ACROSS THE SHATS TO THE SANDY SEA
To one who has been brought up in the belief that cleanliness is next
to godliness, the most unpleasant feature of desert travel is the lack
of facilities for bathing. You never appreciate the luxury of a tub,
soap, and an unlimited supply of warm water until you find yourself in a
hot and dusty land where they are unobtainable. The Compagnie Générale
Transatlantique—or, as it is usually referred to in North Africa, the
“Transat”—has supplied this need in the score or more of admirably
equipped hotels which it has established along the main routes of travel,
but, once you leave the beaten paths, a bath-tub, or the water with which
to fill it, is as unobtainable as ice in Hades. In the Hôtel de l’Oasis
at Gabés, and again at the residency at Houmt-Souk, we had been provided
with large, circular receptacles of tin into which the Arab servants
had poured an inch or so of tepid water, but these extremely sketchy
ablutions had about as much resemblance to a real bath as the shivering
damsel depicted in “September Morn” has to the surf-riders at Waikiki. So
when I learned that the hot springs of El Hamma, a little oasis town on
the route to Tozeur, had been famous as a bathing-resort ever since Roman
times, I insisted that we spend the night there instead of at Gabés.
[Illustration: LIKE FEATHERED BONNETS ON THE HEADS OF A SAVAGE ARMY
The date-palms rise against the sky line. An oasis is not necessarily a
well, a patch of grass, and a palm on either hand, as the novelists and
the motion-picture makers would have you believe. Some of the Saharan
oases are hundreds of square miles in extent, supporting thousands of
people and hundreds of thousands of date-palms]
Though spring was now well advanced, and though we were in the edge of
the Sahara itself, it was a cold gray day when we set out for El Hamma,
and the biting, dust-laden wind which swept across the steppes struck
through our heavy rugs and greatcoats and chilled us to the marrow.
Shivering, I thought wryly of our friends at home who were doubtless
picturing us as sweltering beneath the torrid sun of Africa. Why the
Transat considers it worth its while to operate a rest-house at so remote
a spot as El Hamma, where European visitors are few and far between, I
cannot imagine. But there it was, a Mexican-like, one-story structure
of adobe, quite unprepossessing as to its exterior but really charming
within, its patio or inner courtyard inclosed by a sort of cloister
with Moorish columns from which opened the rooms. In the center of the
courtyard there was a small pool and fountain, flanked by palm-trees;
and later on, when the weather became warmer, there would be a profusion
of flowers. The place was in charge of a Frenchman who had received his
culinary training in a Paris restaurant, an exiled Boniface whose sole
object in life appeared to be to make his rare guests comfortable and
contented. The sight of European faces and the sound of European voices
must have been very welcome to him, for he was the only white man in the
town.
The _hammam_, we learned, was about half a mile away, on the other side
of the village. Guided by a domestic from the rest-house, we lost no time
in starting thither, for we were tired, chilled, and thickly veneered
with desert dust and looked forward eagerly to the luxury of immersing
ourselves to the chin in steaming water. Remembering its fame under the
Romans, I had pictured in my mind’s eye a rather imposing place, with
comfortable dressing-rooms and, no doubt, a series of marble pools and
steam-rooms such as one finds in native bathing establishments of the
better class throughout the East. A rickety wooden door in a high mud
wall was unlocked by an Arab attendant, who ushered us into a spacious
inclosure, nearly the whole of which was occupied by a stone-bordered
tank. Everything was in the state of untidiness and disrepair
characteristic of Arab countries. The tank was filled with boiling water,
it is true, from which rose clouds of steam, but its surface was covered
with a thick green scum, and the place reeked with the noxious fumes of
sulphur. The “dressing-rooms” consisted of a series of cubicles, floored
with stone and thatched with palm-fronds and so cold and cheerless that
the mere thought of disrobing in them made me shiver. Though, as it
happened, no one was using the _hammam_ at the time, the bathing was, I
gathered, extremely mixed, Europeans and natives, any one, in fact, who
could afford to pay the fee of a few francs, mingling in the pool in a
state of complete nudity. I have spent too much of my life in frontier
regions to be finical, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Our
decision to abandon the idea of bathing was hastened when we saw three
large gray water-rats furtively emerge from one of the dressing-rooms.
This was, we learned, the bathing-establishment _de luxe_ of El Hamma,
patronized only by the wealthier natives; the general run of Arabs
utilize the numerous hot streams which meander in all directions through
the town. These streams are supplied by springs which gush from sandy
hillocks, and almost all of them are at a very hot temperature, often
at the boiling-point. As in the case of the other hot springs found
throughout Tunisia, most of them have medicinal properties and are
said to be highly efficacious in the treatment of certain ailments, a
fact which explains, no doubt, the Roman settlements in remote parts
of the country, for, particularly during the luxurious and dissolute
days of the empire, the Romans, as is well known, were subject to gout,
rheumatism, eczema, and syphilitic diseases. The Arabs, who are extremely
superstitious, assert that the springs of El Hamma were originally cold
and devoid of medicinal properties, but that a beneficent marabout, a
holy man of exceptional sanctity, was persuaded to spit into them one
day, whereupon they became hot and mineralized!
In places the streams have eroded narrow gulches in the soft soil, and
these the natives have here and there roofed over with palm-branches and
matting so as to afford a measure of privacy, of which, however, they did
not appear to avail themselves, for on every hand we encountered Arab men
and boys splashing about and soaping themselves in the steaming waters,
stark naked but quite unashamed. In a somewhat more secluded spot, where
one of the streams broadened out into a fair-sized pool, was a bath
reserved for the other sex, its banks dotted with women and girls in
various stages of dishabille. Despite all that has been written about the
excessive modesty of Moslem women-folk, who, when on the street, swathe
themselves in shapeless garments and cover their faces to the eyes,
the slim brown maidens of El Hamma disrobed themselves before us with
utter unconcern, displaying their charms with as little reserve as the
show-girls in Earl Carroll’s “Vanities.” Some of the younger ones were as
graceful as the bronzes in a museum, with slim rounded bodies and firm
pointed breasts, their clear olive skins suffused with pink and as smooth
and lustrous as satin. They completely ignored our presence, disporting
themselves in the pool with the abandon of water-nymphs, until I
indiscreetly unslung my camera, whereupon a Cerberus in the person of a
wrinkled crone suddenly appeared with a cudgel and, loosing a torrent of
shrill Arabic invective, drove us away. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it
struck me that the nymphs were sorry to see us go.
Dinner was awaiting us when we returned to the rest-house. It was a meal
which prompted me to raise my hat, metaphorically speaking, to the genius
and organization of the Transat, which feeds and lodges the traveler
along the fringe of the Sahara as efficiently as Fred Harvey does along
the line of the Santa Fé. We had vegetable soup, and fish fresh-caught
in the Gulf of Gabés, and roast lamb (which is to all Moslem lands what
roast beef is to England), and a crisp green salad, and for dessert such
a soufflé as only a French chef can produce, the whole topped off by a
cobwebbed bottle of Mouton Rothschild and the syrup-like Arab coffee.
Then we huddled about a meager wood fire—for wood is a luxury which must
be use sparingly in the desert—to smoke and sip our liqueurs and peruse
two-months-old copies of “_L’Illustration_” and “_Le Rire_” until it was
decently late enough to go to bed.
The bedrooms were as damp and chilly as a refrigerator, but, having in
mind the tragic experience of three Americans at this same rest-house
some weeks before, we did not insist on any attempt to heat them. The
Americans in question had, despite the warnings of the Arab servants,
ordered no less than four charcoal braziers lighted in their room. Then,
in order still further to raise the temperature, for it was a bitterly
cold night, they had proceeded to close all the doors and windows,
thereby transforming the room into what very nearly proved to be a lethal
chamber. When their chauffeur sought to arouse them the following morning
there was no response. The door was broken down, and the travelers were
found unconscious in their beds, overcome by the charcoal fumes and at
the point of death from asphyxiation.
[Illustration: THE FANTASTIC DWELLINGS OF MECHOUNECH
Rise like Chinese pagodas above the pools and palm-trees of an oasis in
the Tunisian Sahara]
We breakfasted by candle-light and then set off into the chilly dawn.
Harvey had urged on us the wisdom of starting early, for the way to
Tozeur lies across the salt lakes of the Djerid, a dismal and treacherous
morass which is none too safe by day and exceedingly perilous after
nightfall. These salt lakes form one of the most singular features of
the Tunisian Sahara, stretching in a charm which has only two short
breaks right across the southern end of the regency from the Gulf of
Gabés to the frontier of Algeria, which they penetrate for a considerable
distance. They are called by the French (with their usual inaccuracy of
spelling and pronunciation) _chotts_, whereas the word should really be
the Arabic _shat_, the native term for a broad canal, a lake, an estuary.
Strictly speaking, however, the shats are not lakes at all at the present
day, but shallow depressions, some feet below sea-level, which during
more than half the year are expanses of dried mud thickly incrusted with
white salt, this saline veneer giving them at a little distance the
appearance of broad sheets of ice or water. During the winter, however,
when the effect of the rare rains is felt, the shats frequently contain
several feet of water, which, by liquefying the mud into a quicksand,
makes them quite impassable for man or beast. But during the other seven
months of the year they can be crossed on foot or horseback, and, when
the sun has baked the surface to a sufficient hardness, a motor-car may
venture on them with reasonable safety.
Even during the dry months, however, the shats are exceedingly
treacherous; surfaces which give every indication of solidity at a few
yards’ distance are often but thin crusts which will give way without the
slightest warning beneath the weight of animals or men, precipitating
them into a sea of slime from which escape is frequently impossible. One
hears innumerable stories of the tragedies which have been enacted in the
shats. “A caravan of ours,” relates one Arab writer, “had to cross the
shat one day; it was composed of a thousand baggage-camels. Unfortunately
one of the beasts strayed from the path, and all the others followed it.
Nothing in the world could be swifter than the manner in which the crust
yielded and engulfed them; then it became like what it was before, as if
the thousand camels had never existed.”
It seems probable that at no very distant period, as time is measured
by geologists, the shats formed an arm of the Mediterranean, for, as
has already been remarked, they are several feet below its level, and
shell-fossils in great quantities have been found in them. Unfed by
tributary rivers, this inlet gradually contracted and silted up. Meantime
the sand-banks extended across its mouth until they joined, whereupon,
cut off altogether from the sea, the waters rapidly evaporated under the
fierce African sun, leaving the chain of saucer-like depressions which
we see to-day. Confirmation of this theory is found in the legend which
exists among the desert tribes, of a sea, with ports and ships, which
once stretched across the northern end of the Sahara from the shores of
the Syrtes to the foot of the Aurés; this Arab legend is corroborated by
Greek myth; and support is lent to both by the findings of the scientists.
By some authorities this one-time Saharan sea has been identified with
the semi-mythical Lake Tritonis, in whose foul depths dwelt the old
sea-god Triton, who, it will be remembered, befriended Jason and his
Argonauts. According to Greek mythology, the _Argo_, while on her
homeward voyage from Colchis, was driven south by unfavorable winds to
the coast of Libya, the little vessel eventually becoming entangled in
the ooze of an inland sea. Here the Hellenic adventurers were entertained
for a time by certain alluring nymphs of the neighborhood—ancestresses,
no doubt, of those whom I saw disporting themselves in the pool at
El Hamma—but were rescued by Triton, the patron deity of seafarers,
who guided them to the open sea again. Merely a fable, you say? Well,
perhaps. But don’t be too certain. For, when you stop to think about
it, there is nothing inherently improbable in the narrative that has
been handed down to us of the wanderings of a Hellenic sea-adventurer
named Jason, who, with an equally adventurous crew, set out from Greece
in quest of gold (the ancients were accustomed to gather alluvial gold
in sheep-skins; hence, the Golden Fleece), just as the Argonauts of a
later day set out for the gold-fields of California. Their frail craft
driven from its course by a Mediterranean norther, the exhausted mariners
eagerly availed themselves of the shelter offered by an arm of the sea
which opened from the Syrtis Minor, now known as the Gulf of Gabés; but
the waters grew shallower as they sailed eastward, the sand-bars more
frequent, and finally the _Argo_ went hard and fast aground. This much
being admitted, surely it is quite within the bounds of probability that
some wild-looking native fisherman, bearing the three-pronged fish-spear,
or trident, which has always been associated with the sea-god, and which
is commonly used in those parts to-day, offered his services as a pilot
and helped them out of their difficulties. The truth of the matter is
that most of the Greek myths, when stripped of the fanciful embroideries
with which seamen of all periods have been prone to embellish their
tales, will be found to have a very substantial substratum of fact.
Those of the elder generation will doubtless recall the scheme,
widely discussed in the early eighties, which was deceptively styled
“the flooding of the Sahara.” Its author, Colonel François Roudaire,
maintained that, by connecting the shats with the Mediterranean at a
point a few miles to the north of Gabés, it would be possible to create
an inland sea with an average depth of seventy-eight feet and an area
of more than three thousand square miles, or nearly twice the size of
Great Salt Lake in Utah. Ferdinand de Lesseps reported favorably on the
proposed enterprise, which was based on the following facts. The Gulf
of Gabés is separated by a sandy ridge one hundred and fifty feet high
and thirteen miles across from the Shat-el-Fejej, a depression which
extends into the Shat-el-Djerid which in its turn is separated by a
still narrower ridge from the Shat Gharsa. The Shat Gharsa is succeeded
westward by a chain of smaller depressions, and beyond them lies the
Shat Melrir, whose northwestern end is not far from the Algerian town of
Biskra. Were these shats connected and flooded, the Algerian hinterland
would be brought into direct communication with the sea. De Lesseps
estimated that the work could be completed in five years’ time at a cost
of about thirty million dollars, and on the strength of this a company
was formed to carry the project out. But with the death of Colonel
Roudaire and the odium attaching to all enterprises with which de Lesseps
was associated as a result of the Panama scandals, the scheme fell into
abeyance. The company became simply an agricultural concern, devoting
its energies to the creation of oases by the sinking of artesian wells.
In view, however, of the pronounced interest which the French are now
taking in the development of their North African possessions, a revival
of the enterprise may be looked for in the not far distant future, and
the lost sea the _Argo_ sailed long, long ago may again become a fact.
We sighted the shats when about a half-day out from El Hamma, whence our
way had led across a most dismal and depressing land, sans inhabitants
and sans vegetation. The stony plain which we have been traversing since
daybreak now broke away in a long, irregular slant, sloping down to the
banks of what appeared to be a broad river of ice. The illusion was
perfect. Even in the Syrian Desert, famous for its mirages, I have never
seen anything so deceiving. Sweeping in either direction in spacious
curves to the horizon, its level surface twinkling and flashing in the
sunlight until one is blinded by the glare, this amazing phenomenon looks
for all the world like a mighty frozen river winding out of the nowhere
into the unknown. The brooding silence, the utter solitude, the ancient
myths associated with it, the feeling of eeriness and oppression—all
these served to recall that other mystery-enshrouded region described by
Matthew Arnold:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
From caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
As we rolled cautiously out upon the surface of the shats the illusion
of an ice-field gradually disappeared, and I would have taken an oath
that we were approaching a broad sheet of water. Even Harvey was deceived
and apprehensive, speculating uneasily on its probable depth and on
whether we should be able to get through. Yet, like the lake-mirages of
Arabia, the water seemed always to keep just ahead of us, receding as we
advanced, tantalizingly beckoning us on. That others had preceded us
across the shats was evidenced by the numerous imprints of camels’ feet
in the yielding soil, and by the stakes with which the _méharistes_ of
the Camel Corps had marked the route. These we followed meticulously,
as, in the Alps, one follows the red-painted stones which show the way
across a glacier. Nor was it reassuring to note here and there the
tracks of animals which had strayed from the beaten path; as there were
no return tracks, it was to be assumed that they had been engulfed in
the hungry quicksands. To venture upon the shats with so heavy a car as
ours involved, as I knew full well, a certain measure of risk, and I
experienced a distinct feeling of relief when we gained the other side.
Now we were in the Djerid, as the Arabs call the oasis-sprinkled region
immediately to the south of the shats. _Djerid_ is the Arabic for
palm-frond, and, inferentially, for palm-grove, the name being given to
this tract of sand because of the numerous oases which dot it, in the
words of some old writer, like the spots on a leopard’s skin. To those
who have obtained their ideas of the desert from motion-pictures (made in
California) and certain popular but quite inaccurate works of fiction,
the word “oasis” conveys a picture of a small patch of vegetation, some
scattered clumps of palm-trees, a limpid pool, and, perhaps, a few
striped Arab tents, the whole surrounded by a sea of yellow sand. The
description is accurate enough as far as it goes, perhaps, but it should
be understood that oases are not necessarily of small area. Many of them,
on the contrary, are of the size of American counties, with numerous
villages, extensive systems of lakes and streams, and vast forests of
date-palms. Indeed, some of the great oases of the Inner Sahara, such as
Gourara, Tuat, Tafilet, Tidikelt, and Timbuktu, are as large as the State
of Rhode Island and support considerable populations, both sedentary and
floating, for the larger oases are nearly always important centers of the
caravan trade.
Our immediate objective, our jumping-off place for the country of the
great dunes, was Tozeur, a sand-locked oasis town built on the narrow
isthmus which separates the Shat-el-Djerid from the Shat Gharsa. Tozeur
is one of the most beautiful, prosperous, and interesting oases in the
Tunisian Sahara, its ten score springs supplying a perfect network of
streams, rivulets, and irrigation canals, which in turn support upward
of half a million date-palms. Seven little villages nestle amid this
palm-forest, the tops of the trees, when seen from a little distance
peeping above the intervening sand-dunes, looking like feathered bonnets
on the heads of a savage army.
Though a site so lavishly supplied with water, and commanding the great
trade-routes from Carthage and Cirta to the south, must have been
occupied and cultivated since the very earliest times, the origin of
Tozeur is hidden behind the misty curtains of antiquity. It was evidently
a place of considerable importance in the days of Ptolemy, who calls it
Tisouros; in the depths of its palm-groves one is shown the remains of
what was once a Roman watch-tower, later a Byzantine campanile, then a
Moslem minaret, and is now a crumbling ruin; it was the scene of many
bloody and stirring incidents during the Fatimite wars of the ninth and
tenth centuries; in 1068 the Arab geographer Bekri wrote that almost
every day caravans of a thousand camels or more left Tozeur laden with
dates. Then, for eight hundred years, it seems to have dropped from
sight, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot.” But now it is
coming into its own again. Already a narrow-gage railway has been pushed
southward, across the steppes, across the shats, through Gafsa and
Metaloui, and now the hoot of the tin-pot, ten-mile-an-hour locomotive
is echoed by the palm-groves of Tozeur. In preparation for the expected
tide of tourist travel the Transat has erected in the edge of the oasis
a fine modern hotel, with French-made furniture, and porcelain bath-tubs
with hot and cold running water, and excellent _table d’hôte_ meals,
and a spacious terrace where in the evenings the guests may lounge in
deep cane chairs over their coffee, listening to native music and gazing
dreamily into the brooding, star-lit desert. And from here set out the
great Renault twelve-wheelers, which churn their way across the sandy sea
to Touggourt, to Ourgla, to Ghardaia, and beyond. A few more years, a
very few, and Tozeur, so long a wild and woolly frontier town, will be as
sophisticated—and as spoiled—as Biskra.
I think I have already remarked that Tozeur has upward of half a million
date-palms, most of them of the _deglat_ variety, whose luscious,
semi-transparent, amber-colored fruit melts in the mouth like so much
honey. These date-palms form a veritable forest, along whose paths you
may wander for hours and never weary of its beauty. And in your ears
is always the pleasant sound of running water. Overhead the palm-tops
interlace to form a continuous canopy of glossy green, through whose
interstices the sun sifts to carpet the ground with shadows as delicate
as lace. Beneath the palms, peach and apricot and almond trees blossom in
pink and snowy clouds, and the brown earth beneath is thickly inlaid with
the green patina of gardens and little patches of sprouting grain; for
land is so scarce and valuable in the oases that every foot is cultivated
with almost pathetic care, the owners grudging even the narrow paths
which separate their holdings.
[Illustration: THE FORGOTTEN OF GOD
A harka of the terrible masked Touareg—“the Blue-Veiled Silent Ones”—who
have terrorized the Sahara as the Sioux terrorized the Western plains]
Quite unforgettable is the memory of my first excursion into the
green depths of Tozeur. All about me the stately date-palms rose in a
wilderness of vertical lines. Fascinating brooks gurgled across my path
to lose themselves amid the trees. The air was heavy with the fragrance
of peach and orange blossoms. Toiling amid the groves were bronzed,
bare-limbed, brawny men in snowy turbans. Groups of tattooed women
in flowing garments of blue homespun shuffled by, baskets of produce
balanced on their heads, their heavy necklaces and anklets tinkling.
Bathing in a secluded pool were some naked nut-brown maids who, uttering
cries of feigned dismay, fled precipitately at our approach. From the
leafy depths beyond came the plaintive strains of some reed instrument.
My guide said that it was an Arab boy tootling on a native flute. But I
knew better. The music _I_ heard came from the Pipes of Pan.