Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world
of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident
of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I
had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from
men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration;
but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my
sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in
its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, of a mysterious people, of
a barbaric history and _mise en scène_, a land of the primitive. I
coursed it from end to end.
The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the
globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose
two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with
a broader strait, off Sicily—with a southward wall overlooking
the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic,
whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense
island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging
southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at
those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth
between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer
walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying
altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies,
valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts—a formidable country
for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge
of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands,
runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly
tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole
distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into
the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the
arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where
lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco,
lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.
Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond
race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still
be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from
the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of
history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on
these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable,
poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north
and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and
the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital
of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great
province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as
far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions
among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain,
overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam;
the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away;
the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western
ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood,
and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it
had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of
their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood
poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north
upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of
the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber
spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have
really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it
persisted—a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring,
untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the
other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians,
Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil,
and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and
ways. And now it is the turn of France—that is to say, of dominant
Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.
How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness,
of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying
climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of
physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still
stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect;
the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to
be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It
could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad,
and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper,
gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming
bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely,
silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched
backward, and the train sped on.