SFAX
Sfax, like Kairouan and Sousse, is a walled town and the Souks are even
more fascinating than those of Kairouan. The European part of the town
is quite separate, and is picturesquely built in the Moorish style, the
wide streets planted with palms running across to the harbour with its
busy shipping. It is a very flourishing place, the centre of the olive
oil industry and also the port for the phosphates which are obtained in
such quantities near Metlaoui and other places. These mines seem almost
inexhaustible, and new veins are always being discovered. One sees
truckloads and truckloads of the stuff, looking like sand, coming along
the line. In running the hand through it, one finds quantities of fishes’
teeth, quite whole and perfect and so sharp that they can pierce leather.
Some are as large as the teeth of a fox, pointed and white, and there are
some that have two fangs or even three. The phosphates are one of the
richest products of this country. The ‘ore’ is sometimes shipped direct
from Sfax, being loaded into vessels specially prepared to carry it, or
it is first chemically treated in the neighbourhood and then exported
as super-phosphate. The mining districts contain a large population of
workers, chiefly immigrants, with French managers in authority.
[Illustration: The Souks.
I. M. D.]
Outside the northern walls of Sfax was a large space where fodder was
stacked, and charcoal and grain sold, and where the laden camels came
stepping gravely along the white highway from the country, and here were
small groups of men squatting round cooking pots, or Bedouins collecting
round two negresses who were stirring beans over a charcoal fire,
shredding in red pepper, the firelight playing on their broad features
and flashing teeth.
The drone of native pipes from a ragged booth close under the walls, led
us in that direction and we found two Soudanese doing a kind of dance,
surrounded by a crowd of Arabs. They were in a medley of garments, one
wearing an old khaki coat over his accordion-pleated shirt. It had once
been white, but was stained and worn to an indeterminate shade. Dirty
turbans were on their heads. One stood playing on a curious horned
bagpipe, whilst the other revolved slowly round beating a drum, his
hideous ebony face thrown back, his mouth opening and shutting, showing
the pink interior and a thin tongue that quivered like an animal’s.
Those who gave him money placed it in this horrid slot and he pouched it
instantly in his cheek, all the time twisting and turning in a sort of
dance. The last time I had seen anything of the sort was when I watched
the ‘shimmy shake’ danced by Europeans on board a liner. There it had
been an absurd travesty, civilisation playing at barbarism. Here was the
original stuff, primitive and raw, under the intense blue of an Eastern
sky, the sunlight pouring down on the scene and making great blocks of
shadow under the awning and at the feet of stacked bales of pale yellow
chaff.
The crowd were chiefly in neutral tints, broken with the bright crimson
of a fez here and there, the warm madder of a cloak dyed in henna, or the
brilliant lemon yellow of native slippers.
Along the road a group of Bedouins passed like a classic frieze against
the white background of a marabou. Four camels in single file led by
a man wrapped in a cloak, each laden camel topped by a huddled blue
figure that bent and swayed to the motion. Two or three Bedouin women
accompanied them on foot, in loose girdled robes, bearing burdens on
their heads. Barefoot and erect they strode past, their olive throats
covered with necklaces of coins, their handsome tattooed faces set to the
open country. They are impatient even of the scant civilisation of the
Souks. They are a people of free spaces and the wide sky; as soon might
the kestrel companion with the dove, as these wild natures fraternise
with city folk. And as they swung past, the frowning crenellated walls
of the city looked down, as they have done for ages past, upon them and
the bustle and crowd of the Souks, gazing beyond them to the gentian
sea, whose calm they have watched ruffled by the prows of generations of
conquerors who have come, have ruled, and in their turn become the dust
blown hither and thither by the desert wind.
[Illustration: Bedouin Woman
I. M. D.]
I found sketching in the Souks almost impossible at first, the people
crowded round me so; but a champion suddenly appeared in the shape of an
Arab waiter at the hotel whose eye fell upon my easel. I painted, did I?
Et voilà, he too was devoted to art. Had he not accompanied artists on
many expeditions? Was he not an accredited guide, with patrons in Paris
et partout? For six months he had been guide to an English lady, a great
painter—“Nous avons beaucoup travaillés,” and she had gained a prize in
the Salon for one of her large pictures painted here, here, in Sfax. “I
will accompany you gladly to the Souks, madame. I can show you all the
points from whence one can make an effective picture. And the crowds will
no longer trouble you. All the world knows me.” And when I came down in
the afternoon there indeed was Rached ben Mohamed, a white burnous thrown
over his waiter’s clothes, a cigarette in his mouth. He was as good as
his word. From one intricate street to another he led me, pausing to show
me a corner here, a group there. “This is a magnificent subject,” he
would say, “but not for the afternoon. The shadows are wrong then. You
want a morning light. Tiens! I shall finish my work always very early and
then I am tout à fait à votre disposition.”
He was an amazing character, much darker than an Arab, and I suspect his
mother of having listened to the blandishments of a Soudanese. He talked
a peculiar French rather difficult to follow, with terrific rapidity. All
the shopkeepers in the Souks seemed to know him, and he was treated with
great deference as he swaggered past, wrapped in his burnous, with his
crimson fez on one side, talking of the great artists he had been with,
of the six months he spent in Paris, of the expeditions he had organised
as guide.
“Comme dessin c’est très joli,” he remarked kindly, on looking at
my first hasty pencil sketch in the Souk aux Tapis, “ça donne bien
l’impression.”
My heart rather failed me when I heard of the great canvases painted by
the French artist. I feared my efforts would be withered in his scorn,
but “vous avez vraiment du talent,” he pronounced; and much heartened,
I dashed on cobalt and aureolin in a wild effort to reproduce the
brilliance of the scene in front of me.
I was painting in the Street of Stuffs. It was a narrow way, sloping down
to an entrance to the Souks. A ragged awning was slung from a tumbledown
balcony on one side to the roof of a shop on the other. Brilliant
handkerchiefs and coloured stuffs hung on either side of the pathway;
in the shade of a recess a tailor plied his trade, sitting cross-legged
amongst billows of muslin. The sun beat down, slatting the roadway with
glowing stripes, a continuous crowd surged up and down, men on their way
to the mosque, countrymen staring at the goods proffered for sale, blind
beggars tapping their way along and calling “Give, in the name of Allah!”
and behind them rose the slender tower of a minaret.
I squeezed in between two shops and painted valiantly, whilst Rached
kept the crowd from encroaching on me. He wielded his cane like a scythe
from time to time, making a clean swathe amongst the onlookers. And
all the time he kept up his lordly air, accepting a chair from one, a
cigarette from another, a cup of coffee from a third. He bullied, he
cajoled, or he flattered, and always with success. I suspect him of
assuring the crowd that I was a person of vast importance. I wondered
to myself over his mysterious employment as a waiter, for a large card
hung in the office setting forth his prowess as a guide. I gathered from
him that if a great artist came along (here a faint underlining of the
adjective) he threw up his waitering, engaged a substitute in his place,
and turned guide for several months at a time. “Ah yes,” he said, whilst
we made our way back to the hotel down a white side street whose walls
stood sharp against a blinding sky, “to travel is to live.” He snatched
a narcissus from a passing Arab youth and presented it to me with a
flourish, leaving the original owner too astonished to protest.
[Illustration: I. M. D.
Le marché aux Tapis.
The Souks. Sfax.
21.2.23.]
At the far end of this narrow way was the Street of the Coppersmiths with
its clang of beaten metal and glow of heaped copper. A yard out of it was
crammed with mules and donkeys, their bulky saddles piled in a gay heap
in the archway leading to it. Now and again a laden beast came up the
street, its driver shouting to the crowd to make way. Tattered heaps by
the side of the wall stirred and groaned a petition for alms, the poppy
red of a Spahi’s cloak and his blue pantaloons made a sudden chip of
colour. And everything was soaked in sunlight.
Midway down the street was a curious white minaret, topped with metal
like a sort of pagoda. At its foot collected groups buying and selling.
The yellow roadway was sharply cleft with clear-marked shadows, and a
carpenter in a brown burnous sat on the floor of his shop making axles
for cart wheels, a froth of thin shavings heaped round him. Then a
brightly painted cart with high wheels came past, cleaving a way for
itself in some mysterious manner. Once it and its shouting driver were
past, the crowd flowed together again like water that you have divided
for a moment with a stick, the beggars picked themselves up from the
corners to which they had rolled for safety, and life went on as usual.
The weather was very uncertain, and now set in for a cold wet week. I
wandered about with my sketch-book in the covered Souks and finally
Rached settled me in a small shop with the air of conferring a great
favour upon the owner. It dealt in a variety of goods—silks, buttons,
shot, etc. An elderly Arab dressed in a soft dove-coloured burnous was
a customer, and asked if he might offer me a cup of coffee. I accepted
with thanks, whilst in a hissing whisper the guide conveyed to me the
importance of my new friend. We talked a little through Rached as
interpreter.
The old man told me he was going to Europe in the spring, for medical
treatment as well as for business. He was a dignified figure in his
ample draperies, with thin fine features. Rached told me afterwards that
he was a big silk merchant, and intended going to London to inspect
silk materials. He and the Kaïd were to travel together, with Rached
as interpreter. A fleeting mental picture of the trio progressing down
Regent Street made me smile inwardly. Certainly their interpreter would
be equal to any emergency, but how will those dove coloured draperies
fare, and that calm dignity ever survive the Tube or the rush for a motor
bus? The merchant had three wives, one from Constantinople—“une jeune
femme très riche,” another from Tunis, and a third from his native town
of Sfax. “Elles sont toutes excessivement jolies” asserted Rached, but I
reflected that in a country of veiled women, probably all men’s wives are
beauties. With some interest I asked how many children there were, but
there is only one girl. “And imagine to yourself how rich she will be,”
sighed the guide, who loved money. But he loved still better the flinging
of it about with a lordly air, so I hardly think his own daughter will
ever be a great partie.
After a short time I began to understand the geography of the native
town, but there were still mysterious alleys that seemed to lead
nowhere, shady relatives of the bigger streets. Close to the city wall
was the street of the Pretty Ladies. Like trap-door spiders one stood
in each doorway, dressed in gay silks, her cheeks rouged, eyebrows
painted to meet in a single line, and tiny black patches on her face.
Most of them were not beautiful. But one doorway opened into a sort of
alcove with a stone seat running round it, and here we caught sight of
three pretty girls in earnest conversation with one young man. They were
dressed in light silk striped with colours, heavy silver anklets clashed
as they moved and their perfumed hands were heavy with rings. One turned
and glanced at my English companions, shooting a glance at them from her
long-lashed painted eyes, then drawing her silver veil closer round her
with a mock modesty.
All round the ramparts ran a pathway, and from this height one looked
across the town to the harbour or to the sea of olives that stretched
for miles into the country. It is a prosperous town and the land round
it very rich. When the almond blossom was out, and all the orchards on
the outskirts of the town a smother of blossom, I motored about 15 miles
into the country, and all the way we ran through groves and groves of
carefully kept olives, till from a small tower we looked across their
grey and silver stretches to the white distant town of Sfax along the
bay.