palaces--complicated assemblages of courts and plashing fountains and cool
chambers through which the breeze wanders in an artificial twilight of
marble screens pierced so craftily, one might think them a flowing drapery
of lace-work--where, from such wizard creations of Oriental pomp, you
glance down and behold, stretched at your feet, a burning waste of sand. A
fine incentive to the luxurious imagination of a tyrant, this contrast,
that has all the glamour of a dream....
But such abrupt transitions are not the rule. Midway between the pulsating
town-life and the desert there lies, mostly, a sinister extra-mural
region, a region of gaping walls and potsherds, where the asphodel shoot
up to monstrous tufts and the fallacious colocynth, the wild melon,
scatters its globes of bitter gold. For it is in the nature of Orientals
that their habitations should surround themselves with a girdle of
corrupting things, gruesome and yet fascinating: a Browning might have
grown enamoured of its macabre spell.
No European cares to linger about these precincts after dusk; here lie the
dead, in thick-strewn graves; here the jackal roams at night--it thrusts
its pointed snout through the ephemeral masonry of townsmen's tombs or
scratches downward within the ring of stones that mark some poor bedouin's
corpse, to take toll of the carrion horrors beneath; so you may find many
graves rifled. And if you come by day you will probably see, crouching
among the ruins, certain old men, pariahs, animated lumps of dirt and
rags. They are so uncouth and unclean, so utterly non-human, that one
wonders whether they are really of the sons of Adam, and not rather
goblins, or possibly some freak, some ill-natured jest on the part of the
vegetable or mineral kingdoms. Day after day they come and burrow for orts
among the dust-heaps, or brood motionless in the sunshine, or trace
cabalistic signs with their fingers in the sand--the future, they tell
you, can be unriddled out of its cascade-like movements.
It is one of the complaints of sentimentalists that the French are
abolishing these picturesque Arab cemeteries in Tunisia; combining
firmness with a great deal of tact, they insidiously appropriate these
sanctified premises and deck them with timber as a solace for coming
generations. Let them go! The undiluted Orient is still wide enough; and
no one will appreciate the metamorphosis more than the native citizens
themselves, who love, above all things, to play about and idle in the
shade of trees; perhaps, in the course of time, they will realize that not
only Allah, but also man, is able to plant and take care of them. Your
Arab often has a love of nature which is none the worse for being wholly
unconscious.
At Nefta there is no impure region, properly so called. The searching
sunbeams and the winds are inimical to all the lush concomitants of decay;
the sand also plays its part; so every dead dog, and every dead camel,
arrests the flying grains and is straightway interred--transformed into a
hillock, trivial but sanitary.
There are tombs, of course, tombs galore; but what strikes one most are
the numerous shrines erected to saints alive or dead, of which I have
already spoken.
You will do well to visit the Christian cemetery. It lies on an eminence
above the town and is almost buried under deep waves of sand, which have
risen to the summit of the surrounding walls and drowned the three graves,
all but their tall stones that emerge above the flood. One of them is that
of a _controlleur_ of the district who died at his post while combating a
cholera epidemic--there may be more of them, for aught I know, submerged
beneath the drift.
It is surely in the interests of French prestige to pay a few francs for
the cleansing of such a place in a land where, as conquerors, they live on
a pedestal and are to assert their superiority in every way. It will be
long ere Arabs can appreciate French art and science, but they understand
visible trifles of this kind, and, conversing with them, I have found
that, like many simple-minded people, they are disposed to contrast
unfavourably their own burial-grounds with our trim method of sepulture,
which assures to the defunct a few more years of apparent respect, while
flattering the vanity of the living. To a sensitive Christian this
cemetery of Nefta must be a sad and a scandalous sight; no humble nomad's
tomb on the bleak hillside is more neglected than these memorials to his
fellow-believers who have died, far from their homes, under the flaming
sun of Africa.
From this point you can see the tail-end of the oasis. It lies in the
Zafrana region, and is the worst nourished. This, I suppose, is
inevitable; the gardens must be continually moving--moving away from the
Chott towards their vital sources, which now lie under a respectable
precipice of sand. It is hard to believe that the present site of the
fountains is what one might call the natural, aboriginal one. I imagine
that the cultivators, in the course of ages, must have tracked the element
and followed it up, as a terrier will pursue a rabbit in its burrow,
planting trees in proportion as they laid bare its once subterranean bed.
Thus, the supply of liquid being constant, the oasis is impelled to wander
in the direction of its springs; the more you add to the head, the shorter
grows the tail. In prehistoric days, maybe, the water gushed out somewhere
near the Chott; the charming depression of the "corbeille" is perhaps the
work of human hands.
The same has struck me at Tozeur, which also marches horizontally away
from its termination. An exquisite corbeille could be manufactured here;
all the elements are present; it only requires a few thousand years of
labour. And what are they, in a land like this?
And the oases are undergoing another and more curious
progression--downwards. Strange to think that, while towns and villages
rise higher every year, these gardens are slowly descending into the
depths; they are already far below the circumambient desert, though not so
deeply sunk as the verdant, crater-like depressions of some parts of
Africa. For it stands to reason that as the stream-beds become excavated
more and more--and this is what has brought them to their present
position--the groves must irrevocably follow suit, since water escapes at
the lowest level, while trees cannot be suspended in air. Supposing the
system of dams, which now force the liquid to keep to a certain plane,
fell into disuse, how would it end?
The imagination of an Edgar Poe might picture these Nefta gardens as the
reverse of those of Semiramis--sunk, that is, further into the
profundities of the earth than the already existing Sahara
plantations--with this difference, that here, to obviate infiltration from
the ooze of the Chott, sturdy walls must enclose them. Ages pass, and
still the groves descend, while the defences grow so stout and high that,
viewed from above, the palms down there, in that deep funnel, look like
puny vegetables, and men like ants. And still they descend.... One day the
pale population engaged in tilling this shadowy paradise will be horrified
to perceive, in their encircling bulwarks, rents and crevices that ooze
forth ominous jets of mud. The damage is hastily repaired, but the cracks
appear once more, and, widening imperceptibly at first, soon burst asunder
and admit, from every side, a wrinkled flood of slime which closes with
sullen murmur over the site of the drowned oasis.
Or if the wells dried up? One of those geological displacements that have
taken place in past times would suffice to wipe out the memory of this
town--the palms would wither, the clay-built houses melt into the earth
whence they arose.
Meanwhile, perched on the last wave of an ocean of shining sand, Nefta
sits in immemorial contemplation of the desert and vividly green oasis
which flows, like a grand and luminous river, into the very heart of its
flat dwellings. There is a note of passionate solemnity about the place.
All too soon, I fear, the railway to Tozeur will have done its work; dusty
boulevards, white bungalows, eucalyptus trees and _bureaux de monopoles_
will profane its strangely wonderful beauty, its virginal monotone of
golden grey. Nefta will become a neurasthenic demi-mondaine, like Biskra.
Such, at least, is the prognosis.
But one is apt to forget on how precarious a tenure these gardens are
held, with the hungry desert gnawing ceaselessly at their outskirts; for
the desert is hungry and yet patient; it has devoured sundry oases by
simply waiting till man is preoccupied with other matters. And how rare
they are, these specks of green, these fountains in the sand--rare as the
smiles in a lifetime of woe! Beyond and all around lies a grave and
ungracious land, the land of the lawless, fanatical wanderers.
Those Romans and heathen Berbers, tillers of the soil, had remained in
contact with phenomena; unconcerned, relatively speaking, with the affairs
of the next world, they attained a passable degree of civilization in this
one. But your pastoral Arab scorns a knowledge of general mundane
principles. His life is a series of disconnected happenings which must be
enjoyed or endured; he is incapable of reading aright the past or present,
because he asks himself _why?_ instead of _how?_ Whoever despises the
investigation of secondary causes is a menace to his fellow-creatures.
Face to face with infinities, man disencumbers himself. Those abysmal
desert-silences, those spaces of scintillating rock and sand-dune over
which the eye roams and vainly seeks a point of repose, quicken his animal
perception; he stands alone and must think for himself--and so far good.
But while discarding much that seems inconsiderable before such wide and
splendid horizons, this nomad loads himself with the incubus of
dream-states; while standing alone, he grows into a ferocious brigand.
Poets call him romantic, but politicians are puzzled what to do with a
being who to a senile mysticism joins the peevish destructiveness of a
child.
It is an almost universal fallacy to blame the desert for this state of
affairs; to insinuate, for example, that even as it disintegrates the
mountains into sand, so it decomposes the intellectual fabric of mankind,
his synthesizing faculty, into its primordial elements of ecstasy and
emotionalism. This is merely reaction: the desert's revenge. For we now
know a little something of the condition of old Arabia and Africa in the
days ere these ardent shepherds appeared on the scene, with their crude
and chaotic monotheism. The desert has not made the Arab, any more than it
made the Berber. It would be considerably nearer the truth to reverse the
proposition: to say that the evils which now afflict Northern Africa, its
physical abandonment, its social and economical decay, are the work of
that ideal Arab, the man of Mecca. Mahomet is the desert-maker.
INDEX
Ain Moulares,
Aissouiyah,
Bagdhad,
Bekri, geographer,
Bertholon,
Biskra,
Bled-el-Adher, _see_ Tozeur
Bordereau, Pierre,
Boulanger, General,
Boujaja,
Bournu,
Bruce, James,
Cambon, M.,
Carthage,
Chotts, the,
--el Rharsa,
--Djerid,
Couillault, M.,
Desfontaines,
Djerid, the,
Dougga,
Dufresnoy, M. Paul,
Eberhardt, Isabelle,
Edrisius,
El Djem,
El Hamma,
Eloued,
Faraoun,
Feriana,
Florentinus, Bishop,
Gafsa,
--Meda Hill,
Gordian, Emperor,
Guerin,
Guifla,
Henchir Souatir,
Jebel Assalah,
Jebel Guettor,
Jebel Orbata,
Jebel Zitouna,
Kairouan.
Khroumiria.
Kocher, M.
Koken, Professor.
Leila (Lalla).
Leo, John.
Lesseps, Ferdinand de.
Lucan.
Majen.
Maknassy.
Maltzan.
Mayet, Valery.
Melkarth.
Metlaoui.
Mount Abu.
Movers.
Nefta.
Nefzaoua.
Orosius.
Oudiane.
Oued Baghara.
Oued Baiesh.
Phla,
Ptolemy,
Ras-el-Aioun,
Redeyeff,
Rogib (hill),
Roudaire,
Sallust,
Sbeitla,
Seldja, gorge,
--water
Sfax,
Shaw, Thomas,
Sidi Ahmed Zarroung,
Sidi Mansur,
Sidi Murzouk,
Souf,
Souk-el-Arba,
Sousse,
Suffetula,
Temple,
Thala,
Thomas, M. Philippe,
Timgad,
Tissot, James,
Tozeur (Tisouros)
Triton, lake
Tunis
Udaipur
Zafrana