TROGLODYTES AND LOTUS-EATERS
The white city which the Carthaginians built on the northern shores
of the Gulf of Gabés was called Taparura by the Romans, but its Arab
conquerors, finding that the _fakous_ (cucumber) grew there in great
abundance, changed its name to Sfax. It may strike a European as somewhat
curious to name a large and flourishing city after a vegetable, but
that is because the European fails to realize what a gift from heaven a
cool and juicy cucumber is to a parched and dusty land. In Mesopotamia
cucumbers are sold everywhere and munched like apples, while in the
desert they are considered a rare luxury, being regarded by the Arabs
very much as we regard hothouse grapes and alligator-pears. Indeed, I
have always maintained that, when I was captured by the Bedouins on the
Upper Euphrates in 1920, it was the basket of cucumbers I presented to
the sheikh which effected my release.
Though named for a vegetable, Sfax does not vegetate. On the contrary, it
is one of the most up-and-doing places in Tunisia, its eighty thousand
inhabitants, of whom six thousand are Europeans, driving a prosperous
trade in fruit, cattle, olive-oil, wool, and sponges. The Arab town,
surrounded by a crenelated wall and dominated by the lofty tower of an
ancient mosque, is noisy, busy, and dirty; but the European quarter
is characterized by broad, scrupulously clean streets, a spacious
tree-planted square, and new and handsome public buildings, including
a really fine _hôtel de ville_ and a municipal theater, all built,
appropriately enough, in the modified Moorish style of architecture which
the French have used so successfully throughout North Africa.
The people of Sfax are as justly proud of their water-system as are the
inhabitants of Poland Springs. In addition to two enormous reservoirs or
_fesquias_, owned by the municipality and supplied with water from the
wells of Sidi Salah, ten miles away, there is, just outside the town,
a large walled inclosure containing five or six hundred bottle-shaped
reservoirs called _nasrias_, given by wealthy Arabs to the town. These
cisterns are maintained by the municipality, and the water is supplied to
those who prefer it to that from Sidi Salah.
Sfax is the most important olive-growing center in Tunisia, for
the beylical government has wisely encouraged the industry by
liberal concessions, and it is estimated that there are upward of
a million and a half olive-trees in bearing on the Bokaat-el-Beida
plateau. What with its countless olive-groves and oil-presses, its
almond-orchards, cucumber-gardens, henna-plantations, soap-factories, and
sponge-fisheries, this remote African city plays a not unimportant part
in supplying toilet accessories to the bath-rooms and beauty-parlors of
the world. Its name might appropriately be changed to Cosmétiqueville.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING RUINS IN THE WORLD
Is the great amphitheater at El Djem—the Thysdrus of the ancients—in
southern Tunisia; in size and magnificence scarcely inferior to the
Colosseum at Rome, it rises solitary and with startling abruptness from
the expanse of yellow desert]
Instead of wearing the flowing burnous which is the universal costume of
the natives elsewhere in the regency, the Arabs of Sfax are distinguished
by their short, hooded jackets of dark brown, hand-woven wool or
camel’s-hair elaborately worked with light brown embroidery. These,
with the troops of the garrison—officers of _chasseurs d’Afrique_ in
tight-waisted sky-blue tunics and enormously baggy scarlet trousers;
spahis with great crimson capes, their enormous turbans bound with
_agals_ of camel’s-hair; black _tirailleurs_ from Senegal whose high
tarbooshes, trim uniforms, and smartly wound puttees are all of khaki—to
say nothing of the strange desert types who drift in from the Saharian
provinces and Tripolitania, lend to the streets and _souks_ of Sfax a
diversity and color not found in the more northerly cities of the regency.
A few hours by native sailing-boat off this storied coast are the
Kerkenna Islands, Chergui and Gharbi, which in ancient times were joined
by a bridge whose traces are still visible, but now separated by a
channel of considerable width. They are interesting to every student
of ancient history because of their tragic associations, for it was
here that the fugitive Hannibal, seeking to escape the wrath of Rome,
found refuge for a time, and from here that he fled to Asia Minor. The
Kerkennas were the home, in later years, of another illustrious exile,
that Sempronius Gracchus who dared to lift his eyes to Julia, daughter of
the Emperor Augustus, and paid for his presumption with banishment and
eventually with his life. But the Kerkennas, despite their hectic past,
are to-day a pleasant, friendly, _dolce far niente_ spot, the islanders,
a mixture of many nationalities, being engaged in sponge-fishing and the
manufacture of an inferior but very potent variety of date brandy.
Sfax is the “farthest south” for most visitors to Tunisia, but we kept
on along the edges of the gulf to Gabés, which is the starting-point for
those, prepared to put up with discomforts if not actual hardships, who
wish to visit the cliff-dwellings of Matmata, the _rhorfas_ of Medenine,
the island of Djerba, and the military provinces which adjoin the
Tripolitanian frontier. Though so difficult of access, so far removed
from the beaten paths of travel, as to be rarely visited by Europeans,
these regions are by long odds the strangest and most interesting in
Tunisia, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. Not to see the underground
city of Bled Kebira and the desert sky-scrapers of Medenine is to miss
two of the most extraordinary communities on earth.
Gabés, the Tacape of the Romans, is to France’s Saharan frontier what
Fort Leavenworth was to our own frontier in its wild and woolly days.
In the edge of the desert, close to the borders of Tripolitania, it is
the most important military outpost in the South, a large garrison being
maintained there to hold in check the lawless nomad tribes. The town
itself is wholly without interest, merely a collection of mud houses set
in a large oasis amid a forest of palms. But the Hôtel de l’Oasis, run
by a stout and jovial Frenchwoman, was tolerably comfortable, and the
cuisine was surprisingly good, considering the difficulties of obtaining
supplies, provided one did not object to the use of goat’s milk and
butter, whose rancid taste and revolting odor I myself detest.
The officers and men of the garrison are saved from ennui by the
constant drills and occasional punitive expeditions which form the life
of frontier posts; they have their little _cercles_, where they hold
occasional dances; twice weekly, in the dusty _jardin public_, the band
of the _tirailleurs_ plays the latest pieces from Paris; and on the
beach, about a mile away, a ramshackle pavilion and a string of unpainted
shacks, called by courtesy _cabines des bains_, make a pathetic attempt
to bring to the frontier the distractions of Dinard and Deauville; but
I felt sorry for the handful of Frenchwomen who had accompanied their
soldier husbands into exile and who were dragging out an inconceivably
dreary and monotonous existence in this lonely spot. I have always
maintained that, whether in Africa, India, or the Philippines, it is the
women who are the real builders of empire. They spend their lives far
from home and friends, often separated for years from their children, yet
they serve their countries no less faithfully than the men, but, unlike
the men, without the stimulus of recognition or reward.
* * * * *
Along with their other legends and superstitions, the ancients had a
vague tradition of a curious, semi-mythical people, dwelling in an
inaccessible region near the Syrtes, who made their homes in the bowels
of the earth. They were said to live upon the flesh of snakes and
lizards, to practise customs strange beyond belief, and to speak some
outlandish language which Herodotus compared to the cry of a bat. As
Africa was gradually opened up to civilization these fantastic tales
were set down as unfounded myths and were accounted but examples of the
folk-lore which accumulates about a mysterious and unknown land. But
there the scientists were wrong. For when, in 1869, the first French
columns penetrated the great mountain ranges to the southwest of Gabés in
their initial attempts to conquer the Sahara, they found the Troglodytes
of the ancient tales in the strange inhabitants of the Matmata Plateau.
The Matmata region consists of an isolated, winding, highly mountainous
ridge, with numerous rocky spurs, upward of a hundred and twenty-five
miles in length. Commencing a score of miles or so to the south of
Gabés, it winds southward and eastward across the desert like an
enormous snake. On the backbone of this ridge, a quarter of a mile above
sea-level, is a vast upland plain completely hemmed in by mountain peaks.
Here, in a region of appalling loneliness and desolation, cut off from
the outer world by leagues of mountain land and desert, is the home of
the Troglodytes, among the strangest of the strange peoples who inhabit
this earth.
Provided your car is powerful enough to negotiate the precipitous
ascents, and you are prepared to sacrifice its tires and springs, the
Troglodyte capital, Bled Kebira, can be reached from Gabés in a long
and exceedingly arduous half-day. But this means getting started at
the crack of dawn. Until the foot of the mountains is reached the
going is good enough, the road zigzagging in long salients across a
dusty russet plain. An hour or so of rapid traveling amid clouds of
suffocating dust, and then, reaching the foot-hills, the ascent begins.
As the car pants upward, the terrain steadily becomes more stoney and
broken, the country-side more desolate and forbidding. One moment the
tires are gashed by beds of knife-sharp flints; the next they sink deep
into patches of yellow sand. The way is not only steep and rough but
very narrow, so narrow in places that there is scarcely room between
the outer wheels and the edge of the sheer precipice for a starved
cat to pass. Barring occasional patches of barley or small groves of
discouraged-looking olive-trees, there is no vegetation, and the mountain
slopes are as barren as the walls of the Grand Cañon. No people, no
houses, no animals, unless we except a few stray goats, are to be seen.
Solitude and desolation reign supreme.
[Illustration: MEDENINE, THE STRANGEST CITY IN THE WORLD
The _rhorfa_ look like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete stacked
in tiers. Windowless, and with doors no larger than those of dog-kennels,
they are admirably suited for defence
The doors of these primordial apartment-houses are reached by small
stepping-stones projecting from the face of the building; note the
keyholes beside the doors]
Now the ascent becomes so steep that Harvey is compelled to stop at
frequent intervals to cool his engine. The rapid reports of the exhaust
echo in the still mountain air like the clatter of a machine-gun. Still
the interminable trail leads on, dropping down into the beds of dried-up
rivers, crossing by narrow bridges the _arroyos_ cut in the soil by
smaller torrents, crawling cautiously around rocky shoulders, skirting
the brinks of chasms whose walls drop away from our wheels half a hundred
fathoms sheer, scaling the face of towering cliffs by a series of narrow
shelves hewn from the living rock, but climbing, climbing, always
climbing, that portion of the road which is yet to be traversed unwinding
itself before us like an endless yellow ribbon as it reaches toward the
higher levels. It seems as though we would never reach our destination;
but at long last, topping a final rise, we debouch upon a lofty
table-land, sprinkled with palms and sparsely covered with ill-nourished
grass, with the great peaks of the Djebel Matmata rising in a rocky
rampart all around. Bled Kebira, the largest of the troglodyte towns,
is on the plateau, just ahead, but to reach the far older and fortified
village of Gelaa Matmata, now deserted, we must leave the car and climb
another half a thousand feet or so, for it is perched on the very summit
of the mountain. Even when we gain this fortress in the clouds there is
no sign of human habitation, barring a few fortifications, now in ruins,
but the flanks of the mountains are pitted with what appear to be the
entrances to gigantic rabbit-burrows, which are in reality the doorways
to the former homes of the cave-dwellers.
Though the Matmatas are unquestionably of pure Berber stock, a fine,
upstanding people possessed of extraordinary tenacity and courage, their
origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. They themselves claim to have
been led to this mountain refuge by that remarkable woman, El Kahena, the
African Joan of Arc already mentioned, who made her last desperate stand
at El Djem after defying for years the Arab invaders of her country.
That the Matmatas were originally lowlanders, pasturing their flocks
and tending their olive-trees on the rich plains bordering the Syrtes,
there is good reason to believe. But, constantly harassed by bands of
Arab raiders from Tripolitania and the desert, who burned their towns,
drove off their flocks, and killed those whom they did not carry into
slavery, the Berbers realized that their only hope of existence lay in
seeking refuge amid the wild fastnesses of the Matmata Mountains. Here,
within sight of the fertile plains which they had been forced to abandon,
they intrenched themselves, and, resisting all attacks of their enemies,
succeeded in eking out a precarious existence for centuries, though how
they managed to obtain sufficient food remains a mystery. As the years
passed, however, they grew weary of their enforced seclusion upon the
mountain-top; so, coming to terms with their hereditary enemies, the
nomad tribes, they abandoned Gelaa Matmata and descended to the arable
plateau, five hundred feet or so lower down, where, in the soft, porous
soil, half-clay, half-sandstone, which forms the sides of the hills, they
built, or, rather dug themselves, the present town of Bled Kebira.
They continued to live in their subterranean dwellings partly because
they had become accustomed to them, no doubt, but primarily because
they were still necessary as a defense against marauding bands, for it
was not until the French bayonets came that this much persecuted people
acquired even a speaking acquaintance with peace and security. Now, their
stronghold on the mountain-top long since abandoned, the Matmatas have
their _chef-lieu_ at Bled Kebira, where some twelve thousand of them
live like moles beneath the surface of the earth. Though Bled Kebira
has a population equal to that of many an American community holding a
city charter, there is nothing to suggest its presence, for a small,
whitewashed mosque and the _caserne_ occupied by a handful of French
troops are the only structures above ground.
The troglodyte dwellings of Bled Kebira are extremely difficult
to describe because I can think of nothing which will serve as a
satisfactory basis of comparison. The method of digging one of these
_ghars_, as they are called, is as follows. Selecting a site where the
soil is firm and where there is good drainage, the home-builder proceeds
to sink a shaft, perhaps twenty feet square and from twenty to thirty
feet deep. The bottom of this shaft is leveled off and forms a patio or
courtyard. The next step is to excavate the rooms, the doors of which
open on the shaft; some are on the same level as the courtyard, others
are higher up and reached by ropes. Finally, a tunnel, sometimes several
hundred feet in length, is driven from the courtyard to the surface
of the earth, its entrance, usually in a cranny of the hills, secured
against intruders by a stoutly timbered door with enormous hinges of
hand-wrought iron. Some of these massive doors, like the dwellings
to which they gave admittance, were quite obviously of enormous age,
possibly a thousand years or more.
The rooms, generally of good size, with vaulted ceilings, were
astonishingly neat and clean, their walls whitewashed and decorated with
primitive designs in vivid colors; the scanty furniture—beds, tables, and
divans—cut from the rock itself. The disadvantage of this is that the
furniture cannot be moved, but it has its compensation in the fact that
dust cannot be swept, and refractory collar-buttons cannot be lost, under
pieces of furniture which rise solidly from the floor, of which, indeed,
they are a part. In one dwelling which we visited, that of the sheikh,
the bed, which was about the size of a billiard-table, had been plastered
over and the plaster whitewashed, and the whitewash, in turn, had been
rudely frescoed in brilliant reds and greens. Ranged along one side
of the kitchen, which was separated from the bedroom only by a calico
curtain, stood great jars of pottery, recalling those in which the Forty
Thieves were boiled alive, but here used for such prosaic purposes as the
storage of water, olive-oil, and wine.
Though from the open patios, which served as stable-yards for camels,
donkeys, goats, sheep, and chickens, a stench rose to high heaven, we
were impressed with the scrupulous cleanliness which characterized the
interiors of these underground dwellings: the earthen floors had been
scrubbed and sanded; the beds were made up with spotless linen; the
copper cooking-utensils hanging on the walls had been scoured until
they shone like mirrors. Despite the fact that many of these troglodyte
dwellings are thirty feet or more below the level of the ground, I should
imagine that in dry weather they must be quite comfortable to live
in—indifferently lighted, perhaps, but cool in summer and quite immune
from the chilling winter winds. But I must confess that I should not care
to live in one during the rainy season—and when it rains in Tunisia, it
_rains_—for, though there is a certain amount of drainage, I could see no
reason why a really torrential downpour would not transform the central
courtyard, which is really nothing but a large well, into a cistern.
[Illustration: THE SUN-GOD PAINTS HIS PICTURE IN THE WEST
Have you ever seen a Saharan sunset? No? Then you have missed the
sublimest spectacle that nature has to offer. On the palette of the sky
the Almighty mixes His colors with a beauty of effect which is positively
overwhelming—but, like all really beautiful things, it is of brief
duration]
In their stooped shoulders and prematurely wrinkled faces the Matmatam
women show the effects of their bitter struggle for existence; but some
of the young girls were really lovely, with slim, supple figures, clear
olive skins, and large, lustrous eyes. At the house of the sheikh, with
whom the guide we had brought from Gabés was acquainted, we found his
wives and numerous children assembled in the courtyard to greet us; but
in most of the other dwellings the women fled into their burrows on our
approach and remained concealed until my departure, though, once I had
left, they were shyly eager to welcome my wife and daughter, crowding
about them, fingering their clothes, and asking innumerable questions.
I had rather expected that the Matmata dwellings would contain some
specimens of indigenous art, such as one finds among other very ancient
peoples, as, for example, the Hopi. Yet, so far as I could discover, the
Troglodytes possess no art of their own. The walls of the tunnel-like
entrance to one of their houses, it is true, were decorated with a
sort of dado of colored hand-prints, easily recognizable, however, as
the hand of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, and hence an Arab form of
decoration. The people seem to have an innate if quite undeveloped love
for the beautiful, however, as is evidenced by the pride with which
they display the paltry trinkets—bits of the cheap pottery common in
North Tunisia, gaudy lithographs of Turkish origin, empty wine-bottles
with flowers stuck in the necks, looking-glasses, cracked pieces of
European chinaware, in one case a tin which had contained a well-known
smoking-mixture—which are _objets d’art_ to them. These things are not
beautiful, it is true, but many of the objects which we treasure because
of their rarity are not beautiful either.
A funeral was held in Bled Kebira while we were there, but on account
of the presence of numerous women, and of the fact that the Matmatas
object to having their religious ceremonies witnessed by non-Moslems,
we could view it only from a distance. The services were conducted in
one of the larger _ghars_, and at their conclusion the coffin, borne on
the shoulders of several men, was carried through the winding tunnel to
the open air and thence up a precipitous foot-path to the little unkempt
cemetery, where deceased Matmatas are laid to rest beneath far less soil
than they are accustomed to live under when alive. It was one of the most
bizarre spectacles I have ever witnessed: the multitude of white-veiled,
white-robed figures issuing in seemingly endless procession from a black
hole in the ground, their voices raised in a plaintive, barbaric chant.
“It reminds me,” said Mrs. Powell, “of Doré’s picture of the Day of
Judgment, when the sheeted dead arise from their graves.”
Just then there came from the French _caserne_ on the hill the shrill
notes of a bugle sounding the noon mess-call.
“Yes,” remarked my daughter, “and there goes Gabriel’s horn!”
* * * * *
Midway between the eastern slopes of the Matmata Plateau and the coast,
close to the Tripolitanian border, is Medenine. It is one of the most
extraordinary places in the world; I know of nothing even remotely like
it. Here too the inhabitants are troglodytes, if by troglodytes are meant
those who creep into holes, which is the classic definition. But, whereas
the troglodytes of Matmata lives in holes beneath the ground, those
of Medenine have their holes above it, in what might be termed desert
apartment-houses, four, five, occasionally even six stories in height.
Medenine lies in a shallow depression in the desert, and you come
upon it quite unexpectedly as you top a rise in the yellow plain. A
curiously uncanny sensation is produced by the first sight of this most
amazing city. You rub your eyes and wonder if you are not the victim of
a hallucination. You feel that you are very near to the beginning of
things. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was transported to the Age of
Chivalry. But here you are back in the Age of Stone.
The town consists of some two thousand dwellings called _rhorfa_, which
rise from the ground as abruptly as the chimney of a factory. These
dwellings are not detached, as in most communities, but are closely
packed together in rows and squares. It is next to impossible to find
words which will adequately describe them, for, as human habitations,
they are absolutely unique. Seen from a distance, they look as much as
anything else like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete, ten feet in
diameter, a few ranged in rows on the ground, but most of them stacked in
tiers which in some cases rise to a height of half a hundred feet.
Though there is no intercommunication, they are built side by side, their
walls touching, so that a row of them looks like a series of inverted
U’s—⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂ But superimposed on the first row is a second, and on
the second row a third, some of those primordial apartment-houses rising
to a height of five, and, in a few cases, six stories, with a hundred or
more rooms. Perhaps they might best be compared to the tiers of burial
vaults which are to be seen in certain Italian _campi-santi_ or, better
still, to the cells of a honeycomb.
The walls, of enormously thick rubble roughly plastered over with a
sort of adobe, are windowless, each _rhorfa_ obtaining light and air
only through the single narrow doorway, not much larger than that of
a dog-kennel, about two feet wide and three and a half feet high, or
just large enough to permit a man to squeeze through if he enters on his
hands and knees. The doors are of wood very stoutly built and secured by
enormous wooden bolts. To the right of the door, some two or three feet
from it, is the keyhole, which consists of an aperture in the wall just
large enough to permit a man to insert his arm. When a troglodyte leaves
home his method of locking up the house is a most curious and ingenious
one. His key consists of a piece of wood two or three feet long, its end
fitted with pegs which exactly correspond in size, number, and position
with holes sunk in the end of the bolt. When he is ready to leave he
pulls the door to from the outside; then, inserting his arm in the
keyhole, he gropes about until the pegs on the key drop into the holes in
the bolt, which are spaced differently on each lock, the bolt thus being
drawn forward to lock the door, or pushed back to unlock it. The system,
though clumsy, is much more effective than it sounds, for the bolt is too
far from the opening to permit of its being reached save with the key,
and, unless the holes in the one exactly correspond with the pegs on the
other, there is no way to gain admittance except by breaking the door
down. His door locked, the householder slings his enormous key, as large
and heavy as a policeman’s night-stick, over his shoulder by a leathern
thong. He is not likely to lose it, or to forget it, and in it he has a
formidable weapon. In Medenine, as has been remarked, we are very near
the beginning of things, for this is the “key of the house of David,”
which Isaiah saw resting on the shoulder of Eliakim, that, in the quaint
phraseology of the Scriptures, “he shall open, and none shall shut; and
he shall shut, and none shall open.”
Even when a Medenine householder returns home completely soused, to put
it inelegantly, he has no difficulty in finding his keyhole, which is so
large that he could scarcely miss it. But to find the stairs, and, once
they are found, to avoid falling down them, is quite another matter, for
reaching the door of one of these troglodyte apartments is as hazardous
a performance as entering an upper-story window of an American hotel by
means of a fireman’s scaling-ladder. Occasionally, but not often, these
lofty dwellings are reached by flights of rude stone stairs, extremely
steep and narrow and perilously slippery in wet weather. But in most
cases the inhabitants have to climb up and down by means of small stones,
barely large enough to afford a foothold, which project a few inches
from the face of the house. A monkey would experience no difficulty
whatsoever in gaining the top floor of one of these singular houses, and
neither would an experienced mountain-climber provided he was accustomed
to rock-work, but it required all my strength and agility to reach a
fifth-floor doorway, and even then I had several narrow escapes from very
nasty falls. How a troglodyte who has imbibed over-freely of palm wine
manages to get home at all is a mystery, for some of the doors are fifty
feet above the ground, and, if his foot slipped, there would be “more
work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”
What, you may ask, is the _raison d’être_ of these extraordinary
habitations? The best reason in the world—self-protection. For it has
always been a savage, untamed region, here along the Libyan border, and
life was one desperate, unending struggle for existence until the white
helmets came. There was, it is to be presumed, a semblance of law and
order under the stern rule of Rome, but when the Roman power collapsed
the land was overrun by the Vandals, and after them by the Arabs, and
in the wake of Arabs came veiled raiders from the desert and loot-hungry
corsairs from the coast. Hence it was essential that the inhabitants
devise a form of dwelling which could be successfully defended against
marauders, no matter how numerous or how well armed. And the _rhorfa_
answered the purpose admirably, for, being built of masonry, they cannot
be burned down; the walls are of such thickness as to be proof against
anything short of shell-fire; they are so arranged in squares and rows
that a withering cross-fire can be brought to bear upon assailants; and
they are easy to defend, for the ground floors are used only as granaries
and storehouses, and the householder, living high above the ground, has
only to shoot down through his keyhole, or to batter out the brains of
the first enemy who attempts to enter, in the unlikely event that the
stout door should be broken in.
Not far from Medenine is the smaller community of Metameur, which is a
fortress rather than a village. Here all the houses are built in the
form of a hollow square, inclosing a spacious courtyard, from which they
rise to a height of five or six stories. As has already been mentioned,
none of the houses have windows, and so the outside of the square is
merely a blank wall of rough stone covered with cement, too lofty to be
scaled and too thick to be breached except by modern artillery. In the
center of the courtyard is a well, which insures the inhabitants of a
water-supply should they be besieged. Access to the courtyard is gained
through a tunnel-shaped entrance, so low that one has to crawl through
it almost on all fours. But once inside the inhabitants were perfectly
secure, as long as their food and water held out, for there was no means
by which an enemy could dislodge them. To me these troglodyte towns were
particularly interesting because they illustrate how, even in a region
wholly destitute of natural defenses, a primitive but ingenious people
can protect themselves when dire necessity compels.
As, even to-day, the southern marches of Tunisia are not wholly immune
from attacks by bands of raiders from the desert, Medenine is garrisoned
by a considerable force of _méharistes_, _tirailleurs_, spahis, and
_chasseurs d’Afrique_, whose trim white barracks are in the outskirts of
the town. Rising beyond the squat, vault-like rows of _rhorfa_, perhaps
the most primitive dwellings in the world, and in striking contrast to
them, are the slender masts and cobweb-like aërials of the military radio
station—the last word in twentieth-century civilization.
Circumstances made it necessary for us to lunch at Medenine. It was the
last place on earth where I should have expected to get a decent meal,
for the single European café in the town was at first sight anything but
appetizing. But appearances are sometimes deceiving, for, as it turned
out, the proprietor had once been a chef in a famous Paris restaurant,
and he set before us one of the best-cooked _déjeuners_ that we had in
Africa. My recollections of it are particularly vivid because for the
modest sum of ninety cents I obtained a bottle of fine old Château Yquem!
* * * * *
In pushing so far southward into Tunisia we had a double-barreled
motive: to see the troglodyte communities which I have just described,
and to visit Djerba, the Island of the Lotus-Eaters. This fabled isle,
so alluringly described in the Odyssey, was known to those mariners of
ancient Greece who ventured beyond the rim of their world before the dawn
of history, and the reports which they brought back served as foundation
for the epic tales of Jason and Ulysses. There the Argonauts dwelt for a
time in happy idleness; there they ate of the lotus and the sweet fruit
of the date-palm; there they found a land where it was always afternoon
and life passed like a dream.
Djerba, which in ancient times was connected with the mainland by a
causeway, lies within cannon-shot of the Tunisian coast. It can be
reached in a few hours from Gabés by a coasting-steamer, small and none
too clean; but we chose the longer and more interesting land route,
through Medenine and Zarzis, once an important seaport of the Romans,
to the tip of the peninsula, whence there is a ferry service across the
narrow strait, here barely four miles wide, to El Kantara.
The French resident-general at Tunis had notified the _controleur
civil_ at Houmt-Souk, the island capital, of our intended visit, and
had obtained the promise of a launch to take us across the strait to El
Kantara and a motor-car to take us across the island. But when we arrived
at the place of embarkation, marked only by a police post and a small
stone pier, no sign of a launch was to be seen. After several hours spent
in fruitless attempts to reach Houmt-Souk by telephone, we arranged to be
ferried across to El Kantara by an Arab boatman, a swarthy, black-browed
ruffian who, if appearances count for anything, must have been descended
from the pirates who once terrorized this coast. Judging from the
price demanded, I had assumed that we were chartering the whole boat,
a broad-bowed, clumsy craft with an enormous lateen-sail, but, once we
had paid our passage-money, the skipper insisted on taking aboard not
only a varied assortment of lousy native passengers but donkeys, goats,
sheep, chickens, even a camel, as well, crowding them in until the boat
looked—and smelled—like Noah’s famous vessel. But eventually the tawny
lateen-sail was hoisted with much shouting and we got under way, a
leaning boat on the tranquil turquoise waters, with a palm-fringed strip
of shore to lead us on. As a matter of fact, we could almost have walked
across, for the water of the strait is very shallow, and the stones
of the great Roman causeway which once connected the island with the
mainland were plainly visible, a foot or so beneath the surface.
We landed at El Kantara (the name means “bridge”), the ancient Meninx.
Once a magnificent city, as attested by the sculptured stones, broken
columns, and fragments of marble sarcophagi which still strew the
site, it is now a mere cluster of mud hovels inhabited by native
sponge-fishers, the sole Europeans in the place being the French
_douanier_ and his young and pretty wife. The _controleur civil_ had
telephoned from Houmt-Souk that a car had been sent for us, but as it
had not shown up and as it was now long past noon and breakfast ancient
history, the _douanier_ took pity on us and invited us into his little
house, bringing out for our entertainment a plate of biscuits and a
bottle of the rather pungent cordial called Cap Corse. When at last the
car sent by the _controleur_ made its appearance—it belonged, as might
have been expected, to the ubiquitous Ford family of Detroit—the plate
had been emptied, the bottle had been drained, and the hospitality of our
host and hostess had been strained to the breaking-point, I fear.
It is about five-and-twenty kilometers across the island, the smooth
white road skirting the edges of venerable olive-groves or running
between the walls of prosperous farms. I had expected to find a rugged
land, with lofty peaks and brawling streams and leafy glens and lush
green valleys, for Homer speaks of the “three mountain peaks” and the
“gleaming river” and the high cascades of “downward smoke”; but there
was not a hill or valley worthy of the name; not a single stream of any
sort, let alone a river; nor was there a mountain anywhere in sight.
Physiographically, Djerba is, as might be expected, merely a continuation
of the mainland, but, unlike the mainland, every foot of its gently
rolling surface has been irrigated and cultivated and fertilized until
its naturally arid soil has attained an amazing degree of productiveness.
Numerous palms give it a semi-tropical appearance; the fields are
carpeted with wild flowers; the climate is delightful; and the vast
groves of old, old olive-trees provide ample shade; so it is easy to
understand how the Hellenic mariners, coming here from the bleaker shores
of the Ægean, thought it was a paradise indeed.
The villages are immaculately neat and clean; the little white-walled
houses rise from blazing gardens whose fragrance fills the air; the
fortified farmsteads, built for defense, are cultivated with meticulous
care; half a million olive-trees and three times that number of palms
cover the island with a sea of verdure; and in the spring, when we were
there, the poppies overlaid as with a scarlet mantle the green of the
sprouting grain. Barring only central Morocco, I have never seen any
country where wild flowers grow in such amazing variety and profusion.
During a brief halt while our driver was changing tires Mrs. Powell
gathered specimens of twenty different kinds in half as many minutes. In
places they were so thickly intermingled that the country-side seemed to
be covered with a gorgeous Oriental rug.
The islanders are a simple, friendly folk, willing, industrious, and
hospitable. They have numerous industries, including sponge-fishing,
the making of oil, the manufacture of a kind of white pottery, and
the weaving of the silk and woolen tissues known as burnous stuffs,
though agriculture is their chief pursuit. There are few evidences of
poverty, the inhabitants being, on the whole, extremely prosperous, with
quite a sprinkling of men who, according to island standards at least,
are wealthy. In dress they are distinctive from their fellows of the
mainland, the men wearing the short brown coats of loosely woven homespun
which, being characteristic of the island, are called _djerbas_: the
short but extremely baggy Cretan trousers, so loose in the seat that
it is often used for carrying groceries, chickens, and other objects;
the whole being topped off by the jaunty Tunisian _chéchia_ with its
long blue tassel. The women, when at work, wear dresses of blue cotton
and broad-brimmed hats of braided straw with enormously high crowns, so
that, seen from a little distance, they look like Chinese coolies. They
are of Berber stock and commonly speak a Berber idiom, though the use of
Arabic is rapidly increasing. Curiously enough—for in most things they
are tolerant and easy-going—the islanders are Wahabis, the most fanatical
of the various sects of Moslems. The Puritans of Islam, they practise a
faith of the utmost austerity: they frown on all forms of religious pomp
and circumstance; their places of worship are of the simplest character,
destitute of all decoration; and they carry their insistence on “the only
God” so far as to deny divinity to Mohammed.
Djerba has a large and prosperous Jewish population, Hara Srira, a little
town in the center of the island, having been a place of pilgrimage
for pious Jews for untold centuries. In the middle of the town is the
synagogue, a very ancient building, its interior being most curiously
decorated in marbles of various colors, crude but interesting tiles, and
carved and painted wood. The chief rabbi, a white-bearded patriarch in
flowing robes who might have posed for a portrait of Moses, met us at the
door and conducted us through the semi-darkness of the nave to a sort of
sacristy at the back of the high altar, where he proudly displayed the
ancient manuscripts and massive silver plate which are the synagogue’s
chief treasures. He showed me one splendid volume, a copy of the Talmud,
I believe, its cover studded with semiprecious stones, which had been in
this same synagogue for close on fifteen hundred years; others of the
sacred manuscripts were engrossed on long rolls of vellum which were
contained in cylindrical cases of silver, curiously chased and wrought.
Across the street from the synagogue is the pilgrims’ house, a kind of
religious hostelry, like those common in medieval Europe, containing
hundreds of small rooms, not much more than cells, opening on a spacious
inner court. Here, packed in like sardines, a dozen or more to a room,
are lodged the thousands of pilgrims who, during the season of the
pilgrimage, flock to Djerba not only from Tunisia and Tripolitania but
from all of the Mediterranean countries. I once had the unforgettable
experience of crossing the Mediterranean on a ship loaded with Russian
pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, so I had no difficulty in imagining what
the hostel at Hara Srira must be like—and smell like!—when, in the heat
of an African summer, it is packed to the doors with the pious but
unwashed.
Houmt-Souk, the island capital, is a charming, restful little town with
fine, broad streets, white houses embowered in flowers, and a _jardin
public_ where a French horticultural expert does interesting things with
shrubs and trees. On the beach, not far away, stands an old fort, a relic
of the Spanish power, built some two hundred years before Columbus
sailed westward out of Palos, with carronades still frowning from its
bastions. But the rule of the Dons in Djerba came to a bloody end in
1560, when a Turkish squadron under Piali Pasha and the corsair Dragut
annihilated the Spanish fleet and took the Spanish fort, along with five
thousand prisoners. They were massacred to the last man, and with their
bones was raised a great mound, twenty feet in height, Skull Fort, it was
called, which stood nigh the beach until the middle of the last century,
when it was pulled down at the instance of the Christian community and
the bones given decent interment in the Catholic cemetery.
The single inn boasted by Houmt-Souk is quite impossible, but we were
befriended by fortune in the persons of the _controleur civil_ and his
charming wife, who took compassion on us and invited us to stay at
the residency. After dinner the caïd, who is the head of the Moslem
community, the mayor, the doctor, and a few others dropped in for
bridge, followed by music and dancing. The caïd, a swarthy, portly,
black-mustached Arab in fez, dinner-coat, scarlet sash, and baggy Turkish
trousers, was a most picturesque figure, somewhat reminiscent of one of
the characters in Anthony Hope’s “Phroso.” He had been to Paris, could
converse entertainingly on many subjects, and played a brilliant game
of bridge, as I discovered when he bid six spades against my five no
trumps—and made it.
I had not forgotten that we had come to Djerba because of its renown
as the home of the Lotophagi, and I had determined to do a little
lotus-eating myself, provided, of course, I could get some lotus. To
leave Djerba without tasting its lotus would be equivalent, it seemed
to me, to visiting Astrakhan without trying its caviar or Mocha without
sampling its coffee. But getting the lotus was not so simple a matter
as I had assumed. Neither the _douanier_ at El Kantara nor the man who
drove the car nor the landlady of the inn had so much as heard of it. The
_controleur_ ventured the opinion that the lotus described by Homer was
nothing more or less than the date, which here grows in great profusion,
and cited several authorities in support of his contention. The doctor
reminded us that the lotus of the Egyptians was a variety of water-lily,
and that there were no water-lilies in Djerba for the excellent reason
that there was no water in which to grow them. But the caïd maintained
that the ancients had reference to a prickly shrub, indigenous to the
island, known to botanists as _Zizyphus Lotus_, but locally as jujubier,
from whose sweet-tasting fruit the natives have been accustomed from
time out of mind to ferment a highly intoxicating drink. He promised,
moreover, to procure me a sample of it, and the following day he kept his
word. A single draft of that fiery liquor did more than all the Homeric
verse I ever read to give me an understanding of the strange actions
attributed to Ulysses. No wonder that he forgot his friends in Hellas,
that he lost all ambition to go back and build up ruined Troy, after
having had a dozen gourds or so of that prehistoric white mule. All he
wanted to do was to stretch himself in the shade of a palm and sleep it
off.
* * * * *
Instead of returning to the Tunisian mainland as we had come, we chose
another route, motoring to Adjim, on the southern coast of the island,
and crossing thence by sailing-boat to Djorf. It was a holiday, and our
fellow-passengers had evidently imbibed too freely of the juice of the
lotus, for they were boisterous when we started, and when, half-way
across, the skipper attempted to collect their fares, they became
threatening and abusive. The argument culminated in a fair imitation of
an old-time sea-battle—just such an episode, I imagine, as Ulysses and
his companions would have loved—the shipmaster and his sailors beating
the obstreperous passengers over the head with the oars, while the cargo
of braying donkeys, bleating sheep, and cackling fowls contributed to
the confusion. It was most entertaining for a time, for no one offered
to molest us, but the boat was small and laden to the water’s edge, the
wind was rising, and the sea, like the passengers, was beginning to get
distinctly rough. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see Harvey and
the faithful Cadillac awaiting us on the shore.