TUNIS
The town of Tunis itself is cosmopolitan. Approached by steamer, it
spreads itself out in a white fan along the edge of a lagoon that has the
effect of a bay, being only divided from the Gulf of Tunis by the merest
strip of land. There seems scarcely a finger’s breadth between the two.
In the early morning of a December day the town showed as a white blur
in the haze that hung about the lake. The ship glided slowly through the
narrow entrance at Goulette which leads into a canal deepened out in the
shallow waters of the lagoon, marked on one side by floating buoys and on
the other fringed by the narrow embankment on which runs the tramway to
Carthage.
At first sight Tunis seems knee-deep in water she stands so low, and
indeed a great part of the modern town is built on land reclaimed from
the lake itself. But as one nears the shore the picturesque jumble
resolves itself into flat-topped white houses, the domes of innumerable
mosques, outlines of minarets, lines of dark foliage marking the
whereabouts of central boulevards, and behind them all the wooded slopes
of the Belvedere pleasure park. From here the eye is led by degrees to
further and further hills. It is a picturesque setting. Backed by jagged
rocky hills that glow deep rose and dusky purple at sunset, the capital
gazes over the placid waters of the lake to the deep blue of the Gulf
beyond, to the twin peaks of le Bou-Cornine on the north east and the low
hill of Carthage to the West.
The French part of the town has broad streets with shady avenues of
trees, modern shops with Paris goods displayed behind plate glass
windows. Electric trams pass and re-pass. One could imagine oneself in
the South of France. But by way of the archway called La Porte de France,
left standing when the ancient walls were demolished, one escapes with
a sigh of relief into the native town. Here too, everything is touched
with Europeanism, but enough remains to prick the imagination. The
narrow covered Souks or arcades, where the merchants sit in their tiny
raised shops, their shiny yellow slippers ranged side by side ready to
put on again when business is over, the crowd in flowing Eastern robes
sauntering up and down languidly shopping, the red and green tomb of a
holy man right in the gangway, with a blind beggar squatting beside it
proffering an open hand for alms, the strange chrysalis-shaped white
bundles with their tight black veils, that are women, the passing funeral
with its swathed corpse carried shoulder-high and followed by a chanting
crowd. All this breathes the East.
[Illustration: Entrée d’un Souk
Tunis
I. M. D.
2.23.]
And yet the flavour of it is spoilt by the touch of unreality about it
all. Tawdry European goods are presided over by a dignified Mussulman
in a fez who will perhaps accost you in excellent English. From under
flowing robes appear narrow French shoes. One groans. And then, of a
sudden, you may look up an alley way, and it is the real thing again. A
strip of blue sky, hot sunshine, the blue-green of a small dome, men in
statuesque drapery outside the carved entrance of a mosque. A glimpse
within of kneeling silent figures in white, in dove colour, in grey. And
your flagging spirit fires again. Tunis is a beautiful Arab woman in
European dress, and as such she frequently puts one’s teeth on edge. But
push into the country and you will find the native life untouched, the
peasant people leading the same lives as generations before them led, no
hint of the uneasy modernism that spoils the capital.
One must remember too that the town of Tunis cannot be treated as a
homogeneous entity. It is composed of many elements, all keeping to their
own customs and habits and mixing not at all. The French took over the
Protectorate of the country in 1881, but their race does not predominate
here. There is an immense population of Jews who inhabit their own
quarter, and an even greater number of Italians and Maltese as well as
the natives of the country itself. One hears Italian spoken as often in
the street as French, and I suspect a certain jealousy and suspicion on
the part of the French.
The country is ruled by a Bey under the protection of the French
Government represented by a Resident General. The different provinces
are under the management of Kaïds appointed by the Bey and answerable
to French ‘Contrôleurs Civils.’ The system seems to work well, and
undoubtedly the country has prospered under French protection, even
though that protection was originally thrust upon her. Good roads are
made, a plentiful supply of water is brought to each town, the country
is linked up by railways and telegraphic communication, and schools are
opened in even the smallest places. It seemed to me the inhabitants live
on happy terms with their ‘protectors,’ and I was struck by the absence
of any insolence in the attitude of the latter to the dark-skinned races.
Arabs and Europeans travel in the same railway carriages and trams,
sit perhaps at adjoining tables in restaurants, take their turn at the
booking offices, naturally and without resentment on either side. I had
known India well many years ago, and the difference of our attitude to
a subject race could not but come into my mind now. The British rule is
a beneficent one, and just. But it is the rule of a kindly master over
subordinates. The French method appears to me a happier one.
The town of Tunis itself seems to be spreading rapidly, large hotels
spring up as suddenly as mushrooms after a night’s rain, and the streets
are full of sight-seeing tourists. At times a cargo of as many as five
hundred of them may be dumped on shore, earnestly ‘doing’ Tunis in a
few hours or a day and a half. The town Arab adapts himself to his
environment and becomes one of that race of beings without nationality,
familiar to all who have travelled in distant lands, a hybrid creature
of most distasteful qualities. Where the carcase is to be found there
shall the vultures be gathered together, and as the troops of admiring
tourists debouch upon the street one is irresistibly reminded of a shoal
of herring in shallow water with its accompanying clamour of predatory
gulls. If Allah has caused the harvest to fail, he has at least provided
the tourist.
They are of all varieties: from the superior person sheltered from any
contact with the vulgar world behind the glass windows of his touring
limousine-car, and the crowd that moves from one cosmopolitan hotel
to another, carried about almost without volition like goldfish in a
bowl, to the traveller who perhaps has saved up enough just to do a
Mediterranean trip and to stare with delighted bewilderment at a life so
different from that to which he is accustomed.
In the hotel of one small oasis town I observed a tall and gaunt young
man of indeterminable nationality, and as I rode back peacefully in the
evening from my saunters in search of sketchable points of view I used to
see the same youth striding along the road, the dust flying from behind
his heels, whilst a weary guide tottered in his wake. Mansour was much
amused. “Truly the foreigner is possessed of a devil,” he remarked, “I
know his guide and he tells me that every day his employer sets forth
with a map and walks with fury from the rising up of the sun to its going
down. He is afflicted with a rage of walking. Mahmoud when first engaged
by him rejoiced greatly, for he thought the newcomer to be inexperienced
and foresaw fat profit for himself. But though it is but four days since
he came, already is my friend so greatly exhausted that he can scarce
put one foot before the other. He prays daily that the stranger may soon
leave, for he is so young that there is still great strength in him. He
is tall and his legs are of such a length that he takes but one step
while Mahmoud must take two, and never will he take a car or mount a
donkey.”
We were gently ambling home from a sketching expedition. It was getting
late in the afternoon and the long shadows of the palms lay across the
sandy road. Our steeds were beginning to mend their pace as they came
in sight of their stables. I had been painting hard and was in the
comfortably tired state induced by two hours satisfactory work. Suddenly
there was the sound of footsteps and there shot past us the figure of
the thin young man walking as if for a wager. His brow was unheated,
his face serene. Close behind him panted the sorry figure of Mahmoud
who cast an agonised look upon his friend as he limped past. His figure
was certainly not adapted to violent exercise and he seemed at the last
stages of exhaustion. And so he was. Next day the energetic pedestrian
passed me where I sat sketching down by the river. The dust still spurted
from below his feet. But he was alone. “Mahmoud hath taken to his bed,”
explained Mansour, “he saith that if he gets up he will be made to walk
fifteen miles. And indeed he cannot rise for he is naught but aches and
pains from head to foot and is calling curses upon the foreigner. He had
hoped to be given much money, for had he not ready two pairs of worn-out
shoes to testify for him? But is not life sweeter than money? and he can
do no more. The traveller has not been able to get another guide, for
every man finds himself of a sudden too busy. Thus he will soon leave.
And Mahmoud saith that never will he engage himself from henceforth to
any stranger till he has first looked upon him to see whether or no his
legs be long!”
In Tunis, forgetting that I myself was a tourist, I studied them with
an interested eye. Sitting outside a small restaurant in the central
boulevard where the heaped flower stalls made splashes of colour under
the heavy foliage of the trees, I watched them pass, sipping my coffee
and meditating their infinite variety.
And in the hotel drawing room that evening I was accosted by a grey
haired and aggrieved spinster. “Can you tell me,” she asked, “where I
can find a tea-shop in Tunis?” I explained patiently that tea-shops are
not indigenous to the country, that tea can be served at any café or
restaurant, but that coffee is the national drink and is beautifully
made. “In a town of this size there _must_ be a tea-shop,” she remarked
firmly, “I mean the kind where there is a band and you can get muffins
and scones as well as cakes. I am sure someone told me there _is_ one
here,” she added, casting a suspicious glance upon me. I mentally
shrugged my shoulders and moved away. She spent three days in the place
and every afternoon was devoted to her pathetic quest. And on the last
day as she stood in the hall awaiting the hotel omnibus, her luggage
about her feet and a neat waterproof upon her arm, I ventured to inquire
as to its success. “I was here too short a time to come across it,” she
answered coldly, “but I shall be returning.”
So I gather the search for a tea-shop is to be resumed, and I am very
much afraid that in a year or two she may find it.
The history of Tunisia has been the record of a long sequence of
civilisations that have possessed her in turn, have risen to fame and
glory and one by one have gone down before a fresh power. As far back
as the ninth century B.C., Carthage was founded by the Phœnicians and
rapidly became a rich and powerful city. Her merchants trafficked all
along the Mediterranean and even pushed as far as the little island of
Great Britain wrapped in Atlantic fogs. Her riches were immense and
she dared to enter the lists against Rome itself. This temerity cost
her dear. After two long wars she was beaten, her fleet destroyed, and
finally in 146 B.C. the Romans utterly destroyed the town, and the
country became a Roman province. They rebuilt it later and Carthage again
became rich and powerful. In 439 A.D. she was taken by the Vandals and
about a hundred years later passed into the keeping of the Byzantine
Empire. At the end of the seventh century the city was again utterly
destroyed by Arab conquerors, and since then Carthage has remained a
heap of ruins, the town of Tunis gradually growing in importance and
wealth. The subsequent fortunes of the country since the Arab conquest
down to 1575 were interwoven with the general history of Barbary, but
at that date it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, till it threw off
the Turkish yoke about the eighteenth century and became virtually
independent. Finally, in 1881, France sent an expedition to Tunis with
the proclaimed purpose of punishing the raids of Tunisian tribes into
Algiers, and eventually the Bey, under compulsion, signed a treaty of
suzerainty to the French Republic.
As each of the earlier conquerors in turn tried busily to destroy all
vestiges of his predecessor’s reign, little else but fragments are left
of the older civilisations. Carthage is not even a heap of ruins now. She
is a handful of dust. Her stones were carried away for the construction
of Arab houses, one comes across stray pillars wreathed with the acanthus
of Rome, in the Souks of Tunis, huge blocks of stone are built even into
the mud villages everywhere, marble pillars have been transferred bodily
into the interiors of mosques. Carthage herself has become a desolation
and a waste.
I went there on a day of hot sunshine and an intense blue sky. It is
about ten miles from Tunis. As the train crawled like a caterpillar
along the thread of embankment across the lagoon, an Italian steamer was
gliding through the canal on my right; and beyond the pencilled edge of
the lake was the deep blue rim of sea for which she was bound. On my
left was the placid surface of the lake, dotted with waterfowl and with
a few wooden stakes here and there, on which crouched the black figures
of cormorants looking like dejected priests. On a tiny island were the
ruins of a Spanish fort. Reaching Goulette, there were still a few small
stations to pass, and then came Carthage.
The sandy soil seemed almost to throb in the warmth, hedges of cactus
lined the broad road from the tiny station. Absurd modern villas stood
about, flotsam of the new civilisation. But climbing upward I left
the villas behind and turning on the slopes looked out to where the
blue of the sea faded into a soft haze. To the west the red cliffs of
Sidi bou Said caught the eye, and the clustering white houses of its
beautiful village. On the summit of the hill of Carthage stands the ugly
modern Roman Catholic cathedral, avenging by its presence the deaths of
Saint Perpetua and the unfortunately named poor little Saint Felicity,
Christian martyrs in the Roman amphitheatre of Carthage.
Adjoining the cathedral is the monastery of the Pères Blancs, who have a
small museum filled with Punic and Roman remains. There are fragments of
statues, broken vases, earthenware lamps, coins, medals, sarcophagi in
which one can see frail skeletons preserved in their covering of aromatic
gum. These haughty warriors and princesses lie helplessly exposed to the
gaze of every idle tourist, the painted lids of their resting places
standing sentinel-fashion behind each. I am no antiquarian. All I carried
away was a confused impression of a débris washed up on the shores of
Time; of delicate bracelets and gold rings, of tiny charms, of iridescent
glass bottles dug up from the sand, of all the odds and ends that human
beings gather round them. I think they were not so very different from
ourselves, these people of long ago. And now conquerors and conquered
mingle their remains in the sterile peace of museum shelves. In the
garden outside were ranged pieces of pillars, fragments of vast statues,
here a giant hand, there a colossal head.
A white-robed monk paced slowly along the path with his breviary, and a
bush of rosemary gave out a faint aromatic scent as my skirts brushed it
in passing. A small boy was herding a flock of goats by the shattered
ruins of the amphitheatre, and I wandered from one group of stones to
another, all that was left of a great and famous city. I was shown
fragments of Roman villas with mosaic pavements, private entrances from
them to the theatre where only a broken column or two remains to show the
glories of what had once been. Nearly all the finds of any value have
been taken to the Bardo Museum at Tunis. Here there is almost nothing. A
soft wind stirred the grass growing between the blocks of fallen masonry,
a tiny lizard ran swiftly across one of the grey stone seats, far off in
the gentian blue of the Gulf showed a feather of dark smoke. The silence
was so intense that one could almost hear the rustle of the lizard’s
feet. One’s mind swung giddily backwards through the past centuries. More
than ever one had the sensation of the inexorable tide of Time, carrying
into oblivion the painfully acquired civilisations of the world. Each
so absorbed, so confident, and of them all what is left? The crumbling
fragile bones in the museum, and a tiny chip of blue mosaic in the dust
at my feet, seemed the only answer.