TO KAIROUAN THE HOLY
It is a fortunate circumstance for foreigners of an inquiring turn of
mind that the French occupation of Tunisia met with armed resistance from
the fanatical inhabitants of Kairouan. Had they peacefully accepted the
protectorate, the beautiful and highly interesting religious sanctuaries
of the Holy City of Africa would be rigidly closed to unbelievers, as is
the case in all the other cities of the regency. But they _did_ resist
and were punished in a fashion peculiarly humiliating to the proud spirit
of the Moslem by having their sacred places thrown open to the inspection
of infidels, Kairouan being the only place in all of French North Africa
where non-Moslems enjoy this privilege.
Personally, I always feel a sense of embarrassment upon entering a
mosque; to do so is an affront, whether intentional or not, to another
people’s religion. To see hordes of tourists, guide-book in hand, camera
under the arm, over-size slippers flapping from their heels, shuffling
about an edifice where men are engaged in their devotions, peering
inquisitively into venerated shrines, commenting in audible whispers
on the genuflections of the pious, always strikes me as a rather sorry
spectacle, a breach of good manners and good taste. Were a party
of Moslem visitors to enter a Christian place of worship and behave
precisely as I have seen Christian tourists conduct themselves in Moslem
mosques in Egypt and Turkey, a scandalized sexton would promptly ask them
to leave, if, indeed, no worse befell them.
As the motor goes it is about six score miles, over a tolerably smooth
highway, from Tunis to Kairouan, the route which we followed being the
one taken thirteen hundred years before by the Arab invaders of Tunisia,
though in the opposite direction. It has been in turn a highway of
history, a course of conquest, a path of piety, a trail of torture, a
thoroughfare of travel, a track of trade, a route of romance, this great
trunk-road which leads from the Mediterranean to the desert. It has
shaken to the ponderous tread of Carthaginian elephants, has been rutted
by the tires of Roman chariots, has felt the padded feet of Numidian
camels, has been trampled by the hoofs of Arab chargers, has known Berber
slippers and Byzantine sandals, the calloused soles of monks and friars,
the spurred heels of knights and men-at-arms, the dragging footsteps of
slaves and captives, the measured tramp of modern soldiery. He who can
travel that road without being stirred by thoughts of the mighty events
which have taken place along it has no poetry or imagination in his soul;
the only thing that would give pause to such a person is the upraised
hand of a traffic-cop.
Strange figures flit past us in endless panorama as the big car hurtles
southward, its siren roaring a hoarse warning. A group of Berber women,
their garments of home-dyed blue cut in graceful, classic lines, their
foreheads tattooed with the cross which is a reminder that the natives
of this country were once Christians. A wealthy Arab, wrapped in a
burnous of palest blue, astride a handsome mule with gold-incrusted
saddle-cloth and scarlet leather trappings. A party of desert nomads,
lean, hawk-nosed men, their mouths and nostrils swathed in blue veils
against the suffocating dust, rock by atop of camels, driving before them
a herd of other, camels, destined for the Tunis market. Close to the road
a peasant is tilling his fields with a yoke of snow-white oxen, his plow
an iron-shod beam of wood, as in the days of Abraham. On yonder hillside
a slim, dark-eyed Bedouin girl tends her flock of painted sheep. We
roar through straggling, mud-walled hamlets, before whose coffee-houses
lounge turbaned, white-robed sheikhs—bearded, patriarchal figures who
might have stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament. Droves
of produce-laden donkeys scatter suddenly at the sound of our horn, the
cursing muleteers sometimes throwing the stubborn little animals bodily
into the ditch to give us room. We pass a compact column of khaki-clad,
dust-caked _tirailleurs_, rifles bristling on their shoulders, sweating
beneath their packs, foot-slogging over Africa. Herds of foul-smelling
goats kick up tornadoes of yellow dust as they stampede across the plain.
We take the narrow bridges, spanning the deep gorges which the mountain
streams have gashed as with a knife in the soft soil, like a frightened
cat on the top of a back-yard fence. And away to the southward, in the
far blue distance, towering above Tunisia, rise the wild crags of the
Djebel Zaghouan.
For hour after hour we traverse waterless and treeless wastes, their
yellow-brown expanses broken here and there by patches of bright green
where peasant farmers are striving to wring a meager living from the arid
soil. The hills which fringe the horizon have been stripped of their
forest clothing by fire and wanton destruction, and now they rise, naked
and grim, against the hot blue sky. It is hard to conjure up a picture
of those golden days when to Horace an African farm was a synonym for
boundless fertility, luxury, and wealth; or to accept the assertions of
the early chroniclers that, before the Arabs laid the country bare, one
could ride from Tripoli to the Atlantic with trees to shade him all the
way.
Yet, if the ancient writers are to be believed, what is now an exception
must have been at one period the rule. Vast areas of plain and mountain,
now destitute of tree or shrub, must have been green with forest or
jungle. Great numbers of savage beasts once roamed a region which to-day
can show no wild animals save prowling jackals and occasional gazelles.
From the Tunisian forests came the wild beasts which were used not only
in the arenas of Roman Africa but in the Colosseum of Rome itself.
Elephants roamed the land in herds and were used as the first wave of
attack by the Carthaginian armies; it is recorded that Juba lost the
Battle of Thapsus because his war-elephants, recently captured in the
forests, were untrained. The Roman mosaics preserved in the museums at
Sousse and the Palace of the Bardo depict hunting scenes in which the
game were lions, tigers, leopards, deer, and wild boar. In “Salammbô”
Flaubert tells us how the mutinous mercenaries, marching upon Carthage,
found the road through Sicca Veneria (the modern Kef) lined with crosses
bearing crucified lions.
Insufficient rainfall, a scarcity of springs and streams—these always
have been and always will be the chief problems of the Tunisian farmer.
The soil itself, even the sand of the Sahara, is amazingly fertile; make
no mistake about that. All that it needs is water to cause it to blossom
like the rose. This difficulty the Romans overcame with astonishing
energy, patience, and success, as is attested by the ruined waterworks
which to-day strew not only the plains but the high, desolate plateaus.
They did in Africa two thousand years ago what we are doing to-day in New
Mexico and Arizona, transforming deserts into gardens by the miracle of
water. Not a gallon of the precious fluid was permitted to go to waste.
Every stream was dammed at frequent intervals, just as we have dammed the
Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Gila, the water thus impounded being
distributed by a vast network of canals and aqueducts. Every farmstead
had its wells and tanks, every city and town its elaborate water-system.
The land thus systematically watered was cultivated with a science and
thoroughness which many of our own farmers might profitably emulate
to-day. Horses and cattle, sheep and goats, found rough but ample
pasturage upon the hills. Vineyards covered the lower slopes with their
ordered rows. Figs, dates, apricots, and pomegranates flourished in the
warmer districts. In the spring the alluvial plains became a sea of
waving grain, which was produced in such quantities that Tunisia became
the granary of Italy, and it was commonly said that he who held Africa
could starve Rome.
Nestling in the shadow of the rugged Djebel Zaghouan, from whose summit,
forty-two hundred feet in height, can be obtained a view which embraces
half Tunisia, is the unkempt little village of Zaghouan. One’s first
impression is of a pleasant, restful place, for in the outskirts are
many gardens, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of roses, lilies,
violets, and orange-blossoms; but the town itself, dirty, unpaved,
and squalid, reeks with odors of quite a different kind. Zaghouan is
the Danbury of Tunisia, having a virtual monopoly of the manufacture
of _chéchias_, the tasseled caps of red felt which are the universal
head-gear of the natives. A mile or so above the town are the ruins of
the Nymphea, the colonnaded temple built by the Romans over the famous
spring which eighteen hundred years ago supplied Carthage with water as
it now does Tunis. Here commenced that remarkable system of conduits and
aqueducts, constructed in the reign of Hadrian, whose mammoth arches
still march across the Carthaginian plain.
Another hour or so of dusty motoring, and the domes and minarets and
turreted ramparts of the Holy City rise to view. What induced the Arab
conquerors to choose such a site for their capital and chief sanctuary
passes the comprehension, for Kairouan lies in the middle of a dreary,
waterless expanse, thirty-odd miles from the sea and even farther from
the mountains, without an adequate water-supply or natural resources,
swept by cold winds in winter and scorched by the pitiless summer sun.
It does not even have military strength to recommend it, for it has
never withstood a siege successfully, having been taken and retaken at
least a dozen times. Though it is on the road to nowhere, so far as its
geographical situation is concerned, the followers of Mohammed regard it
as a half-way stop on the road to heaven, seven pilgrimages to Kairouan
being deemed equivalent to a _hadj_ to Mecca itself.
A distinctly medieval appearance is lent the city by its massive
crenelated wall, pierced by five gates and broken by numerous bastions
and towers. The essentially religious character of the place is
immediately made apparent by its most fantastic sky-line, which is broken
by the domes and minarets of the hundred or more _zaouias_ and mosques,
the whole dominated by the enormous tower of the Djamaa Sidi Okba, which,
visible for many miles, rears itself skyward like a great brown finger
pointing to heaven.
Bear with me for a single paragraph while I give a thumb-nail sketch
of Kairouan’s history, which is the history of Arab rule in North
Africa. Twelve years, then, after the camel-driver of Mecca who became
the Prophet had gone to join the houris in the Moslem paradise, his
son-in-law Othman ibn Affan (his son-in-law twice over, in fact, for
he had married two of Mohammed’s daughters) was elected Khalifa, or
Successor. To him fell the congenial task of carrying on the work of
invasion and conquest which had been prosecuted with such success by
the preceding khalifas, Abou Bekr and Omar, who, having subjugated the
decaying empires of Byzantium and Persia, had turned their attention to
the Maghreb—“the West.” When, in 644, Othman assumed the green mantle
of the Prophet, Egypt had already been conquered by the Arab armies
under Amr ibn al Asi, who, by way of celebrating his victory, destroyed
the Alexandrine library, which contained the finest collection of books
and manuscripts in the world. He gave as a reason for this utterly
inexcusable act of vandalism—an act which at one stroke wiped out unique
and authentic records of the ancient world covering many hundreds of
years—the naïve explanation, “If these books contradict the Koran, they
are false; if they agree with it, they are useless.” In the year of
Othman’s succession, Amr ibn al Asi occupied Tripolitania, and three
years later the Arab hosts poured through the south of Tunisia into
Ifrikya and drove out the Byzantines. The administration of the new
province was intrusted by the khalifa to that fiercest of all Moslem
warriors, Okba ibn Nafi, better known as Sidi Okba, who, in the year 670,
founded the city of Kairouan, which became in time the capital of all
the Moslem possessions in the Maghreb, and, by virtue of the sanctity
conferred upon the place by the saints who were buried there, a religious
focus which drew pilgrims all the way from Egypt to Morocco.
By getting an early start from Tunis, one can lunch at Kairouan, spend
the afternoon in visiting the principal mosques, and sleep that night in
the really comfortable hostelry at Sousse. For the casual traveler this
is perhaps the best plan, for the accommodations at Kairouan, though
tolerable enough, are remarkable neither for cleanliness nor comfort, the
Hôtel Splendide—named with a singular lack of appropriateness—being one
of those cold, gloomy little hotels, so common in North Africa, where the
sheets, table-cloths, and napkins are always damp, and where, between
courses, the guest produces a fictitious warmth by sitting on his hands.
To visit the mosques of Kairouan an order is required from the
_controleur civil_—a mere formality. That, together with a pair of red
slippers large enough to pull over one’s shoes, and a handful of small
coins with which to reward the numerous attachés of the ecclesiastical
buildings and to bestow on the holy men and mendicants who crouch at
their entrances, and we are all set for a tour of the sacred city.
On arriving in Rome for the first time, one’s footsteps turn
instinctively in the direction of St. Peter’s; the visitor to Kairouan
makes directly for the Great Mosque, the Djamaa Sidi Okba. As befits the
premier sanctuary of Africa, it is of enormous size, covering an area of
three acres. Next to nothing of the original structure remains, however,
for it has been rebuilt four times, that which we now see dating from
the early part of the ninth century. Just as the Campanile at Venice
overshadows and dwarfs those two most beautiful buildings, St. Mark’s
and the Doge’s Palace, so the tremendous height and bulk of the square
minaret of the Great Mosque reduces the lovely cloistered building at
its feet to comparative insignificance. As is the case with most of
the famous sanctuaries of Islam, the mosque is built about an enormous
court, surrounded by a very imposing double colonnade, paved with marble,
and provided with fountains in which, as prescribed by the Koran, the
pious must bathe their faces, hands, and feet before entering the place
of worship. Rising from the center of the court is an ancient stone
sun-dial. As the hour of prayer approaches a venerable employee of the
mosque intently watches the creeping shadow, and from the summit of the
lofty tower another attendant watches him. When the edge of the shadow
touches the proper meridian, the man by the sun-dial abruptly raises his
arm, like a semaphore, whereupon a large white flag is broken out from
the gallows-like staff on the tower, and the musical drone of the muezzin
floats out across the city summoning the faithful to prayer: “_Ash hadu
illa ill Allah, wa ash hadu inna Mohammed an rasool Allah!_”
Though the exterior of the Great Mosque leaves much to be desired from
an architectural point of view, the interior, with its maze of horseshoe
arches supported on a forest of marble and porphyry columns, is a very
miracle of form and color. At the end of the central nave, orientated,
of course, toward Mecca, is the _mihrab_, or sacred niche, flanked by
two magnificent columns of variegated marble from Cæsarea in Algeria,
which, it is said, one of the Byzantine emperors offered to buy for
their weight in gold. The _mihrab_ is lined with glorious old tiles in
the “lost shade” of Persian blue, brought from Baghdad by one of the
princes of the Aghleb dynasty, who contributed them to the mosque, along
with the rare Eastern woods which form the _mimbar_, or pulpit, as an act
of penance for having defiled the sacred precincts by a drunken orgy.
The endless vistas of columns and arches; the rich, mellow tints of the
tiles, woods, and marbles; the soft light which filters in through the
colored glass of the windows in the great dome—these combine to produce
an effect of beauty, dignity, and solemnity unsurpassed by any religious
edifice in the world.
Very imposing, with its five great domes, is the Djamaa Amor Abbada,
or, as it is better known, the Mosque of the Saber. A purely modern
structure, with an interior which has little to recommend it, it takes
its name from the enormous saber, as long as a man and almost as heavy,
which hangs against the _mimbar_ as a reminder, I suppose, that Islam is
a religion of the sword. It is venerated as the work of the founder of
the mosque, Amor Abbada, an illiterate blacksmith saint, who, doubtless
bored to extinction by the austere life expected of a marabout, amused
himself by forging these huge clumsy swords. Another of his efforts
took the form of a great pipe, fully five feet in length and painted a
vivid green, which, so the attendant gravely informed us, the saint was
wont to smoke. When my daughter flippantly remarked that it must have
required two strong men to hold it and a five-pound sack of Bull Durham
to fill its capacious bowl, the priest replied reprovingly that Amor
Abbada was a giant and that such things were trifles to him. Which serves
as an illustration of how quickly legends grow in the credulous and
superstitious East, for Amor Abbada, far from being a figure of remote
antiquity, died only a few years before the outbreak of our Civil War. As
a matter of fact, it has never been very difficult to acquire sainthood
in Moslem countries; almost any one can do it who has a well-developed
sense of the dramatic.
By far the most interesting and important of all the religious edifices
of Kairouan is the Djamaa Sidi Sahab, more usually referred to as the
Mosque of the Barber. In it rests, within a richly decorated catafalque,
the body of Sidi Sahab (the Companion), or, to give him his own sonorous
name, Abou-Zamat Obeid Allah ibn Adam el Beloui, who earned his title by
being one of the original ten disciples of Mohammed. Mortally wounded
during the storming of Sbeitla in 656, he found his last resting-place in
the soil of Kairouan. The frequently repeated assertion that El Beloui
was the Prophet’s barber is absurd, as every student of Islamic history
knows, for his nearest approach to the tonsorial trade was in shearing
off the heads of unbelievers when he took part in the conquest of Egypt
and the invasion of Ifrikya. Here is how the ridiculous legend arose.
(It is Mr. Cyril Fletcher Grant who tells the story.) At the last solemn
interview when the Prophet bade farewell to his Sahabs—his Knights of
the Round Table—he gave El Beloui three hairs from his beard, that by
them he might be recognized on the Day of Judgment. El Beloui directed
that the precious relics should be buried with him, one to be laid on his
lips, one on his heart, and one under his right arm, in token that his
eloquence, his love, and his strength had all been devoted to the service
of his adored master. And, as his reward for a loyalty which reached
beyond the grave, he is to-day referred to as a barber!
“But,” exclaimed the American flapper whom we met in the hotel in
Kairouan and to whom I repeated the story of El Beloui, “I always
supposed that the mosque was named after the Barber of Seville. I
thought he was one of those Moors who were driven out of Spain by Queen
Elizabeth. But history is so hard to remember, isn’t it?”
The architectural glories of the Djamaa Sidi Sahab I shall leave to
those who are better qualified than I am to describe them, and lead
you straight through the bewildering series of tiled atria, colonnaded
courts, and marble cloisters to the holy of holies itself, the shrine in
which the Companion lies sleeping. He rests beneath a splendid catafalque
covered, as is the Moslem custom, with magnificent shawls, brocades, and
embroideries. Crossing the floor one’s slippered feet sink deeply into
the soft mellow-toned carpets with which it is overlaid, and for the
manufacture of which Kairouan is famous. The tomb is surrounded with an
elaborately wrought iron grille on which tiny lamps, ostrich-eggs, glass
balls, and little sacks of earth from the sacred soil of Mecca have been
hung by the pious. From above droop, in folds of red and green, dozens of
religious banners, sent by the rich and powerful from all corners of the
Moslem world in tribute to this great Islamic hero.
The sun, a dazzling sphere of reddish gold, was sinking behind the Djebel
Zaghouan when we left the Holy City by its eastern gate and took the road
to Sousse. The multitude of towers and minarets and domes which proclaim
afar the city’s sacred character rose, as though hewn from amethyst
and coral, against the painted sky. To our ears, borne faintly on the
night breeze, came the Angelus of Islam, the muezzin’s quavering call to
evening prayer.
* * * * *
Though the regency of Tunisia barely exceeds in area the State of New
York, it has an amazing variety of scenery, soil, and climate for so
small a country. I can recall no other region where one can see so many
of North Africa’s physiographical characteristics in so brief a time. In
a journey no longer than from Albany to Buffalo, a journey which can be
made quite comfortably by motor-car between dawn and dark of a single
day, the traveler can see the sun rise out of the Mediterranean from the
heights of Carthage; traverse a highly cultivated country-side checkered
with prosperous farms and thriving gardens; plunge into great forests of
cork and oak and pine; follow through leafy glens and rocky gorges the
course of a river longer than the Hudson; climb a mountain range whose
peaks tower for a mile into the blue; drop down upon treeless steppes
carpeted with fields of grain; whirl through endless orchards of olive,
fig, and orange; and dine on a desert oasis, amid a grove of date-palms,
while the sun sinks behind the Saharan sand-dunes.
[Illustration: THE MARABOUT IN THE DESERT
A straggling, low, white building—the burial-place and shrine of some
long-dead holy man—a mysterious green door, a plastered dome, a solitary
palm-tree, the brooding desert all around, and the heavens aflame with
the unforgettable glory of an African sunset]
Tunisia may be divided into five districts, each having its distinctive
topography, climate, and products. In the extreme north, in that little
triangle formed by the Tunisian Atlas, the frontiers of Algeria, and
the sea, is a mountainous, well-watered region with fertile, highly
cultivated valleys and, on the slopes of the mountains, great forests
of cork and pine. The northeastern corner of the regency, including the
peninsula of Cape Bon, the country around Tunis, and the Carthaginian
plain, has a soil and climate peculiarly adapted to the growing of citrus
fruits—the land of the orange and the lemon. Extending from the Atlas
southward to the fringes of the desert are the grain lands of Tunisia—a
bleak, treeless, monotonous expanse of high plateaus and rolling steppes,
normally arid but fertile under irrigation, known as the Tell. Lying
to the east of the Tell, bordering the eastern coast of the regency
from the Gulf of Hammamet to the Gulf of Gabés, is a slender strip of
well-watered, highly fertile land, nowhere much over a dozen miles in
width, called the Sahel. And far to the south, below both the Tell and
the Sahel,
That narrow strip of herbage strown, between the desert and the sown,
are the sand-dunes, _shats_, and oases of the Tunisian Sahara.
Of these five districts, the most important from an agricultural point
of view is the Sahel. This narrow coastal plain, whose _chef-lieu_ is
Sousse, is a region of almost inexhaustible productiveness, a fat land, a
land of live stock, grain, fruit, and vine. For ages past the rich earth
has been washed down from the hills to collect along the shore in deep
layers of alluvial soil, which, scratched and watered, becomes a Garden
of the Lord.
That portion of the Sahel in the vicinity of Sousse is one vast forest of
olive-trees. For miles we motored between the ordered gray-green rows,
the trees so old, so bent, so gnarled, so twisted, that they might well
have been planted by the Romans. Nor, indeed, is that at all improbable,
for olive-trees frequently attain enormous age. In the Garden of
Gethsemane, above Jerusalem, the monks reverently point out two venerable
olive-trees beneath which, they assert, Christ was accustomed to converse
with His disciples.
Sousse, the second most important city of Tunisia, is a charming place.
Its buildings, white as though cut from chalk, are set on the slopes
of a natural amphitheater which rises quite sharply from the harbor,
so that, seen from the sea, it bears a certain resemblance to Algiers.
The Hadrumetum of the ancients, it was already old when Dido ruled at
Carthage; it was hoary with antiquity when London was a cluster of wattle
huts inhabited by painted savages, when Paris had yet to be founded amid
the swamps beside the Seine. In the beginning a Phenician commercial
outpost, established by merchants trading out of Tyre, it become a
Roman colony under Trajan and so remained until the second century of
the Empire, when the Vandals came. But the Vandals were driven out by
Belisarius the Byzantine; and the Byzantines, in their turn, gave way
before the fierce onslaught of the Arab hosts; whereupon the crescent
replaced the cross, its churches were destroyed or converted into
mosques, the Citadel was renamed the Kasbah, and Sousse became a corsair
stronghold, one of its rulers being the terrible Dragut, the most feared
sea-rover of his time.
At Sousse, as elsewhere in French North Africa, the modern city, the
European quarter, has sprung up outside the walls of the old town. And
in no other African city that I know is the contrast thus presented so
striking. _La ville française_, with its broad boulevards and double rows
of shade-trees, its banks, consulates, hotels, churches, brasseries,
cinemas, and ornate public buildings, its numerous little parks and
its inevitable Grande Place, is just such a provincial town as may
be found by the dozen in the south of France. But stroll through one
of the ancient gateways which give access to the Arab city, and you
step backward a thousand years, for crowded within the bastioned and
crenelated ramparts is a tangle of tortuous lanes and dim bazaars lined
by hole-in-the-wall shops (here not a figure of speech, for many of them
are actually built in the wall itself), while, high above the noisy,
noisome town, rise, slender, serene, and snowy, the minarets of the Great
Mosque and the frowning battlements of the Kasbah.
One of the most conspicuous buildings of the old town is the
Ksar-er-Rabit, originally a Byzantine stronghold, but upon the Moslem
conquest transformed into a _rabit_, one of the military outposts,
half-monastery and half-fortress, established by the Arabs along the
frontiers of their far-flung empire. These rabits were garrisoned by a
sect of militant monks, somewhat akin to the Knights Templars, known as
_Mirabits_, who were praying when they were not fighting, and from their
name was derived the word _marabout_—a religious ascetic, a fakir, a holy
man.
* * * * *
The traveler in Tunisia cannot but be impressed by the evidences which
he sees on every hand of the enormous population and amazing prosperity
of this region under the Romans. The whole country-side is strewn with
reminders of this vanished civilization, for Byzacium, as the Romans
called this region, supported a numerous agricultural population and
was dotted with flourishing cities and towns. Everywhere rise the ruins
of cities, buildings, aqueducts, and arches, monuments, monoliths, and
heaps of sculptured stones. Yet, despite these indisputable proofs of a
one-time wealth and greatness, it is difficult, nay, almost impossible,
to realize that dense forests once spread themselves over yonder naked
hills, that great cities stood on their flanks, and that from these arid
steppes came the grain which fed the mouths of Rome.
Of all the monuments of this departed glory, the most impressive, the
most astounding, is the amphitheater at Thysdrus, or, to give it its Arab
name, El Djem. Set in a solitude of orange sand, where the Sahel runs
out in the Sahara, it is one of the most remarkable structures that I
have ever seen. It rises from a shallow, saucer-like depression in the
plain, as grandly as the pyramids at Gizeh, as abruptly as the walls
of the Grand Cañon. As we topped a rise in the road we could see its
towering, rose-brown walls, honeycombed with arches, twenty kilometers
away. From a distance it is profoundly imposing; close at hand it is
positively overwhelming. The grandest Roman monument in all Africa, it is
perhaps the best preserved building of its kind in the world, scarcely
inferior to the Colosseum at Rome. There is nothing to compare with it
in the monumental architecture of modern times. It is so large that it
completely conceals the native town which lies behind it. Though used
by the Arabs for centuries as a quarry, it was so colossal, so strongly
built, as to defy their attempts at destruction. The achievement of
building it is the more astounding when one realizes that the stones
used in this mountain of masonry were hauled by gangs of slaves and
teams of elephants and yokes of oxen, over roads specially constructed
for the purpose, from quarries twenty miles away. The mere sight of
that tremendous structure, rising solitary, majestic, and time-defying
from the lonely plain, does more than all the histories ever written to
impress one with the might of Rome.
Of Thysdrus, the splendid city which once stood upon the site of El Djem
and which gave to Rome three emperors named Gordian, nothing remains save
the amphitheater and some stones and marbles built into the wretched
native dwellings. The construction of the amphitheater is attributed to
Gordian the Elder, who sat on the imperial throne in the first half of
the third century A.D. During the blood-stained years which followed
its erection its arena was the scene of the torture and martyrdom of
thousands of Christians; the dungeons in which the condemned were
confined and the dens of the wild beasts may still be seen.
Perhaps the most dramatic chapter in the long history of the great
building took place, however, shortly after the Arab invasion, when the
Berbers, under the leadership of Koceila, rose in revolt against their
Moslem conquerors. When, toward the close of the seventh century, Koceila
fell in battle on the Medjerda, his place was taken by a remarkable
woman, an African Joan of Arc, known to history as El Kahena, the
Priestess, for her real name is unknown. Convinced that the Arabs were
fighting only for booty, she met and defeated them in a great battle
near Gabés and then proceeded to lay desolate the whole Sahel, razing
the cities, destroying the water-systems, burning the forests and the
orchards. But in 703, realizing that a further prosecution of the war was
hopeless, she intrenched herself in the amphitheater of El Djem. Here she
sustained a long siege, but, driven by starvation to lead a forlorn hope,
she was killed in battle, her head being sent to the khalifa as a sign
that Berber resistance to Arab rule was at an end.
[Illustration: IN THE LAND OF POLYGAMY AND PASSION
The heroine of Mrs. Hull’s novel ran away with an Arab sheikh. Would you
care to run away with this one?
But this beauty of the harem, though only her lustrous and provocative
eyes show above her veil, is undeniably alluring]
It is a little over two score miles from El Djem to Sfax, and, providing
you have sufficient horse-power under the hood of your motor, you can
cover the distance in as many minutes, for the road, like all of those
which the French have constructed in Tunisia, must have been laid out by
the simple method of laying a ruler down on the map and drawing perfectly
straight lines from town to town. It utterly ignores such things as
grades and contours, sometimes driving straight ahead for twenty
kilometers at a stretch. There was no traffic to speak of, and, once
clear of the town, Harvey pressed his foot hard upon the gas. The big car
leaped forward like a thoroughbred at the raising of the starting-gate.
As we topped the rises in the road its wheels seemed to leave the ground
completely; it was like taking off in an airplane. With horn a-blare
we went booming down into little valleys, sky-hooting across narrow
bridges, and roaring up the opposite slopes. The country-side became
a blur of green and brown. The white kilometer-posts seemed as close
together as the beads of a necklace. The telegraph-poles slid past like
the palings in a picket-fence. The needle on the dial of the speedometer
rose to seventy ... eighty ... ninety ... one hundred kilometers....
Africa was slipping away beneath us at the rate of sixty miles an hour.