Front matter (continued 3)

On my return journey down the Seldja gorge, that afternoon, I had a narrow escape. It struck me that it would be more agreeable, instead of once more following the windings of the brook, to proceed along the railway—a single line—that climbs down from Ras-el-Aioun to within a few hundred yards of the bordj, where my horse was waiting. It was easier walking; it would also be shadier (in the tunnels) and, last and chiefest, I would enjoy a change of scene by looking down into the valley instead of up at the cliffs.

Plausible reasoning.

This line is a pretty little piece of engineering; there are bridges and steep embankments that afford fine views into the tortuous depths of the gorge; there are tunnels, blasted into the rock without lining of masonry, deliciously cool and all too short—all too short save one, that seemed never-ending. It writhed about, too, in that dark mountain; I saw no speck of light, either before or behind me; the iron roadway was raised about a foot, on rough stones, above the narrow path that followed the jagged, irregular wall of rock along which I was groping and stumbling. Rather an awkward place, I thought, to meet a train——

And as if in that reflection had lain the potency of a spell, there came upon me, at that moment, from behind, a distinct blast of wind and a low rumbling sound. I pricked up my ears. There was no doubt about it: a train, still invisible, was gliding in good-natured fashion, with steam shut off, down the gradient. A considerable number of ideas, incongruous and quite beside the mark, passed through my mind; but also this one—if I ran, I should inevitably stumble against a sleeper or some projecting stone; if I stumbled, I should lose my presence of mind, and then, perhaps—! Meanwhile, the noise grew louder, deafening; already, in imagination, I felt the monster's hot breath upon me.

Walking steadily, therefore, for a few more yards, I felt a little cavity in the rough-hewn wall of rock that appeared deeper than the others; there I compressed myself, feeling flatter than a turbot, and absurdly resigned. It was the nick of time. The earth was trembling under the mechanical horror; it passed me, with a roar and rush of wind, by I know not how many inches; there were flashes of light, a screeching of machinery, an acrid smell of mineral oils and heated metal. Then all was over again, save for a choking-fit produced by a deluge of bituminous coal.

Just a little flutter.

But outside that tunnel, in the sunshine, I sat down and indulged in certain musings. Suicide of an Englishman in Tunisia: that was it; inasmuch as even they who know me well could hardly be brought to believe that such an act of abysmal foolishness, as this of not investigating on which side the safety-niches were, could be the result of accident. An ignoble, ridiculous death.

It must have been a fit of temporary obliviousness, brought about by the unaccustomed heat of the sun.

Or possibly the kif….

It affects people differently.

I must limit myself to three pipes, in future.

Chapter XVII

ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE

Now, on the former occasion, instead of descending into the bordj from the railway line, I rode with the Tripolitan once more out of the rock-portal into the plain, that glowed with the fugitive fires of sunset. It is a treeless waste, bereft of every sign of cultivation.

And yet, if you look on your left hand as you issue from the gorge, you will perceive, at the very narrowest point, some fragments of ancient masonry adhering to the cliff; they are all that remains of a Roman dam which blocked up the valley, regulated the supply of water flowing from above, and purified it from stones and sand. The inference is clear: the plain must have been cultivated in those days. Likely enough, it was covered, like many other parts of "Africa," with olives, that drew their life from this judiciously managed water-supply.

The Oued Seldja to-day fulfils no such useful function. Once the rock-portal is passed, it unlearns all its sprightly grace and trickles disconsolately through the sands, expiring, at last, in the dreary Chott el Rharsa.

Monsieur Bordereau thinks that the ancient "forest of Africa" was composed 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.

Later on we went to what they call the Roman barrage of the main oasis 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.

The climate, and then their religion, has made them hard and incurious; it 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

There are cities in the East where, from ramparts that support fairy-like 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.