THE BARBARY COAST
The real Barbary coast of the romantic days of the corsairs was the
whole North African littoral. Here the pirates and corsairs had their
lairs, their inlet harbours known only to themselves and their
_confrères_, who as often pillaged and murdered among themselves as they
did among strangers.
To-day all this is changed. It was the government of the United States
and Decatur, as much as any other outside power, who drove the Barbary
pirates from the seas.
Under the reign of Louis XIV Duquesne was charged to suppress the
piracies of the Tripolitan coasts. The celebrated admiral--it was he who
also gave the original name to the site of the present city of
Pittsburgh on the Monongahela--got down to business once the orders were
given, sighted eight of the Barbary feluccas and gave them chase. They
took refuge in the Sultan's own port of Chio, but, with the French close
on their heels, they were captured forthwith, and the Pacha of Tripoli
was forced without more ado to make a treaty containing many onerous
conditions. The corsairs gave back a ship which they had taken, and all
the French who had fallen prisoners in their hands and who were
virtually held in slavery. The admirals of those days had a way of doing
things.
After the French came the English. Blake, the British admiral, who never
trod the deck of a vessel until he was fifty, did his part to sweep
these fierce Mediterranean pirates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli from
the seas. The United States Navy did the rest. This is history; let
those who are further interested look it up.
The North African coast-line from Tunis to Tangier has the aspect of
much of the rest of the Mediterranean littoral, but that strip sweeping
around from Cap Carthage to Tripoli in Barbary, the shores of the great
Tripolitan gulf, may still furnish the setting for as fierce a piratical
tale as can be conceived,--only the pirates are wanting.
This low-lying ground south of Tunis is not a tourist-beaten ground; it
is almost unknown and unexplored to the majority of winter travellers,
who include only Algiers, Biskra, and Tunis in their African itinerary.
South from Tunis, the first place of importance is Hammamet, an
embryotic watering-place for the Tunisians, called by the natives "the
city of pigeons."
[Illustration: _The Sud-Tunisien_]
This up-and-coming station on the route which binds "Numidia" with
"Africa" is possessed of a remarkable source of fresh-water supply. The
Romans in ancient times exploited this same source, and built a
monumental arcade on the site. All vestiges of this architectural work
have however disappeared.
At Nabeul, a few kilometres away, one gets a curious glimpse of native
life interspersed with that of the Jews. Mosques, _souks_, and
synagogues give an Oriental blend as lively in colouring and variety as
will satisfy the most insistent. Nabeul's industry consists chiefly in
the fabrication of pottery,--a fragile, crude, but lovely pottery, which
travellers carry afar, and which is the marvel of all who contemplate
it. The enterprise is of French origin, but the labour which produces
these quaint jugs, vases, and platters (which are not dear in price) is
purely native. The potter's thumb marks are over all. The pieces have
not been rubbed and burnished down, and accordingly the collector knows
he has got the real thing, and not a German or Belgian clay-thrower's
imitation.
Nabeul was the ancient Neapolis, which was destroyed by the Romans at
the same time that Carthage came under the domination of Augustus.
South again from Nabeul, by road or rail, for the railroad still
continues another hundred kilometres, and one is at Sousse. Change cars
for Kairouan, the Holy City of Tunisia!
Sousse is an important and still growing port with as mixed a
population as one will see in any Mediterranean town of twenty-five
thousand inhabitants. The French number perhaps twelve hundred, the
Italians three or four thousand, and the Maltese as many as the French.
The rest are Arabs; you might call them seafaring Arabs rather than
desert Arabs, for they are as often on the sea as off it.
The _souks_ of Sousse are famous. There is no longer a great Berber or
Byzantine city closed in with walls with a gate on each cardinal face;
all this has disappeared in the march of progress; but the Arab town,
everywhere in Algeria and Tunisia, is a feature of the life of the
times, even though it has been encroached upon by European civilization.
The _souks_, or markets, are here more bizarre and further removed from
our twentieth-century ideas of how business is, and should be, done than
in any other mixed European-Mussulman centre of population.
In the Souk des Herbages are sold roots and herbs of all sorts, pimento
peppers, henna, garance, dried peas, and other vegetables. The Souk des
Arabes holds the rug and carpet sellers, the armourers, the weavers of
the cloth of the burnous, tailors, etc. In the Souk des Juifs, a dark,
ill-smelling, tiny nest of narrow corridors, are found the jewelry
makers and the broiderers.
This and more of the same kind is Sousse. In addition there are the
brilliant variegated sails of the Italian and Maltese fishing-boats, the
_dhows_ of the Arabs, and all the miscellaneous riffraff which
associates itself mysteriously with a great seaport. Sousse is an
artist's paradise, and its hotels are excellent,--if one cares for sea
food and eternal mutton and lamb.
The Kasba of Sousse sits high on the hillside overlooking the Arab town
and the _souks_. A long swing around the boulevards brings one to the
same culminating point.
A Phoenician acropolis stood here before the eleventh century, and the
remains of a pagan temple to-day bear witness to the strong contrast of
the manners of yesterday and to-day. The great signal-tower of the
citadel is a reconstruction of a pharo called Khalef-el-Feta, which
stood here in 1068. Whatever may have been the value of this
fortification in days gone by, it looks defective enough to-day with its
hybrid mass of nondescript structures. At all times, and from all points
of view, it is imposing and spectacular, and is the dominant note of
every landscape round about. Its angularities are not beautiful, nor
even solid-looking, and the whole thing is stagy; but for all that it
is imposing and above all grim and suggestive of unspeakable Turkish
atrocities that may have been carried on in its immediate neighbourhood.
Monastir is a near neighbour of Sousse, twenty odd kilometres away, over
as fine a roadway as one may see anywhere. Automobilists take notice!
The Hôtel de Paris at Monastir has a "sight" in its dining-hall, which
alone is worth coming to see, aside from the excellent breakfast which
you get for fifty sous. This apartment was formerly the great
reception-hall of the Arab governors of the province, and as such
becomes at once an historic shrine and a novelty.
Not a town in Algeria or Tunisia has so quaint a vista as that looking
down Monastir's "Grande Rue." It's not very ancient, nor squalidly
picturesque, but somehow it is characteristically quaint. And it
"composes" wonderfully well, for either the artist's canvas or the
kodaker's film. Sousse and Monastir should be omitted from no artist's
itinerary which is supposed to include unspoiled sketching grounds.
Kairouan, the Mohammedan Holy City of Tunisia, lies sixty kilometres
southwest from Sousse.
Kairouan dates only from the Mussulman conquest, having been founded by
the propagator of Islam in Africa, Okba-ben-Nafi (50 Heg. 671 A.D.).
Kairouan became the capital of what is now Tunisia in the ninth century,
and Tunis itself was its servitor. Up to this day Kairouan has guarded
its religious supremacy as the Holy City of the Eastern Moghreb, and
accordingly is a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of all North
Africa.
The French occupied the city in 1881 without resistance on the part of
the inhabitants. And to-day it is a live, wide-awake important centre of
affairs, besides being a Mohammedan shrine of the very first rank.
The native city is entirely free from French innovations and remains
almost as it was centuries ago. The mosques and the native city are
all-in-all for the stranger within the gates, particularly the mosques,
for here, of all places in Tunisia, their doors are opened to the "dogs
of infidels" of overseas. But you must remove your shoes as you enter,
or put on _babouches_ over your "demi-Americain" boots, which you bought
in Marseilles before leaving France (poor things, by the way; one
suspects they were made in England, not in America at all).
Of first importance are the mosques of Sidi-Okba, the "Grande Mosquée;"
and of Sidi-Sahab, the "Mosquée du Barbier." The Djama Sidi-Okba, or
"Grande Mosquée," is a grandly imposing structure with a massive square
minaret of the regulation Tunisian variety. Within it is of the classic
type, with seventeen aisles and eight great thoroughfares crossing at
right angles. It is a cosmopolitan edifice in all its parts, having been
variously rebuilt and added to with the march of time, the earliest
constructive details being of the third century of the Hegira, the ninth
of our era.
The _minbar_, or pulpit, the _faïences_, the ceilings and the best of
Hispano-Arabic details are here all of a superlative luxuriance and
mystery. The "Mosquée du Barbier" ("Sidi-Sahab") is built over the
sepulchre of one of the companions of the Prophet himself. Legend says
that he always carried with him three hairs of the beard of the Prophet.
These were buried with him, of course, but whether that was his sole
recommendation for immortality the writer does not know. Less imposing
than
[Illustration: _In a Kairouan Mosque_]
the "Grande Mosquée," this latter is quite as elaborately beautiful in
all its parts. The carved wooden ceiling, the rugs and carpets of rare
weaves, the stuccos and the _faïences_, are all very effective and
seemingly genuine, though here and there (as in the tomb of Sidi-Sahab)
one sees the hand of the Renaissance Italian workman instead of that of
the Moor.
Kairouan has a special variety of _cafés chantants_ and _cafés
dansants_, which is much more the genuine thing than those at Biskra or
Tunis.
Still south from Tunis, further south even than Sousse, Kairouan, and
Sfax, lies a wonderful, undeveloped and little known country of oases
and _chotts_, the latter being great expanses of marshy land sometime
doubtless arms of the sea itself. The oases of Gabès and Tozeur are
called the _pays des dattes_, for here flourish the finest date-palms
known to the botanical world; while the oases themselves take rank as
the most populous and beautiful of all those of the great African
desert.
The _chotts_ are great depressions in the soil and abound in the region
lying between Touggourt and Biskra in Algeria, and Gabès in Tunisia. The
_chotts_ are undoubtedly dried-out beds of some long disappeared river,
lake or bay, and their crystallized surfaces are to-day veritable
death-traps to the stranger who wanders away from the beaten caravan
tracks which cross them.
The _chotts_ are very ancient, and an account of a caravan which was
lost in one of them was published by a Spanish historian of the ninth
century. Herodotus, too, makes mention of a Lake Triton, probably the
Chott-Nefzaoua of to-day, which communicated with the Syrte, now the
Gulf of Gabès.
The "Sud-Tunisien," as all this vast region is known, is all but an
unknown land to the tourist. Sousse and Sfax are populous, busy maritime
cities, largely Europeanized, but still retaining an imprint quite their
own. Kairouan, just westward from Sousse, where the railway ends, is the
chief tourist shrine of Tunis outside Tunis itself and Carthage. But
beyond, except for an occasional stranger who would hunt the gazelle,
the moufflon, or the wild boar, none ever penetrate, save those who are
engaged in the development of the country, and the military, who are
everywhere.
Between Sousse and Sfax is El Djem, the Thysdrus of the time of Cæsar,
and afterwards one of the richest cities of North Africa. Gordian, the
proconsul, was proclaimed emperor of the colony in 238 A.D., and the
present grand old ruin of an amphitheatre, a great oval like the
Colosseum at Rome, served many times as a fortification against Berber
and Vandal hordes, besides performing its conventional functions. El
Djem and its marvellous arena, nearly five hundred feet in length and
four hundred in width, is one of the surprises of the Tunisian
itinerary.
[Illustration]
From Sfax, which is linked with Sousse by a service of public
automobiles, another apologetic loose end of railway takes birth and
runs west to Gafsa, a military post of importance and not much else; a
favourite spot for the French army board to exile refractory soldiers.
They leave them here to broil under a summer sun and work at road-making
in the heat of the day. After that they are less refractory, if indeed
they are not dead of the fever.