chiefly of olive plantations, and proofs of the former abundance of these
trees can be found in certain local names, such as Jebel Zitouna--the
Mount of Olives--clinging to localities where not a tree is now visible;
there are also sporadic oleasters growing near many Roman ruins. Strong
evidence; and still stronger is this: that Roman oil-presses have actually
been found, buried in the desert sand. Up to a short time ago the Arabs
deliberately destroyed the olives, to avoid paying the tax on them; the
French have changed all this, and though I am not aware that they go so
far as did the Romans, who encouraged tree-planting by exemption from
imposts, yet they have inaugurated a severe regime; one reads with
satisfaction of exemplary penalties inflicted for illicit timber-cutting.
It is good to remember, also, that whereas the Romans had five centuries
of peace to bring Tunisia to its high pitch of prosperity, the French only
began yesterday. And they have a harder task before them, for in the
interval the Arabs have arrived in the country. It is they, with their
roving and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief, changing arable
land into pasture, which grows ever poorer, and finally desert. The
fertility of these regions may be said to have been annihilated by the
goats of a nomad race, whose faith has made it improvident and mentally
sterile.[1]
[Footnote 1: I have just re-perused Lapie's _Civilizations Tunisiennes_.
He says that "la chèvre est le génie malfaisant de la Régence.... Plus que
le despotisme, plus que le fatalisme, elle a ruiné le pays: c'est la
chèvre, en effet, qui déboise et surtout qui s'oppose au reboisement, et
l'on sait quelle influence a eue sur le régime des eaux et sur la
fertilité du sol le déboisement de la province d'Afrique." Apropos of this
pasturing by nomad cattle, it is a singular fact that whereas a large
proportion of desert plants of northern Tunisia are poisonous to camels
and goats, here, in the south, nearly all of them are edible.]
Yet it may be disputed whether the land was as thickly wooded under the
Romans as some would have us believe. If so, how was it that after three
centuries of their rule there should come a drought lasting for five
years? Wood brings water, and if things were so satisfactory, why did they
penuriously hive and distribute the element? They described Africa as a
"waterless land"; Marius, when he made his forced march across country to
surprise Gafsa, took in at one place a sufficient provision of water to
last for three days. This, however, may be due to the fact that he
purposely kept to the desert lest, by following the main route, his
designs should be made public.
One thing strikes me as conclusive evidence that the "Africa" of olden
days was a different country: they had no camels. These beasts were
unknown there at the time of Julius Cæsar, and only came into common usage
towards the end of the fourth century. The Africa of to-day, without
camels, would be almost uninhabitable.
Some years ago, whilst staying among the magnificent forests of
Khroumiria, forests such as certainly never clothed these southern hills,
I grew interested in this question of the old African water-supply.
Comparing the accounts of classic authors with what has been written by
modern students like Bourde, Carton and others, whose very names have
faded from my memory, I remember coming to the conclusion--a very obvious
one, no doubt--that supposing all the ruined Roman hydraulic contrivances
were now in working order, supposing them even to be furnished with such
improvements as modern science could suggest, still the French would be
unable to obtain, at the present moment, the agricultural results of the
Romans. The positive diminution in the supply of liquid has been too
great. Archæologists, for instance, have discovered in the district of
Gafsa alone over a hundred Roman wells and reservoirs, of every shape and
size; but it would be sheer waste of money to re-activate many of these
ancient works--there are wells which would remain dry from one year's end
to another; the watercourses, too, have shrunk or altogether expired.
Quite apart from what the French have taken from it, this Seldja brook
must have carried down a larger volume of water in those days, helped, as
is very probable, by small tributary streamlets which have now ceased to
flow.
Old Arab authors say that one used to be able to walk from one end of
North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration,
this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans
continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with
timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their
goats had time--for it must have required time--to change the climate and
aspect of the province.
These woodlands, at all events, cannot have been all of olives. There is
Sbeitla, for instance, the Roman city whose remains I was unable to visit
owing to the Arctic blasts of wind; viewed from the railway, its
surroundings look so bleak and bare that nobody would believe they could
ever have been timbered. Yet, concerning Sbeitla, we happen to possess the
testimony of three independent older eye-witnesses, who visited the spot
at different periods: first Shaw (about 1725), then Bruce, then the
botanist Desfontaines. All three of them describe the region as wooded.
And, as if to clinch the matter, Leo Africanus, writing in 1550, says that
the inhabitants of Gafsa and its district made their boots out of the
skins of stags. (These are no doubt the fortassa deer, a few of which
still linger in the country north of Feriana.) Stags can only live in
timbered regions. If these forests were still in existence there would be
a greater abundance of water; the cold in winter would be less intense,
and so would the summer heat, since forests are harmonizers of all
climatic discords.
Now these woodlands were not composed of olives, but for the most part of
junipers and of Aleppo pines, a precious growth to which the French began
to pay attention some five years ago. These bright and graceful trees
flourish on the poorest soil and multiply rapidly; they are valuable not
only for their timber, but for their turpentine. You can buy, in the Gafsa
market, a crude black tar made from this tree; the Arabs use it for
impregnating the linings of their water-skins, like the Greeks for their
receptacles of rezzinato wine.
The only drawback to these pines is that their inflammable branches are
always suggesting a display of extempore fireworks to the Arabs, who are
the veriest pyromaniacs.
_Chapter XVIII_
_THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS_
The old olive plantations are creeping back again into regions that have
been deserted for centuries. They follow the railway lines; and nothing is
a fitter commentary on the medievalism which deplores _the building of
railways into the desert_ than facts like that of the plain of Maknassy--a
sterile tract up to a few years ago--which is now covered, for a distance
of sixty kilometres, by olive groves. Why? Because the line from Sfax to
Gafsa happens to pass through it.
The same will take place in due course along the Feriana and other
southern lines, and thus one of the gravest problems that confront the
Tunisian administration will be solved: the unstable nomads will fix
themselves--they are already fixing themselves--round these new
agricultural centres. In 1890 there were still eight tents to every five
houses in Tunisia, but this proportion is rapidly changing. And besides
this, the railway, with its facility for the rapid conveyance of troops,
has given security to regions formerly so dangerous that no settler,
however favourable the soil, would have dared to establish his home there;
it has awakened the date industry and created halfa deposits all along the
line.
There is one of them at Gafsa station, for instance--relatively small; and
yet, in the season, two hundred camel-loads of this costly hay arrive
there every day, to be dried, pressed and stored ready for transportation
to the coast, whence it is shipped to Europe. In 1905 sixteen thousand six
hundred tons of halfa were forwarded from the interior by the Sfax-Gafsa
line alone!
And were it not for this railway the branch line to Tozeur would never
have been contemplated; the oases of Souf and Djerid and Nefzaoua, with
their teeming populations, would have slumbered the sleep of ages in their
burning desert sands. And to realize what a change it has wrought in the
appearance of the ports of Sfax, Sousse and even Tunis, one must have
known these places in the olden days. The company pays yearly half a
million francs to the Government; it contributes another yearly sum of
600,000 francs towards the harbour enlargement scheme of Sfax; indeed, it
may be said to have created the modern town of Sfax, its hotels, banks,
restaurants, theatres.
And what brought the railway?
The phosphates. But for their discovery no Utopian would have thought of
constructing these lines just yet. An unlovely deposit of brown dust has
worked a revolution upon the minds of men, upon the face of the country.
It has even enriched the French vocabulary.
"Your friend, is he an _alfatier_?"
"No, sir; he is a _phosphatier_."
As I issued out of the rock-portal of the Seldja gorge and beheld that
strip of masonry which told so plain a story, with the now barren plain at
its foot, it struck me that this spot was pregnant with a romance beyond
that of mere scenery. It was well, here, to pause awhile and contrast old
and new notions of African prosperity. The Romans had the same
difficulties to contend with as have the French: a harsh climate, and
fickle and faithless natives who "cannot be bridled by threats or
kindness." They had the same ambitions; so Strabo tells us that they used
every endeavour to make settlers of them and fix them to the soil, and
"paid particular attention to Masanasses, King of Numidia, because it was
he who formed the nomads of civil life and directed their attention to
husbandry."
Both administrations are necessarily based on military rule. And if the
now uncultivated plain affronts our eye, there is already a set-off to
this apparent superiority of the ancient regime in the new line of railway
which, at great expense, has been made to climb up the sinuosities of the
Seldja gorge itself.
Whither wending?
To fetch more phosphates!
Here they lie, the quintessential relics of those little Eocene fishes and
other sea beasts, if such they were, that swam and crawled about the
waters many years ago--piled up on terraces so high that the mind grows
dizzy at contemplating their multitudes, or the ages required to squeeze
them into this priceless powder; piled up for 500 miles along their old
sea-beach--an arid inland chain of hills, nowadays, where hardly a blade
of grass will grow; sterile themselves, the cause of surpassing fertility
elsewhere. These phosphates are something of a symbol: there are men and
women fashioned after this model.
I question whether the men of the _Pax Romana_ could ever have reached the
phosphate-extracting stage. They were not trending in that direction. Eyes
were turning inwards, and the age of sober thinking was past and over for
the time being, since the Orient began to infect the world with the
mephitic vapours of self-consciousness. Truth was a drug in the market;
for twenty long centuries the Banu-Israel, with their ferocious contempt
of craftsmanship and honest intellectual labour, were enabled to foul the
stream of human endeavour. It is gratifying to think how thoroughly the
modern Jews have shaken off their ancient bigotry--a good refutation, by
the way, of those scholars who still argue about the "immutability of
race-characters."
But those earlier and artless Galileans, methinks, must have been on the
mental level of the Tripolitan savage running beside my horse: it needs no
very cunning marabout to convince him that his little troubles will be set
aright in a world hereafter, where he shall sit comfortably enthroned and
listen to his enemies gnashing their teeth. For the poor in mind are like
children in this, that they create realities to coincide with emotional
states; and for such as these, they say, is the kingdom of Heaven
reserved.
Nevertheless, though men sought the "inner light" and not phosphate
deposits in those days, yet certain men of God, roaming about these same
stony wildernesses, made discoveries in natural history no less surprising
than that of Monsieur Philippe Thomas. Saint Anthony encountered a
faun--half-man, half-goat; he spoke to the creature and was charmed by its
edifying discourse. You will object that Saint Anthony is known to have
been a hallucinated neyropathe; that the story, therefore, may not be
true. So be it.
But such a description can hardly be applied with decency to certain
holier and wiser men, who saw with their own eyes things yet stranger. The
great Augustin tells his congregation--it is in one of his sermons, I
believe--that in these deserts there are men without heads, men who have
one single eye placed in the centre of their breasts. You may suggest that
the saint was quoting from the heathen pages of Herodotus, the _Father of
Lies_. Nothing of the kind. He is too conscientious to speak from hearsay
of such marvellous matters; he says that he personally went among these
headless monocular folk; he says that he spoke to them and lived with
them; that he made a study of their morals and social institutions, which,
in this particular sermon, he holds up as an example to his two-eyed
Christian hearers.
And Saint Augustin has the reputation of being a fairly truth-loving saint
and _doctor ecclesiæ_.
No; phosphate-hunting was assuredly out of the question under such
conditions; scientific curiosity and commercialism, parents of fair talk
and fair dealing among men, retire discomfited when there are immortal
souls to be saved. And soon enough they came, those Ages of Faith, of
moral dyspepsia and perverse aspirations, when truth-seeking, useless
under the _Pax Romana_, became much worse than useless--perilous, that is,
to life and limb. So quickly do we forget past torments, that some of us
continue to yearn for those picturesque days of burnings and
thumb-screwings.
Meanwhile, if truth is found useful for the moment, it is due to the
humanizing work of those quiet investigators like Philippe Thomas--to the
men who have armed their country for the heroic task of cleansing the
Augean stables.
Monsieur Dufresnoy had never met the phosphate discoverer, but another
gentleman described him as follows:--
"He is a simple fellow, and the devil for work. Married, and a good
husband; clear eyes; spectacles, a short beard, rather stout, and not
dark; never so happy as when he is examining old bones and trash of that
kind. A _bon garçon_, mind you. And yet--Lord! what a simpleton. He could
have become a millionaire if he had managed the thing properly. Too
modest, perhaps--too unworldly; too foolish, or too proud: who can tell?
"You never know what is going on in the minds of these _savants_. He told
them he was a veterinary surgeon, and not a man of business. Can you
understand such an attitude?"
"I must think about it, Monsieur."
And so I did, riding home that evening from the Seldja gorge--and next day
too; but, somehow or other, have not yet attained a mature opinion on the
subject. It may be, however, that there is nothing to prevent a man from
being simultaneously modest and proud--nothing, save the fact that we have
not yet coined a word for an alloy of these particular ingredients. We
have words, always either too few or too many; words which are for ever
emancipating themselves from our control and becoming masters instead of
slaves, so that our ideas, which ought to be formed by independent
cerebration, are half derived from mere verbal symbols, which become a
kind of intellectual pepsine that weakens the strongest systems. So when
we speak of a man being "proud," that miserable expression is apt to
engross and dominate us, conjuring up an image which excludes certain
others: that of modesty, for instance.
It comes to this, that if we wish to describe a man who does not seem to
fit into any of the categories permitted by ordinary words, we are driven
to refer him to some exemplar recognized in legend or history--we talk of
his being Epicurean, Voltairean, and so forth.
Let us say, therefore, that Monsieur Thomas, like Pasteur, is of the
Promethean type--a seeker after verity, a light-bringer.
POSTSCRIPT.--This is surely a land of coincidences. In a Tunisian paper of
this very morning I read of the death, on the 13th of February, of
Monsieur Thomas. It describes him as "one of the most perfect citizens of
our poor humanity." He only lived a year to enjoy the annuity of six
thousand francs which the Government of the Regency, with belated
thoughtfulness, had granted him.
_Chapter XIX_
_OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR_
A mule, a sturdy beast, was waiting to convey me from Metlaoui to Tozeur.
Leaving my heavier baggage to follow with some camels, I rode into the
dawn.
Considerably less than half-way stands the rest-house of Guifla, kept by
an Algerian with a pretty wife. Here I saw a few carved Roman stones which
had been found, the man told me, in the neighbouring Oued Baghara. At
Guifla, according to Valery Mayet, they killed an ostrich twenty years
ago--a _rara avis_ in these parts.
There were numbers of engineers and workmen at this place, engaged in
laying down the line of railway which will unite Tozeur to Metlaoui. It
cannot help being a paying concern, I should think, to judge by the
traffic that passed me in the course of this day, for I was hardly ever
out of sight of a caravan.
It was an ideal day for desert travelling--a grey, sunless sky, a gentle
breeze. Another weary stretch brings one to El-Hamma, a small oasis fed by
hot springs which the Romans long ago utilized, and where I had hoped to
refresh myself with a Turkish bath. Alas! the hammam is only a shallow
tank covered with palm-thatching; there were some twenty Arabs splashing
about this establishment and soaping themselves and their
boy-children--bathing was out of the question. Near at hand lies the
women's bath, which is built on the same primitive lines. A pious legend
runs to the effect that this water of El-Hamma used to be cold, but an
Arab marabout was persuaded to spit into it and, lo! it suddenly became
hot and mineral....
As you approach Tozeur the landscape becomes more desert-like; mountains
are left behind; stones are rarer; you wade in sand. One realizes how
useless it would be to construct a good road in these parts, since every
storm would drown it. And such storms are sometimes of great force; there
was a celebrated one in 1857 which lasted for seventy-two hours. It threw
some of the riders of a French detachment off their horses, and finally
obliged the whole company to stamp up and down for twenty-four hours in
the twilight of raging sand for fear of being buried alive. It submerged
several hundred palm trees of the Tozeur oasis _up to their crowns_ (they
are 60 to 100 feet high).
[Illustration: Tozeur and its Oasis]
Notwithstanding these difficulties, an enterprising Maltese runs a
motor-car from Metlaoui to Tozeur and Nefta for all such persons as are
prepared to pay his price, and I hear that the speculation has paid well.
There were moments during my ride when I regretted not having come to some
understanding with him; when I grew tired of the jolting mule, the rough
track and an Arab saddle which keeps one's legs at an angle of 179
degrees. True, my conveyance had only cost four francs....
Straining my eyes at the water-shed beyond El-Hamma, whence one has the
first view of Tozeur and its palm forest, I thought to detect, at an
immeasurable distance, two minute dusky streaks, swimming in air--other
oases, no doubt. They seemed to dangle, by some gossamer thread, from the
grey vault of Heaven.
This first view of the oasis of Tozeur, and the Chott Djerid beyond it,
has often been praised. To me, arriving at the water-shed on a cloudy
afternoon, that line of inky-black palm trees with its background of
blanched sterility melting into a lowering, leaden-hued sky, conveyed a
most uncanny impression: the prospect was absolutely familiar! Yes, there
was no doubt about it: I had seen the place before; not in Africa, of
course, but--somewhere else. Where--where? Suddenly I remembered: it was a
northern landscape, a well-known forest of sombre firs, rising out of the
wintry plain. The white, salty expanse, filling up the interstices between
the palms, helped to complete the illusion; it was powdered snow among the
tree-tops. For a brief moment I was _transported_....
It was not long before I found a companion at Tozeur. He was an Arab from
the Souf, region of sand; dark-skinned, oval-faced, with straight
eyelashes, straight nose, and an infectious, lingering smile; quite a
worthless fellow; he had picked up a few words of French slang, and never
tired of exhibiting them. We rode out to the Chott to see the extraction
of the salt, which is a Government monopoly; the track leads past a famous
lotus, a Methuselah among trees, whose shadow covers 120 square metres of
ground and whose branches are so long, so weary with age, that they bend
downward and touch the earth with their elbows--to rest, as it were--and
then rise up again, refreshed. These salines are about three miles from
Tozeur and an uncommonly simple establishment; they dig a ditch in the
morass which promptly fills with water; the liquid evaporates, leaving the
salt, which impregnates it, to be piled up in heaps on dry land. Next,
they stow the mineral in sacks and transport it to Tozeur on donkeys. It
undergoes no preparation whatever, but is sold as it comes out of the
Chott, agreeable to the palate though rather yellowish in colour. Needless
to say the Government runs no risk of the supply failing; there is salt, a
swooning stretch of salt, as far as eye can reach.
Once you have issued from the oasis in this direction it is all a level of
dried-up mud, speckled with low shrubs and dangerous watery spots, where a
man may slowly sink down and disappear for ever. A strange desert lily,
purple and golden, starts leafless, like a tall orchid, out of the bitter
waste; camels eat its fat, bulbous, snowy-white root; the Arabs call it
_tethuth_.
I saw some darker markings on the surface of the expanse which the workman
at the salines declared to be the ruins of old buildings and quite
inaccessible nowadays, but they may well have been small ridges of sand,
magnified by mirage: those oasis-Arabs have rather indifferent eyesight.
Plainly visible, however, was a line of palms about eight miles distant to
the east; it was one of a group of oases of Oudiane. I looked at it,
wondering whether I should pass that way on my homeward journey.
But my companion, with a languishing gesture, pointed in the other
direction, towards his home.
Tozeur, he thought, was all very well, and so were Oudiane and all the
rest of them, but Eloued was fairer by far. And only three days' journey!
Why not leave this country and go to the Souf, to Eloued, instead? _Sacré
nom!_ I could return by way of Biskra if I liked. And if I paid him five
francs for a camel he would accompany me the whole way, like a brother.
The five francs, he explained, were only for camel-hire; he did not want
me to pay for his food; he liked me for my company--it seems I reminded
him, in a way, of the folks at Eloued. They must be charming people, and I
was almost tempted to follow his advice and make their acquaintance.