find it most instructive. This young fellow is not yet twenty; he ran away
from home for no discoverable reason, then signed on a merchant vessel at
Marseilles and, disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched
port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a night-train, thinking to
reach Tunis. Instead of that, he woke up in the morning and found himself
at Gafsa! Here, you see, are all the elements of wrong-doing, and the
authorities have learnt his history from his papers which they seized. As
a German and a Jew, the French instinctively dislike him; as a Jew and a
foreigner--the Arabs; he is objectionable to look at, dull of wit, and
knows not a word of French or Arabic. But he is poor, and therefore--every
one loads him with kindness."
"And why not?" I asked.
"Why not, indeed? Your friend the magistrate has given him some money out
of his own pocket; the restaurant proprietress refuses to be paid for his
food, while another one, near the station, sends word to say that he can
have a plate of soup there whenever he likes; a young Arab boy--these
Arabs are really incomprehensible--gives him as many cups of tea or coffee
as he can drink; a Jewish lawyer has sent him some clothes; a gentleman in
your hotel a quantity of linen; the Italian barber shaves him gratis; a
certain shopkeeper sends him a bottle of liqueur--of liqueur!--every
second day; the commissaire has given him, free of charge, a decent
unoccupied bedroom in the prison, where he can go in and out as he
pleases; best of all, the _Ponts et Chaussées_ are now employing him at
three francs a day--a princely income, they tell me--at some agricultural
job: pure kindness, inasmuch as he has never handled a spade or pickaxe in
his life. He can have a pleasant time in Gafsa; he can marry an heiress if
so disposed; then, when the place begins to bore him, the German Consul in
Tunis will repatriate him at his Government's expense. 'He's a poor
devil,' they say. Why do I tell you all this? Because--well--I am also
poor--"
Always harping on the old theme!
"The cases are not quite parallel, are they?"
"No. He is young, and fit for work, whereas I am past the middle term of
life. Old age--another horror! Besides, I am a gentleman----"
"Exactly. We should be ashamed to shave you gratis."
"I suppose you're right, Monsieur. I was only trying to explain--to
explain myself--to myself, I mean. Pardon me if I speak too much of my
wretched affairs. But I'll tell you what I think. To endure this revolting
destitution a man must be an Arab. Now, I cannot pretend to be an Arab; I
would not adopt their ideals if I could. And yet, alas! I am beginning to
believe in predestination, as they do; to believe that our faults and our
virtues are distilled beforehand in the silent laboratory of the past. A
sad creed, to think of men born to misfortune; to be obliged to consider
yourself--how do you say in English?--_a stepchild of nature_...."
He was always a good talker, but it is impossible to describe the
intensity of feeling in his speech to-day. He seemed to suffer from some
imperious need of unburdening himself, even to a chance acquaintance like
me; long days of loneliness, maybe, had worked on his nerves and produced
a kind of congestion. But in his words and voice I detected lapses into
other moods, into some other state of being; they gave me the impression
as of two different individuals addressing me. The man did not ring true,
altogether; he was mentally disorganized, disharmonious; those
meretricious reasonings about justice, for example, struck me
disagreeably.
And I could not help contrasting his rambling emotionalism with the
logic--the relentless, diamond-like _justesse_--of the mining engineer. He
is the very antithesis of that pellucid and homogeneous character. The
sanguine temperament ...
What is a man of this type doing in Gafsa?
Mystery!
The rest of us, the cynical Greek doctor, the artist-sage and lover of
Arab institutions, myself (flint-maniac)--to say nothing of men like
Dufresnoy--we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we
have a _raison d'etre_. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how
incongruous a figure against that background of palms and barren
mountains!
An enigmatical creature, and yet not wholly unlovable; he may be unsound
or even unprincipled, he may be deficient in qualities that go to make men
respected and satisfied with the world in general, but he possesses, I
think, certain citizen-virtues unintelligible to the self-centred, rustic
type of mind. He could be stirred to acts of unworldly enthusiasm; he
would share his last crust with some shipwrecked sailor, or shed his blood
gaily for a generous idea. And he is plainly in hard case just now.
_A stepchild of nature_....
"You have a very good English accent, Count."
"We were carefully brought up in languages. Not every one understands
Polish, you know."
"By the way, how does it come about that you, being a Pole, should have a
Russian family name?"
The question seemed to astonish and perplex him. At last he said:
"Oh, it's about the same thing, isn't it? Nowadays, I mean," he added,
with grandiloquent pathos, "ever since the misfortunes of my unhappy
country."
At the entrance to the town we separated, and I watched for some time his
bowed form as it crept along the wood-market in the direction of the
Kairouan road.
This is one of the figures that will persist in my mind very clear and
pathetic, and I shall long remember those plaintive remarks about poverty
that welled up, surely, from the bottom of his heart. How far, I wonder,
is such a man the author of his own calamities, and how far have they
_made him_? Academic questionings, based on out-of-date philosophy! Our
vices, he said, are distilled for us beforehand in the dim laboratory of
the past. His vice, evidently, is to hate work of every kind; his
faculties, therefore, never undergo the rhythmic joy of reaction, for he
is too well nourished to live the _vita minor_ of a starveling, to endure
Arab acquiescence in non-production.
"I am only trying to explain myself--to myself." Half-truth, I imagine. He
is probably conscience-stricken, or at least dissatisfied with his conduct
for one reason or another, and endeavouring to justify some base plan of
action by re-stating ethics in terms of hunger; a specious line of
argument, since hunger is not the rule but the exception.
And then I shall think of his red nose and watery little eyes, his absurd
jewellery--a fine presence, none the less, when he pulls himself together;
there is about him an air of faded distinction that softly symbolizes the
history of his adopted country.
The Count!
Why a count? Because all Poles are counts--those that are not princes. But
why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as
there is something international about a Pole--international, and yet
neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they
all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in
cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know
everybody, and everybody worth knowing is related to them, by marriage or
otherwise, in this or some other century; as men of the world, they are
ready to talk upon any subject with tolerance, geniality and a pleasingly
personal note that withers up the commonplace, smoking, meanwhile,
innumerable cigarettes out of mouthpieces which display a complex
escutcheon contrived in gold and rubies upon the amber surface. Yes, his
choice was good: Poles are gentlemen. But why caricature them? And why,
above all things, select an inappropriate Muscovite name? That argues a
lack of general intelligence and might easily spoil everything; so true it
is, as a legal friend once observed to me, that "it takes a wise man to
handle a lie. A fool had better remain honest."
What can be the meaning of this unlovely comedy? Some defalcation or
forgery? Likely enough. But I think he lacks the cleverness requisite for
a habitual criminal. Perhaps he is only a poor survivor, drifting about in
lonely and distracted fashion while waiting for the inevitable end. Others
may solve the enigma, but not I; for to-morrow we go to Metlaoui.
Yet I know that long after the palms and minarets of Gafsa have faded into
the blurred image of countless other palms and other minarets, I shall be
able to call up the figure of this forlorn and ambiguous fellow-creature,
standing on the asphalt of the river-crossing with his cheap burnous
wrapped around him, sighing, shivering, and setting forth certain views
concerning human life for which there is, after all, a good deal to be
said.
_Chapter XIII_
_TO METLAOUI_
I should be sorry to say how long the train takes to crawl through the
thirty odd kilometres that separate Gafsa from Metlaoui. My companion on
the trip, M. Dufresnoy, tells me that the return journey is still slower,
because the line runs mostly uphill and the trucks, thirty or forty of
them, are loaded with minerals. Fortunately, the car in which we
travelled--each train has only a single passenger carriage--was
comfortable, being built after the fashion of the Swiss "Aussichtswagen,"
with seats on the exterior platform whence one can admire the view.
It gave me some idea of the goods traffic (phosphates) along this line
when he told me that during the past seven days 23,000 tons of mineral had
been conveyed to the port of Sfax alone, to say nothing of those that had
gone further on, to Sousse and Tunis. And not long ago, he said, the
company had an unpleasant surprise: sixteen new engines of a powerful
type, which they had ordered from Winterthur, were suddenly discovered to
be liable to a duty of 1000 francs apiece as "imported articles."
"We can afford it," he said. "Our five hundred-franc shares are standing
at three thousand seven hundred francs."
But he thought that a grave error had been committed in selecting the
narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once
the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would
have to deal with other material, such as tourists, that require fast
services.
They had an accident last year. The couplings of a train, climbing uphill
from Gafsa past the Leila oasis, suddenly broke, with the result that the
rear portion rushed backwards again, careered through the Gafsa station
and up the artificial incline which leads towards the Oued Baiesh, crossed
the bridge, and thundered at a vertiginous pace into the desert beyond. As
luck would have it, another train was just then approaching Gafsa. They
collided with terrific force and, telescoping being out of the question
since both were loaded with minerals, escaladed each other in Eiffel-tower
fashion. Arab eye-witnesses say that the stoker of the up-train was thrown
out by the impact and flew across country "like a bird" for half a mile;
he alighted on his feet, and was found, after a week or so, wandering
about the plain in a dazed condition. The driver was killed outright, and
his widow draws a respectable pension from the company.
Since then two engines are always employed to move the train up the few
miles beyond Gafsa.
The cream-tinted level is speckled with white incrustations and sombre
tufts of desert herbs; here and there, where the winter's rain lingers
underground, are spots of brilliant green; short-lived crops of corn, sown
by the nomads. The hills to the right of the line are bare and torn into
wild ravines; lilac-hued patches, ever changing and fair to see, move
among their warm complexities: cloud-shadows. Here, if anywhere, one
learns that shadows are not always grey or black; even those cast in
moonlight have a certain ghostly coloration.
It was a marvellously clear day, and not many miles before reaching our
destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far
as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly
twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible--white buildings piercing a dusky
line of palms--an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed in the brushwood a
couple of bustards, their heads peering above the herbage. These birds are
rather rare hereabouts, and shy of approach. Arabs say that the bustard is
like the camel: once it begins to run, you never know when it will stop.
They surround them therefore cautiously, and gradually close the circle to
within shooting distance.
Metlaoui is the name of two distinct villages which have been conjured out
of the waste by the discovery of its phosphate deposits--the station
village and, a mile or so further on, Metlaoui proper, with its big
establishments for working the minerals.
Here already, at the station settlement, there is more life than in Gafsa,
though the surroundings are decidedly unpropitious--a waterless plain,
with low hills in the foreground, phosphate-bearing, and wondrously tinted
in rose and heliotrope. There are respectable stores here, very different
from the shops of Gafsa. I entered a large Italian warehouse which
contained an assortment of goods--clothing, jams, boots, writing-paper,
sealing-wax, nails, agricultural implements, guns, bedding, mouse-traps,
wire, seeds, tinned foods--and vainly endeavoured to think of some article
which a _colon_ might require and not find here. The only drawback is that
there are no "colons" in the district.
While waiting for a conveyance to take me to the industrial settlement, I
strolled about and found my way across a sad stretch of ground littered
with tin cans, bottles, and other refuse, to a slight eminence whereon lay
a cemetery. In this forlorn square are about twenty tombs, already
crumbling to dust, although not one of those I saw was five years old.
Humble victims for the most part--Italians in the prime of life who had
come to these regions to gain a little money; or little children, carried
off by the harsh climate (yet the climate of this place is preferred to
that of Gafsa). The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the
inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered
friend or parent, is soon effaced by winds and rain.
One is wholly unprepared for the appearance of Metlaoui proper. In ten
years' time a village has sprung up here, partly of factories and smoky
chimneys, but chiefly of trim bungalows, with white walls and red roofs,
that are dotted over the uneven surface of the ground. The whole site is
owned by the company, and inhabited by its officials and overseers. It has
its own church, shops, schools, hospital, workmen's clubs, bakeries, and
its air of neatness and well-being contrasts pleasingly with the forsaken
landscape all around.
The higher posts are reserved for Frenchmen, but among the lower grades
you may find a number of other nationalities; Spaniards and
Sardinians--hardiest of white Mediterranean races--as well as some
Italians, and not a few Greeks. The manual labour in the mines is
performed by Africans.
Not along ago nearly every drop of water for this settlement had to be
conveyed from Gafsa on the backs of camels. But the company has now
captured a spring at the head of the Seldja gorge, about eight miles
distant, which brings a copious flow of water into the place. Thus they
have been enabled to plant a great number of trees, but I wish they could
be persuaded to adopt a little more variety in their choice of them. One
grows tired of the eucalyptus, that doleful and dismal growth, and even of
the eternal pepper trees, green as they are; and the results, in a few
years' time, would be far more charming if they would take the trouble to
copy some of the Algerian municipalities in this respect, or--better
still--obtain professional advice from the Agricultural Institute at
Tunis, which could furnish them with a large list of ornamental timber and
shrubs that would thrive equally well, and convert Metlaoui into a
veritable garden city. The plants suffer at first from the strong winds,
but they acclimatize themselves by degrees.
Remembering what had been told me of the unsuccessful attempt of the
French to appropriate the water springs of Sidi Mansur, near Gafsa, I
asked Dufresnoy whether the Arabs had not contested the action of his
company at Seldja.
"I should think so!" he said. "They raised the devil. But we are not civil
servants here, who must humour the caprices of half a dozen savages: the
health of the settlement was dependent on our getting this water, and we
took it, _voilà!_ The great ambition of the company is to fix its people
on the spot; to make life here so pleasant for them that they don't want
to leave."
"You must find it difficult. The Arabs, I suspect, run back to the desert
as soon as they have earned a few francs; and as for the European
tradesmen, no doubt they get rich quickly, and then return to their homes
again as soon as possible."
"That is exactly what the company manages to avoid. Let them prosper, we
say; but slowly. And we succeed."
"How so?"
"By manipulating the rates of merchandise transport. The railway to Sfax
belongs to us, and we can regulate prices as it suits us; if we liked, we
could choke off all trade. Ah, the company knows its business! Of course,
that makes us many enemies; they call it high-handedness and brutality--a
concern like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks--_we_ call it
common sense. If the railway were not ours, if we were not practically
dictators of the country, those Americans, with their immense phosphate
importation into Europe, would eat us up; and then these local merchants
would lose everything. That is the justification of our so-called tyranny.
Are we to have nothing for our risks? Look at this installation of
machinery--all built, too, with a view to future aggrandizement: does it
strike you as a half-hearted speculation?"
Daring, on the contrary. Here are gargantuan sheds, capable of holding
thirty thousand tons of mineral apiece; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for
drying them artificially in winter-time, when the sun's heat is
insufficient; all around you a gehenna of mad industrial life, smoke and
steam, a throbbing agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons; there
are chains of buckets, filled with phosphates, wandering overhead in
endless progression or disappearing sullenly into the bowels of the earth;
passionate electric motors; mountains of coal and iron contrivances;
railway engines snorting and whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down
from the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them out of the cars to
dry, amid clouds of tawny dust. One might well grow crazy at the idea of
the primary difficulties involved in grafting upon the desert soil this
ordered mechanical efflorescence, this frenzied blossoming of human
activity.
What is happening?
They are separating the crude phosphate from its natural impurities;
drying, pounding, and loading it upon trains for removal to the sea-board.
That is all.
_Chapter XIV_
_PHOSPHATES_
A light railway leads up to the hills where the phosphates lie. Here you
may see the fiends at work. A legion of wild-eyed, swart and nearly nude
creatures are disembowelling the hoary mountain: visions such as this must
have floated before Milton's eye when he drew his picture of Mammon, who,
with his horde of demons, opened in the hill a spacious wound--
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of our mother Earth
For treasure better hid....
The workers are chiefly of three races: Tripolitan, Khabyle (Algerian),
and Moroccan; they live in separate clusters among the rocks, each with
their peculiar national traits and mode of building; there is hardly a
woman among them all.
Besides these tribes a certain proportion of Tunisian Arabs are employed,
but they are too weak or timorous to relish underground work; a sprinkling
of negroes, as well as some of the hillfolk from the district surrounding
Metlaoui, who go by the quaint name of Boujaja.
"Good fellows," said Dufresnoy. "They will slit your throat for a you."
The surface phosphates having already become exhausted, the mineral is now
pursued into the dim recesses of the earth. Tunnels are excavated, whence
smaller ones radiate in definite directions--all of them sustained by
wooden beams; the amount of material to be extracted from a given spot is
scientifically fixed; it is shattered by minute blasts of dynamite and,
once the trolley cars have carried it away, the wooden supports are
removed and these cavities filled up by the collapse of the roof. By this
means accidents are forestalled such as that which took place some years
ago when, owing to an oversight of some subordinate left in charge, an
immense mass of mountain fell in, entombing about three hundred miners,
whose bodies are not yet recovered. The ill-fated engineer who was legally
responsible for the mishap was in Paris at the time; he returned in all
haste. After seeing the mischief, he tried to throw himself into an Arab
well, and, baulked of this, lay down at night under a passing train and
was decapitated.
They showed me a map of this subterranean world, variously tinted
according to the regions already exploited and those yet virgin. It
reminded me, with its regular streets and blocks, of some model city in
the Far West.
The underground workings here are about thirty kilometres in length.
Beside these Metlaoui deposits, the company has begun to attack those of
Redeyeff, and will shortly open an assault upon the others at Ain
Moulares, which lie near Henchir Souatir, the present terminus of the
Feriana line. It employs six thousand men; some of the mineral goes as far
as Japan; the output of last year amounted to over a million tons.
One may well be interested in the discoverer of these phosphates, in the
man who has revolutionized the trade of Tunisia. He is a veterinary
surgeon in the French Army--Monsieur Philippe Thomas.
His record is of the best.
Born in 1843, he has taken part in twelve military campaigns,
distinguishing himself particularly in the Franco-Prussian war.
But, above all, he is a savant.
He has written valuable treatises on the diseases of domestic beasts,
describing, among other things, a hitherto unobserved infectious malady of
goats. He is the author of a number of memoirs on the geology of Northern
Africa, and has discovered no less than two hundred new species of fossil
animals of that country; he has made numerous contributions to our
knowledge of its ethnology, prehistoric tombs, and flint implements. Many
of these writings date from the seventies and earlier; they have procured
for him the membership of learned societies, as well as medals and
decorations of all kinds.
A man of such distinction, one would think, coming to Tunisia in 1885 at
the head of a scientific expedition sent by the Ministry of Public
Instruction, would be received according to his merits. It was far
otherwise. Whether from distrust of his capacities or some other cause,
Monsieur Cambon, the Resident, assumed towards him a most chilling
official manner, and the commanding military officer, General Boulanger,
all but refused to grant the escort necessary for his expedition. In one
of his papers he speaks of this reception as "several degrees below zero."
Then, in the same year, appeared his sensational report of the discovery
of phosphate deposits which he had traced over a long line of country;
realizing their commercial value, he insisted that they should be
exploited "_pour le plus grand bien de l'agriculture française et
algérienne._" Nevertheless, ten years passed ere a company could be
formed, as financiers were diffident about the American competition and
the risks of installation in a desert country.
A tardy recognition of his services to the company took the form of a
pecuniary grant, in 1904, of fifteen thousand francs--little enough, in
all conscience, considering the millions he has gained for them. They
further honoured him by changing the name of the station-settlement of
Metlaoui into "Philippe-Thomas."
"It's very economical," Dufresnoy observed.
I am glad to think that another place of that name, the mining village,
will continue to exist; it would seem a pity to erase from the map the
tuneful word Metlaoui, which contains the five vowels in a remarkably
small compass....