Produced by Eric Eldred, S. R. Ellison and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
[Illustration: Photo Portrait--Girl in Shawl]
FOUNTAINS
IN THE SAND
RAMBLES AMONG THE OASES OF TUNISIA
_By Norman Douglas_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. EN ROUTE
II. BY THE OUED BAIESH
III. THE TERMID
IV. STONES OF GAFSA
V. SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
VI. AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
VII. AT THE CAFÉ
VIII. POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
IX. SOME OF OUR GUESTS
X. THE OASIS OF LEILA
XI. A HAVEN OF REFUGE
XII. THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
XIII. TO METLAOUI
XIV. PHOSPHATES
XV. THE SELDJA GORGE
XVI. AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS
XVII. ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE
XVIII. THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
XIX. OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
XX. A WATERY LABYRINTH
XXI. OLD TISOUROS
XXII. THE DISMAL CHOTT
XXIII. THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
XXIV. NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GAFSA AND JEBEL ORBATA
ENTRANCE TO THE TERMID
AT THE TERMID
A STREET IN GAFSA
HADRIAN'S INSCRIPTION
THE LAST PALMS
CAFÉ BY THE MULBERRY-TREE
MY FRIEND SILENUS
NATIVES OF GAFSA
THE ROMAN WALL
OLIVES IN THE OASIS
TOZEUR AND ITS OASIS
THE WATERS OF TOZEUR
THE SHRINE ON THE CHOTT
MARABOUT IN THE NEFTA GARDENS
A BEGGAR
_FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND_
_Chapter I_
_EN ROUTE_
Likely enough, I would not have remained in Gafsa more than a couple of
days. For it was my intention to go from England straight down to the
oases of the Djerid, Tozeur and Nefta, a corner of Tunisia left unexplored
during my last visit to that country--there, where the inland regions
shelve down towards those mysterious depressions, the Chotts, dried-up
oceans, they say, where in olden days the fleets of Atlantis rode at
anchor....
But there fell into my hands, by the way, a volume that deals exclusively
with Gafsa--Pierre Bordereau's "La Capsa ancienne: La Gafsa moderne"--and,
glancing over its pages as the train wound southwards along sterile
river-beds and across dusty highlands, I became interested in this place
of Gafsa, which seems to have had such a long and eventful history. Even
before arriving at the spot, I had come to the correct conclusion that it
must be worth more than a two days' visit.
The book opens thus: _One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax._ Undoubtedly,
this was the right thing to do; all my fellow-travellers were agreed upon
that point; leaving Sfax by a night train, you arrive at Gafsa in the
early hours of the following morning.
One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax....
But a fine spirit of northern independence prompted me to try an
alternative route. The time-table marked a newly opened line of railway
which runs directly inland from the port of Sousse; the distance to Gafsa
seemed shorter; the country was no doubt new and interesting. There was
the station of Feriana, for instance, celebrated for its Roman antiquities
and well worth a visit; I looked at the map and saw a broad road
connecting this place with Gafsa; visions of an evening ride across the
desert arose before my delighted imagination; instead of passing the night
in an uncomfortable train, I should be already ensconced at a luxurious
table d'hôte, and so to bed.
The gods willed otherwise.
In pitch darkness, at the inhuman hour of 5.55 a.m., the train crept out
of Sousse: sixteen miles an hour is its prescribed pace. The weather grew
sensibly colder as we rose into the uplands, a stricken region, tree-less
and water-less, with gaunt brown hills receding into the background; by
midday, when Sbeitla was reached, it was blowing a hurricane. I had hoped
to wander, for half an hour or so, among the ruins of this old city of
Suffetula, but the cold, apart from their distance from the station,
rendered this impossible; in order to reach the shed where luncheon was
served, we were obliged to crawl backwards, crab-wise, to protect our
faces from a storm which raised pebbles, the size of respectable peas,
from the ground, and scattered them in a hail about us. I despair of
giving any idea of that glacial blast: it was as if one stood, deprived of
clothing, of skin and flesh--a jabbering anatomy--upon some drear
Caucasian pinnacle. And I thought upon the gentle rains of London, from
which I had fled to these sunny regions, I remembered the fogs, moist and
warm and caressing: greatly is the English winter maligned! Seeing that
this part of Tunisia is covered with the forsaken cities of the Romans who
were absurdly sensitive in the matter of heat and cold, one is driven to
the conclusion that the climate must indeed have changed since their day.
And my fellow-traveller, who had slept throughout the morning (we were the
only two Europeans in the train), told me that this weather was nothing
out of the common; that at this season it blew in such fashion for weeks
on end; Sbeitla, to be sure, lay at a high point of the line, but the cold
was no better at the present terminus, Henchir Souatir, whither he was
bound on some business connected with the big phosphate company. On such
occasions the natives barricade their doors and cower within over a
warming-pan filled with the glowing embers of desert shrubs; as for
Europeans--a dog's life, he said; in winter we are shrivelled to mummies,
in summer roasted alive.
I spoke of Feriana, and my projected evening ride across a few miles of
desert.
"Gafsa ... Gafsa," he began, in dreamy fashion, as though I had proposed a
trip to Lake Tchad. And then, emphatically:
"_Gafsa?_ Why on earth didn't you go over Sfax?"
"Ah, everybody has been suggesting that route."
"I can well believe it, Monsieur."
In short, my plan was out of the question; utterly out of the question.
The road--a mere track--was over sixty kilometres in length and positively
unsafe on a wintry night; besides, the land lay 800 metres in height, and
a traveller would be frozen to death. I must go as far as Majen, a few
stations beyond Feriana; sleep there in an Arab funduk (caravanserai), and
thank my stars if I found any one willing to supply me with a beast for
the journey onward next morning. There are practically no tourists along
this line, he explained, and consequently no accommodation for them; the
towns that one sees so beautifully marked on the map are railway
stations--that and nothing more; and as to the broad highways crossing the
southern parts of Tunisia in various directions--well, they simply don't
exist, _voilà_!
"That's not very consoling," I said, as we took our seats in the
compartment again. "It begins well."
And my meditations took on a sombre hue. I thought of a little overland
trip I had once undertaken, in India, with the identical object of
avoiding a long circuitous railway journey--from Udaipur to Mount Abu. I
remembered those "few miles of desert."
Decidedly, things were beginning well.
"If you go to Gafsa," he resumed, "--if you really propose going to Gafsa,
pray let me give you a card to a friend of mine, who lives there with his
family and may be useful to you. No trouble, I assure you!"
He scribbled a few lines, addressed to "Monsieur Paul Dufresnoy,
Engineer," for which I thanked him. "We all know each other in Africa," he
said. "It's quite a small place--our Africa, I mean. You could squeeze the
whole of it into the Place de la Concorde.... Nothing but minerals
hereabouts," he went on. "They talk and dream of them, and sometimes their
dreams come true. Did you observe the young proprietor of the restaurant
at Sbeitla? Well, a short time ago some Arabs brought him a handful of
stones from the mountains; he bought the site for two or three hundred
francs, and a company has already offered him eight hundred thousand for
the rights of exploitation. Zinc! He is waiting till they offer a
million."
Majen....
A solitary station upon the wintry plain--three or four shivering Arabs
swathed in rags--desolation all around--the sun setting in an angry cloud.
It was a strong impression; one realized, for the first time, one's
distance from the life of civilized man. Night descended with the rush of
a storm, and as the friendly train disappeared from my view, I seemed to
have taken leave of everything human. This feeling was not lessened by my
reception at the funduk, whose native manager sternly refused to give me
that separate sleeping-room which, I had been assured, was awaiting me and
which, as he truthfully informed me, was even then unoccupied. The
prospect of passing the night with a crowd of Arabs was not pleasing.
Amiability being unavailing, I tried bribery, but found him adamantine.
I then produced a letter from the Resident of the Republic in Tunis,
recommending me to all the _bureaux indigènes_ of the country, my
translation of it being confirmed and even improved upon, at the expense
of veracity, by a spahi (native cavalryman) who happened to be present,
and threatened the man with the torments of the damned if he failed to
comply with the desires of his government.
"The Resident," was the reply, "is plainly a fine fellow. But he is not
the _ponsechossi_."
"Ponsechossi. What's that?"
"THIS," he said, excavating from under a pile of miscellaneous rubbish a
paper whereon was displayed the official stamp of the _Ponts et
Chaussées_--the Department of Public Works for whose servants this choice
apartment is--or rather ought to be--exclusively reserved: the rule is not
always obeyed.
"Bring me THIS"--tapping the document proudly--"and you have the room."
"Could I at least find a horse in the morning--a mule--a donkey--a camel?"
"We shall see!" And he slouched away.
There was nothing to be done with the man. Your incorruptible Oriental is
always disagreeable. Fortunately, he is rather uncommon.
But the excellent spahi, whom my letter from head-quarters had
considerably impressed, busied himself meanwhile on my behalf, and at
seven in the morning a springless, open, two-wheeled Arab cart, drawn by a
moth-eaten old mule, was ready for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this
instrument of torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m.,
memories of that ride being blurred by the physical discomfort endured.
Over a vast plateau framed in distant mountains we were wending in the
direction of a low gap which never came nearer; the road itself was full
of deep ruts that caused exquisite agony as we jolted into them; the
sun--a patch of dazzling light, cold and cheerless. At this hour, I
reflected, the train from Sfax would already have set me down at Gafsa.
Save for a few stunted thorns in the moister places, the whole land, so
far as the eye could reach, was covered with halfa-grass--leagues upon
leagues of this sad grey-green desert reed. We passed a few nomad families
whose children were tearing out the wiry stuff--it is never cut in
Tunisia--which is then loaded on camels and conveyed to the nearest depot
on the railway line, and thence to the seaboard. They were burning it here
and there, to keep themselves warm; this is forbidden by law, but
then--there is so much of it on these uplands, and the wind is so cold!
The last miles were easier travelling, as we had struck the track from
Feriana on our left. Here, at an opening of the arid hills, where the road
begins to descend in a broad, straight ribbon, there arose, suddenly, a
distant glimpse of the oasis of Gafsa--a harmonious line of dark palm
trees, with white houses and minarets in between. A familiar vision, and
often described; yet one that never fails of its effect. A man may weary,
after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque
paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that
his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever
new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the
waste--the miracle of water; and that of fire--the sun.
A low hill near the entrance of the town (it is marked Meda Hill on the
map) had attracted my attention as promising a fine view. Thither, after
settling my concerns at the hotel, I swiftly bent my steps; it was too
late; the wintry sun had gone to rest. The oasis still lay visible,
extended at my feet; on the other side I detected, some three miles away,
a white spot--a house, no doubt--standing by a dusky patch of palms that
rose solitary out of the stones. Some subsidiary oasis, probably; it
looked an interesting place, all alone there, at the foot of those barren
hills.
And still I lingered, my only companion being a dirty brown dog, of the
jackal type, who walked round me suspiciously and barked, or rather
whined, without ceasing. At last I took up a stone, and he ran away. But
the stone remained in my hand; I glanced at it, and saw that it was an
implement of worked flint. Here was a discovery! Who were these carvers of
stones, the aboriginals of Gafsa? How lived they? A prolonged and
melodious whistle from the distant railway station served to remind me of
the gulf of ages that separates these prehistoric men from the life of our
day.
But as if to efface without delay that consoling impression, my downward
path led past a dark cavern before which was lighted a fire that threw
gleams into its recesses; there was a family crouching around it; they
lived in the hollow rock. A high-piled heap of bones near at hand
suggested cannibalistic practices.
These, then, are the primitives of Gafsa. And for how long, I wonder, has
this convenient shelter been inhabited? From time immemorial, perhaps;
ever since the days of those others. And, after all, how little have they
changed in the intervening thousands of years! The wild-eyed young wench,
with her dishevelled hair, ferocious bangle-ornaments, tattooings, and
nondescript blue rags open at the side and revealing charms well fitted to
disquiet some robust savage--what has such a creature in common with the
rest of us? Not even certain raptures, misdeemed primeval; hardly more
than what falls to man and beast alike. On my appearance, she rose up and
eyed me unabashed; then sank to the ground again, amid her naked and
uncouth cubs; the rock, she said, was warmer than the black tents; they
paid no rent; for the rest, her man would return forthwith. And soon there
was a clattering of stones, and a herd of goats scrambled up and vanished
within the opening.
The partner was neither pleased nor displeased at seeing me there; every
day he went to pasture his flock on the slopes of the opposite Jebel
Guetter, returning at nightfall; he tried to be civil but failed, for want
of vocabulary. I gave him the salutation, and passed on in the gloaming.
_Chapter II_
_BY THE OUED BAIESH_
This collecting of flint implements grows upon one at Gafsa; it is in the
air. And I find that quite a number of persons have anticipated me in this
amusement, and even written tomes upon the subject--it is ever thus, when
one thinks to have made a scientific discovery. These stones are scattered
all over the plain, and Monsieur Couillault has traced the site of several
workshops--_ateliers_--of prehistoric weapons near Sidi Mansur, which lies
within half a mile of Gafsa, whence he has extracted--or rather retrieved,
for the flints merely lie upon the ground--quantities of instruments of
every shape; among them, some saws and a miniature spade.
[Illustration: Gafsa and Jebel Orbata]
My collection of these relics, casually picked up here and there, already
numbers two hundred pieces, and illustrates every period of those early
ages--uncouth battle-axes and spear-points; fine needles, apparently used
for sewing skins together; the so-called laurel-leaves, as thin as
card-board; knife-blades; instruments for scraping beast-hides--all of
flint. What interests me most, are certain round throwing-stones; a few
are flat on both sides, but others, evidently the more popular shape, are
flat below and rise to a cone above. Of these latter, I have a series of
various sizes; the largest are for men's hands, but there are smaller
ones, not more than eleven centimetres round, for the use of children: one
thinks of the fierce little hands that wielded them, these many thousand
years ago. Even now the natives will throw by preference with a stone of
this disk-like shape--the cone pointing downwards. But, judging by the
size of their implements, the hands of this prehistoric race can hardly
have been as large as those of their modern descendants.
Then, as now, Gafsa must have been an important site; the number of these
weapons is astonishing. Vast populations have drifted down the stream of
time at this spot, leaving no name or mark behind them, save these relics
fashioned, by the merest of chances, out of a practically imperishable
material; steel and copper would have rotted away long ago, and the
stoutest palaces crumbled to dust under the teeth of the desert air.
The bed of the Oued Baiesh, which flows past Gafsa and is nearly half a
mile broad in some places, is rich in these worked flints which have been
washed out of its steep banks by the floods. Walking here the other day
with a miserable young Arab who, I verily believe, had attached himself to
me out of sheer boredom (since he never asked for a sou), I observed, in
the distance, a solitary individual, a European, pacing slowly along as
though wrapped in meditation; every now and then he bent down to the
ground.
"That's a French gentleman from Gafsa. He collects those stones of yours
all day long."
Another amateur, I thought.
"But not like yourself," he went on. "He picks them up, bad and good, and
when they don't look nice he works at them with iron things; I've seen
them! He makes very pretty stones, much prettier than yours. Then he sends
them away."
"How do you know this?"
"I've looked in at his window."
A modern "atelier" of flints--this was an amusing revelation. Maybe--who
knows?--half the museums of Europe are stocked with these superior
products.
Sages will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of Tübingen, in a
learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the
Mesvinian, Strepyian, Præchellean--to say nothing of the Mousterian,
Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other types. So be it. He further
says, what is more intelligible to the uninitiated, that a bed of hard
conglomerate which crops up at Gafsa on either side of the Oued Baiesh,
has been raised in days of yore; it was raised so slowly that the river
found time to carve itself a bed through it during the process of
elevation; nevertheless, a certain class of these artificial implements,
embedded since God knows when, already formed part of this natural
conglomerate ere it began to uplift itself. This will give some idea of
the abysm of time that lies between us and the skin-clad men that lived
here in olden days.
An abysm of time...
But I remembered the cave-wench of the Meda Hill. And my companion to-day
was of the same grade, a characteristic semi-nomad boy of the poorest
class; an orphan, of course (they are nearly all orphans), and quite
abandoned. His whole vocabulary could not have exceeded one hundred and
fifty words; he had never heard of the Apostle of Allah or his sacred
book; he could only run, and throw stones, and endure, like a beast, those
ceaseless illnesses of which only death, an early death as a rule, is
allowed to cure them. His clothing was an undershirt and the inevitable
burnous, brown with dirt.
"What have you done to-day?" I asked him.
"Nothing."
"And yesterday?"
"Nothing. Why should I do anything?"
"Don't you _ever_ wash?"
"I have nobody to wash me."
Yet they appreciate the use of unguents. The other day a man accidentally
poured a glassful of oil into the dusty street. Within a moment a crowd of
boys were gathered around, dabbling their hands into it and then rubbing
them on their hair; those that possessed boots began by ornamenting them,
and thence conveyed the stuff to their heads--the ground was licked dry in
a twinkling; their faces glistened with the greasy mixture. "That's good,"
they said.
Such, I daresay, were the pastimes of those prehistoric imps of the
throwing-disks, and their clothing must have been much the same.
For what is the burnous save a glorified aboriginal beast-skin? It has the
same principle of construction; the major part covers the human back and
sides; the beast's head forms the hood; where the forefeet meet, the thing
is tied together across the breast, leaving a large open slit below, and a
smaller one above, where the man's head emerges.
The character of the race is summed up in that hopeless garment, which
unfits the wearer for every pleasure and every duty of modern life. An
article of everyday clothing which prevents a man from using his upper
limbs, which swathes them up, like a silkworm in its cocoon--can anything
more insane be imagined? Wrapped therein for nearly all their lives, the
whole race grows round-shouldered; the gastric region, which ought to be
protected in this climate of extremes, is exposed; the heating of their
heads, night and day, with its hood, cannot but injure their brains; their
hands become weak as those of women, with claw-like movements of the
fingers and an inability to open the palm to the full.
No wonder it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their spiritual
life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and design,
following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are practically
atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome, on cold days,
to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding alms! Man has been
described as a tool-making animal, but the burnous effectually counteracts
that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying vesture, a step in the
direction of fossilification. Will the natives ever realize that the
abolition of this sleeveless and buttonless anachronism is one of the
conditions of their betterment? Have _they_ made the burnous, or
vice-versa? No matter. They came together somehow, and suited one another.
The burnous is the epitome of Arab inefficiency.
They call it simple, but like other things that go by that name, it
defeats it own objects of facilitating the common operations of life. It
is amusing to watch them at their laundry-work. Unless a man stand still
and upright, the end of this garment is continually slipping down from his
shoulders; one of the washerman's hands, therefore, is employed in holding
it in its place; the other grasps a stick upon which he leans while
stamping a war-dance with his feet upon the linen. This is only half the
performance, for a friend, holding up _his_ cloak with one hand, must bend
over and ladle the necessary water upon the linen with the other. Thus two
men are requisitioned to wash a shirt--a hand of one, two feet of the
other. No wonder they do not wash them often; the undertaking, thanks to
the burnous, is too complicated.
Yet there is no denying that it adds charm to the landscape; it is highly
decorative; its colour and shape and peculiar texture are as pleasing to
the beholder as must have been the toga of the old Romans (which, by the
way, was a purely ceremonial covering, to be doffed during work: so
Cincinnatus, when the senators found him at the plough, went in to dress
in his toga ere receiving them).
Stalking along on their thin bare shanks, their glittering eyes and hooked
noses shaded within its hood, many adult Arabs assume a strangely
bird-like appearance; while the smooth-faced youths, peering from under
its coquettish folds, remind one of third-rate actresses out for a spree.
In motion, when some half-naked boy sits merrily upon a galloping
stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace
of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age,
crouching at some street-corner in hieratic immobility.
Yes, there is no denying that it looks artistic; the burnous is
picturesque, like many antediluvian things. And of course, where nothing
better can be procured, it will protect you from the cold and the stinging
rays of the sun. But if a European wants a chill in the liver or any other
portion of the culinary or postprandial department, he need only wear one
for a few days on end; raise the hood, and you will have a headache in ten
minutes.
Nevertheless I have bought one, and am wearing it at this very moment. But
not as the poorer Arabs do. Beneath it there is a suit of ordinary winter
clothing, as well as two English ulsters--and this _indoors_. Perhaps this
will give some idea of the cold of Gafsa. There is no heating these bare
rooms with their icy walls and floorings: out of doors a blizzard is
raging that would flay a rhinoceros. And the wind of Gafsa has this
peculiarity, that it is equally bitter from whichever point of the compass
it blows. Let those who contemplate the supreme madness of coming to the
sunny oasis at the present season of the year (January) bring not only
Arctic vestment, eiderdowns, fur cloaks, carpets and foot-warmers, but
also, and chiefly, efficient furnaces and fuel for them.
For such things seem to be unknown hereabouts.
_Chapter III_
_THE TERMID_
The chief attractions of Gafsa, beside the oasis, are the tall minaret
with its prospect over the town and plantations, and the Kasbah or
fortress, a Byzantine construction covering a large expanse of ground and
rebuilt by the French on theatrical lines, with bastions and crenellations
and other warlike pomp; thousands of blocks of Roman masonry have been
wrought into its old walls, which are now smothered under a modern layer
of plaster divided into square fields, to imitate solid stonework. It
looks best in the moonlight, when this childish cardboard effect is toned
down.
One of the two hot springs of Gafsa is enclosed within this Kasbah, while
the other rises near at hand and flows into the celebrated baths--the
_termid_, as the natives, using the old Greek word, still call it. It is a
large and deep stone basin, half full of warm water, in which small
fishes, snakes and tortoises disport themselves; the massive engirdling
walls demonstrate its Roman origin. Thick mists hang over the _termid_ in
the early mornings, when the air is chilly, but later on it becomes a
lively place, full of laughter and splashings. Here, for a sou, you may
get the boys to jump down from the parapet and wallow among the muddy ooze
at the bottom; the liquid, though transparent, is not colourless, but
rather of the blue-green tint of the aquamarine crystal; it flows rapidly,
and all impurities are carried away.
There are always elderly folk idling about these premises, and youngsters
with rods tempting the fish out of the water; day after day the game goes
on, the foolish creatures nibble at the bait and are drawn up on high;
their fellows see the beginning of the tragedy, but never the end, where,
floundering in the street, the victims cover their silvery scales with a
coating of dust and expire ignominiously, as unlike live fishes as if they
came ready cooked out of the kitchen _panés et frits_.
Above this basin is another one, that of the women; and below it, at the
foot of a lurid stairway, a suite of subterranean (Roman) chambers, a kind
of Turkish bath for men, where the water hurries darkly through; the place
is reeking with a steamy heat, and objectionable beyond words; it would
not be easy to describe, in the language of polite society, those features
in which it is most repulsive to Europeans.
[Illustration: Entrance to the Termid]
How easily, as in former days, might now a health-giving wonder be created
out of these waters of Gafsa, that well up in a river of warmth and
purity, only to be hopelessly contaminated! The French tried the
experiment, but the natives objected, and they gave way: these are the
spots on the sunny ideal of "pacific penetration." Any other
nationality--while allowing the Arabs a fair share of the element--would
simply have rebuilt this _termid_ and put it to a decent use, in the name
of cleanliness and civilization; the natives acquiescing, as they always
do when they recognize their masters. Or, if a display of force was
considered inadvisable, why not try the _suaviter in modo_? Had a couple
of local saints been judiciously approached, the population would soon
have discovered that the _termid_ waters are injurious to health and only
fit for unbelievers. What is the use of a _marabout_, if he cannot be
bribed?
I am all for keeping up local colour, even when it entails, as it
generally does, a certain percentage of local smells; yet it seems a pity
that such glorious hot springs, a gift of the gods in a climate like this,
should be converted into a _cloaca maxima_, especially in Gafsa, which
already boasts of a superfluity of open drains.
But my friend the magistrate showed me a special bathing room which has
lately been built for the use of Europeans. We tried the door and found it
locked.
Where was the key?
At the _Ponts et Chaussées_.
Thither I went, and discovered an elderly official of ample proportions
dozing in a trim apartment--the chief of the staff. Great was this
gentleman's condescension; he bade me be seated, opened his eyes wide, and
enquired after my wants.
The key? The key of the _piscine?_ He regretted he could give me no
information as to its whereabouts--no information whatever. He had never
so much as seen the key in question; perhaps it had been lost, perhaps it
never existed. Several tourists, he added, had already come on the same
quest as myself; he also, on one occasion last year, thought he would like
to take a bath, but--what would you? There was no key! If I liked to
bathe, I might go to the tank at the gardens of Sidi Ahmed Zarroung.
I gently insisted, pointing out that I did not care for a walk across the
wind-swept desert only to dip myself into a pool of lukewarm and
pestilentially sulphureous water. But "the key" was evidently a sore
subject.
"There is no key, Monsieur"; and he accompanied the words with a
portentous negative nod that blended the resigned solicitude of an old and
trusted friend with the firmness of a Bismarck. This closed the
discussion; with expressions of undying gratitude, and a few remarks as to
the palpable advantages to be derived from keeping a public bathing-room
permanently locked, I left him to his well-earned slumbers....
It is hard to understand what the guide-books mean when they call the
market of Gafsa "rich and well-appointed": a five-pound note, I calculate,
would buy the entire exhibition. The produce, though varied, is wretched;
but the scenery fine. Over a dusty level, strewn with wares, you look upon
a stretch of waving palms, with the distant summit of Jebel Orbata shining
in the deep blue sky. Here are a few butchers and open-air cooks who fry
suspicious-looking bundles of animal intestines for the epicurean Arabs; a
little saddlery; half a camel-load of corn; a broken cart-wheel and
rickety furniture put up to auction; one or two halfa-mats of admirable
workmanship; grinding-stones; musty pressed dates, onions, huge but
insipid turnips and other green things, red peppers----
Those peppers! An adult Arab will eat two pounds of them a day. I have
seen, native women devouring, alternately, a pepper, then a date, then
another pepper, then another date, and so on, for half an hour. An infant
at the breast, when tired of its natural nourishment, is often given one
of these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer, or by way of change
and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach
troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a cure, if the
people could be induced to do things by halves; but they cannot; it is
"all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with them at
first, they return to their peppers and a painful disease.
It is this lack of measure and reasonableness among them which accounts
for what I believe to be a fact, namely, that there are more reclaimed
drunkards among Arabs than among ourselves. They will break off the
alcohol habit violently, and for ever. And this they do not out of
principle, but from impulse or, as they prefer to call it, inspiration;
indeed, they regard our men of fixed principles as weaklings and cowards,
who stiffen themselves by artificial rules because they cannot trust their
judgments to deal with events as they arise--(the Arab regards terrestrial
life as a chain of accidents)--cowards and infidels, trying to forestall
by human devices the unascertainable decrees of Allah.
Allah wills it! That is why they patiently bear the extremes of hunger,
and why, if fortune smiles, they gorge like Eskimos, like
boa-constrictors.
I have seen them so distended with food as to be literally incapable of
moving. Only yesterday, there swept past these doors a bright procession,
going half-trot to a lively chant of music: the funeral of a woman. I
enquired of a passer-by the cause of her death.
"She ate too much, and burst."
During the summer months, in the fruit-growing districts, quite a number
of children will "burst" in this fashion every day.
_Mektoub_! the parents then exclaim. It was written.
And no doubt there is such a thing as a noble resignation; to defy fate,
even if one cannot rule it. Many of us northerners would be the better for
a little _mektoub_. But this doctrine of referring everything to the will
of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for
apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. A creed of everyday use
which hampers a man's reasoning in the most ordinary matters of life--is
it not like a garment that fetters his hands?
_Mektoub_ is the intellectual _burnous_ of the Arabs....
There is some movement, at least, in this market; often the familiar
story-tellers, surrounded by a circle of charmed listeners; sometimes,
again, a group of Soudanese from Khordofan or Bournu, who parade a black
he-goat, bedizened with gaudy rags because devoted to death; they will
slay him in due course at some shrine; but not just now, because there is
still money to be made out of his ludicrous appearance, with an incidental
dance or song on their own part. Vaguely perturbing, these negro melodies
and thrummings; their reiteration of monotony awakens tremulous echoes on
the human diaphragm and stirs up hazy, primeval mischiefs.
And this morning there arrived a blind singer, or bard; he was led by two
boys, who accompanied his extemporaneous verses--one of them tapping with
a pebble on an empty sardine-tin, while the other belaboured a beer-bottle
with a rusty nail: both solemn as archangels; there was also a
professional accompanist, who screwed his mouth awry and blew sideways
into a tall flute, his eyes half-closed in ecstatic rapture. Arab gravity
never looks better than during inanely grotesque performances of this
kind; in such moments one cannot help loving them, for these are the
little episodes that make life endurable.
[Illustration: At the Termid]
The music was not altogether original; it reminded me, with its mechanical
punctuations, of a concerto by Paderewski which contains an exquisite
movement between the piano and kettledrum--since the flute, which ought to
have supported the voice, was apparently dumb, although the artist puffed
out his cheeks as if his life depended upon it. Only after creeping quite
close to the performers could I discern certain wailful breathings; this
brave instrument, all splotched with variegated colours, gave forth a
succession of anguished and asthmatic whispers, the very phantom of a
song, like the wind sighing through the branches of trees.
_Chapter IV_
_STONES OF GAFSA_
There are interesting walks in the neighbourhood of Gafsa, but I can
imagine nothing more curious than the town itself; a place of some five
thousand inhabitants, about a thousand of whom are Jews, with a sprinkling
of Italian tradespeople and French officials and soldiers. Beyond naming
the streets and putting up a few lamps, the Government has left it in its
Arab condition; the roadways are unpaved, hardly a single wall is plumb;
the houses, mostly one-storied, lean this way and that, and, being built
of earthen-tinted sun-dried brick, have an air of crumbling to pieces
before one's very eyes. A heavy and continuous shower would be the ruin of
Gafsa; the structures would melt away, like that triple wall of defence,
erected in medieval times, of which not a vestige remains. Yet the dirt is
not as remarkable as in many Eastern places, for every morning a band of
minor offenders is marched out of prison by an overseer to sweep the
streets. Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if possible, the
roadway; it is supported on palm-rafters, forming a kind of tunnel
underneath. Everywhere are immense blocks of chiselled stone worked into
the ephemeral Arab clay as doorsteps or lintels, or lying about at random,
or utilized as seats at the house entrance; they date from Roman or
earlier times--columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern,
the majority unpretentious and solid.
[Illustration: A Street in Gafsa]
What do the natives think of these relics of past civilization? Do they
ever wonder whence they came or who made them? "The stones are there,"
they will tell you. Yet the wiser among them will speak of _Ruman_; they
have heard of _Ruman_ moneys and antiquities.
Arabs have a saying that Gafsa was founded by Nimrod's armour-bearer; but
a more reasonable legend, preserved by Orosius and others, attributes its
creation to Melkarth, the Libyan and Tyrian Hercules, hero of
colonization. He surrounded it with a wall pierced by a hundred gates,
whence its presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city of a hundred gates. The
Egyptians ruled it; then the Phoenicians, who called it Kafaz--the walled;
and after the destruction of Carthage it became the retreat and
treasure-house of Numidian kings. Greeks, too, exercised a powerful
influence on the place, and all these civilized peoples had prepared Gafsa
to appreciate the beneficent rule of the Romans.
Then came Vandals and Byzantines, who gradually grew too weak to resist
the floods of plundering Arab nomads; the rich merchants fled, their
palaces fell to ruins; the town became a collection of mud huts inhabited
by poor cultivators who lived in terror of the neighbouring Hammama tribe
of true Arabs, that actually forbade them to walk beyond the limits of the
Jebel Assalah--a couple of miles distant. So the French found them in
1881.
There are, however, a few decent houses, two-storied and spacious; in one
of them, I am told, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom my
fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He is absent at the Metlaoui
mines just now, and his wife and children in Paris.
The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not extend to the native
houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original,
inconceivable squalor--squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago
ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native
secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of
the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast, abandoned
pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks
and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth of
generations--there is hardly a level yard of ground--rags and dust and
decay! Here they live, the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little
sense of home as the wild creatures of the waste. But at night, when the
most villainous objects take on mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand; they assume an air of biblical desolation, as
though the curse of Heaven had fallen upon the life they once witnessed;
and even as you look into them, something stirs on the ground: it is an
Arab, sleeping uneasily in his burnous; he has felt, rather than heard,
your presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and rises out of the dust,
like a sheeted ghost.
It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before you when least
expected; to be ever-present, emerging, one might almost say, out of the
earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and you may
be sure that there is an Arab, brooding among the rocks or in the sand,
within a few yards of you.
_The stones are there_. This is another feature which they have in common
with the beasts of the earth: never to pause before the memorials of their
own past. Goethe says that where men are silent, stones will speak. If
ever they spoke, it is among these crumbling, composite walls of Gafsa.
A Roman inscription of the age of Hadrian, which now forms the step of an
Arab house, will arrest your glance and turn your thoughts awhile in the
direction of this dim, romantic figure. How little we really know of the
Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the monuments
that sprang up in his footsteps! Never since the world began has there
been a traveller in the grandiose style of Hadrian; he perambulated his
world like a god, crowned with a halo of benevolence and omnipotence.
And it occurs to me that there must be other relics of antiquity still
buried under the soil of Gafsa, which is raised on a mound, like an
island, above the surrounding country; particularly in the vicinity of the
_termid_, which we may suppose to have lain near the centre of the old
town. And where are the paving-stones? The painstaking John Leo says that
the streets of Gafsa are "broad and paved, like those of Naples or
Florence." Have they been slowly submerged under the debris of Arabism, or
taken up and worked into the masonry of the Kasbah and other buildings?
Not one is left: so much is certain.
I borrowed Sallust and tried to press some flavour out of his description
of Marius' march to the capture of Gafsa. It was a fine military
performance, without a doubt; he led his troops by unsuspected paths
across the desert, fell upon the palace, sacked and burnt it, and divided
the booty among his soldiers: all this without the loss of a single man.
The natives needed a lesson, and they got it; to this day the name of
Marius is whispered among the black tents as that of some fabulous hero.
But what interests me most is the style of Sallust himself. How
ultra-modern this historian reads! His outlook upon life, his choice of
words, are the note of tomorrow; and when I compare with him certain
writers of the Victorian epoch, I seem to be unrolling a papyrus from
Pharaoh's tomb, or spelling out the elucubrations of some maudlin scribe
of Prester John.
The stones are there. And the quarries whence the Romans drew them have
also been found, by Guerin; they lie in the flanks of the Jebel Assalah,
and are well worth a visit; legions of bats--_tirlils_, the Arabs call
them--hang in noisome clusters from the roof.
Concerning these bats, the following story is told in Gafsa.
Not long ago a rich Englishman came here. He used to go out in the
evenings and shoot bats; then he put them into bottles with spirits of
wine--he was an amateur of bats. On the day of his departure from the
place, he said to the polyglot Arab guide whom he had picked up somewhere
on his wanderings:
"You will rejoin me in Tunis in ten days. Bring me more bats--tirlils:
_comprenni?_--from this country. I will give you fifty centimes apiece."
"Bon, Monsieur," said the guide, and took counsel with the folks of Gafsa,
who, after certain reservations and stipulations, showed him the way into
these quarries.
On the day appointed he entered the rich tourist's hotel in Tunis,
followed by ten porters, each carrying a large sack.
"Hallo!" said the Englishman, "what's all this?"
"Bats, Monsieur."
"Eh? How much?"
"Bats; _tirlils_, _chauve-souris_, _pipistrelli_... They will need much
bottles. Six hundred tirlils in each sack; ten sacks; six thousand
tirlils. Much bottles! Three thousand francs, Monsieur. Shall I open him?"
The tourist cast a dismayed glance over the sacks, gently heaving with
life.
[ILLUSTRATION: Hadrian's Inscription]
"Look here," he said, "I'll give you fifty francs...."
The Arab was surprised and grieved. He thought he was giving a pleasure to
Monsieur, who had asked for bats. He had been obliged to borrow money from
his aged mother to help to pay the nine hundred francs which he had
already disbursed for assistance in catching the tirlils; he had risked
his life; there were the transport expenses, too: very heavy. He had
travelled with many Englishmen and had always found them to be men of
honour--men who kept their word. And in this case there were witnesses to
the bargain, who would be ready, if necessary, to go into the French
tribunals and testify to what they had heard....
"I see. Well, come to-morrow morning, but go away now, quick! before I
break your head. Take your damned tirlils to your damned funduk, and be
off!--clear out!--_comprenni?_"
And he looked so very angry that the Arab, a prudent fellow, walked
backwards out of the room, more surprised and grieved than ever.
Thanks to the disinterested and strenuous exertions of a Jewish
international lawyer, the affair was settled out of court after
all--fifteen hundred francs, plus expenses of transport.
_Chapter V_
_SIDI ARMED ZARROUNG_
Sidi Ahmed Zarroung--that is the name of the miniature oasis visible from
the Meda Hill, at the foot of those barren slopes. It is a pleasant
afternoon's walk from Gafsa.
The intervening plain is encrusted with stones--stones great and small.
Here and there are holes in the ground, where the natives have unearthed
some desert shrub for the sake of its roots which, burnt as fuel, exhale a
pungent odour of ammonia that almost suffocates you. Once the water-zone
of Gafsa is passed, every trace of cultivation vanishes. And yet, to judge
by the number of potsherds lying about, houses must have stood here in
days of old. An Arab geographer of the eleventh century says that there
are over two hundred flourishing villages in the neighbourhood of Gafsa;
and Edrisius, writing a century later, extols its prosperous suburbs, and
pleasure-houses.
Where are they now?
One of these villages, surely, must have lain near this fountain of Sidi
Ahmed Zarroung, which now irrigates a few palms and vegetables and then
loses itself in the sand; a second spring, sulphureous and medicinal, but
destructive to plants, rises near at hand. This is the one which the
gentleman of the _Ponts et Chaussées_ recommended me for bathing purposes.
But I saw no trace of ancient life here; there is only a muddy pond, full
of amorous frogs and tortoises, cold-blooded beasts, but fiery in their
passions; and a few Arabs that live in the large white house, or camp on
the plain around. They told me that the descendants of the holy man who
gave his name to the place are still alive, but they knew nothing of his
history beyond this, that he was very pious indeed.
If you do not mind a little scrambling, you can climb from here up to the
last spur of the Jebel Guettor which overlooks the plain--it is crowned by
a ruined building, once whitewashed, and easily visible from Gafsa. On its
slopes I struck a vein of iron, another of those scientific discoveries,
no doubt, like the flint implements, in which someone else will have
anticipated me. And here I also found iron in a more civilized shape, a
fragment of a shell--relic, perhaps, of the first French expedition
against Gafsa, or of some more recent artillery practice.
From its summit one sees the configuration of the country as on a map; the
high Jebel Orbata, 1170 metres, now covered with snow, coming forward to
meet you on the other side of the wide valley. From this point it is easy
to realize, as did the commander of that French expedition, the
significance of this speck of culture, its strategic value: Gafsa is a
veritable key to the Sahara. I daresay the abundant water-supply of the
town is due to these two chains of hills which almost touch each other and
so force the water to rise from its underground bed.
At this elevation you perceive that Gafsa is truly a hill-oasis, bleak
mountains rising up on all sides save the south. There, where the two
highest ranges converge from east and west, where the broad waterway of
the Oued Baiesh has in olden days, when it wandered with less capricious
flow, carved itself a channel through the opening--there, at the very
narrowest point--sits the oasis. A tangle of palms that sweep southward in
a radiant trail of green, the crenellated walls of the Kasbah gleaming
through the interstices of the foliage--the whole vision swathed in an
orange-tawny frame of desolation, of things non-human....