river; the large blocks of which it is composed are unquestionably
antique, but they have been carried to this spot not by the ancients, but
by Berber cultivators of long ago. Gazing upon these venerable stones we
were led to talk of past times, of buried treasures and their wondrous
lore. One of his uncles, he tells me, is versed in the black arts and an
adept at raising hoards; he learnt it from a Moroccan. But bad luck had
dogged his footsteps lately. He discovered a treasure whose guardian _jin_
offered to surrender it if he brought three things: a white goat, certain
materials for fumigation, and "the book." It seemed a very simple request,
but each time, unfortunately, that he arrived at the enchanted spot,
he found that, for some extraordinary reason, he had left at home one or
the other of these three articles; and when at last he managed to bring
all three of them together, he accidentally--_sale bête!_--said a pious
"bismillah" at the critical moment, which of course spoilt everything.
And here a wild craving came upon me: I wished to follow the winding of
this brook and trace it to its source, which I judged to be not far
distant. The companion, smiled, as usual; he was ready for anything; but
the undertaking proved to be rather arduous. We walked and climbed for
long among the gardens, crawling under vines and thorny shrubs, wading
tributary brooks and clambering up and down their steep earthen banks with
a hundred dogs in full pursuit; there was no possibility of orientation;
we doubled our tracks over and over again--it was like being imprisoned in
the works of a clock.
At last, and doubtless by the merest of accidents, we emerged from the
true oasis of orderly fruit trees and vegetables; the soil became sandy
and uneven, with palms sprouting up in isolated clusters amid tamarisks
and bristly reeds. The stream, meanwhile, continued to divide and
subdivide into smaller rivulets. After a good deal of walking on this kind
of ground, we finally reached the head of the waters--the eye, as the
Arabs poetically call a fountain, alluding to its liquid purity, its
genial play of light and movement.
It trickles out under a tall incline of sand, and the crowns of the palms
at this spot are not quite on a level with the desert overhead. Looking
down from these sandy heights, I found that we had followed a tortuous
river of green palms, that flowed through yellow sands into a distant lake
of the same green--the oasis.
But the companion had become quite silent. He was bewitched, apparently,
by the rural charms of this place. At last he said:
"If only I had brought some _kif_ to smoke!"
Your Oriental, as a rule, becomes hungry at the sight of a fair landscape;
he manifests a sudden yearning for food. Not so these Souafa; they must
have their native _kif_ on such occasions. They are all, I am sorry to
say, partakers of the pernicious drug.
"You have forgotten your _kif_?" I asked. "Well, that _was_ an oversight!"
And, to his astonishment, I fumbled in my pocket, produced the stuff and
lit a pipe. I smoked on placidly, looking at him and wondering what his
thoughts might be. "An Inglis"--perhaps he was saying to himself--"one of
those who joke and talk in such friendly fashion, and then, when it cornes
to a you's worth of _kif_--a single puff of his pipe...! _Sacré cochon!_
That is how they grow rich."
Possibly he reasoned thus, but I fancy he reasoned not at all. There he
sat, and kept his eyes fixed on the ground; a European might have feigned
interest in something else, or cheerful indifference, but this
desert-child did none of these things. He simply sat and suffered dumbly:
it was a blow of fate, to be borne like all the rest of them. A fine
exemplar (_édition mignonne_) of the mektoub profession. It gave a dignity
to the fellow.
Presently I made him a gift of the whole apparatus. He was quite
speechless, at first, with surprise.
The spot was well chosen for indulgence in the divine herb, bland quencher
of doubts, begetter of blissful images; impossible to conceive anything
but a good genius residing amid these bubbling waters and gently stirring
foliage. Everything was kindly and gracious, and yet----
"Yonder," he said, pointing dreamily with his pipe-stem to a place not far
distant, "yonder they killed a man and a woman. They hacked them to little
pieces."
And he unfolded a tale of love and revenge.
It was the usual intrigue; with this peculiarity, that the woman was quite
a poor creature, of blameless past, married and mother of children; the
man--though what we should call a "gentleman by birth"--had long ago
become a vagabond, a child of iniquity, an outcast from the coast-towns,
whom some wave of misfortune had left stranded on this green island in the
desert. Listening to the hazy and rather disconnected recital, I tried to
piece the story together as it really happened; to discover its logic, its
necessity; the arts by which this decayed citizen, proficient only in the
lore of vice and scorned by the whole populace, had gained his end; above
all, how it came about that these two never wearied of their infatuation.
Had he struck some latent and hideously defective chord in her motherly
breast, that began to throb in response to his amorous complexities--was
_that_ their common bond?
Likely enough.
But I would prefer to think otherwise. I would prefer to think that this
woman's very simplicity, and this green dell, had worked a miracle;
purging and simplifying him, carrying him away from depraved memories of
middle life towards certain half-forgotten and holier ideals of youth that
revived, at last, and took shape in the prime features of this--as he may
have called it--pastoral diversion; making him cling to them stubbornly,
even as we might promise ourselves to cling to some friend of past days,
were he ever to return....
The idyll lasted for long, ere the awful retribution came--the element of
insecurity acting, I suppose, as a cement. There is in most of us, Arabs
or otherwise, a deep-seated sporting instinct (is that the right word?)
which the system of legalized unions was contrived to curb, but cannot; if
connubial life were a hazardous liaison there would be fewer divorces.
A perverse and sordid romance, you will say.
And yet it endured, like many of its kind.
_Chapter XX_
_A WATERY LABYRINTH_
Tozeur is more than twice as large as Gafsa, and the inhabitants are a
healthier race, good-natured and docile, with much of the undiluted Berber
blood still in their veins. The houses are also of better construction,
and not a few of them can boast of cool, vaulted chambers and an upper
story. Unfortunately for the artistic effect, new French buildings are
rising up here and there; it is inevitable--the place cannot be expected
to stand still; artists and dreamers must now go further afield.
And the oasis is a forest of sumptuous splendour, wherein grow bananas
(absent in Gafsa), together with every other kind of fruit and vegetable,
but chiefly date-palms, that give the highest and most constant return.
They cultivate seventy different varieties. There are half a million trees
paying taxes--the common variety sixty centimes, the delicate amber-tinted
and translucent _deglat_ twice as much; some trees produce more than fifty
francs a year. But they require incessant care; "palms must eat and
drink," say the Arabs; they drink, in the summer months, a hundred cubic
metres of water apiece!
The export of these dates has been going on for centuries; in 1068 the
geographer Bekri wrote that almost every day a thousand camels, or even
more, leave Tozeur loaded with dates, and the trade will become still
livelier when they have finished building the railway which is to connect
this place with the present terminus Metlaoui. Maybe the Egyptians
introduced the tree into these regions: they cultivated dates as early as
3000 B.C. It is perhaps the earliest fruit of which we have clear record,
save that old apple of 4004 B.C. which gave some trouble to Adam and Eve.
In olden days they sold negro slaves here for two or three quintals of
dates apiece.
The irrigation of these palms is a hair-splitting business.
Water-conduits, varying in size from a brook to the merest runlet, cross
and recross each other on palm-stem aqueducts at different levels; the
properties are served with the precious element according to time. And
inasmuch as the labourers have no clocks or watches, they have devised a
complicated and apparently frivolous system of marking the hours; the
water is cut off from a certain property, for instance, when a certain
shadow shall have attained the length of three footsteps of a man, and so
forth; the shadow varies according to the seasons, but, in the long run,
everybody is satisfied. There is peace now under the palms; the days are
over when the lean and hungry desert folk, who cannot climb trees, used to
ride hither and, pointing their guns at the terrified cultivators, make
them clamber aloft and throw down a month's provision of dates.
Arabs will tell you that there are 194 water springs at Tozeur; they are
ready to give you the names of every one of them, and several more; these
unite to form what might almost be called a river, which is then
artificially divided into three rivulets--divided so neatly, says an old
writer, that even some fragment of wood or other object drifting down the
current is split up, perforce, into three equal parts, one for each of
them; these three, later on, are once more subdivided into seven smaller
ones apiece--twenty-one in all; and these, again, into a certain fixed
number of almost microscopic brooklets. Allah is all-knowing! To me,
wandering for the first time in this region, the irrigation canals seemed
to flow from every point of the compass. I teased my spirit with the
imaginary task of unperplexing the liquid maze, of drawing a map of this
dædal network of intersecting waters.
[Illustration: The Waters of Tozeur]
You can stroll in every direction along shady paths in the oasis and never
weary of its beauty. The tiller-folk are a happy people--one can see from
their faces that they have few cares; those that are not at work under the
trees may be seen splashing about the brooks or wending to market with
donkeys that almost disappear under immense loads of green stuff; they
will greet you with a smile and a "Bon soir, Moussié!" (It is always bon
_soir_.)
Seven little villages nestle under the palms; here and there, too, you
enter unexpectedly upon gem-like patches of waterless, shimmering
sand--mock-Saharas, golden and topaz-tinted, set in a ring of laughing
greenery; there are kingfishers in arrowy flight or poised, like a flame
of blue, over the still pools; overhead, among the branches, a ceaseless
cooing of turtle-doves. At this season, a Japanese profusion of white
blossoms flutters in the breeze and strews the ground; these peaches,
apricots, plums and almonds are giants of their kind, and yet
insignificant beside the towering trunks of the palms whose leaves shade
them from the sunny rays; the fruit trees, in their turn, protect the
humble corn and vegetables growing at their feet.
During the Turkish period these oases were in danger of their lives; the
sand invaded them, choking up the waters and gradually entombing the
plants. The nomads and their flocks and camels, pasturing at liberty round
the cultivated tracts, had destroyed the scrub vegetation which hindered
the flying desert sands from penetrating into the groves; they had
trampled to powder the soil at these spots, so that every breath of wind
raised it heavenwards in a cloud. But the peril is averted now by the
system of _tabias_ or sand-dykes introduced some twenty years
ago--introduced, I believe, in accordance with the suggestion of Monsieur
Baraban, whose book on Tunisia drew attention, among other things, to this
deplorable condition of the oases and the threatened loss to the
exchequer.
Now, if you look closely at this sand, you will see that it is full of
minute crystalline particles, and that, in places where it lies
undisturbed, these hard and jagged grains wedge themselves into the softer
ones and form a coherent crust. It was observed that the wind cannot raise
this crust, and the problem how to manufacture it in the neighbourhood of
the oases was solved by enclosing the near-lying tracts of half-desert
within low mounds crowned by upright palm branches, and forbidding all
access to man and beast. The flying plague heaps itself against the
palisade and submerges it; a new set of branches is then inserted, and so
the structure grows higher and more efficacious every year. The soil
within the enclosures, meanwhile, grows hard; wild shrubs sprout up to
help in the work, and though the crust yields, like thin ice, at the
slightest pressure of the fingers, the end is accomplished.
The protected districts are already assuming a different aspect from the
true desert outside, which shifts with the breeze; apart from their tufts
of vegetation, the soil has become quite dark in colour. Only the most
reckless of nocturnal nomads will dare to violate these hallowed precincts
in search of firewood; the citizens have already learned to regard them
with reverential fear. At a long distance from the town I asked a small
boy to climb over the palisade.
"Not if you give me a packet of cigarettes!" he said. "The
_brigadier_"--in an awed whisper--"he sees everything."
Hearing that protective works of a new kind are being carried on at this
moment, I walked yesterday to the bare slopes that lead down to the
water-springs. A hundred or more Arabs were engaged, under the supervision
of a keen-eyed young Frenchman, in digging a multitude of curved
concentric ditches across the hollow of the catchment area, intersected by
diagonal ones here and there; the general appearance of the work--the
bright yellow of the newly excavated part set against the dark ground of
the old--was as if some gigantic fishing-net had been carelessly thrown
across the country. These little dykes were about two feet deep, and there
must have been already some twenty miles of them. The overseer explained:
"You see what happens. Our putting this tract under the tabia-system had
prepared us an unpleasant surprise. The rain formerly used to sink into
the soft sand, but since the crust has formed, thanks to our efforts, it
no longer sinks, but runs over the hard surface, pours in a flood down
that steep incline at whose foot the fountains issue, and threatens to
suffocate them with soil torn from its banks. The very life of the oasis
was imperilled by our well-meant artifices. But now, with these little
ditches, we hope to catch and tame the showers, and force them to wander
about in these channels till they either sink into the earth or evaporate.
Not a drop of liquid is to leave the catchment basin; it is exactly the
reverse of what we desire in Europe."
It struck me as a simple and efficient device.
Midday came and the workers were paid off, each of them receiving a slip
of printed paper for the half-day's work; the possession of four of these
slips entitles them to exemption from the yearly tax of two francs forty
centimes which they would otherwise pay: a good example of the "politique
d'association." They trooped away gleefully, and I could not help
remarking on their cheerful humour.
"They are gentle as young girls," he said, "and far more tractable;
thievish, of course, and untruthful--but so are all children! They attach
themselves to me in a pathetic, dog-like fashion, without hope of
preferment or any ulterior object.... Yes, they have established
themselves in my heart, somehow or other; perhaps because I am an orphan
and rather lonely and susceptible.... I really love these poor Arabs, as a
father might love them----"
"That stick of yours: it looks business-like. May I ask whether you ever
chastise them?"
"Why not? Would I not thrash my own children if they deserved it? This
work in Africa," he went on, "attracts and interests me. At home I lose my
personality and become a sheep in a herd, but here, in the desert, I can
create and leave a mark, which has always been my ambition. I think I
could live in this country for ever. Can you understand such a feeling?
None of my colleagues can; their minds are in France, and they complain of
a colonial exile, as if Tunisia were the Devil's Island; they call me an
enthusiast, because I think well of this warm, palpitating soil in which I
seem, I don't know how, to have struck deep roots."
And he gazed lovingly over the sea of glossy palm-tops, down yonder, on
our right. This, I thought, was a most unusual type of Frenchman; and yet
there was something in his language, or perhaps in his ideas, which was
already familiar to me.
"To be Sultan of Tozeur, for example--ha! I would bend them to my will; I
would lead them to battle and give them laws; I would have them about me
as slaves and companions--they should sing to me and tell me stories while
I go to sleep. This fair land seems like the realization of some old,
dimly remembered dream of mine. How does it all come about, I wonder?"
_Sultan of Tozeur_--that gave me the cue, and I hazarded the guess that he
had inherited his tastes from certain old rovers and conquerors of the
northern seaboard.
"True," he said, "our family comes from Normandy, though we have lived in
Paris for two generations. Now how on earth did you find that out?"
These are the men whom the Franco-Tunisian administration will do well to
encourage as officials and settlers in the wilder parts.
_Chapter XXI_
_OLD TISOUROS_
There is a daily recurring spectacle at Tozeur which enchanted me: the
camping ground at dawn. Here the caravans repose after their desert
journeys; hence they start, at every hour, in picturesque groups and
movement. But whoever wishes for a rare impression of Oriental life must
go there before sunrise, and wait for the slow-coming dawn. It is all dark
at first, but presently a sunny beam flashes through the distant palms,
followed by another, and yet another--long shafts of yellow light
travelling through the murk; then you begin to perceive that the air is
heavy with the smoke of extinguished camp-fires and suspended particles of
dust; the ground, heaving, gives birth to dusky shapes; there are weird
groans and gurglings of silhouetted apparitions; and still you cannot
clearly distinguish earth from air--it is as if one watched the creation
of a new world out of Chaos.
But even before the sun has topped the crowns of the palms, the element of
mystery is eliminated; the vision resolves itself into a common plain of
sand, authentic camels and everyday Arabs moving about their
business--another caravan, in short....
And at midday?
Go, at that hour, to the thickest part of the grove; then is the time; it
must be the prick of noon, for the slanting lights of morning and eve are
quite another concern; only at noon can one appreciate the incomparable
effects of palm-leaf shadows. The whole garden is permeated with light
that streams down from some undiscoverable source, and its rigid trunks,
painted in a warm, lustreless grey, are splashed with an infinity of keen
lines of darker tint, since the sunshine, percolating through myriads of
sharp leaves, etches a filigree pattern upon all that lies below. You look
into endless depths of forest, but there is no change in decorative
design; the identical sword-pattern is for ever repeated on the identical
background, fading away, at last, in a silvery haze.
Here are no quaint details to attract the eye; no gorgeous colour-patterns
or pleasing irregularities of form; the frosted beauty of the scene
appeals rather to the intelligence. Contrasted with the wanton blaze of
green, the contorted trunks and labyrinthine shadow-meanderings of our
woodlands, these palm groves, despite their frenzied exuberance, figure
forth the idea of reserve and chastity; an impression which is heightened
by the ethereal striving of those branchless columns, by their joyous and
effective rupture of the horizontal, so different from the careworn tread
of our oaks and beeches.
Later on, when the intervening vines and fruit trees are decked in leaves,
the purity of this geometrical design will be impaired....
The origin of Tozeur is lost in the grey mists of antiquity, since a site
like this must have been cultivated from time immemorial; the first
classical writer to mention the town is Ptolemy, who calls it Tisouros; on
Peutinger's Tables it is marked "Thusuro." The modern settlement has
wandered away from this ancient one which now slumbers--together, maybe,
with its hoary Egyptian prototype--under high-piled mounds whereon have
arisen, since those days, a few mediæval monuments and crumbling
maraboutic shrines and houses of more modern date, patched together with
antique building blocks and fragments of marble cornices: an island of
sand and oblivion, lapped by soft-surging palms.
They call it Bled-el-Adher nowadays, and this is the place to spend the
evening. I was there yesterday, perhaps for the last time.
It exhales a soporific, world-forgotten fragrance. There is no market
here, no commercial or social life, save a few greybeards discussing
memories on some doorstep; the only mirthful note is a swarm of young boys
playing hockey on the sand-heaps, amid furious yells and scrimmages.
True hockey being out of the question on account of the deep sand, they
have invented a variant, a simple affair: they arrange themselves roughly
into two parties, and the ball is struck into the air with a palm branch
from the one to the other; there, where it alights, a general rush ensues
to get hold of it, clouds of sand arising out of a maze of intertwining
arms and legs. The lucky possessor is entitled to have the next stroke,
and the precision and force of their hitting is remarkable; they evidently
do little else all day long.
I noticed an element of good humour and fair play not prevalent among the
Gafsa boys; there was no peevish squabbling, and I only saw one fight
which was a perfectly correct transaction--nobody interfering with the two
combatants who hammered lustily at each other's faces, and at last
separated, satisfied and streaming with blood.
For some days past they had seen my interest in the game, and yesterday I
observed that it was suddenly suspended; a consultation was taking place,
and presently one of the boys approached me and politely asked whether I
would not care to join; if so, I might have his club; and he placed the
weapon and ball in my hand. The proposition tempted me; it is not every
day that one is invited in such gentlemanly fashion to wallow on all fours
with young Arabs. I made one or two strokes, not amiss, that called forth
huge applause; and then returned, rather regretfully, to my sand-heap, to
meditate on my own misspent youth, a subject that very rarely troubles me.
There is a tall, round building that stands within a hundred yards of
where I sat; they call it the "Roman" tower, and the foundation-stones,
though not _in situ_, are probably of that period; it was a Byzantine
bell-tower, then a minaret, now a ruin. And here, confronting me, lie a
few stones, that are all that remain of a pagan temple which became a
Christian basilica and afterwards a mosque. In the fifth century
Tisouros--this slumberous Bled-el-Adher--was a dependency of the Greek
"Duke of Gafsa" (how strange it sounds!); Florentinus, its bishop, was
executed by the king of the Vandals; Christian churches survived, side by
side with mosques, as late as the fourteenth century. There seems to have
been no great religious intolerance in those days.
They showed me a gold coin of the Emperor Gordian--the same who built the
amphitheatre of El-Djem--which was found here, as well as some lamps and
sculptured fragments of stone. Bruce speaks of cipollino columns; they are
still to be seen, if you care to look for them, split up, since his time,
to mend walls and doorsteps. Tozeur must have looked well enough under the
later Empire.
And now, sand-heaps and a brood of young savages, shouting at their game.
It is long since these people knew the meaning of refined things, although
some of the houses, their fronts decorated with gracious designs in
brickwork, testify to a not extinct artistic feeling--the citizens once
enjoyed a reputation for delicacy and love of letters. There is nothing
like systematic misgovernment for degrading mankind, and I think it likely
that the gradual fusion of the Arab and Berber races, so antagonistic in
all their aspirations, may have helped to abrade the finer edges of both
parent-stocks. But the native civilization was not remarkable at any time.