is a land of uncompromising masculinity. The softer element--thanks to the
Koran--has become non-existent, and you will look in vain for the
creative-feminine, for those intermediate types of ambiguous, submerged
sexuality, the constructive poets and dreamers, the men of imagination and
women of will, that give to good society in the north its sweetness and
_chatoyance_; for those "sports" and eccentrics who, among our lower
classes, are centrifugal--perpetually tending to diverge in this or that
direction. The native is pre-eminently centripetal. His life is reduced to
its simplest physiological expression; that capacity of reflection, of
forming suggestive and fruitful concepts, which lies at the bottom of
every kind of progress or culture, has been sucked out of him by the sun
and by Mahomet's teaching.
A land of violence, remorseless and relentless; the very beetles, so
placid elsewhere, seem to have acquired a nervously virile temperament;
they scurry about the sand at my feet with an air of rage and
determination.
So I mused, while the game went on boisterously in the mellow light of
sunset till, from some decaying minaret near by, there poured down a
familiar long-drawn wail--the call to prayer. It was a golden hour among
those mounds of sand, and I grew rather sad to think that I should never
see the place again. How one longs to engrave certain memories upon the
brain, to keep them untarnished and carry them about on one's journeyings,
in all their freshness! The happiest life, seen in perspective, can hardly
be better than a stringing together of such odd little moments.
_Chapter XXII_
_THE DISMAL CHOTT_
Hearing that there are few or no tourists in Nefta just now, I left Tozeur
three days ago, an hour or so before sunrise.
This region, the Djerid, is all sand; an isthmus of sand thrust in between
the two Chotts of Djerid and Rharsa; the oases ara scattered about the
country, says some old writer, like the spots on a leopard's skin....
The air was keen, and I shivered on my mule, looking back often at the
dark forest of Tozeur, where I had spent some happy days.
After about five miles of comfortable wading through soft sand, I became
aware of a ghostly radiance that hovered over the pallid expanse of the
Chott. Abruptly, with the splendour of a meteor, the morning star shot up.
Then the sun's disk rose, more sedately, at the exact spot where Lucifer
had shown the way; and climbing upwards, produced a spectacle for which I
was not prepared.
For as it left the horizon, a counterfeit sun began to unroll itself from
the true, as one might detach a petal from a rose; at first they clung
together, but soon, with a wrench, parted company, and while the one
soared aloft, the image remained below, weltering on the treacherous mere.
For a short while the flaming phantasma lingered firm and orb-like, while
the space between itself and reality grew to a hand's breadth; then slowly
deliquesced. It gave a prolonged shiver and sank, convulsed, into the
earth.
Light was diffused; the colour of daytime invaded the ground at our feet,
flitting like some arterial rill through the dun spaces. Wonderful, this
magic touch of awakening! It is the same swiftness of change as at sunset,
when the desert folds itself to sleep, like some gorgeously palpitating
flower, in the chill of nightfall; or rather, to use a metaphor which has
often occurred to me, it hardens its features, crystallizing them into a
stony mask, even as some face, once friendly, grows strangely indifferent
in death.
My companion of this morning, who happened to be of a religious turn of
mind, took the opportunity to glide off his beast and, standing a little
apart, with his arms thrown through the reins to prevent the mule from
straying, recited the dawn prayer. The noble gesticulations looked well on
that bare sandy dune, in the face of the Chott.
As for myself, I thought of the old god Triton, who dwelt in yonder foul
lake and showed some kindness to Jason, long ago, when his ships were
entangled in the ooze; I thought of Tritogeneia, the savage, mud-born
creature who, cast into the purifying crucible of Hellenic mythopoesis,
emerged as bright-eyed Athene, mother of wisdom and domestic arts. The
Amazon maidens of the country used to have combats in her honour with
sticks and stones, and the fairest of them, decked in a panoply of Grecian
armour, was conducted in a chariot about the lake. A fabled land! Here,
they say, Poseidon was born, and Gorgo and Perseus, Medusa and Pegasus and
other comely and wondrous shapes that have become familiar to us through
Greek lore.
These folks of Atlantis "saw no dreams," but they studied astronomy and
navigation; their priests may well have been those Druids whose
temple-structures, the senams and cromlechs, have wandered from the
Tripolitan frontier as far as the chilly coasts of Brittany, and Salisbury
Plain, and Ultima Thule. And every day, as the sun passed over their
heads, they saluted him not as the Giver of Life or Lord of Earth, but
cursed him with imprecations long and loathsome, for his scorching fires.
Shaw, I believe, was the first to identify the Chotts with Lake Triton.
There were islands in this sea; the sacred isle of Phla, for instance,
which the Spartans were commanded by an oracle to colonize, and whereon
stood a temple to Aphrodite. There are islands to this day, great and
small; one of them is called Faraoun--evidently an Egyptian name, for
Egyptian influence was felt early in these regions; at Faraoun grows a
peculiar kind of date which, we are told, an Egyptian army had left there.
The waters of the pool touched Nefta, whose Kadi gave Tissot a description
of a buried vessel which, from its shape, could be nothing but a "galère
antique"--it was dismembered for fuel, and metal nails were found in its
framework.
Movers is probably correct in seeking at Nefta the Biblical Naphtuhim of
the generation of Noah: an Egyptian document speaks of it as the "land of
Napit." Arabs have another theory of its origin. According to a chronicle
preserved in the Nefta mosque, the founder of the town was Kostel, son of
Sem, son of Noah; he called it Nefta because it was here that water
boiled, for the first time, after the Deluge. The Romans called it Nepte,
but, in confirmation of this old story, I observe that the Arabs of to-day
invariably pronounce Nefta as _Nafta_. It is quite likely, too, that the
name Hecatompylos, the city of a hundred gates, which has been applied to
Gafsa, is a misreading for Hecatompolis, the land of those hundred cities
which, they say, studded the shores of this great lake.
For it was a lake, or series of lakes, and nothing else; geological
evidence is opposed to the supposition that the Chott country was ever a
gulf of the Mediterranean within historical times--it was merely a chain
of inland waters. And another surprising discovery has been made of late,
namely, that these depressions lie at different levels and have, each of
them, its own system of alimentation. This fact came to light between 1872
and 1883, when a number of studies were undertaken with a view to the
restoration of this ancient Libyan Sea. Men of middle years will still
remember the excitement produced by this scheme which originated with
Tissot, though another name will for ever be associated with it, that of
Roudaire, a man of science dominated by an obsession, who clung to this
project with the blind faith of a martyr, his enthusiasm growing keener in
proportion as the plan was proved to be futile, fantastic, fatuous. True,
the great Lesseps had taken his part.
Desolation reigns on this morass of salt, where the life of man and beast,
and even of plants and stones, faints away in mortal agony. Unnumbered
multitudes of living creatures have sunk into its perfidious abysses. "A
caravan of ours," says an Arab author, "had to cross the Chott one day; it
was composed of a thousand baggage camels. Unfortunately one of the beasts
strayed from the path, and all the others followed it. Nothing in the
world could be swifter than the manner in which the crust yielded and
engulphed them; then it became like what it was before, as if the thousand
baggage camels had never existed." Yet it is traversed in several
directions, and if you strain your eyes from these heights you can detect
certain dusky lines that crawl in serpentine movement across the
melancholy waste--caravan tracks to the south.
Unlike the living ocean, this withered one never smiles: it wears a
hostile face. There is a charm, none the less--a charm that appeals to
complex modern minds--in that picture of eternal, irremediable sterility.
Its hue is ever-changing, as the light falls upon it; the plain, too,
shifts up and down with mirage play, climbing sometimes into the horizon,
or again sharply defined against it; often it resembles a milky river
flowing between banks of mud. The surface is rarely lustrous, but of a
velvety texture, like a banded agate, mouse-colour or liver-tinted, with
paler streaks in between, of the dead whiteness of a sheet of paper; now
and again there flash up livid coruscations that glister awhile like
enamel or burnished steel, and then fade away. These are the fields of
virgin salt which, when you cross them, are bright as purest Alpine snow,
and may blind you temporarily with their dazzling glare. Viewed from these
uplands, however, the ordered procession of horizontal bars stretching
into infinity, their subdued coloration, fills the mind with a wave of
deep peace.
Walking from Nefta to the Chott, you will reach, on the burning plain, a
maraboutic shrine that might serve as an asylum for some
conscience-stricken, malaria-proof penitent. They go well together,
maraboutism and the Chott--two factors that make for barrenness in man and
nature.
And Nefta is full of such shrines. Another one, for example, has been
built into the very heart of the rustling palm forest; the water glides
under its walls wherein sits the aged impostor who, unlike his amiable
colleague at Tozeur, is too holy even to speak to unbelievers (you are
permitted to gaze upon him through a grated window). Yet another one is
the humble Sidi Murzouk, the negroes' sanctuary, among the sand-hills on
the middle heights.
[Illustration: Nefta: The Shrine on the Chott]
These are three representative types of a hundred, at least.
It is hard to say why the French foster these Arab maraboutic tendencies
as opposed to the saner ideals of the Berber stock; perhaps they think it
politic to _arabize_ the older race in this and a few other particulars,
though it signifies, almost invariably, a retrograde movement of
civilization.
Of these pious folk the paradox is true that the best are the worst;
those, that is, who do not expose themselves to ridicule or adverse
criticism, whose good intentions are self-evident, who carry out to the
letter the apostolic injunction of clothing the naked, feeding the hungry,
and succouring the distressed. It is they who pander to all the worst
qualities of the Arabs, improvident and incorrigible loafers, besides
affording an asylum to every criminal; their _zaouiahs_, like our own
mediæval convents, are often enough mere menageries of deformed minds and
bodies. As for the much-vaunted calm to be found within their walls, it is
there, to be sure, together with certain other things--there and nowhere
else, since the frantic religious passions, of which such monastic
institutions are offshoots, have made peaceable living outside their walls
an impossibility.
In a land where no one reads or writes or thinks or reasons, where dirt
and insanity are regarded as marks of divine favour, how easy it is to
acquire a reputation for holiness--(oral tradition alone can make a
saint)--to turn the god-habit of your fellow-creatures into a profitable
source of revenue: as easy as it was in Europe, in the days when we
cherished such knaves and neurotic dreamers. Some of them are simple
epileptics, verminous and importunate; others, shrewd worldly rogues who,
having run away from home after a fit of discontent or homicide, cruise
vaguely about Islamism for half a lifetime, and at last return, bearded
venerables, to be stared at by their kinsfolk as portents, heaven-sent,
because they have freighted themselves with a cargo of fond maxims such as
"The World is Illusion: all Flesh is Vanity," and similar gnomic
balderdash, the wisdom of the unlettered.
No wonder they despise what they call the world. For the real world, the
cosmos of rational thought and action, has never existed for them. At
Tangier, Mecca, Jerusalem or Timbuctu, they have sat eternally in the same
coffee-houses or mosques, and listened eternally to the same theological
chatterings; which accounts for a certain "family likeness" between all of
these mentally starved creatures, who are nevertheless favoured of Allah
so far as bodily comforts are concerned, inasmuch, as (if they play their
cards correctly) money, wives, and lands pour down upon them till, in old
age, they become so fuddled with homage and holy mumblings that they
themselves cannot exactly remember whether they are humbugs or not: this,
I take it, must be the culminating point, the _dernier mot_, of maraboutic
enlightenment.
And beside these ten thousand impromptu saints that spring up daily out of
the fertile soil of Arab imagination and poverty, every one of the
descendants of Mahomet's daughter is a marabout, and all their children,
male and female, in _sæcula sæculorum_.
God alone, who numbers the stars, can keep count of their legions.
_Chapter XXIII_
_THE GARDENS OF NEFTA_
A person unacquainted with tropical vegetation would be amazed at the
prodigality of the oasis of Nefta; in point of exuberance it is as
superior to Tozeur as that to Gafsa. But the cathedral-like gravity of
Tozeur is lacking; there is too much riot and opulence, too many
voluptuous festoons and spears and spirals, a certain craving, so to
speak, after the purely ornate: if Tozeur represents the decorative style
of Louis Quatorze, this is assuredly Louis Seize. One great drawback is
that the thick undergrowth often obstructs the view; and another, that you
cannot walk about in all directions, as at Tozeur, because there is too
much running water--perhaps one should say too few paths and bridges. For
the last two days a sand-storm of unusual violence has been raging. On the
ridges above the town one can hardly stand on one's feet; the grains fly
upwards, over the crest of the hill, in blinding showers, mighty squadrons
of them careering across the plain below. The landscape is involved in a
dim, roseate twilight. But occasionally there comes a sickly radiance from
behind the curtain of cloud that glimmers lustreless, like an incandescent
lamp seen through a fog: it is the sun shining brightly in the pure
regions of the upper air.
Here, under the trees, the wind is scarce felt, though you can perceive it
by the fretful clashing of the palm branches overhead. And despite the
storm there is a strange hush in the air, the hush of things to come, a
sense of uneasiness; spring is upon us, buds are unfolding and waters draw
up forcefully from a soil which seems to heave under one's very feet. It
is a moment of throbbing intensity.
And the scirocco moans to these pangs of elemental gestation which man,
the creature of earth, still darkly feels within him.
The ground is cultivated with mathematical parsimoniousness and divided
into squares which made me think of the Roman _agrimensores_. But
concerning this point, a civilized old native told me the following
legend. Long ago, he said, these oases were wild jungles, and the few
human creatures who lived near them little better than beasts. Then came a
wise man who cut up and ploughed the watery district of Gafsa, Tozeur and
Nefta; he planted trees and all the other growths useful to mankind; he
divided the land into patches, led the water through them, and apportioned
them among certain families--in short, he gave these oases their present
shape, and did his work so well that up to this day no one has been able
to suggest any improvements or to quarrel with his arrangement. The story
interested me; it may be a variant of the old Hercules myth--it shows how
much the Arabs, with their veneration for past heroes and prophets, and
their sterile distrust in the possibility of any kind of progress, will
believe.[1]
[Footnote 1: It shows, also, that one cannot be too careful what one
writes.]
I will take this little credit to myself, that, unconvinced of my own
explanation, I made further enquiries and learned that--allowing for the
inevitable exaggeration--the man actually existed! His name was Ibn
Shabbath; he was a kind of engineer-topographer who lived about the
thirteenth century; he wrote a commentary, in three volumes, on some
well-known Arabic geographical poem--a commentary which exists only in a
few manuscript copies, one of which is preserved at the Grand Mosque in
Tunis, and another, I am told, in the library of Monsieur de Fleury.
[Illustration: Marabout in the Nefta Gardens]
Yet the _deglat_ palms which grow here in great abundance--the finest in
the world--with their lower leaves pendent, sere and yellow; the figs,
lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in savage meshes of unpruned
boughs among which the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers
liana-fashion, in crazy convolutions--all these things conspire to give to
certain parts of the oasis, notwithstanding its high cultivation, a
bearded, primeval look. The palms, particularly the young ones, are
assiduously tended and groomed by half-naked gardeners who labour in the
moist earth by relays, day and night.
What nights of brooding stillness in summer, under the palms, when those
leaves hang motionless in the steaming vapour as though carved out of
bronze, while the surrounding desert exhales the fiery emanations of
noontide, often 135 degrees in the shade. For the heat of Nefta is
hellish. One might think that the inhabitants, whom Bertholon holds to be
descendants, somewhat remote, of the old marrow-sucking,
grandmother-devouring Neanderthal folk, would have become placid by this
time; that all harshness must have been boiled out of them. Far from it!
The faces that one sees are less friendly than those at Tozeur, and they
were noted, in former days, for their vehemence in religious matters. I am
sorry to hear it, but not surprised. The arts and other fair flowerings of
the human mind may succumb to fierce climates, but theological zeal is one
of those things which no extremes of temperature can subdue; it thrives
equally well at the Poles or Equator, like that "Brown or Hanoverian rat"
which Charles Waterton--a glorious old zealot himself--so cordially
detested.
There are eight Europeans here, and thirteen thousand natives: I should
not care to be in Nefta on the day when the Senoussi are to realize their
long-deferred hopes. All the same, it is a relief not to hear the eternal
gossip of employés or to see the soldiers loitering at street corners,
like dressed-up chimpanzees. The better class of natives are sometimes of
an astonishing immaculate cleanliness from head to foot; they are often
remarkably handsome. The traveller Temple was struck, at Nefta, with the
beauty of its "desart nymphs, whose eyes are all fire and brilliancy," and
he might have said the same of the boys.
But I observe a defect in the eyes of all Arabs, namely, that they seem to
be unable to utilize them as a means of conveying thoughts; they have no
eye language, even among each other, and must express by words or by some
gesture what other people can make clear with a glance. The best-looking
youth or maiden has eyes which, beautiful as they are, might be those of a
stuffed cow for all the expression they emit. They cannot even wink.
From the rising ground at the back of Nefta you look down into a circular
vale of immoderate plant-luxuriance, a never-ending delight of the eye;
the French call it by the appropriate name of "la corbeille." Here the
springs issue--152 of them--from under steep walls of sand; they form glad
pools of blue and green that mirror the foliage with impeccable
truthfulness and then, after coursing in distracted filaments about the
"corbeille," join their waters and speed downhill towards the oasis, a
narrow belt of trees running along either side. This marvellous
palm-embroidered rift sunders Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills
overhead, into two distinct towns or settlements. The eye follows the
stream as far as the low-lying plantations and into the Chott beyond,
resting at last upon the violet haze of its mysterious southern shores.
Visible from here are also certain mounds at the eastern extremity of the
oasis, near the Chott; they are marked on the map as "ruins of Zafrana."
What this Zafrana was, or how it comes to have a name resembling that of a
small Sicilian village, I cannot tell; thither, at all events, I bent my
steps, having heard that ancient coins, as well as lamps, had been found
here. So far as I can make out there is only pottery on this site, and
none of it pre-Mohammedan; if a city ever stood here it has been
completely entombed, or torn into shreds by the wind, the flying sands,
and the heat. Nefta itself, built of soft loam, would crumble away in
briefest time if left unrepaired. The acute Guerin was not more successful
than myself at Zafrana, nor was Maltzan.
This being the most exposed corner of the oasis, the _tabias_ have grown
to a fine size; I climbed over the inner one, which must be ten yards high
and at least twenty in breadth. From its summit one perceives distant
forms of ruinous buildings rising up in the Tozeur direction, on the slope
which inclines to the Chott. Was this, perhaps, Zafrana?
No. Riding up to them, I found they were merely turret-like eminences of
hard bluish clay, the carapace of the desert, which the wind has carved
into quaint semblances of human dwellings. In the evening light they catch
the last rays of the sun and shine like diaphanous spectres upon the
darkened ground, but at sunrise, when the yellow sands sparkle with light,
they tower up grim and menacing: a mournful, ghoul-haunted region, like
those veritable townships of the past, Dougga, Timgad and the rest of
them, standing all forlorn in their African desolation.
Whoever has visited such sites will understand the impression they
conveyed to men of simpler ages. He will realize how they must have
inflamed the phantasy of those wandering mediæval Arabs who could make no
distinction, in this respect, between the works of man and those of
nature, nor bring themselves to believe that such titanic structures were
reared by human hands or for any human purpose--were otherwise than an
illusion, or a natural incongruity. That amphitheatre of El-Djem, for
example, visible for leagues in the solitude around--what more apt to
become a true mountain of wondrous shape, the haunt of some Ifrit
imprisoned in its cup or soaring thence, a pillar of cloud, into the
zenith?
These are the ruins whose report was carried to Bagdhad by those early
caravan traders, and there woven into the flowery tapestries of the
"Arabian Nights"--nightmare cities, rising like an enchantment out of the
desert sand; bereft of the voices and footsteps of men, but teeming with
hoarded treasure and graven images of gods that gaze down, inscrutable and
sternly resplendent, upon the wanderer who, stumbling fearfully through a
labyrinth of silent halls, suddenly encounters, in demon-guarded chamber,
some ensorcelled maiden, frozen to stone.
_Chapter XXIV_
_NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE_