IV

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian

Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving,

pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral

ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old

Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle

of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high

hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the

long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, crisscrossed

with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out

into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It

is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin—with a cemetery;

it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent

landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also,

impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare

places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even

when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the

thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The

cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and,

as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable—it

lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of

withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from

common dirt and débris—the eternal potter’s field. It is a

fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple

elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the

land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and

in new horizons.

Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax

lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a

town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the

course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality—with an

omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man’s

domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach;

where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in

full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are

islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized,

isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land

wind; or olive groves—silvery gleams—on the hillsides, clumps

of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be;

or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with

pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps,

beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same

recurring simplicity—a man leading a spirited horse in the

street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the

sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding

sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at

long intervals is a monochord—a point of dazzling white far off,

dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven

roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm

rise and unite it to heaven—to the fire-veined evening sky, deep

and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning bloom

of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent;

by the Moorish café lie or sit or crouch motionless figures,

sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes

or gazing at checkers, or vacant—always somnolent, statuesque,

sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere—only

a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being

far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the

eternal and the ruined in their first aspect; as of things left by

the tide, derelicts of life all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow,

kaleidoscopic combination of these things, a reiteration without

new meaning—the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the

plain, the fields, camels and sheep, and herdboys—horizons,

somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on

the sea at Monastir and Mahdia—such a homeless sea! There may

be boats with bending sails, the fisher’s life, suggesting those

strange outlying islands they touch at, exile islands from long ago,

where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of

the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world—still

the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia,

once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is

a famous battle name in Mohammedan and crusading and corsair annals;

it stood many a great siege on its rocky peninsula, in Norman and

other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as

one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it

seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror

of tempest on this dangerous coast—shallow waters and inhospitable

shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it,

and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always

the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring

coast-line before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it

wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To

descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll,

to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may

be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea

holds—so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I

remembered the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories,

stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their

glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns

to the land—and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile.

So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and

by garden and grove, into the ever-enveloping plain that opened

before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late

in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw

the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense commanding power

and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is

a great ruin—a colosseum; arches still in heaven, and piled and

fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque; it still keeps its massive

and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast

down in the waste, its monumental splendor—a hoar and solemn

token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation

to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its

subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud,

unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only

stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside

it is hardly perceptible, like a mole-hill, a mere trace of human

life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold, starry sky,

Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set

off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and

a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still—the vast

heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights—till after

some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul,

I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant

miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove,

and drew up at Sfax.

V

Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an

important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives

and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief

market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind

it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold,

and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the

immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the

sponge. In the early morning light the open spaces about the market

were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which

may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side—the

vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup

or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but

all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view

beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats

of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of

Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping

the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all

charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory

for years—the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the

sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed

with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.

Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles

south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards

sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals,

as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with

nothing to break the expanse—only millions of olive-trees regularly

planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little

tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the

whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression

that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like

an endless spider’s web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical

effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity

of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape,

is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed

with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a

ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude

in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely

distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.