Feriana line. It employs six thousand men; some of the mineral goes as far
as Japan; the output of last year amounted to over a million tons.

One may well be interested in the discoverer of these phosphates, in the
man who has revolutionized the trade of Tunisia. He is a veterinary
surgeon in the French Army--Monsieur Philippe Thomas.

His record is of the best.

Born in 1843, he has taken part in twelve military campaigns,
distinguishing himself particularly in the Franco-Prussian war.

But, above all, he is a savant.

He has written valuable treatises on the diseases of domestic beasts,
describing, among other things, a hitherto unobserved infectious malady of
goats. He is the author of a number of memoirs on the geology of Northern
Africa, and has discovered no less than two hundred new species of fossil
animals of that country; he has made numerous contributions to our
knowledge of its ethnology, prehistoric tombs, and flint implements. Many
of these writings date from the seventies and earlier; they have procured
for him the membership of learned societies, as well as medals and
decorations of all kinds.

A man of such distinction, one would think, coming to Tunisia in 1885 at
the head of a scientific expedition sent by the Ministry of Public
Instruction, would be received according to his merits. It was far
otherwise. Whether from distrust of his capacities or some other cause,
Monsieur Cambon, the Resident, assumed towards him a most chilling
official manner, and the commanding military officer, General Boulanger,
all but refused to grant the escort necessary for his expedition. In one
of his papers he speaks of this reception as "several degrees below zero."

Then, in the same year, appeared his sensational report of the discovery
of phosphate deposits which he had traced over a long line of country;
realizing their commercial value, he insisted that they should be
exploited "_pour le plus grand bien de l'agriculture française et
algérienne._" Nevertheless, ten years passed ere a company could be
formed, as financiers were diffident about the American competition and
the risks of installation in a desert country.

A tardy recognition of his services to the company took the form of a
pecuniary grant, in 1904, of fifteen thousand francs--little enough, in
all conscience, considering the millions he has gained for them. They
further honoured him by changing the name of the station-settlement of
Metlaoui into "Philippe-Thomas."

"It's very economical," Dufresnoy observed.

I am glad to think that another place of that name, the mining village,
will continue to exist; it would seem a pity to erase from the map the
tuneful word Metlaoui, which contains the five vowels in a remarkably
small compass....

Dufresnoy tells me that those barren slopes where the mines lie, and where
the different races now work together in apparent amity, were once the
scene of a sanguinary primitive battle. There is a steep gully at one
point, a dry torrent; the Khabyles lived on one side of it, the
Tripolitans on the other, and between these two races there occurred, on a
starlit night in May, 1905, an affray of unearthly ferocity.

The Khabyles, prudent folk, many of whom had served in the French Army,
had long been laying in a store of warlike provisions; their secret was
well kept, although it was observed that piles of stones were being
collected round their huts, and that a goodly quantity of dynamite and
petroleum was missing from the stores; some of them possessed guns and
revolvers, the rest were armed with knives, daggers and savage mining
gear. They chose a Sunday for the attack, well knowing that the
Tripolitans, who are good-natured simpletons, would be least prepared to
resist them on that day, and half of them in a state of jollification; and
they were so sagacious, that they actually induced a few drunken
Tripolitans to insult them, before beginning the conflict. This, they
knew, would be counted in their favour afterwards.

Hardly was the night come when they advanced in battle array--the fighting
contingent in front; behind them the boys and older men, who kept them
supplied with stones and weapons. A well-nourished volley of missiles
greeted the Tripolitans, some of whom rushed to the fray, while others
took refuge in their huts or with the Moroccans who lived in their own
village near at hand. It was now quite dark, but at close quarters the
stones began to take effect, and hardly was a man down, than five or six
Khabyles ran out of the ranks to finish him off with their knives; others,
meanwhile, went to the locked huts and fired them, or burst them open with
dynamite.

The explosions and lights began to attract attention in Metlaoui; the
whole sky was aflame; there were mysterious bursts of sound, too, and a
chorus of wild howls. Something was evidently wrong, up there.

A party of Europeans, accompanied by a small force of local police, went
up to the mines to investigate. They found themselves powerless; "keep
yourselves out of danger," they were told, "and let us settle our own
affairs." The carnage was in full swing; it was hell let loose. Not
content with killing, they mutilated each other's corpses, bit off noses,
gouged out eyes, and thrust stones in the mouths of the dead; burnt and
hacked and slashed each other till sunrise; no element of bestiality was
lacking. The wounded crawled away to die in caves, or were carried to
nomad camps. The number of the dead was never ascertained; Dufresnoy says
"about a hundred," which is probably below the mark, as an eye-witness saw
three railway trucks loaded with the slain. To this day they find
mouldering human remains, relics of that battle, hidden away in crevices
of the rocks.

Although, once roused, the Tripolitans fought like demons, they were
worsted--the others were too numerous. They had a brief moment of revenge,
however; for during their retreat, on Monday morning, they encountered two
young Khabyle boys who had been on absence and were now returning to work
at the mines, blissfully ignorant of what was going on. These unfortunate
lads were literally torn to shreds.

I confess that, as a spectacle, I should have preferred that night's
engagement to anything in modern warfare. It must have been a stupendous
exhibition of the _bête humaine_.

The Khabyles meditated nothing short of a total extirpation of the
Tripolitan stock; they sent to the mines of Redeyeff for auxiliaries of
their nation, some of whom actually arrived in time for the slaughter; the
rest were intercepted on the hill-paths by the police of Gafsa, who had
been telegraphically summoned and despatched by special train. And soon
afterwards, elated by success, the Khabyles fell foul of the Moroccans and
sent word that they meant to fight them too for sheltering Tripolitan
fugitives in their huts. The Moroccans were delighted at the prospect; but
the management got wind of the project in good time, which was just as
well, for the Moroccans are not only the most orderly of the native
settlers at the mines, but also by far the strongest and fiercest, and it
might have fared ill with the Khabyles. The Tripolitan village has now
been moved to another site--a certain number of troops, too, are
definitely stationed at Metlaoui.

"As usual," said Dufresnoy, "we came in for the blame. They say that we
did not allow the real authors, the Khabyles, to be punished, because they
are French citizens, and all the rest of it. Don't believe a word of that.
If it had been the Tripolitans, we would have acted just the same; we
cannot be bothered with decisions of civil courts, which would have
satisfied nobody, besides depriving us, probably, of a number of good
workmen. There was a little outcry about this, too: that none of the
wounded were treated in our hospital, but carried down to the native
_funduk_ near the station. 'The hospital,' said our director, 'is for
those who are injured in the performance of their duty, and not for
bloodthirsty savages.' That's sound--that's military. One cannot afford to
be sentimental in this country."

I asked what could possibly be the reason for such a ferocious outbreak of
hostility.

"Long-standing animosities of race," he said, "and, as determining cause,
_cherchez la femme_"

"But you said that there were no women on the place."

"_Eh bien, cherchez toujours_...."

And then it also occurred to me that among the mass of local literature
and newspaper files I had perused in his house there was not a single
criticism of this affair. I thought it strange, I said.

He smiled.

"Local politics, my friend! We are obliged to keep the Press well under
control, you know. Don't compare Tunisian life with life in England; there
is no public opinion here, no idea of fair play. These papers, if they
were not subventioned, would print abominations such as no English
journalist could conceive; they would alienate our best friends in the
long run. The company must take account of things as they are, not as they
should be--of Arab savagery, Franco-Tunisian malevolence; of journalistic
venality and public credulity. Whoever is not for us is against us. That
is why the only papers that dare to criticize our management are those
which nobody reads; those, to put it bluntly, which are not worth bribing.
For the rest, there is not a writer in the whole country capable of
grasping either our aims or our methods; the poor fellows have not had the
required education. They only want their mouths stopped."

"That must be more convenient than libel suits; and more economical as
well."

"Just so. Above all things, we are bound to consider the interests of our
shareholders."




_Chapter XV_

_THE SELDJA GORGE_


It is good, after such visions of human infirmity and of death, to ride
over the plain to the Seldja gorge, an astonishing freak of nature. I was
twice within its towering walls of rock; the first time on horseback,
accompanied by a young Tripolitan miner, and in the evening; yesterday
again, in the torrid noon, afoot, alone.

You will do well, in every case, to ride as far as the _bordj_, or
rest-house, that stands near the entrance of the cleft, since there are
about four wearisome miles of level country to be traversed after leaving
Metlaoui. On the first occasion the Tripolitan ran for this whole long
stretch beside my horse, which trotted briskly; he amused himself, none
the less, in belabouring its hind-quarters with a club to make it go still
faster, and I confess to being not scandalized, not inordinately
scandalized, at this performance. We grow hard among the implacable desert
stones. Besides, it was only a hired beast. Any true lover of animals will
understand.

Skirting the foot of the hills that trend along, apparently closed, one
suddenly encounters a broad stream-bed with a rivulet meandering down its
centre; this is the Seldja-water (_arabice_, Thelja). It issues out of a
gateway, hitherto unrevealed; and here you may turn aside from the plain
and enter into the heart of the mountains, into a world of nightmare
effects. This very portal is fantastic, theatrical; it leads into an arena
of riven rocks that might serve as council-chamber for a cloud of Ifrits,
and is closed at the further end. There is a second gateway to be passed
before you can enter the gorge itself.

The track winds upwards--the whole length of the defile is about three
miles--sometimes between walls of rock which are chiselled so smoothly by
the gentle waters that one can hardly believe them to be of natural
workmanship (and at these points, as a rule, your only path is the
stream-bed itself); opening out again into wide amphitheatres, rose-tinted
cirques of desolation, where masses of debris, slipped down from the
heights, lie prone in Dantesque confusion. There are rock-doves and
falcons fluttering about the sunny precipices; cliff-swallows build
precarious habitations against the roof of yawning caverns; sandpipers and
wagtails skim over the streamlet that glides in a smiling flood across
reaches of yellow sand. The charm of water in the waste! This Seldja-brook
is a true child of the sun; cold in the morning and evening hours, its
restless little heart becomes tepid at midday with the glowing beams.

Spiky reeds and tamarisks trip alongside, and the wild fig thrusts
demoniac roots into the crevices; here and there you may see a group of
oleasters, descendants, maybe, of the now vanished Roman olive plantations
in the plain, or a stunted palm that has shot up from the stone cast away
by some passing caravan. For these Oueds are all highways dating from
immemorial ages; there is a ceaseless passage of man and animals along
them.

We passed numbers of camels, groaning and snorting among the slippery
rocks, with the water splashing over their feet; higher up, a large
descending flock of sheep, over six hundred of them, completely blocked up
the valley. They were being led to the plain below, where, thanks to the
recent rains, a succulent but ephemeral crop of green had sprung up. Their
owner was a fine Boujaja, some six and a half feet in height, accompanied
by a sturdy brood of children: milk-drinkers. The upland pastures could
wait, he said. Strange to think that two more showers a year might make
settlers of these vagrants.

It was among these rocks that Philippe Thomas first detected the traces of
those phosphates that have made his name famous. Tissot, in 1878, already
anticipated their discovery.

In point of sheer grandeur, of convulsed stratification and cloven ravine,
of terrorizing features, I have seen gorges far finer than this of Seldja.
Yet it contains one stretch of superlative beauty--a short defile or
cañon, I mean, formed of two opposing precipices with a chasm of some
thirty yards between them; they wind and curve, parallel to one another,
with such magisterial accuracy that one would think they had been designed
with mighty compasses from on high, and then carved out, sagaciously, by
some titanic blade.

Here we halted; it was time to turn back. There was an indentation in the
rocks near at hand, fretted away by hungry floods of the past and
overhung, now, with creepers and drooping fernery, concerning which my
Tripolitan companion told me a long and complicated legend. This shadowy
hollow, he explained, was the bridal couch, in olden days, of an earthly
maiden and her demon-lover. He was a simple fellow, unfortunately, who
knew the story too well to be able to tell it coherently.

On my second visit, however, I pushed vigorously up the stream-bed in the
heat of the morning, determined to reach the head of the waters. Gradually
the aspect of the valley changes. It opens out; the rocks melt away into
bare white dunes, the country assuming the character of a tableland; you
begin to feel a sense of aloofness.

There was blazing sunshine in these upper regions, but a fresh breeze;
this is the Ras el-Aioun, where the French have bridled some of the wild
waters, thrusting them into a tube that carries them in a mad whirl to
their settlement at Metlaoui. Here, too, they have planted a promising
youthful oasis, a kind of nursery garden of poplars and cypresses and
tamarisks and mimosas, in whose shade grow geraniums, mesembryanthemum and
other flowers and creepers, as well as a host of vegetables of every kind.
I soon discovered a recess in this delectable pleasaunce, and began my
solemn preparations for luncheon.

Out of the pool below there resounded a tuneful croaking of frogs: it
spoke of many waters....

Presently an Italian workman or gardener with curly grey hair and
moustache--the ubiquitous Italian--came up and began to talk,--_per fare
un po' di compania_. He conversed delightfully, a smile playing about his
kindly old face. He told me about the garden, about the French engineers,
about himself, chiefly about himself, in limpid, child-like fashion. He
had travelled far in the Old and New Worlds; in him I recognized, once
again, that simple mind of the wanderer or sailor who learns, as he goes
along, to talk and think decently; who, instead of gathering fresh
encumbrances on life's journey, wisely discards even those he set out
with.

Seldja, he told me, used to be a dangerous place for Europeans to
traverse; many robberies and even murders had taken place there in times
past; the new regime, of course, had put an end to all that. But there
were still two perils: the frightful flies that bred diseases and made the
gorge almost impassable in the hot months (every one suffered from
fevers), and the serpents. Ah, those _maladette bestie di serpenti_--they
swarmed among the rocks: they were of every kind and size; worst of all,
the spleenful naja. He himself had killed one that measured two metres in
length and was as thick as a man's arm. They don't wait till you can hit
them, he said, but rush straight at you, swift as an arrow, upraised on
their massive posterior coils, hissing like a steam-engine, and swelling
out their throat with diabolical rage.

This is the beast that figured in the competition between Aaron and
Pharaoh's conjurers, and it remains the favourite of modern African
snake-charmers, who catch it after first irritating it by means of a
woollen cloth wherein the fangs are embedded and broken. It is also, no
doubt, the dreaded species which Sallust describes as infesting the region
of Gafsa. But Lucan goes a little too far in his account of Cato's
expedition into these parts; this veracious historian has inserted a few
pages of sublime serpent nonsense, exquisite fooling....

Of all the deadly worms that breed in these wildernesses the most
formidable, because the most sluggish, is the two-horned nocturnal
cerastes, the "pretty worm of Nilus." No sensible person, nowadays, goes
into the bled[1] [Footnote: This is one of the many Arabic words which
admit of no clear translation. As opposed to a town, it means a village or
encampment; as opposed to that, the open land, a plain, or particular
district. When colonists talk of "going into the bled," they mean their
farms; in newspaper language it signifies the country generally, inhabited
or not--what we should call "the provinces "; oftentimes, again, the
barren desert or (more technically) the soil.] in summer-time unless armed
with a phial of the antidote--Trousse Calmette or Trousse Legros--whose
liquid is injected with a hypodermic syringe above and below the wound,
and has saved many lives.

"And the scorpions, Signore! We have to tie cotton-wool round the legs of
our beds so that these infernal creatures cannot climb up while we are
asleep; they get entangled in it, ha, ha! And that is why we all keep cats
and hens, who eat them, you know, just like the Arabs do. And sometimes it
rains scorpions."

I had heard that story before, from natives; and it may well be founded on
fact. The terrific gusts of desert wind overturn the stones under which
the scorpions lie; the fragile beasts are exposed to the blast and, being
relatively light, swept skyward across leagues of country with the flying
sand. A similar explanation has been given for those old accounts of frog
and fish rains.

"Yes; they drop from the clouds. During certain storms I have picked them
off my clothes, three or four at a time. Rather a ticklish operation,
sir."

So we discussed the world in that umbrageous shelter, to the music of the
frogs. He condescended to partake of a microscopic share of my meal, and
thereafter left me, with some old-world compliment, to irrigate his
thirsty lettuces.



_Chapter XVI_

_AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS_


I sat alone, screened from the midday heat, drowsy and content. It was a
pleasant resting-place, under that leafy arbour, through which only a few
rays of light could filter, weaving arabesque designs that moved and
melted on the floor as the wind stirred the foliage overhead. And a
pleasant occupation, listening to those amiable amphibians in the mere
below--they carried my thought back to other frog-concerts, dimly
remembered, in some other lands--and gazing through the green network of
branches upon that sun-scorched garden, where now a silvery thread of
water began to attract my attention as it stole, coyly, among the
flower-beds.

The day is yet young, methought; it is too hot to think of marching home
at this hour. Now is the time, rather, for a pipe of _kif_--if only to
demonstrate the difference that exists between man and the ape. For your
monkey can be taught to eat and drink like a Christian; he can even learn
to smoke tobacco. But he cannot smoke _kif_: the stuff would choke him.

Four pipes, reverentially inhaled ... it was almost too much, for a mere
dilettante.

But the mystery of the frogs, the when and where of it, was solved. Slowly
and benignly the memories travelled back, building themselves into a
vision so clear-cut and elaborate withal, that I might have been holding
it, as one holds some engraving or miniature, in my hand. It was in the
Rhine-woods, of course; long years ago, in summertime. But the frog-music
here was not amiable at all; never have I heard such angry batrachian
vociferations. They came in a discontented and menacing chorus from ten
thousand leathery throats, and almost drowned our converse as we crept
along through the twilight of trees that shot up from the swampy earth.

These Rhine-woods are like pathless tropical jungles: everything is so
green and luxuriant; and morning grew to midday while we threaded our way
through the tangle of interlacing boughs and undergrowth. Yet we knew, all
the time, that something else was in store for us, some joy, some
surprise. And lo! there was an opening in the forest, and we suddenly
found ourselves standing upon the summit of a high bank at whose foot
there rolled a sunlit and impetuous torrent. Too staid for the formation
of ripples, too swift for calm content, the river seemed to boil up from
below in a kind of frolicsome rage. A blissful sight.

"_Er spinnt_" my companion was saying.

In what obscure chamber of the brain had those words slumbered, closely
folded, for thirty years? It was indeed an authentic weaving of arabesque
designs upon the even texture of the living liquid mass; multitudinous
rings and ovals and lozenges were cast up from the green depths as from a
mighty over-bubbling cauldron; some fiercely engulfed again, others torn
hither and thither into new and pleasing shapes, fresh ones for ever
emerging; only a few contrived to linger unchanged, floating in sunny
splendour down the face of the waters. A blissful sight! The dark and mazy
woodlands, now, were left far behind--the croaking of the frogs sounded
strangely distant. We gazed in ecstasy upon that shining flood....

On my return journey down the Seldja gorge, that afternoon, I had a narrow
escape. It struck me that it would be more agreeable, instead of once more
following the windings of the brook, to proceed along the railway--a
single line--that climbs down from Ras-el-Aioun to within a few hundred
yards of the _bordj_, where my horse was waiting. It was easier walking;
it would also be shadier (in the tunnels) and, last and chiefest, I would
enjoy a change of scene by looking down into the valley instead of up at
the cliffs.

Plausible reasoning.

This line is a pretty little piece of engineering; there are bridges and
steep embankments that afford fine views into the tortuous depths of the
gorge; there are tunnels, blasted into the rock without lining of masonry,
deliciously cool and all too short--all too short save one, that seemed
never-ending. It writhed about, too, in that dark mountain; I saw no speck
of light, either before or behind me; the iron roadway was raised about a
foot, on rough stones, above the narrow path that followed the jagged,
irregular wall of rock along which I was groping and stumbling. Rather an
awkward place, I thought, to meet a train----

And as if in that reflection had lain the potency of a spell, there came
upon me, at that moment, from behind, a distinct blast of wind and a low
rumbling sound. I pricked up my ears. There was no doubt about it: a
train, still invisible, was gliding in good-natured fashion, with steam
shut off, down the gradient. A considerable number of ideas, incongruous
and quite beside the mark, passed through my mind; but also this one--if I
ran, I should inevitably stumble against a sleeper or some projecting
stone; if I stumbled, I should lose my presence of mind, and then,
perhaps--! Meanwhile, the noise grew louder, deafening; already, in
imagination, I felt the monster's hot breath upon me.

Walking steadily, therefore, for a few more yards, I felt a little cavity
in the rough-hewn wall of rock that appeared deeper than the others; there
I compressed myself, feeling flatter than a turbot, and absurdly resigned.
It was the nick of time. The earth was trembling under the mechanical
horror; it passed me, with a roar and rush of wind, by I know not how many
inches; there were flashes of light, a screeching of machinery, an acrid
smell of mineral oils and heated metal. Then all was over again, save for
a choking-fit produced by a deluge of bituminous coal.

Just a little flutter.

But outside that tunnel, in the sunshine, I sat down and indulged in
certain musings. _Suicide of an Englishman in Tunisia_: that was it;
inasmuch as even they who know me well could hardly be brought to believe
that such an act of abysmal foolishness, as this of not investigating on
which side the safety-niches were, could be the result of accident. An
ignoble, ridiculous death.


It must have been a fit of temporary obliviousness, brought about by the
unaccustomed heat of the sun.

Or possibly the _kif_....

It affects people differently.

I must limit myself to three pipes, in future.



_Chapter XVII_

_ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE_


Now, on the former occasion, instead of descending into the _bordj_ from
the railway line, I rode with the Tripolitan once more out of the
rock-portal into the plain, that glowed with the fugitive fires of sunset.
It is a treeless waste, bereft of every sign of cultivation.

And yet, if you look on your left hand as you issue from the gorge, you
will perceive, at the very narrowest point, some fragments of ancient
masonry adhering to the cliff; they are all that remains of a Roman dam
which blocked up the valley, regulated the supply of water flowing from
above, and purified it from stones and sand. The inference is clear: the
plain must have been cultivated in those days. Likely enough, it was
covered, like many other parts of "Africa," with olives, that drew their
life from this judiciously managed water-supply.

The Oued Seldja to-day fulfils no such useful function. Once the
rock-portal is passed, it unlearns all its sprightly grace and trickles
disconsolately through the sands, expiring, at last, in the dreary Chott
el Rharsa.

Monsieur Bordereau thinks that the ancient "forest of Africa" was composed
chiefly of olive plantations, and proofs of the former abundance of these
trees can be found in certain local names, such as Jebel Zitouna--the
Mount of Olives--clinging to localities where not a tree is now visible;
there are also sporadic oleasters growing near many Roman ruins. Strong
evidence; and still stronger is this: that Roman oil-presses have actually
been found, buried in the desert sand. Up to a short time ago the Arabs
deliberately destroyed the olives, to avoid paying the tax on them; the
French have changed all this, and though I am not aware that they go so
far as did the Romans, who encouraged tree-planting by exemption from
imposts, yet they have inaugurated a severe regime; one reads with
satisfaction of exemplary penalties inflicted for illicit timber-cutting.

It is good to remember, also, that whereas the Romans had five centuries
of peace to bring Tunisia to its high pitch of prosperity, the French only
began yesterday. And they have a harder task before them, for in the
interval the Arabs have arrived in the country. It is they, with their
roving and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief, changing arable
land into pasture, which grows ever poorer, and finally desert. The
fertility of these regions may be said to have been annihilated by the
goats of a nomad race, whose faith has made it improvident and mentally
sterile.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have just re-perused Lapie's _Civilizations Tunisiennes_.
He says that "la chèvre est le génie malfaisant de la Régence.... Plus que
le despotisme, plus que le fatalisme, elle a ruiné le pays: c'est la
chèvre, en effet, qui déboise et surtout qui s'oppose au reboisement, et
l'on sait quelle influence a eue sur le régime des eaux et sur la
fertilité du sol le déboisement de la province d'Afrique." Apropos of this
pasturing by nomad cattle, it is a singular fact that whereas a large
proportion of desert plants of northern Tunisia are poisonous to camels
and goats, here, in the south, nearly all of them are edible.]

Yet it may be disputed whether the land was as thickly wooded under the
Romans as some would have us believe. If so, how was it that after three
centuries of their rule there should come a drought lasting for five
years? Wood brings water, and if things were so satisfactory, why did they
penuriously hive and distribute the element? They described Africa as a
"waterless land"; Marius, when he made his forced march across country to
surprise Gafsa, took in at one place a sufficient provision of water to
last for three days. This, however, may be due to the fact that he
purposely kept to the desert lest, by following the main route, his
designs should be made public.

One thing strikes me as conclusive evidence that the "Africa" of olden
days was a different country: they had no camels. These beasts were
unknown there at the time of Julius Cæsar, and only came into common usage
towards the end of the fourth century. The Africa of to-day, without
camels, would be almost uninhabitable.

Some years ago, whilst staying among the magnificent forests of
Khroumiria, forests such as certainly never clothed these southern hills,
I grew interested in this question of the old African water-supply.
Comparing the accounts of classic authors with what has been written by
modern students like Bourde, Carton and others, whose very names have
faded from my memory, I remember coming to the conclusion--a very obvious
one, no doubt--that supposing all the ruined Roman hydraulic contrivances
were now in working order, supposing them even to be furnished with such
improvements as modern science could suggest, still the French would be
unable to obtain, at the present moment, the agricultural results of the
Romans. The positive diminution in the supply of liquid has been too
great. Archæologists, for instance, have discovered in the district of
Gafsa alone over a hundred Roman wells and reservoirs, of every shape and
size; but it would be sheer waste of money to re-activate many of these
ancient works--there are wells which would remain dry from one year's end
to another; the watercourses, too, have shrunk or altogether expired.

Quite apart from what the French have taken from it, this Seldja brook
must have carried down a larger volume of water in those days, helped, as
is very probable, by small tributary streamlets which have now ceased to
flow.

Old Arab authors say that one used to be able to walk from one end of
North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration,
this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans
continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with
timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their
goats had time--for it must have required time--to change the climate and
aspect of the province.

These woodlands, at all events, cannot have been all of olives. There is
Sbeitla, for instance, the Roman city whose remains I was unable to visit
owing to the Arctic blasts of wind; viewed from the railway, its
surroundings look so bleak and bare that nobody would believe they could
ever have been timbered. Yet, concerning Sbeitla, we happen to possess the
testimony of three independent older eye-witnesses, who visited the spot
at different periods: first Shaw (about 1725), then Bruce, then the
botanist Desfontaines. All three of them describe the region 

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