.FOUNmiNS
IN THE SAND

RMBLBS AMONG
THE OASES OF
TUNISIA BY

-Yi^LIl«¥]MII¥EI^SnirY°

Bought with the income
ofthe
Matthew C, D. Borden Fund I

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
SIREN LAND
BY NORMAN DOUGLAS
Ss. net. Illustrated
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
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Morning Leader: — "A vastly entertaining and permanently en
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Daily Ne-ws : — " It is, indeed, a relief to read literature such as
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Glasgo-w Herald: — "The most enjoyable piece of literary work
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Ne-n Tork Nation : — " The book is in a paradoxical degree both
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charmingly." Chicago Evening Post .•— " ' Siren Land ' is every inch a book."
LONDON : J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND

OTHER VOLUMES OF TRAVEL
UNIFORM WITH THIS BOOK
EGYPTIAN AESTHETICS By RENE FRANCIS
BEHIND THE RANGES
By F. G. AFLALO
LONDON : MARTIN SECKER

FOUNTAINSIN THE SAND
RAMBLES AMONG THE OASES OF TUNISIA
By Norman Douglas SSS

LONDON : MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

CONTENTS

I. EN ROUTE
II. BY THE OUED BAIESH
III. THE TERMID
IV. STONES OF GAFSA
V. SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
VI. AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
VII. AT THE CAFE
VIII. POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
IX. SOME OF OUR GUESTS
X. THE OASIS OF LEILA
XI. A HAVEN OF REFUGE
XII. THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
XIII. TO METLAOUI
XIV. PHOSPHATES
XV. THE SELDJA GORGE
XVI. AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS
XVII. ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE
XVIII. THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
XIX. OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
XX. A WATERY LABYRINTH
XXI. OLD TISOUROS
XXIL THE DISMAL CHOTT
XXIII. THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
XXIV. NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE

PAGE 13
24
33425°
63 72
88
95
105 120127141150 161
169 175 182
191
202212 220230
238

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACINO PAQE
GAFSA AND JEBEL ORBATA 24
ENTRANCE TO THE TERMID 3+
AT THE TERMID 4°
A STREET IN GAFSA 42
HADRIAN'S INSCRIPTION 48
THE LAST PALMS 52
CAFE BY THE MULBERRY-TREE 56
MY FRIEND SILENUS 64
NATIVES OF GAFSA 96
ROMAN STONES IN WALL 1 1 2
OLIVES IN THE OASIS 1 1 8
TOZEUR AND ITS OASIS 192
THE WATERS OF TOZEUR 204
THE SHRINE ON THE CHOTT 226
MARABOUT IN THE NEFTA GARDENS 232
A BEGGAR 240

Fountains in the Sand

Chapter I
EN ROUTE
LIKELY enough, I would not have remained
in Gafsa more than a couple of days. For
J it was my intention to go from England
straight down to the oases of the Djerid,
Tozeur and Nefta, a corner of Tunisia left unex
plored during my last visit to that country — there,
where the inland regions shelve down towards those
mysterious depressions, the Chotts, dried-up oceans,
they say, where in olden days the fleets of Atlantis
rode at anchor. . . .
But there fell into my hands, by the way, a volume
that deals exclusively with Gafsa — Pierre Bor
dereau's " La Capsa ancienne : La Gafsa moderne "
— and, glancing over its pages as the train wound
southwards along sterile river-beds and across
dusty highlands, I became interested in this place
13

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
of Gafsa, which seems to have had such a long and
eventful history. Even before arriving at the spot,
I had come to the correct conclusion that it must
be worth more than a two days' visit.
The book opens thus : 0-ne ¦must reach -Gafsa by
way of Sfax. Undoubtedly, this was the right thing
to do ; all my fellow-travellers were agreed upon
that point ; leaving Sfax by a night train, you arrive
at Gafsa in the early hours of the following morning.
One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax. . . .
But a fine spirit of northern independence
prompted me to try an alternative route. The
time-table marked a newly opened line of railway
which runs directly inland from the port of Sousse ;
the distance to Gafsa seemed shorter ; the country
was no doubt new and interesting. There was the
station of Feriana, for instance, celebrated for its
Roman antiquities and well worth a visit ; I looked
at the map and saw a broad road connecting this
place with Gafsa ; visions of an evening ride across
the desert arose before my delighted imagination ;
instead of passing the night in an uncomfortable
train, I should be already ensconced at a luxurious
table d'hote, and so to bed.
The gods willed otherwise.
In pitch darkness, at the inhuman hour of
5.55 a.m., the train crept out of Sousse : sixteen
14

EN ROUTE
miles an hour is its prescribed pace. The weather
grew sensibly colder as we rose into the uplands,
a stricken region, tree-less and water-less, with
gaunt brown hiUs receding into the background ;
by midday, when Sbeitla was reached, it was
blowing a hurricane. I had hoped to wander, for
half an hour or so, among the ruins of this old city
of Suffetula, but the cold, apart from their distance
from the station, rendered this impossible ; in
order to reach the shed where luncheon was served,
we were obliged to crawl backwards, crab-wise, to
protect our faces from a storm which raised pebbles,
the size of respectable peas, from the ground, and
scattered them in a hail about us. I despair of giving
any idea of that glacial blast : it was as if one stood,
deprived of clothing, of skin and flesh — a jabbering
anatomy — upon some drear Caucasian pinnacle.
And I thought upon the gentle rains of London,
from which I had fled to these sunny regions,
I remembered the fogs, moist and warm and
caressing : greatly is the English winter maligned !
Seeing that this part of Tunisia is covered with the
forsaken cities of the Romans who were absurdly
sensitive in the matter of heat and cold, one is
driven to the conclusion that the climate must
indeed have changed since their day.
And my fellow-traveller, who had slept through-
^5

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
out the morning (we were the only two Europeans
in the train), told me that this weather was nothing
out of the common ; that at this season it blew in
such fashion for weeks on end ; Sbeitla, to be sure,
lay at a high point of the line, but the cold was no
better at the present terminus, Henchir Souatir,
whither he was bound on some business connected
with the big phosphate company. On such occasions
the natives barricade their doors and cower within
over a warming-pan filled with the glowing embers
of desert shrubs ; as for Europeans — a dog's life, he
said ; in winter we are shrivelled to mummies, in
summer roasted alive.
I spoke of Feriana, and my projected evening
ride across a few miles of desert.
" Gafsa . . . Gafsa," he began, in dreamy
fashion, as though I had proposed a trip to Lake
Tchad. And then, emphatically :
" Gafsa ? Why on earth didn't you go over
Sfax ? "
" Ah, everybody has been suggesting that route."
" I can well believe it. Monsieur."
In short, my plan was out of the question ;
utterly out of the question. The road— a mere
track — ^was over- sixty kilometres in length and
positively unsafe on a wintry night ; besides, the
land lay 800 metres in height, and a traveller
16

EN ROUTE
would be frozen to death. I must go as far as
Maj en, a few stations beyond Feriana ; sleep
there in an Arab funduk (caravanserai), and thank
my stars if I found any one wiUing to supply
me with a beast for the journey onward next
morning. There are practically no tourists along
this line, he explained, and consequently no accom
modation for them ; the towns that one sees so
beautifuUy marked on the map are railway stations —
that and nothing more ; and as to the broad highways
crossing the southern parts of Tunisia in various
directions — ^weU, they simply don't exist, voila !
" That's not very consoling," I said, as we took
our seats in the compartment again. " It begins
weU." And my meditations took on a sombre hue. I
thought of a Uttle overland trip I had once under
taken, in India, with the identical object of avoiding
a long circuitous railway journey — from Udaipur
to Mount Abu. I remembered those " few miles
of desert."
Decidedly, things were beginning weU.
" If you go to Gafsa," he resumed, " — if you
reaUy propose going to Gafsa, pray let me give you
a card to a friend of mine, who lives there with his
famUy and may be useful to you. No trouble,
I assure you ! "
B 17

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
He scribbled a few Unes, addressed to " Monsieur
Paul Dufresnoy, Engineer," for which I thanked
him. " We aU know each other in Africa," he said.
" It's quite a small place — our Africa, I mean.
You could squeeze the whole of it into the Place
de la Concorde. . . . Nothing but minerals here
abouts," he went on. "They talk and dream of
them, and sometimes their dreams come true. Did
you observe the young proprietor of the restaurant
at Sbeitla ? Well, a short time ago some Arabs
brought him a handful of stones from the mountains ;
he bought the site for two or three hundred francs,
and a company has already offered him eight hundred
thousand for the rights of exploitation. Zinc !
He is waiting tiU they offer a miUion."
Maj en. . . .
A solitary station upon the wintry plain — three
or four shivering Arabs swathed in rags — desolation
all around — the sun setting in an angry cloud.
It was a strong impression ; one realized, for the
first time, one's distance from the Ufe of civilized
man. Night descended with the rush of a storm,
and as the friendly train disappeared from my view,
I seemed to have taken leave of everything human.
This feeling was not lessened by my reception at
the funduk, whose native manager sternly refused
to give me that separate sleeping-room which,
i8

EN ROUTE
I had been assured, was awaiting me and which,
as he truthfuUy informed me, was even then un
occupied. The prospect of passing the night with
a crowd of Arabs was not pleasing.
Amiability being unavailing, I tried bribery, but
found him adamantine.
I then produced a letter from the Resident of
the Republic in Tunis, recommending me to all the
bureaux indigenes of the country, my translation
of it being confirmed and even improved upon,
at the expense of veracity, by a spahi (native
cavalryman) who happened to be present, and
threatened the man with the torments of the
damned if he failed to comply with the desires of
his government.
" The Resident," was the reply, " is plainly
a fine feUow. But he is not the fonsechossi."
" Ponsechossi. What's that ? "
" This," he said, excavating from under a pile
of misceUaneous rubbish a paper whereon was
displayed the official stamp of the Pouts et Chaussies
— the Department of Public Works for whose
servants this choice apartment is — or rather ought
to be — exclusively reserved : the rule is not always
obeyed. " Bring me this " — tapping the document
proudly — " and you have the room."
19

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
" Could I at least find a horse in the morning —
a mule — a donkey — a camel ? "
" We shaU see ! " And he slouched away.
There was nothing to be done with the man.
Your incorruptible Oriental is always disagreeable.
Fortunately, he is rather uncommon.
But the exceUent spahi, whom my letter from
head-quarters had considerably impressed, busied
himself meanwhile on my behalf, and at seven in
the morning a springless, open, two-wheeled Arab
cart, drawn by a moth-eaten old mule, was ready
for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this instrument of
torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30
p.m., memories of that ride being blurred by the
physical discomfort endured. Over a vast plateau
framed in distant mountains we were wending
in the direction of a low gap wliich never came
nearer ; the road itself was full of deep ruts that
caused exquisite agony as we jolted into them ; the
sun — a patch of dazzling light, cold and cheerless.
At this hour, I reflected, the train from Sfax would
already have set me down at Gafsa.
Save for a few stunted thorns in the moister
places, the whole land, so far as the eye could reach,
was covered with halfa-grass — ^leagues upon leagues
of this sad grey-green desert reed. We passed a few
nomad famiUes whose children were tearing out
20

EN ROUTE
the wiry stuff — ^it is never cut in Tunisia — ^which
is then loaded on camels and conveyed to the nearest
depot on the railway line, and thence to the sea
board. They were burning it here and there, to
keep themselves warm ; this is forbidden by law,
but then — there is so much of it on these uplands,
and the wind is so cold !
The last miles were easier travelling, as we had
struck the track from Feriana on our left. Here,
at an opening of the arid hills, where the road begins
to descend in a broad, straight ribbon, there arose,
suddenly, a distant glimpse of the oasis of Gafsa —
a harmonious line of dark palm trees, with white
houses and minarets in between. A familiar vision,
and often described ; yet one that never fails of
its effect. A man may weary, after a while, of
camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque
paraphernalia of Arab life ; or at least they end in
becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note
of them ; but there are two spectacles, ever new,
elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses :
this of palms in the waste — the miracle of water ;
and that of fire — the sun.
A low hiU near the entrance of the town (it is
marked Meda HUl on the map) had attracted my
attention as promising a fine view. Thither, after
settUng my concerns at the hotel, I swiftly bent
21

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
my steps ; it was too late ; the wintry sun had
gone to rest. The oasis still lay visible, extended at
my feet ; on the other side I detected, some three
miles away, a white spot — a house, no doubt —
standing by a dusky patch of palms that rose soUtary
out of the stones. Some subsidiary oasis, probably ;
it looked an interesting place, all alone there, at the
foot of those barren hills.
And still I lingered, my only companion being
a dirty brown dog, of the jackal type, who walked
round me suspiciously and barked, or rather whined,
without ceasing. At last I took up a stone, and he
ran away. But the stone remained in my hand ;
I glanced at it, and saw that it was an implement
of worked flint. Here was a discovery ! Who were
these carvers of stones, the aboriginals of Gafsa ?
How lived they ? A prolonged and melodious
whistle from the distant railway station served to
remind me of the gulf of ages that separates these
prehistoric men from the life of our day.
But as if to efface without delay that consoling
impression, my downward path led past a dark
cavern before which was lighted a fire that threw
gleams into its recesses ; there was a family crouching
around it ; they lived in the hoUow rock. A high-
piled heap of bones near at hand suggested can
nibalistic practices.

EN ROUTE
These, then, are the primitives of Gafsa. And
for how long, I wonder, has this convenient shelter
been inhabited ? From time immemorial, perhaps ;
ever since the days of those others. And, after all,
how Uttle have they changed in the intervening
thousands of years ! The wild-eyed young wench,
with her disheveUed hair, ferocious bangle-orna
ments, tattooings, and nondescript blue rags open
at the side and revealing charms well fitted to
disquiet some robust savage — what has such a
creature in common with the rest of us ? Not even
certain raptures, misdeemed primeval ; hardly
more than what faUs to man and beast alike. On
my appearance, she rose up and eyed me unabashed ;
then sank to the ground again, amid her naked and
uncouth cubs ; the rock, she said, was warmer than
the black tents ; they paid no rent ; for the rest,
her man would return forthwith. And soon there
was a clattering of stones, and a herd of goats
scrambled up and vanished within the opening.
The partner was neither pleased nor displeased
at seeing me there ; every day he went to pasture
his flock on the slopes of the opposite Jebel Guettor,
returning at nightfall ; he tried to be civil but failed,
for want of vocabulary. I gave him the salutation,
and passed on in the gloaming.

23

Chapter II
BT THE OUED BAIESH
THIS collecting of flint implements grows
upon one at Gafsa ; it is in the air. And
I find that quite a number of persons
have anticipated me in this amusement,
and even written tomes upon the subject — it is ever
thus, when one thinks to have made a scientific
discovery. These stones are scattered all over the
plain, and Monsieur Couillault has traced the site
of several workshops — ateliers — of prehistoric
weapons near Sidi Mansur, which lies within half
a mile of Gafsa, whence he has extracted — or
rather retrieved, for the flints merely lie upon the
ground — quantities of instruments of every shape ;
among them, some saws and a miniature spade.
My coUection of these relics, casuaUy picked up
here and there, already numbers two hundred pieces,
and illustrates every period of those early ages —
uncouth battle-axes amd spear-points ; fine needles,
apparently used for sewing skins together ; the
»4

Gafsa and Jebel Orbata

BY THE OUED BAIESH
so-caUed laurel-leaves, as thin as card-board ; knife-
blades ; instruments for scraping beast-hides —
aU of flint. What interests me most, are certain
round throwing-stones ; a few are flat on both sides,
but others, evidently the more popular shape,
are flat below and rise to a cone above. Of these
latter, I have a series of various sizes ; the largest are
for men's hands, but there are smaUer ones, not
more than eleven centimetres round, for the use
of children : one thinks of the fierce little hands that
wielded them, these many thousand years ago.
Even now the natives will throw by preference
with a stone of this disk-Uke shape — the cone point
ing downwards. But, judging by the size of their
implements, the hands of this prehistoric race can
hardly have been as large as those of their modern
descendants. Then, as now, Gafsa must have been an important
site ; the number of these weapons is astonishing.
Vast populations have drifted down the stream of
time at this spot, leaving no name or mark behind
them, save these relics fashioned, by the merest of
chances, out of a practically imperishable material ;
steel and copper would have rotted away long ago,
and the stoutest palaces crumbled to dust under the
teeth of the desert air.
The bed of the Oued Baiesh, which flows past
25

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Gafsa and is nearly half a mile broad in some places,
is rich in these worked flints which have been washed
out of its steep banks by the floods. Walking here
the other day with a miserable young Arab who,
I verily beUeve, had attached himself to me out
of sheer boredom (since he never asked for a sou),
I observed, in the distance, a solitary individual,
a European, pacing slowly along as though wrapped
in meditation ; every now and then he bent down
to the ground.
" That's a French gentleman from Gafsa. He
coUects those stones of yours all day long."
Another amateur, I thought.
" But not like yourself," he went on. " He picks
them up, bad and good, and when they don't look
nice he works at them with iron things ; I've seen
them ! He makes very pretty stones, much prettier
than yours. Then he sends them away."
" How do you know this ? "
" I've looked in at his window."
A modern " atelier " of flints — this was an
amusing revelation. Maybe — ^who knows ? — half
the museums of Europe are stocked with these
superior products.
Sages wiU be interested to learn that Professor
Koken, of Tubingen, in a learned pamphlet, lays
it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the
26

BY THE OUED BAIESH
Mesvinian, Strepyian, Praechellean — to say nothing
of the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Mag-
dalenian, and other types. So be it. He further
says, what is more inteUigible to the uninitiated,
that a bed of hard conglomerate which crops up
at Gafsa on either side of the Oued Baiesh, has been
raised in days of yore ; it was raised so slowly that the
river found time to carve itself a bed through it
during the process of elevation ; nevertheless,
a certain class of these artificial implements, em
bedded since God knows when, already formed
part of this natural conglomerate ere it began to
uplift itself. This wiU give some idea of the abysm
of time that lies between us and the skin-clad men
that lived here in olden days.
An abysm of time . . .
But I remembered the cave-wench of the Meda
HiU. And my companion to-day was of the same
grade, a characteristic semi-nomad boy of the
poorest class ; an orphan, of course (they are nearly
all orphans), and quite abandoned. His whole
vocabulary could not have exceeded one hundred
and fifty words ; he had never heard of the Apostle
of AUah or his sacred book ; he could only run, and
throw stones, and endure, like a beast, those cease
less illnesses of which only death, an early death as
a rule, is aUowed to cure them. His clothing was
27

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
an undershirt and the inevitable burnous, brown
with dirt.
" What have you done to-day ? " I asked him.
" Nothing."
" And yesterday ? "
" Nothing. Why should I do anything ? "
" Don't you ever wash ? "
" I have nobody to wash me."
Yet they appreciate the use of unguents. The
other day a man accidentally poured a glassful of
oil into the dusty street. Within a moment a
crowd of boys were gathered around, dabbling
their hands into it and then rubbing them on their
hair ; those that possessed boots began by ornament
ing them, and thence conveyed the stuff to their
heads — the ground was licked dry in a twinkling ;
their faces glistened with the greasy mixture.
" That's good," they said.
Such, I daresay, were the pastimes of those pre
historic imps of the throwing- disks, and their
clothing must have been much the same.
For what is the burnous save a glorified aboriginal
beast-skin ? It has the same principle of con
struction ; the major part covers the human back
and sides ; the beast's head forms the hood ; where
the forefeet meet, the thing is tied together across
the breast, leaving a large open slit below, and
28

BY THE OUED BAIESH
a smaller one above, where the man's head
emerges. The character of the race is summed up in that
hopeless garment, which unfits the wearer for every
pleasure and every duty of modern life. An article
of everyday clothing which prevents a man from
using his upper limbs, which swathes them up, like
a sUkworm in its cocoon — can anything more insane
be imagined ? Wrapped therein for nearly aU their
lives, the whole race grows round-shouldered ;
the gastric region, which ought to be protected
in this cUmate of extremes, is exposed ; the heating
of their heads, night and day, with its hood, cannot
but injure their brains ; their hands become weak
as those of women, with claw-like movements of the
fingers and an inability to open the palm to the
fuU. No wonder it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro ;
no wonder their spiritual life is apathetic, unfruitful,
since the digits that explore and design, following
up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are
practicaUy atrophied. You wiU see beggars who
find it too troublesome, on cold days, to extricate
their hands for the purpose of demanding alms !
Man has been described as a tool-making animal,
but the burnous effectuaUy counteracts that whole
some tendency ; it is a mummifying vesture, a
29

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
step in the direction of fossiUfication. WiU the
natives ever realize that the abolition of this sleeve
less and buttonless anachronism is one of the
conditions of their betterment f Have they made
the burnous, or vice-versa ? No matter. They
came together somehow, and suited one another.
The burnous is the epitome of Arab inefiiciency.
They call it simple, but like other things that go
by that name, it defeats it own objects of facilitating
the common operations of life. It is amusing to
watch them at their laundry-work. Unless a man
stand still and upright, the end of this garment
is continually slipping down from his shoulders ;
one of the washerman's hands, therefore, is em
ployed in holding it in its place ; the other grasps
a stick upon which he leans while stamping a war-
dance with his feet upon the linen. This is only
half the performance, for a friend, holding up his
cloak with one hand, must bend over and ladle the
necessary water upon the linen with the other.
Thus two men are requisitioned to wash a shirt —
a hand of one, two feet of the other. No wonder
they do not wash them often ; the undertaking,
thanks to the burnous, is too complicated.
Yet there is no denying that it adds charm to
the landscape ; it is highly decorative ; its colour and
shape and peculiar texture are as pleasing to the
30

BY THE OUED BAIESH
beholder as must have been the toga of the old
Romans (which, by the way, was a purely ceremonial
covering, to be doffed during work : so Cincinnatus,
when the senators found him at the plough, went
in to dress in his toga ere receiving them).
Stalking along on their thin bare shanks, their
glittering eyes and hooked noses shaded within its
hood, many adult Arabs assume a strangely bird-Uke
appearance ; while the smooth-faced youths, peering
from under its coquettish folds, remind one of third-
rate actresses out for a spree. In motion, when
some half -naked boy sits merrily upon a gaUoping
staUion, his bare Umbs and flying burnous take on
the passionate grace of a panathenaic frieze ; it
befits equaUy well the repose of old age, crouching
at some street-corner in hieratic immobility.
Yes, there is no denying that it looks artistic ;
the burnous is picturesque, like many antediluvian
things. And of course, where nothing better can
be procured, it wiU protect you from the cold and
the stinging rays of the sun. But if a European
wants a chiU in the liver or any other portion of
the cuUnary or postprandial department,^ he need
only wear one for a few days on end ; raise the
hood, and you will have a headache in ten minutes.
Nevertheless I have bought one, and am wearing
it at thjs very moment. But not as the poorer
31

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Arabs do. Beneath it there is a suit of ordinary
winter clothing, as weU as two English ulsters —
and this indoors. Perhaps this will give some idea
of the cold of Gafsa. There is no heating these bare
rooms with their icy walls and floorings : out of
doors a blizzard is raging that would flay a rhino
ceros. And the wind of Gafsa has this peculiarity,
that it is equaUy bitter from whichever point of
the compass it blows. Let those who contemplate
the supreme madness of coming to the sunny
oasis at the present season of the year (January)
bring not only Arctic vestment, eiderdowns, fur
cloaks, carpets and foot-warmers, but also, and
chiefly, efficient furnaces and fuel for them.
For such things seem to be unknown hereabouts.

32

Chapter III
THE TERMID
THE chief attractions of Gafsa, beside the
oasis, are the tall minaret with its pros
pect over the town and plantations, and
the Kasbah or fortress, a Byzantine con
struction covering a large expanse of ground and
rebuilt by the French on theatrical lines, with
bastions and creneUations and other warlike pomp ;
thousands of blocks of Roman masonry have been
wrought into its old walls, which are now smothered
under a modern layer of plaster divided into square
fields, to imitate soUd stonework. It looks best in
the moonlight, when this childish cardboard effect
is toned down.
One of the two hot springs of Gafsa is enclosed
within this Kasbah, while the other rises near at
hand and flows into the celebrated baths — the
termid, as the natives, using the old Greek word,
StiU caU it. It is a large and deep stone basin, half
fuU of warm water, in which small fishes, snakes
C 33 .

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
and tortoises disport themselves ; the massive
engirdling walls demonstrate its Roman origin,
Thick mists hang over the termid in the early
mornings, when the air is chiUy, but later on it
becomes a lively place, fuU of laughter and splash-
ings. Here, for a sou, you may get the boys to jump
down from the parapet and waUow among the
muddy ooze at the bottom ; the liquid, though
transparent, is not colourless, but rather of the
blue-green tint of the aquamarine crystal ; it flows
rapidly, and all impurities are carried away.
There are always elderly folk idling about these
premises, and youngsters with rods tempting the
fish out of the water ; day after day the game goes
on, the foolish creatures nibble at the bait and are
drawn up on high ; their fellows see the beginning
of the tragedy, but never the end, where, floundering
in the street, the victims cover their silvery scales
with a coating of dust and expire ignominiously,
as unlike live fishes as if they came ready cooked out
of the kitchen fanes et frits.
Above this basin is another one, that of the
women ; and below it, at the foot of a lurid stairway,
a suite of subterranean (Roman) chambers, a kind
of Turkish bath for men, where the water hurries
darkly through ; the place is reeking with a steamy
heat, and objectionable beyond words ; it would
34

Entrance to the Termid

THE TERMID
not be easy to describe, in the language of polite
society, those features in which it is most repulsive
to Europeans.
How easily, as in former days, might now a health-
giving wonder be created out of these waters of
Gafsa, that weU up in a river of warmth and purity,
only to be hopelessly contaminated ! The French
tried the experiment, but the natives objected, and
they gave way : these are the spots on the sunny
ideal of " pacific penetration." Any other nation
ality — ^while aUowing the Arabs a fair share of the
element — would simply have rebuilt this termid
and put it to a decent use, in the name of cleanliness
and civilization ; the natives acquiescing, as they
always do when they recognize their masters. Or,
if a display of force was considered inadvisable,
why not try the suaviter in modo ? Had a couple
of local saints been judiciously approached, the
population would soon have discovered that the
termid waters are injurious to health and only fit
for unbelievers. What is the use of a marabout,
if he cannot be bribed ?
I am aU for keeping up local colour, even when it
entails, as it generaUy does, a certain percentage of
local smells ; yet it seems a pity that such glorious
hot springs, a gift of the gods in a climate like this,
should be converted into a cloaca maxima, especiaUy
35

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
in Gafsa, which already boasts of a superfluity of
open drains.
But my friend the magistrate showed me a
special bathing room which has lately been built
for the use of Europeans. We tried the door and
found it locked.
Where was the key ?
At the Fonts et Chaussees.
Thither I went, and discovered an elderly official
of ample proportions dozing in a trim apartment —
the chief of the staff. Great was this gentleman's
condescension ; he bade me be seated, opened his
eyes wide, and enquired after my wants.
The key f The key of the piscine P He regretted
he could give me no information as to its where
abouts — no information whatever. He had never
so much as seen the key in question ; perhaps it
had been lost, perhaps it never existed. Several
tourists, he added, had already come on the same
quest as myself ; he also, on one occasion last year,
thought he would like to take a bath, but — what
would you ? There was no key ! If I liked to bathe,
I might go to the tank at the gardens of Sidi Ahmed
Zarroung. I gently insisted, pointing out that I did not
care for a walk across the wind-swept desert only
to dip myself into a pool of lukewarm and pesti-
36

THE TERMID
lentiaUy sulphureous water. But " the key " was
evidently a sore subject.
" There is no key. Monsieur " ; and he accom
panied the words with a portentous negative nod
that blended the resigned solicitude of an old and
trusted friend with the firmness of a Bismarck.
This closed the discussion ; with expressions of
undying gratitude, and a few remarks as to the
palpable advantages to be derived from keeping
a public bathing-room permanently locked, I left
him to his weU-earned slumbers. . . .
It is hard to understand what the guide-books
mean when they call the market of Gafsa " rich and
weU-appointed " : a five-pound note, I calculate,
would buy the entire exhibition. The produce,
though varied, is wretched ; but the scenery fine.
Over a dusty level, strewn with wares, you look upon
a stretch of waving palms, with the distant summit
of Jebel Orbata shining in the deep blue sky. Here
are a few butchers and open-air cooks who fry
suspicious-looking bundles of animal intestines for
the epicurean Arabs ; a little saddlery ; half a
camel-load of corn ; a broken cart-wheel and rickety
furniture put up to auction ; one or two halfa-mats
of admirable workmanship ; grinding-stones ; musty
pressed dates, onions, huge but insipid turnips and
other green things, red peppers 
37

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Those peppers ! An adult Arab wiU eat two
pounds of them a day. I have seen native women
devouring, alternately, a pepper, then a date, then
another pepper, then another date, and so on, for
half an hour. An infant at the breast, when tired
of its natural nourishment, is often given one of
these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer,
or by way of change and amusement. Their
corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach
troubles of the race ; a milk diet would work wonders
as a cure, if the people could be induced to do things
by halves ; but they cannot ; it is " aU peppers
or aU milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with
them at first, they return to their peppers and a
painful disease.
It is this lack of measure and reasonableness among
them which accounts for what I beUeve to be a fact,
namely, that there are more reclaimed drunkards
among Arabs than among ourselves. They wiU break
off the alcohol habit violently, and for ever. And
this they do not out of principle, but from impulse
or, as they prefer to caU it, inspiration ; indeed,
they regard our men of fixed principles as weakUngs
and cowards, who stiffen themselves by artificial
rules because they cannot trust their judgments
to deal with events as they arise — (the Arab regards
terrestrial life as a chain of accidents) — cowards and
38

THE TERMID
infidels, trying to forestaU by human devices the
unascertainable decrees of Allah.
AUah wiUs it ! That is why they patiently bear
the extremes of hunger, and why, if fortune smiles,
they gorge like Eskimos, like boa-constrictors.
I have seen them so distended with food as to be
literaUy incapable of moving. Only yesterday, there
swept past these doors a bright procession, going
half-trot to a lively chant of music : the funeral of
a woman. I enquired of a passer-by the cause of
her death.
" She ate too much, and burst."
During the summer months, in the fruit-growing
districts, quite a number of children wiU " burst "
in this fashion every day.
Mektoub / the parents then exclaim. It was
written. And no doubt there is such a thing as a noble
resignation ; to defy fate, even if one cannot rule
it. Many of us northerners would be the better
for a little mektoub. But this doctrine of referring
everything to the wiU of AUah takes away all stimulus
to independent thought ; it makes for apathy,
improvidence, and mental fossiUfication. A creed
of everyday use which hampers a man's reasoning
in the most ordinary matters of life — is it not like
a garment that fetters his hands ?
39

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Mektoub is the inteUectual burnous of the
Arabs. . . .
There is some movement, at least, in this market ;
often the familiar story-tellers, surrounded by a
circle of charmed listeners ; sometimes, again, a
group of Soudanese from Khordofan or Bournu,
who parade a black he-goat, bedizened with gaudy
rags because devoted to death ; they will slay him
in due course at some shrine ; but not just now,
because there is still money to be made out of his
ludicrous appearance, with an incidental dance or
song on their own part. Vaguely perturbing, these
negro melodies and thrummings ; their reiteration
of monotony awakens tremulous echoes on the
human diaphragm and stirs up hazy, primeval
mischiefs. And this morning there arrived a blind singer,
or bard ; he was led by two boys, who accompanied
his extemporaneous verses — one of them tapping
with a pebble on an empty sardine-tin, while the
other belaboured a beer-bottle with a rusty nail :
both solemn as archangels ; there was also a pro
fessional accompanist, who screwed his mouth awry
and blew sideways into a tall flute, his eyes half-
closed in ecstatic rapture. Arab gravity never looks
better than during inanely grotesque performances
of this kind ; in such moments one cannot help
40

At the Termid

THE TERMID
loving them, for these are the little episodes that
make life endurable.
The music was not altogether original ; it re
minded me, with its mechanical punctuations, of
a concerto by Paderewski which contains an exquisite
movement between the piano and kettledrum —
since the flute, which ought to have supported the
voice, was apparently dumb, although the artist
puffed out his cheeks as if his life depended upon it.
Only after creeping quite close to the performers
could I discern certain wailful breathings ; this
brave instrument, aU splotched with variegated
colours, gave forth a succession of anguished and
asthmatic whispers, the very phantom of a song,
like the wind sighing through the branches of
trees.

41

Chapter IV
STONES OF GAFSA
THERE are interesting walks in the neigh
bourhood of Gafsa, but I can imagine
nothing more curious than the town
itself; a place of some five thousand
inhabitants, about a thousand of whom are Jews,
with a sprinkling of Italian tradespeople and French
officials and soldiers. Beyond naming the streets
and putting up a few lamps, the Government has
left it in its Arab condition ; the roadways are un
paved, hardly a single waU is plumb; the houses,
mostly one-storied, lean this way and that, and,
being built of earthen-tinted sun-dried brick, have
an air of crumbling to pieces before one's very eyes.
A heavy and continuous shower would be the
ruin of Gafsa ; the structures would melt away,
like that triple wall of defence, erected in mediaeval
times, of which not a vestige remains. Yet the dirt
is not as remarkable as in many Eastern places, for
every morning a band of minor offenders is marched
42

A Street in Gafsa

STONES OF GAFSA
out of prison by an overseer to sweep the streets.
Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if
possible, the roadway ; it is supported on palm-
rafters, forming a kind of tunnel underneath.
Everywhere are immense blocks of chiseUed stone
worked into the ephemeral Arab clay as doorsteps
or lintels, or lying about at random, or utilized as
seats at the house entrance ; they date from Roman
or earUer times — columns, too, some of them
adorned with the lotus-pattern, the majority un
pretentious and solid.
WUat do the natives think of these relics of past
civiUzation ? Do they ever wonder whence they
came or who made them ? " The stones are there,"
they wiU tell you. Yet the wiser among them will
speak of Ruman ; they have heard of Ruman moneys
and antiquities.
Arabs have a saying that Gafsa was founded by
Nimrod's armour-bearer ; but a more reasonable
legend, preserved by Orosius and others, attributes
its creation to Melkarth, the Libyan and Tyrian
Hercules, hero of colonization. He surrounded it
with a waU pierced by a hundred gates, whence its
presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city of a hun
dred gates. The Egyptians ruled it ; then the
Phcenicians, who caUed it Kafaz — the waUed ; and
after the destruction of Carthage it became the
43

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
retreat and treasure-house of Numidian kings.
Greeks, too, exercised a powerful infiuence on the
place, and all these civilized peoples had prepared
Gafsa to appreciate the beneficent rule of the
Romans. Then came Vandals and Byzantines, who gradu
ally grew too weak to resist the floods of plundering
Arab nomads ; the rich merchants fled, their
palaces fell to ruins ; the town became a collection
of mud huts inhabited by poor cultivators who
lived in terror of the neighbouring Hammama tribe
of true Arabs, that actuaUy forbade them to walk
beyond the limits of the Jebel Assalah — a couple
of miles distant. So the French found them in
1881. There are, however, a few decent houses, two-
storied and spacious ; in one of them, I am told,
lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom
my fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He
is absent at the Metlaoui mines just now, and his
wife and children in Paris.
The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not
extend to the native houses and courtyards, which
therefore survive in all their original, inconceivable
squalor — squalor so uncompromising that it has
long ago ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses
into humble interiors, when native secretiveness
44

STONES OF GAFSA
has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the
inside of the entrance ! In the daytime it is like
looking into vast, abandoned pigsties, fantastically
encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks
and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated
filth of generations — there is hardly a level yard of
ground — ^rags and dust and decay ! Here they live,
the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little
sense of home as the wUd creatures of the waste.
But at night, when the most villainous objects
take on mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand ; they assume an air of
bibUcal desolation, as though the curse of Heaven
had faUen upon the life they once witnessed ; and
even as you look into them, something stirs on the
ground : it is an Arab, sleeping uneasily in his
burnous ; he has felt, rather than heard, your
presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and rises
out of the dust, Uke a sheeted ghost.
It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before
you when least expected ; to be ever-present,
emerging, one might almost say, out of the earth.
Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated
land, and you may be sure that there is an Arab,
brooding among the rocks or in the sand, within a
few yards of you.
The stones are there. This is another feature
45

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
which they have in common with the beasts of the
earth : never to pause before the memorials of their
own past. Goethe says that where men are silent,
stones wiU speak. If ever they spoke, it is among
these crumbling, composite waUs of Gafsa.
A Roman inscription of the age of Hadrian,
which now forms the step of an Arab house, will
arrest your glance and turn your thoughts awhile
in the direction of this dim, romantic figure. How
little we reaUy know of the Imperial wanderer,
whose journeyings may still be traced by the monu
ments that sprang up in his footsteps ! Never since
the world began has there been a traveller in the
grandiose style of Hadrian ; he perambulated his
world like a god, crowned with a halo of bene
volence and omnipotence.
And it occurs to me that there must be other
relics of antiquity still buried under the soil of
Gafsa, which is raised on a mound, like an island,
above the surrounding country ; particularly in the
vicinity of the termid, which we may suppose to
have lain near the centre of the old town. And
where are the paving-stones ? The painstaking
John Leo says that the streets of Gafsa are " broad
and paved, like those of Naples or Florence." Have
they been slowly submerged under the debris of
Arabism, or taken up and worked into the masonry
46

STONES OF GAFSA
of the Kasbah and other buildings ? Not one is
left : so much is certain.
I borrowed SaUust and tried to press some flavour
out of his description of Marius' march to the cap
ture of Gafsa. It was a fine mUitary performance,
without a doubt ; he led his troops by unsuspected
paths across the desert, fell upon the palace, sacked
and burnt it, and divided the booty among his
soldiers : aU this without the loss of a single man.
The natives needed a lesson, and they got it ; to this
day the name of Marius is whispered among the black
tents as that of some fabulous hero. But what
interests me most is the style of Sallust himself.
How ultra-modern this historian reads ! His outlook
upon Ufe, his choice of words, are the note of to
morrow; and when I compare with him certain
writers of the Victorian epoch, I seem to be unrolling
a papyrus from Pharaoh's tomb, or spelling out the
elucubrations of some maudlin scribe of Prester John.
The stones are there. And the quarries whence
the Romans drew them have also been found, by
Guerin ; they lie in the flanks of the Jebel Assalah,
and are weU worth a visit ; legions of bats — tirlils,
the Arabs caU them — ^hang in noisome clusters from
the roof.
Concerning these bats, the foUowing story is told
in Gafsa. 47

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Not long ago a rich Englishman came here. He
used to go out in the evenings and shoot bats ; then
he put them into bottles with spirits of wine — he was
an amateur of bats. On the day of his departure from
the place, he said to the polyglot Arab guide whom
he had picked up somewhere on his wanderings :
" You wiU rejoin me in Tunis in ten days. Bring
me more bats — tirlils : comfrenni P — from this
country. I will give you fifty centimes apiece."
" Bon-, Monsieur," said the guide, and took
counsel with the folks of Gafsa, who, after certain
reservations and stipulations, showed him the way
into these quarries.
On the day appointed he entered the rich tourist's
hotel in Tunis, followed by ten porters, each
carrying a large sack.
" Hallo ! " said the EngUshman, " what's aU
this f "
" Bats, Monsieur."
"Eh? How much?"
"Bats; tirlils, chauve-souris, fipistrelli. . . .They
will need much bottles. Six hundred tirUls in each
sack ; ten sacks ; six thousand tirlils. Much bottles !
Three thousand francs. Monsieur. Shall I open
him ? "
The tourist cast a dismayed glance over the sacks,
gently heaving with life. 4§

Hadrian's Inscription

STONES OF GAFSA
" Look here," he said, " I'U give you fifty
francs. . . •"
The Arab was surprised and grieved. He thought
he was giving a pleasure to Monsieur, who had asked
for bats. He had been obliged to borrow money
from his aged mother to help to pay the nine
hundred francs which he had already disbursed
for assistance in catching the tirUls ; he had risked
his Ufe ; there were the transport expenses, too :
very heavy. He had traveUed with many EngUsh
men and had always found them to be men of
honour — men who kept their word. And in this
case there were witnesses to the bargain, who would
be ready, if necessary, to go into the French tribunals
and testify to what they had heard. . . .
" I see. WeU, come to-morrow morning, but
go away now, quick ! before I break your head.
Take your damned tirUls to your damned funduk,
and be off ! — clear out ! — com-prenni P "
And he looked so very angry that the Arab, a
prudent fellow, walked backwards out of the room,
more surprised and grieved than ever.
Thanks to the disinterested and strenuous exer
tions of a Jewish international lawyer, the affair
was settled out of court after all — ^fifteen hundred
francs, plus expenses of transport.

49

Chapter V
SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG-^that is the
name of the miniature oasis visible from
the Meda Hill, at the foot of those barren
slopes. It is a pleasant afternoon's walk
from Gafsa.
The intervening plain is encrusted with stones —
stones great and small. Here and there are holes
in the ground, where the natives have unearthed
some desert shrub for the sake of its roots which,
burnt as fuel, exhale a pungent odour of ammonia
that almost suffocates you. Once the water-zone
of Gafsa is passed, every trace of cultivation
vanishes. And yet, to judge by the number of
potsherds lying about, houses must have stood
here in days of old. An Arab geographer of the
eleventh century says that there are over two
hundred flourishing viUages in the neighbourhood
of Gafsa ; and Edrisius, writing a century later,
extols its prosperous suburbs and pleasure-houses.
Where are they now ? so

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
One of these viUages, surely, must have lain
near this fountain of Sidi Ahmed Zarroung,
which now irrigates a few palms and vegetables-
and then loses itself in the sand ; a second spring,
sulphureous and medicinal, but destructive to
plants, rises near at hand. This is the one which
the gentleman of the Fonts et Chaussees recom
mended me for bathing purposes.
But I saw no trace of ancient life here ; there
is only a muddy pond, full of amorous frogs and
tortoises, cold-blooded beasts, but fiery in their
passions ; and a few Arabs that live in the large
white house, or camp on the plain around. They
told me that the descendants of the holy man
who gave his name to the place are stiU alive,
but they knew nothing of his history beyond this,
that he was very pious indeed.
If you do not mind a little scrambling, you
can cUmb from here up to the last spur of the Jebel
Guettor which overlooks the plain — it is crowned
by a ruined building, once whitewashed, and
easily visible from Gafsa. On its slopes I struck
a vein of iron, another of those scientific discoveries,
no doubt, Uke the flint implements, in which
someone else wiU have anticipated me. And here
I also found iron in a more civilized shape, a frag
ment of a sheU — relic, perhaps, of the first French
SI

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
expedition against Gafsa, or of some more recent
artiUery practice.
From its summit one sees the configuration
of the country as on a map ; the high Jebel Orbata,
1 1 70 metres, now covered with snow, coming
forward to meet you on the other side of the wide
vaUey. From this point it is easy to realize, as
did the commander of that French expedition,
the significance of this speck of culture, its strategic
value : Gafsa is a veritable key to the Sahara. I
daresay the abundant water-supply of the town
is due to these two chains of hiUs which almost
touch each other and so force the water to rise
from its underground bed.
At this elevation you perceive that Gafsa is
truly a hiU-oasis, bleak mountains rising up on all
sides save the south. There, where the two highest
ranges converge from east and west, where the
broad waterway of the Oued Baiesh has in olden
days, when it wandered with less capricious flow,
carved itself a channel through the opening —
there, at the very narrowest point — sits the oasis.
A tangle of palms that sweep southward in a radiant
trail of green, the creneUated walls of the Kasbah
gleaming through the interstices of the foliage —
the whole vision swathed in an orange-tawny frame
of desolation, of things non-human. . . .
52

The Last Palms

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
I was tempted to think that the sunset view from
the Meda eminence was the finest in the immediate
neighbourhood of Gafsa. Not so ; that from the
low hiUs behind Sidi Mansur, with the stony
ridge of Jebel Assalah at your back, surpasses it
in some respects. Through a gap you look towards
the distant green plantations, with a shimmering
level in the foreground ; on your other side lies
the Oued Baiesh, crossed by the track to Kairouan,
where strings of camels are for ever moving to and
fro, laden with merchandise from the north or
with desert products from the oases of Djerid
and Souf. The dry bed of the torrent glows in
hues of Isabel and cream, while its perpendicular
mud-banks, on the further side, gleam like precipices
of amber ; the soil at your feet is besprinkled with
a profusion of fair and fragile flowerlets.
Here stand, like sentinels at the end of aU things
Uving, the three or four last, lonely palms — they
and their feUows lower down are fed by a silvery
streamlet which is forced upwards, I suppose,
by contact with Professor Koken's conglomerate ;
above and below this oasis-region the river-bed
is generally dry. It must be a wonderful sight,
however, when the place is in flood — a deluge
of liquid ooze careering madly southward towards
the dismal Chotts amid the crashing of stones
53

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
and palm trees and the collapse of banks. For the
Oued Baiesh can be angry at times ; in 1859 it
submerged fifty hectares of the Gafsa gardens.
Instead of returning by the main road from
Sidi Mansur, one can bend a little to the right
and so pass the military hospital, a large estabUsh
ment which looks as if it could be converted into
a barrack in case of need. This is as it should be.
Gafsa is a rallying-point, and must be prepared
for emergencies. Here, too, lie the cemeteries :
the Jewish, fronting the main road, with a decent
enclosure ; that of the Christians, framed in a wire
fence and containing a few wooden crosses, imitation
broken columns and tinsel wreaths ; Arab tombs,
scattered over a large undefined tract of brown
earth, and clustering thickly about some white-
domed maraboutic monument, whose saintly relics
are desirable companionship for the humbler
dead. The bare ground here is littered with pottery
and other fragments of ancient life testifying
to its former populousness : flint implements,
among the rest. Of the interval between the
latest of these stone-age primevals and the first
Egyptian invasion of Gafsa we know nothing ;
they, the Egyptians, brought with them that
plough which is figured in the hieroglyphics,
54

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
and has not yet changed its shape. You may see
the venerable instrument any day you like, being
carried on a man's back to his work in the oasis.
Athwart this region there runs an underground
(excavated) stream of water, led from Sidi Mansur
to nourish the Gafsa plantations. Through holes
in the ground one looks down upon the element
flowing mysteriously below ; figs and other trees
are set in these hoUows for the sake of the shade
and moisture, and their crowns barely reach the
level of the soil. This is no place to wander about
at night — a false step in the darkness and a man
would break his neck. There was talk, at one time,
of leading this brook, which is sweet and non-
mineral, into Gafsa for drinking purposes, but the
native garden proprietors raised their inevitable
howl of objections, and the project was aban
doned. If you ask a local white man as to the misdeeds
of his administration, be sure he will mention
the affair of the railway station which was built
too far from the town, and this of the Sidi Mansur
water. And who, you ask, was to blame for these
folUes ? Oh, the controlleur, as usual ; always the
controlleur ! It is no sinecure being an official
of this kind in Tunisia, with precise Government
instructions in one pocket, and in the other his
55

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
countrymen's contrary lamentations and suggestions,
often reasonable enough. . . .
Loaded down with a choice selection of Sidi
Mansur flints, which are singular as having a white
patina, I returned to Gafsa in the late afternoon
and entered my favourite Arab cafe. Here, at
all events, if you do not mind a little native esprit
de corps, you wiU be able to thaw your frozen limbs ;
aU the other rooms of Gafsa, public and private,
are like ice-ceUars. There are many of these coffee
houses in the town, and this is one of the least
fashionable of them. Never a European darkens
its door ; seldom even a native soldier ; it is not
good enough for them ; they go to finer resorts.
At its entrance there lie, conveniently arranged
as seats, some old Roman blocks, overshadowed
by a mulberry, now gaunt and bare. It must
be delightful, in the spring-time, to sit under its
shade and watch the street-life : the operations
at the neighbouring dye-shop where gaudy cloths
of blue and red are hanging out to dry, or, lower
down, the movement at the wood-market — a
large tract of " boulevard " encumbered with
the impedimenta of nomadism. There is a ceaseless
unloading of fuel here ; bargains are struck about
sheep and goats, the hapless quadruped, that
refuses to accompany its new purchaser good-
56

Cafe by the A'lulberry Tree

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
naturedly, being lifted up by the hind legs and
made to walk in undignified fashion on the re
maining two. Fires gleam brightly, each one sur
rounded by a knot of camels couched in the dust,
their noses converging towards the flame, while
old desert hags, bent double with a life of hardship,
bustle about the cooking-pots. There are brawls,
too — Arabs seizing each other by the throat,
raising sticks and uttering wild imprecations. . . .
But within that windowless chamber, aU is
peace. Eternal twilight reigns, and your eyes
must become accustomed to the gloom ere you
can perceive the cobwebby ceiling of palm-rafters,
smoke-begrimed and upheld by two stone columns
that glisten with the dirt of ages. Here is the
hearth, overhung by a few ancient pots, where
the server, his head enveloped in a greasy towel,
officiates like some high priest at the altar. You
may have milk, or the mixture known as coffee,
or tea flavoured in Moroccan style with mint,
or with cinnamon, or pepper. The water-vessels
stew everlastingly upon a slow fire fed with the
residue of pressed olives. Or, if too poor, you
may take a drink of water out of the large clay
tub that stands by the door. Often a beggar will
step within for that purpose, and then the chubby
serving-lad gives a scowl of displeasure and makes
57

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
pretence to take away the cup ; but the mendicant
will not be gainsaid — water is the gift of AUah !
And, if so please you, you may drink nothing at
aU, but simply converse with 'your neighbour,
or sit StiU and dream away the days, the weeks,
the year, sleeping by night upon the floor.
A few of the customers are playing at cards
or sedately chatting ; others begin to prepare
their favourite smoke of hashish. A board is called
for and the hashish-powder spread out upon it.
The operator chops it into still finer particles
by means of a semicircular blade, deftly blowing
away the dust — this brings out its strength. He
is in no hurry ; it is a ceremony rather than a task.
Slowly he separates the coarser from the finer
grains, his fingers moving with loving deliberation
over the smooth board. Then the cutting process
is repeated once more, and yet again. Maybe he
will now add a little of the Soufi stuff, to improve
the taste.
At last all is ready, and small pipes are extracted
from the folds of the burnous and fiUed with half
a thimbleful of the precious mixture. Two or
three whiffs, deeply inhaled, stream out at mouth
and nostrils ; then the pipe is swiftly passed on to
a friend, who drains the last drop of smoke and
knocks out the ashes. Not a word is spoken.
58

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
Hand him your pipe, if you are wise, and let
him fiU it for you. This kif, they say, affects
people differently ; but I think that, as a general
effect, you will discover a genial warmth stealing
through your limbs, while the things of this world
begin to reveal themselves in a more spiritual
perspective. I thought of the sunset this afternoon, as
viewed from Sidi Mansur. They are fine, these
moments of conflagration, of mineral incandescence,
when the sober limestone rocks take on the tints of
molten copper, their convulsed strata standing
out like the ribs of some agonized Prometheus,
whUe the plain, where every little stone casts an
inordinate shadow behind it, clothes itself in
demure shades of pearl. Fine, and all too brief.
For even before the descending sun has touched
the rim of the world the colours fade away ;
only overhead the play of blues and greens con
tinues — freezing, at last, to pale indigo. Fine,
but somewhat trite ; a well-worn subject, these
Oriental sunsets. Yet the man who can revel in
such displays with a whole heart is to be envied
of a talisman against many ills. I can conceive
the subtlest and profoundest sage desiring nothing
better than to retain, ever undiminished, a child-
Uke capacity for these simple pleasures. . . .
59

FOUNTAINS IN THEfSAND
A spirit of immemorial eld pervades this tavern.
SUently the shrouded figures come and go. They
have lighted the lamp yonder, and it glimmers
through the haze like some distant star.
And I remembered London at this sunset
hour, a medley of tender grey-in-grey, save where
a glory of many-coloured light hovers about
some street-lantern, or where a carriage, splashing
through the river of mud, leaves a momentary
track of silver in its rear. There are the nights,
of course, with their bustle and flare, but nights
in a city are apt to grow wearisome ; they fall
into two or three categories, whose novelty soon
wears off. How different from the starlit ones
of the south, each with its peculiar moods and
aspirations !
Yet the Thames — odd how one's kif-vevenes
always lead to running water — the Thames, I
know, will atone for much. It is even more im
pressive at this season than in its summer clarity,
and as I walk, in imagination, along that roUing
flood flecked with patches of unwholesome iri
descence and crossed by steamers and barges
that steer in ghostly fashion about the dusky
waters, I marvel that so few of our poets have
responded to its beauty and signification. They
find it easier, doubtless, to warble a spring song or
60

SIDI AHMED ZARROUNG
two. The fierce pulsations of industry, the shiftings
of gold that make and mar human happiness —
these are themes reserved for the bard of the
future who shaU strike, bravely, a new chord,
extracting from the sombre facts of city life a
throbbing, many-tinted romance, even as out of
that foul coal-tar some, who know the secret,
craftUy distU most delicate perfumes and colours
exquisite. The bard of the future . . . h'm ! Will
he ever appear ? As an atavism, perhaps. Take
away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive
man — the jingle and pathetic fallacy — and the
residue, if any, would be better expressed in prose.
My neighbour, a sensible person, has ceased
to take interest in the proceedings. Perched
upright at first, his head drooping within the
folds of his cloak, he has slowly succumbed ; he
has kicked off his sandals, stretched himself out,
and now slumbers. I, too, am beginning to feel
weary, and no wonder. . . .
Primitive man with those flints of his, that
weigh me down at this moment. This stone-
coUecting, par exemple ! I wonder what induced
me to take up such a hobby. The German Pro
fessor, as usual. Ah, Mr. Koken, Mr. Koken —
those light words of yours have borne a heavy
fruit. I possess four hundred implements now,
6i

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
and they wiU double the weight of my luggage
and ruin my starched shirts, especiaUy those
formidable " praecheUean " skuU-cleavers. And I
know exactly what the customs officer at Marseilles
will say, when he peeps into my bag :
" Tiens, des cailloux ! Monsieur est botaniste P "
And then a crowd of people will assemble,
to whom I must explain everything, with the
result of being arrested for smuggling forbidden
mining samples out of a colony and ending my
days in some insanitary French prison.

62

Chapter VI
AMUSEMENTS BT THE WAT
MEANWHILE, to satiate myself with
Gafsa impressions, I linger by the
margin of the pool that lies below
the fortress. Hither the camels are
driven to slake their thirst, arriving sometimes in
such crowds as almost to fill up the place. Don
keys and horses are scoured by half-naked lads ;
in the clearer parts, a number of tattooed Be
douin girls are everlastingly washing their house
hold stuffs. Only on rare occasions is the liquid
undisturbed, and then it shines with the steely-
blue transparency of those diamonds that are a
class by themselves, superior to " first-water "
stones. At the slightest agitation aU the ac
cumulated ooze and filth of , generations — rags
and decomposing frogs and things unmention
able — rise to the surface in turbid clouds. The
element weUs out hot, from under the neighbouring
Kasbah, with a pestiferous mineral aroma.
Hither comes, at fixed intervals, my friend
63

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Silenus, the water-carrier, on his philosophic don
key; nearly all Gafsa draws its supply of cooking
and drinking water from this fetid and malodorous
mere. A fine example of French inefficiency, this
" abreuvoir." Two hundred francs would suffice
to tap the liquid a few yards higher up, by means
of a common cast-iron pipe, whence it would
rush out, pure and undefiled, to fill in a few
moments those multitudinous water-skins that
are now laboriously furnished, by hand, out of
the often tainted pool below.
And of native inefficiency, likewise. Day after
day, age after age, have these women done their
laundry-work at this spot, and yet their clothing,
for purposes of the work, is more hopelessly in
adequate than the burnous of the males. They
wiU arrive wrapped up in twenty rags that are
always faUing off their backs and shoulders (they
possess no baskets). One by one these articles
are removed, soaped with one little hand, stamped
upon by two little feet, and laid aside. Nothing
remains, at last, but a single covering garment —
a loose chemise full of artistic possibilities for the
onlookers. It gives the poor girls endless trouble,
for it is continuaUy slipping off their bodies on
one side or the other, and one hand is engaged,
64

My Friend Silenus

AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
aU the time, in counteracting these mischievous
movements. Standing as they do up to their
knees in the water, it is tucked up high and of
course tumbles down again every minute. At the
end of their washing they are as wet as drenched
poodles. No harm in this, in summer-time ; but with
the thermometer below freezing-point they would
suffer considerably were they not inured, like to
other creatures of the desert, to every kind of
discomfort. The chief mental exercise of the Arab, they
say, consists in thinking how to reduce his work
to a minimum. Now this being precisely my own
ideal of life, and a most rational one, I would
prefer to put it thus : that of many kinds of simpli
fication they practise only one — omission, which
does not always pay. They are imaginative,
but incredibly uninventive. How different from
the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost
preternatural sagacity in small practical matters !
Scorn of theories is one of their chief race-charac
teristics, and that is why they end in becoming
stoics — stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who suffer
without knowing why.
There was one of these girls in particular
whom I noticed every day, and whom, at last,
E 65

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
I compassionately suppUed with a couple of safety-
pins, after explaining their uses. She was decidedly
ugly. But sometimes you may see others here,
with neatly chiselled limbs and elfish eyes of a
sultry, troubling charm into which, if sentimentaUy
disposed, you can read an ocean of love ; these
need not be supplied with safety-pins. An en
thusiastic Frenchman at Gabes actually married
one of these sphynx-like creatures — a hazardous
and quixotic experiment. As brides for a lifetime
(slaves) they cost from a hundred to six hundred
francs apiece, and even more ; and you wiU do well
to abonner yourself with the family beforehand,
in order to be sure of obtaining a sound article,
as with the Tartar girls in Russian Asia and else
where. As a general rule, those of the semi-nomads
— the Gourbi people — cost more than those of the
true wanderers. The price varies according to
the season and a thousand other contingencies ;
it rises, inevitably, in the neighbourhood of settled
places, where employment of one kind (olive-
picking, etc.) or another — chiefly of another —
can be found for them.
One of the prettiest I ever saw was offered
me for three hundred francs. It was an uncommon
bargain, due to a drought and certain family
mishaps. These Uttle wildUngs are troublesome
66

AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
to carry about. They are less nimble and amiable
than the boys, and often require more beating
than a European has time to give them. You can
always seU them again, of course ; and sometimes
(into the towns) at a good profit.
The Arab woman is the repository of aU the
accumulated nonsense of the race, and her in
fluence upon the young brood is retrogressive
and malign. It matters little what happens in
the desert where men and women are necessarily
animals, but it does among the middle and upper
native classes of the larger places. Here the French
have established their so-called Arab-French schools,
excellent institutions which are largely attended,
and would produce far better results but for the
halo of sanctity with which boys in every country —
but particularly in half-civilized ones — are apt
to invest the most flagrantly empty-headed of
mothers. In Tunisia, as soon as the youngsters
return home, these women quickly undo all the
good work, by teaching them that what they have
learnt at school is dangerous untruth, and that
the Koran and native mode of Ufe are the only
sources of happiness. Then, to keep the son at
home, the mother wiU hasten to catch a bride
for him who shaU be, if possible, more incompetent
than herself, in order that she, the mother, may
67

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
retain her ascendency over him. The father,
meanwhile, shrugs his shoulders : Mektoub ! There
is no fighting against such heroic perseverance on
a woman's part ; besides, was he not brought up
on the same lines ?
The mischief is done, for Arabs relapse easily ;
even native officers, who have served for years
in the French army, will, on returning home,
don the burnous, sit at street corners, and become
more arabized than ever. So it comes about that,
if the eyes of the former generation were entirely
averse from French rule, the present one is Janus-
faced — ^looking both ways. Some day, presumably,
there wiU be a further adaptation, and their eyes,
like those of certain flat-fish, will wander round
and settle down definitely on the right side. . . .
This is a favourite month for native weddings.
There was one going on last night. I looked into
the courtyard of a ruinous building which was
crammed with spectators. The Aissouyiahs were
performing, in honour of the occasion.
These are the dervish fanatics whom every
one knows. They eat scorpions, glass, nails, and
burning coals ; they cut themselves with knives and
other instruments — impostors, for the most part.
It is mere child's play to what you can see further
East. 68

AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
Yet, with the starry night overhead, and the
flare of torches lighting up a seething mass of
faces below, of bronzed limbs and bright-tinted
rags dangUng at every altitude from the palm
rafters and decayed stairway, the scene was more
weirdly fascinating than as one generaUy sees it
— in mosques or in the open dayUght. There
were wild strains of music and song ; a wave of
disquietude, clearly, was passing over the beholders.
These performances, at such a time, may originaUy
have taken place for purposes of nuptial excite
ment or stimulation ; but it requires rather an
exotic mentaUty to be stimulated, otherwise than
unpleasantly, by the spectacle of Uttle boys writhing
on the ground in simulated agony with a long iron
skewer thrust through their cheeks. They catch
them young ; and these scholars, or aspirants,
are indubitably frauds and often worse than frauds.
Mixed with them are a certain proportion of un
balanced, half-crazy individuals, who reaUy work
themselves into a frenzy and give the semblance
of veracity to the entertainment. A judge of
native physiognomy can generaUy teU the two types
apart. There are also a few sensible men — butchers,
porters, and the like — who do not mind a little
pain for the sake of the profit.
For the rest, the ceaseless mandarin-like head-
69

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
wagglings and mutterings of the names of AUah
would stupefy anyone's brain up to a point. It
is not only Arabs who daze their understandings
with godly ejaculations, oft repeated. The mara
bout leader, who is a kind of maitre de ballet,
enfolds each performer in his arms and makes a
few passes round him, or kisses him. The
uninitiated then reel off in a trance of hypnotic
joy; the others do the same, in more theatrical
fashion. At the end of each one's trick he de-
mesmerizes him once more, and perhaps touches
the wound with his hands. He passes the skewer
or sword between his lips as a disinfectant — a wise
precaution. These lacerations heal quickly. I have spoken
to men labouring in the fields on the day following
such excesses, and found them ready to " work "
again the same evening.
It ended up with a beast-dance — two fine
negroes, all but naked, depicting the amorous
rages of panthers or some other cat-like feral.
This was really good, of its kind ; and if, as regards
the earlier part of the programme, it was stiU
difficult to teU where religion ended and sensuality
began (it sometimes is), there was no doubt about
the last item, which was purely sadistic. Soon
there issued the familiar triUings from the balcony,
70

AMUSEMENTS BY THE WAY
and the firing-off of guns, to announce that the
drama was terminated.
It is we shrinkingly jesthetic creatures who
conjure up by a mere effort of the imagination
what these blunt folks cannot conceive without
gross visual stimulants. That is because they have
not enjoyed our advantages ; they are not civilized.
Among other things, they have not gone through
a " reformation." Take a northern stock, sound
in mind and body ; infuse into it a perverse dis
respect for the human frame and other anti-
rational whimsies ; muddle the whole, once more,
by a condiment of Hellenistic renaissance and add,
as crowning flavour, puritan " conscience " and
" sinfulness " — mix up, in a general way, good
nourishment with ascetic principles — and you wiU
attain to a capacity of luxuriance in certain matters
that may weU be the envy and despair of poor
primitives Uke the Arabs.
Extremes meet. Performances such as these
are beyond good and evil. They are for the wholly
savage or the wholly civilized. We complain
considerably just now of the swamping of class
distinctions in our lands, but a man of culture
has a prerogative to which the biliously moral
middle classes can never aspire : to be an Arab,
when it suits him. 71

Chapter VII
AT THE CAFE
WHETHER it be due to the incessant
cold and dry winds, that parch the
more genial humours, or to some
other cause, there is certainly a tone
of exacerbation, at this moment, among the Euro
pean residents at Gafsa. I noticed it very clearly
yesterday evening in the little French cafe — a
soul-withering resort, furnished with a few cast-
iron tables and uncomfortable chairs that repose
on a flooring of chiU cement tiles — ^where, in sheer
desperation, two or three of us, muffled up to our
ears, congregate before dinner to exchange gossip
and imbibe the pre-prandial absinthe.
I announced my intention of leaving shortly
for Tozeur.
"So you have not yet taken your fill of dirt
and discomfort in Tunisia, Monsieur ? " asked
one of the clients. He is a wizened old nondescript
with satyr-like beard, a kind of Thersites, who is
understood to have established, from the days of
72

AT THE CAFE
Abdelkader and " for certain reasons," his head
quarters at Gafsa, where he sips absinthes past
all computation, exercising his wit upon everybody
and everything with a fluent and rather diverting
pessimism. " You wiU probably perish on the
road to Tozeur, in a sandstorm."
"Ah, those sandstorms: they interest me. Have
you ever been to Tozeur ? "
" God forbid ! Gafsa is quite bad enough for
me. Or you may be strangled by the Arabs ;
such things occur every day. You smile ? Read
the papers ! At some places, like Sfax, there are
regular organized bands of assassins, the police
being doubtless in their pay. Be sure to hold
your revolver in readiness — better carry it in
your jacket pocket, like this. . . . No revolver !
(To the company at large) He has no revolver !
In that case, don't dream of going out after sunset,
here or anywhere else in this country. And read
the papers."
It was always " read the papers."
I mentioned that I had walked home, at midnight
on the previous evening, from the station.
" Then don't do it again, if you value your life.
Not long ago a lieutenant was attacked on that
very road, and almost beaten to death. He managed
to crawl back to barracks, and is now a wreck,
73

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
incapacitated from further service. By a miracle
he was able to identify one of his assailants. They
gave him — what do you think ? — two years' im
prisonment ! Why not the Legion d'Honneur while
we are about it ? Then there was the Italian —
a respectable Italian, for a wonder — ^who went
out for a walk and was never heard of again. The
country was scoured for two months, but not so
much as a button was ever found — not a button !
They had buried his body in the sand. That's
their usual system, cheap and effective. And the
guide-books say that Tunisia is as safe as the heart
of France — ha, ha, ha ! I wonder how much
they are paid for making that statement, and who
pays it ? "
" The hotel proprietors, with an occasional
subsidy from the Government." This from a
bloodthirsty young extremist in gaiters and riding-
breeches, who had once been a colon, a farmer,
but had given it up in disgust. " We cherish
these savages," he went on, " as if they were our
uncles and aunts ; everywhere, that is, save in
those districts which are still under military rule.
There you should see the natives stand up and
salute you ! I am anti-military myself ; but
I maintain that this salute should be kept up, as
demonstrating the gulf that exists between our-
74

AT THE CAFE
selves and them. But the moment you leave
that zone the gulf is systematically bridged over,
to make it more pleasant for the poor, misused
Arab. Let me teU you what I think. I think that
the Sicilians would have managed things better
than we have done. And I also think that our
controlleurs, they are not Frenchmen, but Arabs."
" Foyons, voyons ! " said a clear voice from another
table — a new-comer, apparently. " These are the
criticisms to which we are exposed, because we
introduce an enUghtened and progressive policy."
" Progressive policy be damned ! We have
held Gafsa for the last thirty years, and what
have we done to improve the place ? Nothing."
" Pardon me ! We have planted twenty-seven
pepper trees. Tunisia exists for needy people
in search of work. If you can't make it pay, leave
it alone. You have every facility for buying land,
for importing this and that — why don't you settle
down and make yourselves at home ? A colony,
my friend, is not an orchid."
" And as for those Sicilians," interposed the
faun-like wooer of the Green Fairy, " I think
you're aU wrong. I admit that they are more
flexible than we are, if you like to put it that way.
They will do things that no Frenchman can do;
they will establish themselves in places where
75

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
no Frenchman could live ; they wiU eat things which
no Frenchman could swaUow ; they wiU oust the
very Arabs out of the country in course of time,
by sheer number of progeny and animal vitality.
Oh, yes ; it's clear the Sicilians can lower their
standard to any extent. But they can never raise
it. They are the cancer of Tunisia. Wherever
they go, they bring their filth, their mafia, roguery
and corruption. Every Sicilian is a potential
Arab, the difference between them being merely
external ; the true African variety wears less
clothes and keeps his house cleaner. I know
them ! A race of sinister buffoons and cut-throats,
incapable of any ennobling thought, whose highest
virtues are other men's vices, whose only method
of reasoning is the knife. . . . Don't accuse me.
Messieurs, of prejudice, when I am trying to state
the case impartiaUy."
You will often hear it put as baldly as that.
The alien inhabitants of Tunisia are weU hated
by a certain type of Frenchmen. The country
has been compared to a wine-bottle that bears
some high-flown label indicative of fine stuff
within — the French administration — but is fiUed,
unfortunately, with a poisonous mixture from
round the corner, the Jews, SiciUans, Maltese, and
Corsicans. 76

AT THE CAFE
It is as difficult for a tourist to arrive at a just
opinion on this subject as for the average French
man. The traveller will not find it easy to acquire
the necessary first-hand data, while the other is
warped by his congenital xenophobia.
In 1900 there were 80,000 Italians, mostly
SiciUans, in the Regency, as opposed to 20,000
Frenchmen, one-half of whom were Government
servants. This great predominance of a foreign
stock scared some good folks, and a " Comite du
peuplement francais " was organized, to study ways
and means of populating Tunisia with French
citizens. If SiciUans could obtain grants of land under
the same conditions as Frenchmen, large tracts,
now waste, would be converted into gardens,
to the profit of the exchequer. Is it worth while ?
No, thinks the Government ; and with reason.
French rule in Northern Africa is a politico-moral
experiment on a large scale, with what might be
caUed an idealistic background, such as only a
civiUzed nation can conceive. Italians might im
prove the land, but they could never improve
the Arab ; they are themselves not sufficiently
wise, or even weU-intentioned.
The Anti-Semitic agitation has died a natural
death: you may curse the Jews, but you cannot
n

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
crush them. They make good citizens, and are
for ever trying to gain more political influence,
which is surely to their credit, though it annoys
a certain class in Tunis. As intermediaries between
the Arab and the white man they are invaluable,
their plasticity allowing them to ascend or descend
in either direction, while their broad and active
tolerance, fruit of bitter experience in the past,
has honeycombed the land with freemasonry and
scientific charity and liberalism. So far as I can
see, their dirt does not detract from their astute
ness — perhaps it aids it, by removing one source
of mental preoccupation, cleanliness. The old
distinction between Livornese and Tunisian Jews
is slowly becoming effaced.
If there is one class of these immigrants whom
the ordinary French employe hates more than
another it is his own countrymen, the Corsicans.
They have the gift of climbing into smaU but
lucrative posts of administration, and there, once
established, they sit fast like limpets, to the dismay
of competing French office-seekers. Eject them ?
You might as well propose to uproot Atlas or Ararat.
Not only can they never be displaced, but from
year to year, by every art, good or evil, they con
solidate their position. That done, they begin
to send for their relations. One by one new Corsi-
78

AT THE CAFE
cans arrive from over the sea, each forming a centre
in his turn, where he sits tight, with a pertinacious
solidarity that borders on the superhuman.
Cave-hunting savages at heart, and enemy to
every man save their own blood relations, the
Corsicans are the nightmare of the Arabs on account
of their irreclaimable avarice and brutality. They
would flay the native alive, if they dared, and sell
his skin for boot-leather. They can play at being
plus arabes que les arabes, and then, if the game
goes against them, they invoke their rights of French
citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman
knows it aU ; he regrets that such creatures should
be his own compatriots — regrets, maybe, that he
is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness
and insensibility ; and shrugs his shoulders in
civilized despair.
As for the Maltese, they would be all very well
if — ^if they were not British subjects. But such
being the case, you never know ! It is disheartening
to find such babble in the mouth of respectable
officials and writers.
I am weU aware that there is a Sicilian in fabula
who is not "mafioso"; that the crude banditism
which sits in every Corsican's bones has raised
him to the elysium of martyrs and heroes and not,
where he ought to have gone, to the gallows ;
79

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
that the Maltese are not merely cantankerous
and bigoted (Catholic) Arabs, but also sober,
industrious, and economical. I have lived with
aU these races in their own countries and — apart
from a fatal monkey-like apprehensibility which
passes for inteUigence but, as a matter of fact,
precludes it — ^have found chiefly this to admire
in them, that they are prolific and kind to their
offspring. SmaU praise ? Not altogether. The same may
apply to cats and dogs, but it does not always apply
to civilized races of men. The Scotchman, for
instance, can produce children, but is often unkind
to them {Read the papers .') ; the Frenchman is
kind to children, but often cannot produce them.
It would seem that chiefly in half-cultured people
are these two qualities, twin roots of racial and
domestic virtues, to be met with side by side.
Whatever may be the cause of it — better food,
a different legislation or climate, or contact with
other nations — the suggestive fact remains, that
the more objectionable idiosyncrasies of the Maltese,
Corsicans and Sicilians become diluted on African
soil. Can it be the mere change from an island
to a continent ? There may be some truth in
Bourget's " oppression des iles." Insulani semper
mali, says an old Latin proverb. . . .
§9

AT THE CAFE
" Do you know," the gaitered young ex-farmer
was saying — " do you know how many French
colons there are in the whole regency ? Eight
or nine hundred, drowned in an ocean of Arabs,
who own the land. And that's what we call settling
a country. The Americans knew better when they
cleared out the redskins ! And how do the English
manage in India ? Why, they shoot them — piff-
paff : it's done ! That's the way to colonize
(looking approvingly at me) — supprimez Vindigene !
A nation cannot condescend to the idealistic ravings
of an individual."
I observed that I had never heard of that method
being actuaUy adopted in India.
" You say that. Monsieur, because you fear it
sounds a little drastic. But we are not in Paris
or London just now ; we can say what we think.
Or better stiU" (glowing with enthusiasm), "they
tie them to the mouth of a big gun, and then —
Boum . . . houpla ! ! Biftek a la tartare."
" You are misinformed, my friend," said the
voice from the other table. " That Indian cannon
business was merely an administrative experi
ment." I looked at the speaker, who was smiling mirth-
fuUy to himself. He was a fair-complexioned
man of about forty-five, rather carefuUy dressed.

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
blue-eyed, with a short, weU-groomed beard —
evidently an old acquaintance of the company.
" It's all right for you," the other retorted,
" with your comfortable offices and your fat,
ever-increasing salaries. You are not a harassed
agriculturist, skulking in fear of his life, or a
public servant, starving on four francs a day.
Behold ! " he went on, extracting a newspaper
out of his pocket, " behold the latest portrait of
yourself and your coUeagues — ^you have an air of
revolting prosperity. And your whole biography,
too, in black and white ; your wife, your chUdren,
your past career . . . what it is to be a capitalist ! "
" Tiens ! I never saw this. And printed in
Paris a fortnight ago ! But it may be lying some
where about the house. I only returned at midday,
you know. Not exactly a flattering likeness. . . ."
The document was handed round. It was
a French journal devoted to mining interests,
and contained a long article dealing with the
phosphate industry of Metlaoui, near Gafsa, with
views of the works and portraits of its principal
representatives. Beneath that of the speaker
were printed the words —
"Paul Dufresnoy,
Ingenieur civil des mines,"
and some other titles. 82

AT THE CAFE
An odd coincidence, this meeting, on the eve
of my departure.
I passed over to his table and mentioned that
I possessed an introductory letter to him.
" How ? And you are leaving to-morrow for
the Djerid ? You are not coming to see me ? "
I replied that I would gladly give myself that
pleasure. His family, he explained, was away
just now, but if I could arrange to delay my de
parture for a little while he would accompany
me as far as Metlaoui, which lies on the Tozeur
route, and show me over the mines. He was to
return to his work there in a week or so. The
proposal was too tempting to be refused.
We spoke of the spirit of irritation and dis
content that seemed rife among the Europeans
in Gafsa.
" Yes, the wind," he said ; " or perhaps Africa
generaUy. I've often noticed that men, and women
too, put on new faces and characters hereabouts.
This contact with an inferior race upsets their
nervous equihbrium. The lack of comfort and
the need of abrupt action makes them discard
gentleness and other external husks of civilization.
The mildest of us are liable to become brusque ;
and harsh ones, brutal. Only the native remains
resigned." 83

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Thereupon I propounded my hypothesis of
the Mektoub or resignation doctrine : the intellectual
burnous of the Arabs.
The theory, he thought, was so good that there
must be something wrong with it. His work
brought him into daily contact with the natives,
and, so far as he could judge, Mektoub was only
one aspect of their general way of looking at things.
It was bound up, for instance, with that idea of
impenitence. Unlike ourselves, who approve of
self-abasement, the Arab regards repentance as
only fit for slaves. He does not hunt for his own
sins ; he hunts for yours, and hits you on the
head when he finds them. There was something
in the notion, he thought, for surely remorse
was rather a provincial sensation; it implies that
a man has reaUy done something wrong, or that
he thinks he has ; in either case, what was there
to boast of ? He had Uttle time for studies, nowa
days, but it seemed to him that the trend of feeling
was in the direction of Old Testamentary ideals.
Men were growing tired of offering their other
cheek to be smitten ; they found it degrading,
as do the Arabs. Why not import some of these
sterner conceptions into our morality, as we import
their peppery curries and kouskous and pilaffs
into our cuisine ? 84

AT THE CAFE
He was inclined to say amiable things about the
English race. The Anglo-Saxon, he thought,
with his " constitutional non-morality," had come
nearest to discovering a sensible working system
of conduct — as a nation. It is his highest racial
virtue to lead the Cosmic Life — to take aU he can
get, and ask for more. That is why every one,
in his heart of hearts, envies and admires him.
His chief defect, he thought, was a disdain of a
knowledge of general principles, justifiable enough
in the times of unsound teleological theorizings,
but not nowadays, when we have at last set foot
upon earth.
" And what do you say," I asked, " to our
so-caUed national hypocrisy ? "
" WeU, we others are apt to stand aside and
marvel whether you have succeeded by reason of
it, or in spite of it. Of course it annoys us beyond
words ! But there is a form of it which is highly
laudable : the Anglo-Saxon, it seems to me, often
acts in apparently hypocritical fashion out of
consideration for what he conceives to be the
opinions of the majority. Profoundly self-respect
ing, he is equally careful not to impinge upon the
feelings of others, however wrong-headed he may
think them. In such cases, his hypocrisy is only
a proof of civilization and genuine politeness.
85

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Hence also that shyness and reserve which I have
often noticed in your countrymen — they are not
signs of awkwardness or indecision, but of strength
systematicaUy controlled."
" That is very gratifying. And what of our
snobbishness ? "
" The English snobbishness," he replied, " may
not be beautiful, but its origins are sufficiently
venerable to inspire respect. It testifies to long
poUtical stability ; it is rooted in Magna Charta.
We foreigners, who upset our Governments and
annihilate our aristocracies every ten years, wiU
never attain that mellow stage. One may dislike
it ; one dislikes the by-products of many excellent
institutions. Your Government, for example, does
extraordinarily little to foster art or literature
or research. Taken by itself, that is an evil. But
as a by-product of the English cult of the individual
— of that avoidance of pestilential State interference
in everything which is the curse of continental
Europe — it may be gladly endured, if not ad
mired." He added :
" When one Uves out of Europe, Monsieur,
one learns to know England better. To see things
at their true perspective one must take up a stand
at a proper distance from them. England only
86

AT THE CAFE
begins to show its true proportions at a point
where other lands cease to be visible. Austria,
for instance, can only be examined on the spot.
Once you have crossed the insignificant Mediter
ranean, this immense and fertile country, with its
long history of rulers and battles, has already
faded into air. Ca n'existe plus. Your Gladstone
explained the phenomenon correctly : Austria has
never done good to the world."
I gathered that the Metlaoui phosphate company
had modelled its principles on those of the " Anglo-
Saxon." There is little " pestilential State inter
ference " in its management ; the board of directors
takes aU it can get, and asks for more. It is a paying
concern, and consequently the shareholders admire
it unreservedly — in the rest of mankind, this feeling
is tinctured with a strong dose of envy.

87

Chapter VIII
POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
ONE dines early in Gafsa, and afterwards
there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to
do. Cafes become tedious with their
card-games, cowboy politics and per
sistent allusions to " la femme," that protean
fetich which dominates and saturates the Gallic
mind, oozing out, so to speak, at every pore of
their social and national life. They never seem
to grow out of the Ewig-weibliche stage. If only,
like the Maltese, they would talk less and do more
in certain respects, the "comite du peuplement"
might close its doors. But such recklessness would
ill comport with the ant-like hiving quality which
paid back, within I forget how few years, the
German war indemnity.
After dinner, therefore, a short promenade about
the streets and oasis, to court that illusive phantom,
sleep, and to replenish the mind with new and
peaceful images. I found a cloudless and relatively
warm night. The wind had died down, and there
88

POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
was a brilUant comet (the Johannesburg comet) in
the sky. Knots of natives were gazing at it with
disfavour : I listened, and heard one of them
attributing the Franco-Tripolitan frontier incident
to its baleful fires. " And there is more to come,"
he added, " unless it goes away." Townspeople, of
course ; the cultivators are asleep long ago.
Why don't you settle down and make yourselves
at home ? With those words Dufresnoy had put
his finger on the spot. The same idea must occur
to every one who compares the French method of
colonization with that pursued in English depen
dencies. Even our most ephemeral civU servants
take pleasure in " settling down " ; they acquire
local interests in golf, or native folklore, or butter
flies ; they manage to surround themselves with an
atmosphere of home. Among the colons of Tunisia
you may find a home establishment of the most
comfortable type, but Government employes re
gard the Regency in the light of an exile ; they never
try to make their life more endurable, as they easily
could do, with a little co-operation.
In Gafsa, for example, where the summer
temperature is lOO, no ice can be procured unless
you drive to fetch it from the station settlement
where the phosphate company has its servants ;
if you want good vegetables, you must telegraph
89

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
inland for them to Metlaoui, whither they are
brought from the sea-coast, via Gafsa, for the con
sumption of the " company " ; fresh fish, which are
caught in fabulous quantities at Sfax, and could
be transported by every over-night train, are hardly
ever visible in the Gafsa market. There is no
chemist's shop in the place, not even the humblest
drug-store, where you can procure a pennyworth
of boric acid or court-plaster. So they live on,
indulging all the time in a luxury of lamentation.
There would be better shops in places like Gafsa
if foreign commercial settlers were not discouraged
from establishing themselves. French ones, needless
to say, refuse to " settle."
The hotels in the country places, too, would be
better. At present they exist on a system of mono
polism and favouritism ; it is quite beyond the
ambitions of their managers to coUect a clientMe ;
most of these concerns are palpably run on the
following principle : to keep the guest in such a
state of chattering starvation, that he is ready to eat
anything. How often have I yearned, in these
" Grand Hotels " — they are aU grand hotels — for the
material comforts and the decent fare of some little
wayside hostelry in Finland, or a rest-house in the
jungle of Ceylon !
Why do French traveUers not complain oftener ?
90

POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
WeU, the Frenchman is a patriotic creature
and congenitally kind-hearted ; the proprietors of
these establishments are country-people of his ;
they are poor devils who have got stranded, somehow
or other, in Tunisia ; one must have patience with
them. Sometimes, however, your self-respecting
Gaul is strained beyond the point of patriotic
endurance by the concoctions of these Locustas
and Borgias ; then he unsheathes that dagger-like
Neanderthal manner which he carries about with him
for rare occasions of self-defence ; and it warms the
cockles of one's heart to hear how pertinently he
discourses damnation to the cringing host. For
we non-Frenchmen, be it understood, are aU " des
desequilibres " who demand toast, hot water and
such-like exotics ; our complaints need not be taken
seriously ; besides, foreigners are bound to pay in
any case. But when a countryman begins to find
fault there is not only a possibUity that something,
after all, may not be quite right with the cuisine or
drainage, but even a chance that one or two items
wiU be coldly struck off the reckoning. And that
hurts !
They will teU you that there is nothing to be
procured in the market ; but if you proceed to the
spot, you will at least see succulent legs of mutton
exposed for sale. The chef of the establishment,
91

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
however, when making his morning purchases,
passes by these with scorn, and betakes himself to a
Uttle booth whose table is strewn with dubious
scraps of skin and bones, which have already been
fingered and contemptuously thrown aside by fifty
dirty Arabs (I speak as an eye-witness) ; he buys a
few handfuls of these horrors for three or four sous,
and forthwith — hey, presto ! — they are transformed
into a "ragout a la bretonne" for the famished
traveller. Tunisia is a sheep-rearing country — there
are sixty thousand sheep in the controle of Gafsa
alone — but you may live there a lifetime before
seeing a leg of mutton at a country table d'hote.
For all the " gigots " that ever appear at my host's
entertainment, one might reaUy think that the
muttons of Africa were a peculiar species, a species
without legs : crawling, maybe, on their beUies,
like Nebuchadnezzar.
"Je m'en f — de vot' bon-homme," said one of
these gentlemen to me, referring to Baedeker,
with whose sacred pages I had threatened him.
" And as for the tourists, they'll come just the
same." And so they do ! But they all end in discovering
that even the worm will turn, when suffering from
the torments of dyspepsia tunesina veridica sine qud
non . . . 92

POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS
A good deal of amateurish talking is done, in
Gafsa, in regard to the profits that would be gained
were the oasis to be given over to Sicilian cultivators.
Apart -from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of
Gafsa, who is the chief owner of it, would have
something to say on the subject, these advantages
would be limited to pruning the trees and grafting
some of them ; introducing, possibly, a few more
vegetables, and having the ground more parsi
moniously tended than at present. The magnesia
in the water is hostile to the majority of delicate
European growths. Something, no doubt, could
be done in the way of improvement, but as a set-off
to a visionary project of this kind, which is averse
to the whole spirit of French rule in Tunisia, there
would be a great rise in prices : Italians would form
their inevitable ring. The extent of the gardens
has almost doubled since 1880, without their help.
As to the Arabs 
If the French looked to their prison system they
would soon arrive at better results. For childish
thefts and such-like trespasses, committed nearly
always at the instigation of their parents, boys of
ten and twelve are now locked up with hardened
criminals, often for considerable periods : what is
this but a State-aided manufacture of crime ? Go
to the prison of Sfax, and you will realize that there
93

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
may be some reason for the absinthe-drinker's
remark as to the " organized bands of assassins " at
that place. I speak of what I have seen with my
eyes. I found the prison of Souk-el-Arba, for
instance, so tightly packed with men and young
boys that there was not room for all of them to
lie down at night, and such furious fights used to
occur for the possession of places near the wall (the
room was in pitch-darkness) that the warder was
obliged to enter, every now and then, and restore
order by beating those nearest the door about the
head with a club.
The Arab boy, they will tell you, is fuU of guile,
and must be repressed.
Granted, but 
A colony, furthermore, is not an orchid.
Granted. Q.E.D.

94

Chapter IX
SOME OF OUR GUESTS
ISHALL be glad to leave for Metlaoui and
the Djerid. Gafsa is losing its fiavour; the
novelty and pungency are gone. The same
old faces, the same old bouts de conversation ;
quickly, indeed, does one live oneself into a place
and learn, or think to learn, aU its little secrets.
The hotel, too, has suddenly become an insuffer
able menagerie. Mysterious inspectors come and
go, and commercial traveUers of unappetizing looks
and habits are far more frequent than formerly.
But I shaU regret the earth-convulsing laughter of
the Greek doctor, who has latterly taken to putting
in an appearance at meal-time. He is a gruff, jovial
personage, and so huge in bulk that he can barely
squeeze into the door of his Uttle shop in the souk
where he sits, surrounded by unguents and embroca
tions, to treat the natives for their multifarious dis
tempers. He is quite straightforward about the
business. " You come to this country to spend
money," he tells me, " but I — to make it."
95

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
The profession is not all plain sailing, however,
for the French authorities raise every kind of
obstacle in his path ; they tear his red advertise
ments down from the street walls and openly caU
him a quack. Were it not for the Greek Consul in
Tunis, who happens to be an old friend of his, who
knows how much longer they would allow him to
practise in the land !
I sometimes go to watch his operations, which,
so far as I can judge, are fairly remunerative, thanks
to Achmet the interpreter, one of whose many
duties it is to inform himself confidentiaUy of the
financial status of prospective patients. For the
richest sheikh will don tattered clothes when he
visits the surgery, and would doubtless be taken for
some poor labourer were it not for Achmet, who
sees through the disguise and gives a discreet sign
to iEsculapius, whose services, of course, must be
prepaid ; it is money down before he will prescribe
or give away a drop of medicine.
I was much interested in one of his methods as
exemplified on the person of a native youth who
was led in the other day. He was an Aissouiyah
dancer, and had evidently overdone his part in the
heat of enthusiasm ; there were no less than forty-
three sword-cuts across his middle. After receiving
a handsome fee the doctor gave him some liniment
96

Natives of Gafsa

SOME OF OUR GUESTS
which caused exquisite pain : the patient writhed
in agony.
" That's good medicine," I heard Achmet tell
ing him, reassuringly ; " that's strong. See how it
hurts ! "
For a while he bore up bravely, but the pain
growing worse instead of better, the doctor was at
last persuaded, out of compassion and in return for
a second fee, to give him something with a more
soothing effect.
But eye diseases are his speciality. His piece de
resistance is a Jewish tradesman whom he has lately
supplied with an admirable glass eye — a thing almost
unheard-of in these parts. This man and myself
were sitting in the shop not long ago when a
Moroccan happened to be passing who had known
him in his one-eyed days ; the stranger gave him a
sharp look and then walked swiftly away, apparently
suspecting himself to be the victim of some absurd
haUucination as regards the new eye. But he re
turned anon, to make sure of his mistake, I suppose ;
while the Jew confronted him with a defiant glance
of his two eyes. They stared at each other for some
time in silence. At last the Moroccan enquired :
" Are you the man who sold me that piece of
cloth three weeks ago ? "
" I am he."
Q 97

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
There was another long pause. Then :
" That new eye : how came you by it ? "
The Jew, a dreadful scoffer, pointed heavenwards
with one finger.
" A thing of God ! " he said. " A miracle has
been vouchsafed me."
But the man of Mequinez answered nothing. He
gazed at him once more, and then, slowly bending
down his head, folded his hands across his breast
in prayer, and walked away. . . .
Then there is the Polish Count, Count Pono-
mareff, who arrived four days ago. He is past
middle age, with a drooping moustache and large
red nose ; a wistful and woebegone figure, but a
briUiant conversationalist, when the mood is upon
him. I have not taken very kindly to the man.
Among other things, he disapproves of flint-collect
ing ; he asks, rather scornfully, " whether one can
sell such stones." And yet, for some obscure
reason, he has singled me out among the men as
the object of his favourable notice, affecting rather
a distant manner towards the rest of us ; the ladies,
however, are charmed by his courtly graces. He
wears profuse jewellery, to set off his title, no
doubt. It is understood that he has held high
Government posts, and is now only waiting for some
letters before joining certain friends in a costly
98

SOME OF OUR GUESTS
caravan expedition further south. Yet he seems
poor — hopelessly poor. I surprised him, soon after
his arrival, in a heated debate with the landlord on
the subject of candles and cafe au lait. Then he
enquired if the country was safe.
" Not if you go out with a machine comme ga,"
touching the Count's gorgeous watch-chain.
He knows, at least, how to handle his knife and
fork, which is more than can be said of all the in
mates of this hostelry. A town-dweller, evidently ;
he teUs me he detests wild life of every kind and
has come here only to oblige his friends ; he calls
the Arabs " ignoble savages."
Such, however, is not the opinion of another
guest, my friend Monsieur M  . One must be
careful how one criticizes the habits of the natives
in his presence ; not that he would be angry, for
he is too gentle to feel wrath ; or become argumen
tative — ^he is too sure of his ground for that ; but
he might be wounded on his most sensitive spot,
and he would certainly think you — well, mis
informed. The motley crew of Gafsa have become his
favourites ever since his arrival in the country two
weeks ago, and he has a theory that it is a mistake
to endeavour to learn their language — it only leads
you astray, it spoils the " direct impression."
99

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
He is a weU-known French painter, whom some
eye trouble has forced — only temporarily, let us
hope — to abandon the brush. Despite his patri
archal beard, he is an impenitent romanticist of
contagious youthfulness ; the entire universe lies so
harmoniously disposed and in such roseate tints be
fore his mental vision, that no one save Madame
M  , a wise lady of the formal-yet-opulent type,
whom Maupassant would have classed as "encore
desirable," is able to drag him to earth again, with
a few words of wholesome cynicism.
Just for the fun of the thing, and to while away
his hours of enforced idleness, he is collecting facts
for a book to be entitled " Customs of the Arabs,"
as exemplified by the life of Gafsa. The idea came
to him quite suddenly, after reading some descrip
tions which he considered sadly misleading. Cus
toms of the Arabs ! To tease him, I quote the
authority of Bordereau, who says that there are
practically no Arabs in Gafsa ; that the customs of
this town are one thing and those of the Arabs
another, unless he applies the word Arab to aU the
Mohammedan races of these parts.
The objection is brushed aside ; one word is as
good as another, n'est-ce pas P
I point out a genuine Arab who happens to be
passing ; he has come down from the hills and is
lOO

SOME OF OUR GUESTS
leading a camel loaded with halfa ; he is gaunt and
iU-clad, but walks with a fine swagger, and is evi
dently a valuable young person, to judge by his
tattooings. " That ? That's only a young savage from the
mountains. How are you to find out anything about
him ? And I make a point, you know, of only re
cording what I see with my eyes. No theories for
me ! I mean to see everything and to set it down ;
to describe the Arabs as they are — as they really are,
in all the circumstances of their daily lives. One
must see everything."
As a painter, I urge, he must have discovered how
useful it is to restrict the field of vision now and
then ; to be deliberately half blind.
" Painting, Monsieur, is one thing, and writing
another. It is one of the few advantages of growing
old that things begin to fall, so to speak, into their
proper places. When I go to my studio, I go for
distraction ; art, it seems to me, is there to create
moods, pleasurable or otherwise ; a painter must
seize impressions. But I go to my library for in
formation ; the business of a writer is to collect
and arrange facts ; a book, as I apprehend it, should
be — a book. That is my quarrel with this Tunisian
literature ; many of the things that have been
written about the country are not books at all ;
IOI

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
while others are full of mistakes. Look at these two
volumes, for instance ! Impressionistic realism, I
suppose they would call it, scrawled down by an
excitable female journalist who, I am sorry to say,
has created quite a rage for European and American
lady tourists among these Arabs, to the great dis
credit of our civilization. Read them. Monsieur, as
a warning example, and perhaps you wiU give me
your Bordereau instead ; there may be something in
it, after aU."
I gladly make the exchange, and regard the
transaction in the light of an omen, an epoch. I
have been craving for something different from the
facts of Bordereau, who has been my companion
all these days. A solid little piece of work, by the
way, which often set me wondering whether our
British public would care to pay four shillings for
a technical account of the climate, history and
natural products of some remote Egyptian oasis.
But perhaps the cost of production has been de
frayed by some Government department.
These two volumes by Isabelle Eberhardt — where
have I heard that name before ? — look tempting. I
promise myself some hours of pleasant reading.
" And then, for downright misstatement," he
continued, " look at this. Here is a Monsieur
Kocher, who passes for an authority, and who, de-

SOME OF OUR GUESTS
scribing the Arab marriage customs, talks of the
' brutalite du viol dans le marriage — un drame lugu-
bre.' Now that comes of not examining things with
one's own eyes. Since my arrival here I have already
seen several Arab weddings and something of their
married life, and I must say, candidly, that I find it
full of romance. Say what you will, these Arabs are
unconscious poets."
" And if you want still further information," I
said, " ask the boy whom I saw blacking your boots
this morning. He will describe to you the minutest
details of his married life with surprising frankness.
His father bought him a wife two weeks ago, under
the condition, however, that his little brother is to
be aUowed to share in the joys of matrimony. That
young savage from the mountains would blush, if
Arabs ever could blush, to hear their revelations."
" Oh, oh, oh ! You appal me ! But I would Uke
to make personal enquiries into the matter ; that is,
if I can make them understand me. It is my rule,
you know."
" Do, Monsieur ; question both the brothers, and
write down their ansjwers, the perusal of which will
be a liberal education for our boys at home. Among
other things, they say that whenever  But here
is Madame coming ! "
" Never mind her ! She takes an interest in Arab
103

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
institutions, as I do. . . . Only imagine, Amelie,
our shoeblack is said to be actually married ; and
so is his little brother, and they have one and the
same bride ! Two husbands to one wife, or half a
wife apiece — what do you think of that ? "
" I think it's quite enough to begin with. Re
member, mon cher, they are only children."

104

Chapter X
THE OASIS OF LEILA
I RODE, for a farewell visit, to the smaU
oasis of Leila, or Lalla, which lies a few miles
beyond the railway station. It is one of
several parasitic oases of Gafsa : a collection
of mud-houses whose gardens are watered by a
far-famed spring, the fountain of Leila.
The water gushes out, tepid and unpleasant
to the taste — but health-giving, they say, like
so many unpleasant things — from under steep
banks of clay through which the railway to Sfax
has been cut. It is a sleepy hoUow of palms, a
place to dream away one's cares. The picturesque
but old-fashioned weU at this spot has just been
replaced by a modern trough of cement. I watched
the work from beginning to end, ten or fifteen
Arabs, supervised by a burly Sicilian mason, finishing
the job in a few days.
" These Saracens ! " — such was the overseer's
constant lament — " these Saracens ! You don't
know, dear sir, what fools they are."
105

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
In never-ending procession of gaudy rags the
village folk come to these waters, the boys mostly
on horseback, the women afoot. Donkeys are
loaded with the heavy black goat-skins of water;
there is laundry-work going on, and a good deal
of straightforward love-making under the shade.
These children of nature have a wild beauty of
their own, and the young girls are frolicsome as
gazelles and far less timid. They have none of the
pseudo-bashfulness of the townsfolk. For the rest,
only the dessus du panier of womankind goes veiled
hereabouts — a few portly dames of Gafsa, that is,
who are none the worse, I suspect, for keeping
their features hidden. Perhaps the good looks
of these Leila people are a heritage from olden
days, for this oasis is known to be a race islet,
inhabited almost exclusively by men of the EUez
stock — one of the three races that have chiefly
contributed to the formation of the modern Gafsa
type ; a conquering brood of European origin,
small but shapely.
But untold ages ere this the waters of LeUa
were already frequented by men of another kind,
by the flint-artists. Among the relics of their
occupation I picked up, here, an unusually fine
implement of the " amygdaloid " shape.
Not a soul in Gafsa, native or foreign, could
1 06

THE OASIS OF LEILA
teU me who was the lady Leila that gave her name
to this fountain. On the spot, however, I heard
this tale : She was a young girl, madly enamoured
of an Arab youth, but strictly guarded. Her
married sister alone knew of their infatuation,
and used to help her by keeping a look-out for
him at the water-side ; and when he appeared,
she would return home and sing to herself (as
if it were a snatch of some old ditty) — Leila,
Leila, your lover comes ! But the maiden under
stood, and swiftly, under pretence of fetching
water, she would run to meet him at the well,
and take her joy. The story has an air of
probabiUty ; such things are done every day,
at every fountain throughout the land. This
lingering at the well is one of the moments when
their hard life is irradiated by a gleam of romance.
An old man also gave me the following account : —
Ages ago, he said, when Gafsa belonged to
the Sultan of Trablus (Tripoli) there was sad
misgovernment in the land. The taxes became
quite unendurable, and the city was half emptied
of its inhabitants, who fled this way and that,
rather than submit to the extortions of the Sultan's
officers. And among those who escaped in this
fashion was a god-fearing widow and her children.
Her name was Leila. She took up her abode
107

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
near this fountain, which was then little frequented.
Here she dwelt, doing good works whenever
occasion offered. And here, at length, she was
received into the mercy of Allah and entombed.
The country-folk gave her name to the water,
to perpetuate the memory of her pious life. . . .
The depression beyond this fountain is celebrated
as the resort of game, and yesterday a French
gentleman of my acquaintance went there, provided
with all the accoutrements of sport, not omitting
a copious luncheon-basket — there might be snipe
or partridges, or perhaps a hare, a gazelle, a leopard
— who knows ?
He returned in good time for dinner.
" Voila ma chasse ! " he said, opening his bag.
It contained a bundle of wild asparagus, for salad,
and fourteen frogs, which he had killed with a
rifle. " You can't get frogs as easily in my part of
France," he told me. " If the sport were not
forbidden for seven months out of the twelve,
the species would long ago have become extinct."
I enquired whether the close-season for frogs
was officially set down, like that of hares or wild
fowl. " Frogs," he explained, " are not considered
game in the governmental sense of that word ;
io8

THE OASIS OF LEILA
they faU into the category of fisheries which,
as you know, comes under the jurisdiction of the
respective prefects. Hence the close-time, though
officiaUy fixed, varies according to the different
provinces. In my department, for example, it
begins on the 15th of January. At Gafsa, if I
may judge by certain indications, it would probably
be arranged to commence still earlier."
Far be it from me to decry the succulent hams
of Rana esculenta (or rather ridibunda). I have been
offered far more fearful wild-fowl nearer home —
certain ornithological wrecks, I mean, that have been
kept beyond the feather-adhering stage, and then
reverently held before a fire, for two minutes,
wrapped in a bag, lest the limbs should drop off.
There is considerable talk at Gafsa of the wild
mountain sheep, the Barbary mouflon. They
say that as late as the early nineties it was no un
common thing to meet with flocks of over thirty
grazing in the mountains. Although a special
permit must now be obtained to be allowed to
shoot them, their numbers have much diminished.
But the accounts vary so wonderfully that one
cannot form any idea of their frequency. Some
talk of seventeen being shot in the course of two
weeks' camping, others of three in a whole season.
As a rule, they are not stalked, but driven, by an
109

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
army of Arabs which the sheikh organizes for that
purpose, towards certain openings in the hills
where the sportsman takes up his stand. The
desert lynx is sometimes met with, and hyenas,
they say, occur as near to Gafsa as the Jebel Assalah.
Arabs have told me that the fat of the hyena
is used by native thieves and burglars to smear
on their bodies when they go marauding. The
dogs, they say, are so terrorized by the smell of
it, so numbed with fear and loathing, that they
have not the heart to bark. (Pliny records an ancient
notion to the effect that dogs, on coming in contact
with the hyena's shadow, lose their voice.)
Here, at the Jebel Assalah, I encountered a
jackal — a common beast, but far oftener heard
than seen. While resting in a sunny hoUow of
rock, I heard a wild cry which came from a shepherd
who was driving the jackal away from his goats.
The discomfited brute trotted in my direction,
and only caught sight of me at a few yards' distance.
I never saw a jackal more surprised in my life.
When a camel expires in the plain near some
nomads' tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap
for jackals near the carcase — they eat these beasts
and sell their skin for a few francs ; the traps
are craftily concealed underground, with a little
brushwood thrown over them to aid the deception.
IIO

THE OASIS OF LEILA
It is impossible to be aware of their existence. But
woe betide the wanderer who steps on them !
For the machine closes with the shock of an earth
quake, a perfect volcano of dust and iron teeth
leaping into the air. Its force is such that the
jackal's leg is often cut clean off, and he hops away
on the remaining three. For this and other reasons,
therefore, it is advisable not to approach too near
a dead camel.
The desert hare is shot or coursed with muzzled
greyhounds, sloughis, who strike it down with their
paws ; unmuzzled, they rend it to pieces. There
are few of them in Gafsa just now, on account of
the cold to which they are sensitive; although
muffled in wooUen garments they shiver pitifully.
Of falconers, I have only met one riding to the
chase. It was the Kaid of Gafsa, a wealthy man
of incalculable political influence both here and
in Tunis. It is even whispered  But no ; one
must not repeat all one hears. . . .
With the proprietor's permission I went over
a young plantation of trees and vegetables that
has sprung up near the railway line, about half
way between Gafsa and Leila. Excavating to
a depth of six metres at the foot of the bare
Rogib hiU, they encountered an apparently un
limited supply of water, and here, where formerly
III

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
nothing but a few scorched grasses and thorns
could be seen, is now a luxuriant little oasis. More
might be done with the place, but the owner
seems to have lost interest in it ; the locusts, too,
have been rather destructive of late.
He had planted quantities of prickly pears,
he said, but the Bedouins' cattle had devoured
them. These are useful growths in Tunisia,
requiring hardly any moisture and forming, when
full-grown, impenetrable walls of spiky green.
They also bring in a respectable revenue. In the
district of Kairouan, for instance, many families
draw their entire income from them. A few have
been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near
Gafsa, but they are unprotected and liable to be
trodden down in their early years, or eaten. Barbed
wire, herald of civilization, is almost unknown in
these parts.
Like most tradespeople, this proprietor was
rather despondent about the future of Gafsa.
There had certainly been some improvement
within the last twenty years — slight, but steady ;
the building of the railway station so far outside
the town he considered a disgraceful piece of
jobbery, a crime which had permanently injured
the prospects of the place. Merchants, he said,
are entirely dependent on the state of the Metlaoui
iiz

Roman Stones in Wall

THE OASIS OF LEILA
mines. If, like last year, these do weU, then Gafsa
also thrives. If there is a strike or over-production,
as at this moment, Gafsa suffers.
Tourists come to this town, he said, but they
leave next day. Nothing is done to make their
stay agreeable.
The natives are not of a kind to take much
interest in its welfare. Gafsa has gone through
too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches'
cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a hand
some or characteristic face. They have not the
wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the
etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen
class ; much less the lily-like personal beauty of
the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some men
that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the
savage Neanderthal brood that lived here in pre
historic times, the only pure race-type that survives
is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to
which Monsieur Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa,
has already referred. No wonder ; since Egyptian
invasions of this region went on for centuries,
culminating in the extended sea-dominion of
Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth cen
tury B.C.
A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the
place up to the thirteenth century a.d.
H 113

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
This confusion of blood has done one good
thing for them — it has given them considerable
tolerance in matters of religion. They are the
least bigoted Orientals one could wish to meet.
Only fifteen in a hundred, perhaps even less,
perform the devotions prescribed by the Prophet.
And it is part of their charming heterodoxy to be
dog-eaters. They will catch and devour each
other's dogs ; they even breed them for the market,
though they dare not expose the meat publicly,
any more than that of swine, which they eat with
relish. But up to a few days ago they had never
ventured to touch the dog of a foreigner. On
Wednesday evening, however, a fox-terrier belonging
to a French official was found in the street, dead,
with its throat cut. A stream of blood was traced
from that spot to the door of a native eating-shop,
and enquiries from the neighbours elicited the
fact that the cook of the establishment had caught
the beast and cut its throat ; that the miserable
creature, in its dying struggles, had escaped from
his grasp and run in the direction of home, only
to stagger by the roadside and expire from loss of
blood. There was a wild excitement over this little
episode. The dog of a Frenchman killed, for
culinary purposes, by an Arab ; it was the comble
114

THE OASIS OF LEILA
of temerity ! The owner of the animal, on hearing
the news, buckled on his revolver and repaired
to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting
his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already
conjured into some safe place of custody. If he
is wise he wiU languish in prison for some days
longer. Gafsa lies high, and I ask myself whether its
fierce shiftings of heat and cold, its nocturnal
radiation that splits the very rocks and renders
life impossible for many plants (outside the culti
vated zone, which equalizes these extremes) —
whether aU this has not had a numbing and stupe
fying influence on the character of the inhabitants.
Would not a man, under such perennial vexations,
end in bowing his head and letting things take
their course ? I notice the climatic effect upon
myself is a growing incapacity for mental effort.
It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun,
they say, still exhales a certain amount of warmth.
Add to this, Arab frugality and the cheapness
of native living throughout the country, which
removes aU stimulus to work. A middle-class
citizen tells me that he has just returned from
Tunis, where a lawsuit had kept him for two years.
He went there with an overland caravan which
cost next to nothing ; he slept in a zaouiah,
115

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
where he also obtained a bath gratis ; he spent
on his food four sous a day, neither more nor less,
and by way of amusement took coffee with his
friends or stroUed down to the harbour to look
at the ships. Six pounds in two years ! And
natives in authority, who are generally the richest,
pay nothing whatever for their nourishment.
Like the Kaid of Gafsa, they simply requisition
it in the market ; the seUers grumble, but conform
to custom.
How quickly their looks can improve is shown
by those who join the army. In a few months
they grow fat, cheerful, and bright-complexioned,
thanks to the hygienic life and better food. As
it is, I have noticed single individuals among the
poorest classes who look remarkably weU as com
pared with their fellows. " They drink milk,"
was the explanation given me.
There is vitality enough among the young boys
who play hockey — these ball games are non-Arabic,
a reUc of Berberism — and keep up the sport till
late at night amid a good deal of iU-tempered
fighting and puUing about. Their mothers' milk
is still inside them ; they have not yet succumbed
to the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits
of their elders. But soon manhood descends
upon them Uke a cataclysm ; it tears them with
ii6

THE OASIS OF LEILA
a frenzy which is anything but divine and there
after absorbs them, to the exclusion of every other
interest. Hockey-sticks are thrown away. . . .
That witchery of Orientalism, with its im
memorial customs, its wondrous hues of earth
and sky — it exists, chiefly, for the delectation
of hyperborean dreamers. The desert life and
those many-tinted, mouldering cities have their
charms, but the misery at intermediate places
like Gafsa (and there are hundreds of them)
is too great, too irremediable to be otherwise
than an eyesore. They have not solved the problem
of the simple life, these shivering, blear-eyed folk.
Their daily routine is the height of discomfort ;
they are always ailing in health, often from that
disease of which they plaintively declare that
" whoever has not had it, cannot enter the kingdom
of Heaven," and which, unlike ourselves, they
contract by their patriarchal habit of eating and
drinking out of a common dish. They die like
flies. Naturally enough ; for it is not too much
to say, of the poorer classes, that they eat dirt,
and that only once a day. A fresh shirt in the year
is their whole tailor's bill ; two or three sous a day
wiU feed them ; sunshine, and the stone floor of a
mosque or coffee-house by night, is all they ask
for, and more than they sometimes get.
117

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
An old Arab song contains words to this effect :
" Kafsa is miserable ; its water is blood ; its air is
poison ; you may live there a hundred years without
making a friend." No doubt the plethoric Sicilian
mason at the Leila fountain would thoroughly
endorse this statement with his " Ah, signore —
these Saracens ! " . . . But one learns to like the
people none the less. They are merely depressed ;
they are not deficient in mother-wit or kindliness ;
a little good food would work wonders.
The oasis people are milk-drinkers, and would
be healthier than the townsmen but for the
agues, fevers and troublesome " Gafsa boil " to
which they are subject.
I go to these plantations at night-time, after
dinner, when the moon plays wonderful tricks
of light and shadow with the over-arching foliage.
The smooth sandy stretches at the outskirts of
the gardens shine like water at rest, on which the
leaves of an occasional sparse tuft of palms are
etched with crystalline hardness of delineation.
This untiUed region is most artistic, the isolated
clumps shooting up Uke bamboos out of the bare
soil. The whole grove is still wrapped in its wintry
sleep, and one can look through the naked branches
of the fruit trees into its furthest reaches. Only
the palm leaves overhead and the ground at one's
ii8

Olives in the Oasis

THE OASIS OF LEILA
feet are green ; the middle spaces bleak and brown.
But, do what he wiU, a man who has lived in the
tropics becomes rather blase in the matter of palms.
Besides, there are no flints to be found
here. . . ,
Yet such is the abundance of water that these
Gafsa gardens have a character different from
most African plantations. They are more art
lessly furnished, with rough, park-like districts
and a not unpleasing impression of riot and waste —
waste in the midst of plenty.
Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of
country — the temperate region at the tail-end
of the grove. Only olives grow here ; seventy-
five thousand of them. Beside their silvery-
grey trunks you may see herds of the smaU but
brightly- tinted oxen reposing; the ground is
pied with daisies and buttercups, oleanders border
the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of the
djouak, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound
from some hidden copse.
There wiU be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the
carefuUy-tended oases of the Djerid.

119

Chapter XI
A HAVEN OF REFUGE
THE cold being past aU endurance and
belief, I was tempted to fulfil my pro
mise and caU upon Monsieur Dufresnoy.
What kind of man was this that man
aged to survive it ?
They led me to his house, which is one of the
few two-storied buildings of the town and lies in a
squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty
waUs surround a massive entrance-gate studded with
nails and bands of iron, intervolved in artful de
signs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle ; only
an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I
paused — it was grim, claustral, almost menacing ;
there was an air of enchantment about the mansion,
as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals
might turn on their rusty hinges.
Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly
panic. M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost
ran into me. I tried to explain the sensations his

A HAVEN OF REFUGE
domicile had aroused in my mind ; he laughed at
first, and then admitted that he had often felt the
same thing. The house was apt to look like that,
he said, when his wife was away.
The inside appearance, once that portal has been
passed, is quite different, and I was glad to have
an opportunity of seeing the place, as it is one of the
surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-
houses that date from better days, being built
originally for some Turkish grandee or governor —
for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing
widow to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step
through the gate into an open square patio, sur
rounded, on the sides not abutting on the street,
by an arched passage that reposes on old Roman
columns. This covered loggia, running round
three fronts of the court, is the feature of the
house : wonderful how a few arcades and piUars
wiU impart an air of distinction and even luxury !
Almost nothing has been done to change the old
appearance of this smaU but weU-proportioned
patio ; the waUs have been freshly whitewashed,
the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright
flower-bed set in the centre — nothing more.
The five or six lower rooms to which the loggia
gives access must be delightfully cool in summer, but
they are dark and chilly at this season. Luckily, the

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
mansion possesses an upper story where the family
resides during the winter, in rooms that are actually
floored with wood. From here, looking out of the
windows, there is a wondrous view over a wilderness
of decayed Arab dwellings upon the oasis beyond,
and the distant purple mountains.
There is an irresistible air of geniality about this
home : can it be the house itself ? For a subtle
influence, no doubt, penetrates to the heart of man
from the mere form and disposition of inanimate
things, I was prepared to be smothered in a pro
fusion of local effects ; of saddle-cloths, silk hangings,
water-pipes, daggers and match-locks, dim nooks
with divans, and those other decorations that
suggest the glamour of the Orient to certain Western
minds. Or again, I said to myself, this European
wife will have imported certain tastes from over the
sea ; the house will be replete with trifles carefuUy
disposed in negligent fashion, silver photograph
frames and flower vases reposing on diminutive
tables, and such-like indications of what our novelists
caU the " tender but indefinable touches of a
woman's hand."
Nothing of the kind. The place is simply com
fortable : it appeals to one's sense of propriety.
There are carpets and genuine arm-chairs — unique
phenomena in this part of the world ; best of aU,

A HAVEN OF REFUGE
fire-places wherein ample logs of olive-wood glimmer
and glister aU day long.
And so the last few days have passed. Mentally,
too, I am thawing once more ; the hotel life and
solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me dis
agreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps
stimulating- in youth and in the plenitude of health ;
but there comes a period when one lives less in
future dreamings than in the experiences of the
past — unpleasant company, for the most part ;
when one craves to see the faces and hear the
opinions of rational feUow-creatures ; when one
requires, in short, to be distracted. This is the age,
too, at which a man begins to realize the significance
of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian
hotels can only be inhabited by young hopefuls.
The house contains a considerable library of
local Uterature — mostly technical and dealing with
Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it
inteUigible to a simple traveUer like myself. From
certain books I have begun to make extracts con
cerning the places I am Ukely to visit : Metlaoui,
the Djerid oases, and the Chott country.
Dufresnoy is essentiaUy a mining engineer. He
evidently knows his business thoroughly ; he has
been employed in various parts of the French
dominions and likes the work ; aU of which has not
123

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
prevented him from becoming a man of the world
and keeping his other inteUectual pores open.
There is nothing of the professional in his con
versation. He is rather undemonstrative, for a
Frenchman. He told me an odd thing about the native rising
in Thala in 1896, when a marabout preached death
to aU foreigners, with the result that several white
men were murdered (it was a hastily collected band
of Italian tradesmen who put down the insurrec
tion). They caught him, and in due time he died (?)
in prison — they were probably afraid to execute
him : perhaps he killed himself — and the odd thing
is this : that although the necessary sum has been
contributed for erecting a monument to these
unhappy victims of native ferocity, yet the Franco-
Tunisian authorities are averse to the plan, on the
ground that such a public monument might offend
Arab susceptibilities. This struck me as overdoing
the " pacific penetration " policy ; and he thought
so too, more especially as there is a commemorative
stone to some preposterous native bigot at the very
place. . . .
I shaU be sorry to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui.
In him I often admire that fine trait of his race :
the clarifying instinct. He possesses — with no
pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere —
124

A HAVEN OF REFUGE
an innate rigour of judgment in every matter of
the mind ; he avoids crooked thinking by a process
of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear
intuitive. Even as a true collector of antiques
has quite a peculiar way of handling some rare
snuff-box or Tanagra statuette and, though un
acquainted with that particular branch of art, yet
straightway classes it correctly as to its merits, so,
to him, an idea of whatever kind is an objet de vertu,
to be appraised with unfailing accuracy. He is a
connoisseur of abstractions. What the Goth carves
out grotesquely after a painful labour of mental
elimination, the right deposited, as residue, after
a thousand wrongs — what the Latin smothers
under a deluge of mere words : this your Frenchman
of such a type wiU nimbly disentangle from all its
unessentials ; he presents it to your inspection in
reasonable and convincing shape — purified, clipped,
pruned. What is this gift, this distinguishing mark ?
Discipline of the mind, culminating in inteUectual
chastity — in what may be called a horror of perverse
or futile reasoning.
He mentioned, incidentally, the case of suicides
among the natives to prove that the Mektoub
doctrine is not whoUy pernicious. Suicides were
quite unusual, he said ; the Arabs do not seem to
be able to faU in with the idea, preferring to bear
125

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
the greatest evils rather than take an active part in
the undoing of themselves. That was Mektoub : to
bow the head, dumbly resisting. And were they not
right ? Did not the great majority of European
cases of suicide imply a neurotic condition — such
as when men of business have suffered reverses on
Exchange or lost some trivial appointment ? How
easily things could be bridged over, or repaired,
or even endured ! The most hopeless invalid could
testify to the fact that some pleasure can still
be extracted out of a maimed or crippled existence ;
a man, however impoverished, might stiU live in
dignified and fairly cheerful fashion.
He thought that in the matter of suicides, as
in that of remorse, we were too " spectacular and
altruistic " ; that we lived in a rather unwholesome
atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas con
cerning honour and duty ; that the Mektoub
practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying
primitive sanity which we would do well to foster
within us.

126

Chapter XII
THE MTSTERIOUS COUNT
GAFSA, even Gafsa, has its enigmas.
I climbed this afternoon to the summit
of the Rogib hiU, which lies near the
railway station, on the further side of
the Oued Baiesh. This, presumably, is the site
where Marius halted for the last time before
attacking the town ; and the spot was also interest
ing to me on account of its fiint implements. . . .
A sad and barren range of hills. There was no
sunshine, for a scirocco-storm raised clouds of dust
and obscured the sky ; the wind was bitterly cold.
Finding it impossible to attune my phantasy to
the picture of Marius and his soldiers, I descended
once more.
On the station turnpike I overtook a solitary
foot-passenger, who plodded slowly along. It was
the Polish Count. He had been absent from the
hotel for several days, and now appeared to be in
the gloomiest of humours.
Where had he been ? 127

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
For a promenade, he said. It was too dreary
sitting indoors, all alone. He had left the hotel.
The place was too noisy : the dogs barked inces
santly. He had taken rooms with a Jew, and
arranged to have his meals at a smaU Italian
trattoria. This was a half-truth, I felt sure. The dogs
of Gafsa, no doubt, are past all endurance ; they
are worse than in any Turkish village where they
howl at least in unison, and so continuously through
the night that one ceases to take note of them ;
but the man's real reason for this change of domicile
was probably another one.
" You must find that much quieter," I said, " and
cheaper as well. These hotels are rather preten
tious." " Pretentious and dear. Here I am, stranded in
an unknown place, without friends ; remittances
are due to me, and they never come " — ^he broke
into the subject without reserve — " and it is
hard, I assure you, to deprive oneself of things, of
trifles, if you like to call them so, to which one is
nevertheless accustomed and entitled, so to speak,
by birthright. But I am talking to the winds,
no doubt. You, Monsieur, are one of the fortunate
ones ; you don't know — you don't know  "
" Yes I do," I replied, trying to think of something
128

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
to say in the way of consolation. " I know quite
well  "
" How do you know ? " he interrupted. And
next, with needless vehemence : " What do you
know ? "
I was surprised at his sudden change of tone.
It was awkward, aU this. I gave utterance to such
commonplaces on the instability of human affairs
as occurred to me, and ended up by offering, I hope
with sufficient delicacy, to assist him to the small
extent that lay in my power.
" Ah ! "
He seemed infinitely relieved by my words : he
evidently expected some answer of quite another
import. Turning his back to the wind, and pausing
for a moment to adjust his clothing, he replied,
with ambassadorial deliberation :
" You may be certain. Monsieur, that I would not
easily forget a kindness of this nature ; my lot in life
has been far too unhappy to make me undervalue
what you, a stranger, have just offered me. But I will
decline : what are a few francs to me ? Pray don't
think me ungrateful, however. You have caught me
in an almost delirious moment, and your friendly
words just now, when I felt myself so abandoned
and in so critical a state of mind, with this dreadful
desert wind moaning and everything, as it seems,
I 129

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
hostile to me : your kind words, I say, touched me
more deeply than I can express." (Here he wiped
away a genuine tear.) " But my luck may yet turn,
and then, be sure, I will make you forget all my
childish querulousness."
And he went on, almost gaily :
" I never could keep money ! And the worst of
it is, I hate work ; I was not brought up to it,
and you will admit that I am too old to begin life
anew. Yet I object on principle to so-caUed charity,
being intelligent enough to know that there is
only one kind of charity, and Justice is its name.
But what is justice ? I suppose we aU possess some
kind of natural rights, according to our stations ;
justice, I take it, would consist in our being per
mitted to enjoy those rights. If this is correct,
then — ah. Monsieur, the demoralizing effects of
poverty, of non-justice, on a man like myself ; how
it lowers your self-respect and makes you capable
of actions that you would reprobate, in your right
mind  "
" In your right mind ? Is a poor man, then,
insane ? "
" How can I make you understand ? TeU me, is
not poverty a kind of madness, an obsession that
haunts you night and day ? To puzzle, at every
hour, how to meet this demand and how to shun
130

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
that one ; to deny yourself the necessities of
life, and your friends those poor little pleasures
that you are yearning to bestow upon them — is it
not a mental malady, a fever ; is it not damnation
itself ? The thousand meannesses : how they
degrade you ; how they suck away your strength,
your ambition, your faith ! To see no openings
before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair ! I
cannot hope to make you conceive such a heU :
one must have been there oneself. But note this.
Monsieur : never judge an impoverished man by
your own standards of right and wrong — never !
For the old-established meanings of things shift
for him — they shift ; and his temptations become
formidably subtle beyond belief. When rich,
he says calmly Non; fa ne va pas. But to forego an
advantage, when poor, is the same as if — let me see
... as if one asked you to leave lying some fas
cinating flint in the desert waste."
" That simile, surely, is aU wrong. Count.
Nobody can be injured by my flint-mania,
whereas  "
" I know, I know ; I am not trying to excuse
things ; I am only explaining how they happen.
But how explain to others ? We always talk of
putting ourselves in our neighbours' place ; idlest
of phrases ! since we cannot possibly avoid bringing

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
our personal apparatus to bear on their problems.
There is a gulf between man and man. You wiU
hardly believe that I used to take an interest —
quite superficial, you know, but none the less real
— in all those questions of the day that absorb the
ordinary man of ease, in politics and art and what
not ; but nowadays all my interests are centred
on one single point. On what point, do you think ?
On keeping up the external appearance, and the
manners, of weU-being. I have no energy left for
anything else ; and even this effort quite exhausts
me. Art and politics ! What, in the name of
heaven, do I care for art and politics, with the knife
at my throat ? I only utilize these things ; yes, I
utilize them for conversational purposes, in order
to deceive others as to my true, incessant and miser
able preoccupations. Laughable, is it not ? Why
don't you smile. Monsieur — ^you, who have never
known the bitterness ? "
We were crossing the broad Oued Baiesh, a
stretch of yellow sand and stones. To obviate
damage by sudden floods, the French have covered
this tract of the road with a coating of asphalt ; but
the busy life here, the droves of camels and sheep,
the Arab folk laughing over their laundry-work
in the shallow streamlet that trickles through the
waste — all these things were gone for the moment.
132

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
But for the torn line of Gafsa palms that confronted
us on the other side of the river-bed, we might have
been in the veriest wilderness. Although the wind
was lulled, petulant little pillars of sand still arose
here and there among the boulders, and sank down
again, as if exhausted ; the descending sun had
emerged, a lurid disk, framed in a sulphureous halo
that melted imperceptibly into the gold of the west.
It was growing chiUier than ever, and the Count,
shivering with cold, drew his burnous more closely
about him ; he had bought one for fifteen francs,
probably in imitation of myself, or because I once
jokingly caUed it " a garment for millionaires who
need not use their hands." He liked to be taken for
a milUonaire. I looked at him awhile, wondering what thoughts
were ruling the expression of his perplexed and
sorrowful features, and then tried to turn the
conversation into other channels.
" Are there interesting people at your Italian
restaurant ? "
" Well, there is Hirsch, the young German : you
know him ? "
" The police commissaire was talking to me about
his case yesterday."
" Ha, was he ? Let me teU you that I have
investigated it thoroughly, and find it most in-
133

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
structive. This young feUow is not yet twenty ;
he ran away from home for no discoverable reason,
then signed on a merchant vessel at Marseilles and,
disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched
port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a
night-train, thinking to reach Tunis. Instead of
that, he woke up in the morning and found himself
at Gafsa ! Here, you see, are all the elements of
wrong-doing, and the authorities have learnt his
history from his papers which they seized. As a
German and a Jew, the French instinctively dislike
him ; as a Jew and a foreigner — the Arabs ; he is
objectionable to look at, dull of wit, and knows not
a word of French or Arabic. But he is poor, and
therefore — every one loads him with kindness."
" And why not ? " I asked.
" Why not, indeed ? Your friend the magistrate
has given him some money out of his own pocket ;
the restaurant proprietress refuses to be paid for
his food, while another one, near the station, sends
word to say that he can have a plate of soup there
whenever he likes ; a young Arab boy — these Arabs
are really incomprehensible — gives him as many
cups of tea or coffee as he can drink ; a Jewish
lawyer has sent him some clothes ; a gentleman in
your hotel a quantity of linen ; the Italian barber
shaves him gratis ; a certain shopkeeper sends him
134

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
a bottle of liqueur — of liqueur ! — every second day ;
the commissaire has given him, free of charge, a
decent unoccupied bedroom in the prison, where
he can go in and out as he pleases ; best of aU, the
Fonts et Chaussees are now employing him at three
francs a day — a princely income, they tell me — at
some agricultural job : pure kindness, inasmuch
as he has never handled a spade or pickaxe in his
life. He can have a pleasant time in Gafsa ; he
can marry an heiress if so disposed ; then, when the
place begins to bore him, the German Consul in
Tunis will repatriate him at his Government's
expense. ' He's a poor devil,' they say. Why do I
teU you all this ? Because — weU — I am also poor — "
Always harping on the old theme !
" The cases are not quite parallel, are they ? "
" No. He is young, and fit for work, whereas I am
past the middle term of life. Old age — another
horror ! Besides, I am a gentleman  "
" Exactly. We should be ashamed to shave you
gratis." " I suppose you're right. Monsieur. I was only
trying to explain — to explain myself — to myself, I
mean. Pardon me if I speak too much of my
wretched affairs. But I'll tell you what I think.
To endure this revolting destitution a man must be
an Arab. Now, I cannot pretend to be an Arab ;
135

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
I would not adopt their ideals if I could. And yet,
alas ! I am beginning to believe in predestination,
as they do ; to believe that our faults and our virtues
are distilled beforehand in the silent laboratory of
the past. A sad creed, to think of men born to
misfortune ; to be obliged to consider yourself — ^how
do you say in English ? — a stepchild of nature. . . ."
He was always a good talker, but it is impossible
to describe the intensity of feeling in his speech
to-day. He seemed to suffer from some imperious
need of unburdening himself, even to a chance
acquaintance like me ; long days of loneliness,
maybe, had worked on his nerves and produced a
kind of congestion. But in his words and voice
I detected lapses into other moods, into some other
state of being ; they gave me the impression as of
two different individuals addressing me. The man
did not ring true, altogether ; he was mentaUy
disorganized, disharmonious ; those meretricious
reasonings about justice, for example, struck me
disagreeably. And I could not help contrasting his rambling
emotionalism with the logic — the relentless,
diamond-like justesse — of the mining engineer. He
is the very antithesis of that pellucid and homo
geneous character. The sanguine temperament . . .
What is a man of this type doing in Gafsa ?
136

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
Mystery !
The rest of us, the cynical Greek doctor, the
artist-sage and lover of Arab institutions, myself
(flint-maniac) — to say nothing of men Uke Dufresnoy
— ^we aU contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place;
we have a raison d^etre. But this composite, unadap-
tive city-dweUer : how incongruous a figure against
that background of palms and barren mountains !
An enigmatical creature, and yet not wholly un
lovable ; he may be unsound or even unprincipled,
he may be deficient in qualities that go to make
men respected and satisfied with the world in general,
but he possesses, I think, certain citizen-virtues
uninteUigible to the self-centred, rustic type of
mind. He could be stirred to acts of unworldly
enthusiasm ; he would share his last crust with some
shipwrecked sailor, or shed his blood gaily for a
generous idea. And he is plainly in hard case just
now. A stepchild of nature. . . .
" You have a very good English accent. Count."
" We were carefuUy brought up in languages.
Not every one understands Polish, you know."
" By the way, how does it come about that you,
being a Pole, should have a Russian family name ? "
The question seemed to astonish and perplex him.
At last he said : 137

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
" Oh, it's about the same thing, isn't it ? Nowa
days, I mean," he added, with grandiloquent pathos,
" ever since the misfortunes of my unhappy
country." At the entrance to the town we separated,
and I watched for some time his bowed form as it
crept along the wood-market in the direction of
the Kairouan road.
This is one of the figures that will persist in my
mind very clear and pathetic, and I shall long
remember those plaintive remarks about poverty
that weUed up, surely, from the bottom of his heart.
How far, I wonder, is such a man the author of his
own calamities, and how far have they made him P
Academic questionings, based on out-of-date philo
sophy ! Our vices, he said, are distilled for us before
hand in the dim laboratory of the past. His vice,
evidently, is to hate work of every kind ; his
faculties, therefore, never undergo the rhythmic
joy of reaction, for he is too well nourished to live
the vita minor of a starveling, to endure Arab
acquiescence in non-production.
" I am only trying to explain myself — to myself."
Half-truth, I imagine. He is probably conscience-
stricken, or at least dissatisfied with his conduct
for one reason or another, and endeavouring to
justify some base plan of action by re-stating ethics
138

THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT
in terms of hunger ; a specious line of argument,
since hunger is not the rule but the exception.
And then I shall think of his red nose and watery
little eyes, his absurd jeweUery — a fine presence,
none the less, when he pulls himself together ;
there is about him an air of faded distinction that
softly symbolizes the history of his adopted country.
The Count !
Why a count ? Because all Poles are counts —
those that are not princes. But why a Pole ? Well,
perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inas
much as there is something international about a
Pole — international, and yet neither equivocal nor
vulgar ; every one sympathizes with them, for they
aU possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose
loss is borne in cheerful resignation, and never so
much as aUuded to ; they know everybody, and
everybody worth knowing is related to them, by
marriage or otherwise, in this or some other century ;
as men of the world, they are ready to talk upon
any subject with tolerance, geniality and a pleas
ingly personal note that withers up the common
place, smoking, meanwhile, innumerable cigarettes
out of mouthpieces which display a complex
escutcheon contrived in gold and rubies upon the
amber surface. Yes, his choice was good : Poles
are gentlemen. But why caricature them ? And
139

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
why, above aU things, select an inappropriate
Muscovite name ? That argues a lack of general
intelligence and might easily spoil everything ;
so true it is, as a legal friend once observed to me,
that " it takes a wise man to handle a lie. A fool
had better remain honest."
What can be the meaning of this unlovely comedy?
Some defalcation or forgery ? Likely enough.
But I think he lacks the cleverness requisite for a
habitual criminal. Perhaps he is only a poor
survivor, drifting about in lonely and distracted
fashion while waiting for the inevitable end. Others
may solve the enigma, but not I ; for to-morrow
we go to Metlaoui.
Yet I know that long after the palms and minarets
of Gafsa have faded into the blurred image of
countless other palms and other minarets, I shall be
able to call up the figure of this forlorn and am
biguous fellow-creature, standing on the asphalt of
the river-crossing with his cheap burnous wrapped
around him, sighing, shivering, and setting forth
certain views concerning human life for which there
is, after all, a good deal to be said.

140

Chapter XIII
TO METLAOUI
I SHOULD be sorry to say how long the train
takes to crawl through the thirty odd kilo
metres that separate Gafsa from Metlaoui.
My companion on the trip, M. Dufresnoy,
teUs me that the return journey is still slower,
because the line runs mostly uphiU and the trucks,
thirty or forty of them, are loaded with minerals.
Fortunately, the car in which we travelled — each
train has only a single passenger carriage — was
comfortable, being built after the fashion of the
Swiss " Aussichtswagen," with seats on the exterior
platform whence one can admire the view.
It gave me some idea of the goods traffic (phos
phates) along this line when he told me that during
the past seven days 23,000 tons of mineral had been
conveyed to the port of Sfax alone, to say nothing
of those that had gone further on, to Sousse and
Tunis. And not long ago, he said, the company
had an unpleasant surprise : sixteen new engines of
a powerful type, which they had ordered from
141

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
Winterthur, were suddenly discovered to be liable
to a duty of lOOO francs apiece as " imported
articles." " We can afford it," he said. " Our five hundred-
franc shares are standing at three thousand seven
hundred francs."
But he thought that a grave error had been
committed in selecting the narrow metre gauge ;
it was all very well for phosphate transport,
but once the line over Feriana and the branch to
Tozeur are completed, they would have to deal with
other material, such as tourists, that require fast
services. They had an accident last year. The couplings
of a train, climbing uphill from Gafsa past the
Leila oasis, suddenly broke, with the result that the
rear portion rushed backwards again, careered
through the Gafsa station and up the artificial
incline which leads towards the Oued Baiesh,
crossed the bridge, and thundered at a vertiginous
pace into the desert beyond. As luck would have
it, another train was just then approaching Gafsa.
They collided with terrific force and, telescoping
being out of the question since both were loaded
with minerals, escaladed each other in Eiffel-tower
fashion. Arab eye-witnesses say that the stoker
of the up-train was thrown out by the impact and
142

TO METLAOUI
flew across country " like a bird " for half a mile ;
he aUghted on his feet, and was found, after a week
or so, wandering about the plain in a dazed con
dition. The driver was kiUed outright, and his
widow draws a respectable pension from the
company. Since then two engines are always employed to
move the train up the few miles beyond Gafsa.
The cream-tinted level is speckled with white
incrustations and sombre tufts of desert herbs ;
here and there, where the winter's rain lingers
underground, are spots of brilliant green ; short
lived crops of corn, sown by the nomads. The
hUls to the right of the line are bare and torn into
wild ravines ; lilac-hued patches, ever changing and
fair to see, move among their warm complexities :
cloud-shadows. Here, if anywhere, one learns that
shadows are not always grey or black ; even those
cast in moonlight have a certain ghostly coloration.
It was a marveUously clear day, and not many
miles before reaching our destination we looked
back upon the downhill route traversed which,
so far as one could see, might have been a dead level.
At a distance of nearly twenty miles Gafsa was
plainly visible — ^white buildings piercing a dusky
line of palms — an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed
in the brushwood a couple of bustards, their heads
'43

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
peering above the herbage. These birds are rather
rare hereabouts, and shy of approach. Arabs say that
the bustard is like the camel : once it begins to run,
you never know when it wiU stop. They surround
them therefore cautiously, and gradually close the
circle to within shooting distance.
Metlaoui is the name of two distinct villages
which have been conjured out of the waste by the
discovery of its phosphate deposits — the station
village and, a mile or so further on, Metlaoui proper,
with its big establishments for working the minerals.
Here already, at the station settlement, there is
more life than in Gafsa, though the surroundings
are decidedly unpropitious — a waterless plain, with
low hills in the foreground, phosphate-bearing,
and wondrously tinted in rose and heliotrope.
There are respectable stores here, very difierent
from the shops of Gafsa. I entered a large Italian
warehouse which contained an assortment of goods
— clothing, jams, boots, writing-paper, sealing-wax,
nails, agricultural implements, guns, bedding,
mouse-traps, wire, seeds, tinned foods — and vainly
endeavoured to think of some article which a colon
might require and not find here. The only drawback
is that there are no " colons " in the district.
While waiting for a conveyance to take me to
the industrial settlement, I strolled about and found
144

TO METLAOUI
my way across a sad stretch of ground littered with
tin cans, bottles, and other refuse, to a slight
eminence whereon lay a cemetery. In this forlorn
square are about twenty tombs, already crumbling
to dust, although not one of those I saw was
five years old. Humble victims for the most
part — Italians in the prime of Ufe who had come
to these regions to gain a little money ; or little
children, carried off by the harsh climate (yet the
climate of this place is preferred to that of Gafsa).
The enclosure is fiUing up with drift-sand ; the
inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal
scrawl of some unlettered friend or parent, is soon
effaced by winds and rain.
One is whoUy unprepared for the appearance
of Metlaoui proper. In ten years' time a village
has sprung up here, partly of factories and smoky
chimneys, but chiefly of trim bungalows, with white
walls and red roofs, that are dotted over the uneven
surface of the ground. The whole site is owned
by the company, and inhabited by its ofificials and
overseers. It has its own church, shops, schools,
hospital, workmen's clubs, bakeries, and its air of
neatness and weU-being contrasts pleasingly with
the forsaken landscape all around.
The higher posts are reserved for Frenchmen, but
among the lower grades you may find a number of
K 145

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
other nationalities ; Spaniards and Sardinians —
hardiest of white Mediterranean races — as weU as
some Italians, and not a few Greeks. The manual
labour in the mines is performed by Africans.
Not along ago nearly every drop of water for
this settlement had to be conveyed from Gafsa
on the backs of camels. But the company has now
captured a spring at the head of the Seldja gorge,
about eight mUes distant, which brings a copious
fiow of water into the place. Thus they have been
enabled to plant a great number of trees, but I
wish they could be persuaded to adopt a little more
variety in their choice of them. One grows tired
of the eucalyptus, that doleful and dismal growth,
and even of the eternal pepper trees, green as they
are ; and the results, in a few years' time, would
be far more charming if they would take the trouble
to copy some of the Algerian municipalities in this
respect, or — better still — obtain professional advice
from the Agricultural Institute at Tunis, which
could furnish them with a large Ust of ornamental
timber and shrubs that would thrive equaUy weU,
and convert Metlaoui into a veritable garden city.
The plants suffer at first from the strong winds,
but they acclimatize themselves by degrees.
Remembering what had been told me of the
unsuccessful attempt of the French to appropriate
146

TO METLAOUI
the water springs of Sidi Mansur, near Gafsa, I
asked Dufresnoy whether the Arabs had not con
tested the action of his company at Seldja.
" I should think so ! " he said. " They raised the
devil. But we are not civil servants here, who must
humour the caprices of half a dozen savages : the
health of the settlement was dependent on our
getting this water, and we took it, voila ! The
great ambition of the company is to fix its people
on the spot ; to make life here so pleasant for them
that they don't want to leave."
" You must find it difficult. The Arabs, I suspect,
run back to the desert as soon as they have earned
a few francs ; and as for the European tradesmen,
no doubt they get rich quickly, and then return
to their homes again as soon as possible."
" That is exactly what the company manages to
avoid. Let them prosper, we say ; but slowly.
And we succeed."
" How so ? "
" By manipulating the rates of merchandise
transport. The railway to Sfax belongs to us, and
we can regulate prices as it suits us ; if we liked,
we could choke off aU trade. PCci, the company knows
its business ! Of course, that makes us many enemies;
they caU it high-handedness and brutality — a concern
like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks —
147

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
we caU it common sense. If the railway were not
ours, if we were not practically dictators of the
country, those Americans, with their immense
phosphate importation into Europe, would eat us
up ; and then these local merchants would lose
everything. That is the justification of our so-
called tyranny. Are we to have nothing for our
risks ? Look at this instaUation of machinery — all
built, too, with a view to future aggrandizement :
does it strike you as a half-hearted speculation ? "
Daring, on the contrary. Here are gargantuan
sheds, capable of holding thirty thousand tons of
mineral apiece ; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for
drying them artificiaUy in winter -time, when the
sun's heat is insufficient ; aU around you a gehenna
of mad industrial life, smoke and steam, a throbbing
agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons ;
there are chains of buckets, fiUed with phosphates,
wandering overhead in endless progression or
disappearing suUenly into the bowels of the earth ;
passionate electric motors ; mountains of coal and
iron contrivances ; railway engines snorting and
whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down from
the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them
out of the cars to dry, amid clouds of tawny dust.
One might weU grow crazy at the idea of the
primary difficulties involved in grafting upon the
148

TO METLAOUI
desert soil this ordered mechanical efflorescence, this
frenzied blossoming of human activity.
What is happening ?
They are separating the crude phosphate from
its natural impurities ; drying, pounding, and
loading it upon trains for removal to the sea-board.
That is aU.

149

Chapter XIV
PHOSPHATES
ALIGHT railway leads up to the hills
where the phosphates lie. Here you
may see the fiends at work. A legion
of wild-eyed, swart and nearly nude
creatures are disemboweUing the hoary mountain :
visions such as this must have floated before Milton's
eye when he drew his picture of Mammon, who,
with his horde of demons, opened in the hiU a
spacious wound —
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of our mother Earth
For treasure better hid. . . .
The workers are chiefly of three races : Tri
politan, Khabyle (Algerian), and Moroccan ; they live
in separate clusters among the rocks, each with
their peculiar national traits and mode of building ;
there is hardly a woman among them aU.
Besides these tribes a certain proportion of
Tunisian Arabs are employed, but they are too
weak or timorous to relish underground work ;
150

PHOSPHATES
a sprinkling of negroes, as weU as some of the hiU-
folk from the district surrounding Metlaoui, who
go by the quaint name of Boujaja.
" Good feUows," said Dufresnoy. " They will
slit your throat for a sou."
The surface phosphates having already become
exhausted, the mineral is now pursued into the dim
recesses of the earth. Tunnels are excavated, whence
smaUer ones radiate in definite directions — all of
them sustained by wooden beams ; the amount of
material to be extracted froin a given spot is
scientifically fixed ; it is shattered by minute blasts
of dynamite and, once the trolley cars have carried
it away, the wooden supports are removed and these
cavities filled up by the collapse of the roof. By
this means accidents are forestalled such as that
whieh took place some years ago when, owing to
an oversight of some subordinate left in charge,
an immense mass of mountain fcU in, entombing
about three hundred miners, whose bodies are not
yet recovered. The iU-fated engineer who was
legaUy responsible for the mishap was in Paris at
the time ; he returned in all haste. After seeing the
mischief, he tried to throw himself into an Arab
weU, and, baulked of this, lay down at night under
a passing train and was decapitated.
They showed me a map of this subterranean

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
world, variously tinted according to the regions
already exploited and those yet virgin. It reminded
me, with its regular streets and blocks, of some
model city in the Far West.
The underground workings here are about thirty
kilometres in length. Beside these Metlaoui de
posits, the company has begun to attack those of
Redeyeff, and wiU shortly open an assault upon the
others at Ain Moulares, which Ue near Henchir
Souatir, the present terminus of the Feriana line.
It employs six thousand men ; some of the mineral
goes as far as Japan ; the output of last year
amounted to over a million tons.
One may well be interested in the discoverer
of these phosphates, in the man who has revolu
tionized the trade of Tunisia. He is a veterinary
surgeon in the French Army — Monsieur Philippe
Thomas. His record is of the best.
Born in 1843, he has taken part in twelve military
campaigns, distinguishing himself particularly in
the Franco-Prussian war.
But, above all, he is a savant.
He has written valuable treatises on the diseases
of domestic beasts, describing, among other things,
a hitherto unobserved infectious malady of goats.
He is the author of a number of memoirs on the
152

PHOSPHATES
geology of Northern Africa, and has discovered
no less than two hundred new species of fossil
animals of that country ; he has made numerous
contributions to our knowledge of its ethnology,
prehistoric tombs, and fiint implements. Many
of these writings date from the seventies and earlier ;
they have procured for him the membership of
learned societies, as weU as medals and decorations
of aU kinds.
A man of such distinction, one would think,
coming to Tunisia in 1885 at the head of a scientific
expedition sent by the Ministry of Public Instruc
tion, would be received according to his merits.
It was far otherwise. Whether from distrust of
his capacities or some other cause. Monsieur Cambon,
the Resident, assumed towards him a most chiUing
official manner, and the commanding military
officer. General Boulanger, all but refused to grant
the escort necessary for his expedition. In one of
his papers he speaks of this reception as " several
degrees below zero."
Then, in the same year, appeared his sensational
report of the discovery of phosphate deposits
which he had traced over a long line of country ;
realizing their commercial value, he insisted that
they should be exploited " pour le plus grand bien
de V agriculture frangaise et algerienne^ Never-
153

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
theless, ten years passed ere a company could be
formed, as financiers were diffident about the
American competition and the risks of installation
in a desert country.
A tardy recognition of his services to the company
took the form of a pecuniary grant, in 1904, of
fifteen thousand francs — little enough, in aU con
science, considering the millions he has gained for
them. They further honoured him by changing
the name of the station-settlement of Metlaoui
into " PhUippe-Thomas."
" It's very economical," Dufresnoy observed.
I am glad to think that another place of that
name, the mining village, will continue to exist ;
it would seem a pity to erase from the map the
tuneful word Metlaoui, which contains the five
vowels in a remarkably small compass. . . .
Dufresnoy tells me that those barren slopes
where the mines lie, and where the different races
now work together in apparent amity, were once
the scene of a sanguinary primitive battle. There
is a steep guUy at one point, a dry torrent ; the
Khabyles lived on one side of it, the Tripolitans on
the other, and between these two races there
occurred, on a starlit night in May, 1905, an affray
of unearthly ferocity.
The Khabyles, prudent folk, many of whom had
154

PHOSPHATES
served in the French Army, had long been laying
in a store of warlike provisions ; their secret was
weU kept, although it was observed that piles of
stones were being collected round their huts, and
that a goodly quantity of dynamite and petroleum
was missing from the stores ; some of them
possessed guns and revolvers, the rest were armed
with knives, daggers and savage mining gear. They
chose a Sunday for the attack, weU knowing that
the Tripolitans, who are good-natured simpletons,
would be least prepared to resist them on that day,
and half of them in a state of joUification ; and they
were so sagacious, that they actually induced a few
drunken TripoUtans to insult them, before beginning
the confiict. This, they knew, would be counted
in their favour afterwards.
Hardly was the night come when they advanced
in battle array — the fighting contingent in front ;
behind them the boys and older men, who kept
them supplied with stones and weapons. A
weU-nourished volley of missiles greeted the
Tripolitans, some of whom rushed to the fray,
while others took refuge in their huts or with the
Moroccans who lived in their own village near at
hand. It was now quite dark, but at close quarters
the stones began to take effect, and hardly was a
man down, than five or six Khabyles ran out of the
155

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
ranks to finish him off with their knives ; others,
meanwhUe, went to the locked huts and fired them,
or burst them open with dynamite.
The explosions and lights began to attract atten
tion in Metlaoui ; the whole sky was aflame ; there
were mysterious bursts of sound, too, and a chorus
of wild howls. Something was evidently wrong, up
there. A party of Europeans, accompanied by a small
force of local police, went up to the mines to in
vestigate. They found themselves powerless ;
" keep yourselves out of danger," they were told,
" and let us settle our own affairs." The carnage
was in full swing ; it was heU let loose. Not con
tent with kiUing, they mutilated each other's
corpses, bit off noses, gouged out eyes, and thrust
stones in the mouths of the dead ; burnt and hacked
and slashed each other tiU sunrise ; no element of
bestiality was lacking. The wounded crawled away
to die in caves, or were carried to nomad camps.
The number of the dead was never ascertained ;
Dufresnoy says " about a hundred," which is prob
ably below the mark, as an eye-witness saw three
railway trucks loaded with the slain. To this
day they find mouldering human remains, relics
of that battle, hidden away in crevices of the
rocks. 156

PHOSPHATES
Although, once roused, the Tripolitans fought
like demons, they were worsted — the others were
too numerous. They had a brief moment of re
venge, however ; for during their retreat, on Mon
day morning, they encountered two young Khabyle
boys who had been on absence and were now re
turning to work at the mines, blissfuUy ignorant of
what was going on. These unfortunate lads were
literaUy torn to shreds.
I confess that, as a spectacle, I should have pre
ferred that night's engagement to anything in
modern warfare. It must have been a stupendous
exhibition of the bete humaine.
The Khabyles meditated nothing short of a total
extirpation of the Tripolitan stock ; they sent to
the mines of Redeyeff for auxiliaries of their nation,
some of whom actually arrived in time for the
slaughter ; the rest were intercepted on the hill-
paths by the police of Gafsa, who had beeii tele-
graphicaUy summoned and despatched by special
train. And soon afterwards, elated by success, the
Khabyles feU foul of the Moroccans and sent word
that they meant to fight them too for sheltering
Tripolitan fugitives in their huts. The Moroccans
were delighted at the prospect ; but the manage
ment got wind of the project in good time, which
was just as weU, for the Moroccans are not only the
157

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
most orderly of the native settlers at the mines, but
also by far the strongest and fiercest, and it might
have fared ill with the Khabyles. The Tripolitan
village has now been moved to another site — a cer
tain number of troops, too, are definitely stationed
at Metlaoui.
" As usual," said Dufresnoy, " we came in for the
blame. They say that we did not aUow the real
authors, the Khabyles, to be punished, because they
are French citizens, and all the rest of it. Don't
believe a word of that. If it had been the Tripoli
tans, we would have acted just the same ; we
cannot be bothered with decisions of civil courts,
which would have satisfied nobody, besides de
priving us, probably, of a number of good workmen.
There was a little outcry about this, too : that none
of the wounded were treated in our hospital, but
carried down to the native funduk near the station.
' The hospital,' said our director, ' is for those who
are injured in the performance of their duty, and
not for bloodthirsty savages.' That's sound —
that's military. One cannot afford to be sentimental
in this country."
I asked what could possibly be the reason for such
a ferocious outbreak of hostility.
" Long-standing animosities of race," he said,
" and, as determining cause, cherchez la femme."
158

PHOSPHATES
" But you said that there were no women on the
place."
" Eh bien, cherchez toujours. . . ."
And then it also occurred to me that among the
mass of local literature and newspaper files I had
perused iniiis house there was not a single criticism
of this affair. I thought it strange, I said.
He smiled.
" Local politics, my friend ! We are obliged to
keep the Press weU under control, you know. Don't
compare Tunisian life with life in England ; there
is no public opinion here, no idea of fair play.
These papers, if they were not subventioned, would
print abominations such as no English journalist
could conceive ; they would alienate our best
friends in the long run. The company must take
account of things as they are, not as they should be
— of Arab savagery, Franco-Tunisian malevolence ;
of journalistic venaUty and public credulity. Who
ever is not for us is against us. That is why the
only papers that dare to criticize our management
are those which nobody reads ; those, to put it
bluntly, which are not worth bribing. For the rest,
there is not a writer in the whole country capable
of grasping either our aims or our methods ; the
poor fellows have not had the required education.
They only want their mouths stopped."
1 59

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
" That must be more convenient than libel suits ;
and more economical as well."
" Just so. Above all things, we are bound to
consider the interests of our shareholders."

i6o

Chapter XV
THE SELDJA GORGE
IT is good, after such visions of human in
firmity and of death, to ride over the plain
to the Seldja gorge, an astonishing freak of
nature. I was twice within its towering
waUs of rock ; the first time on horseback, accom
panied by a young Tripolitan miner, and in the
evening ; yesterday again, in the torrid noon, afoot,
alone. You will do well, in every case, to ride as far as
the bordj, or rest-house, that stands near the entrance
of the cleft, since there are about four wearisome
miles of level country to be traversed after leaving
Metlaoui. On the first occasion the Tripolitan ran
for this whole long stretch beside my horse, which
trotted briskly ; he amused himself, none the less,
in belabouring its hind-quarters with a club to make
it go StiU faster, and I confess to being not scandal
ized, not inordinately scandalized, at this perform
ance. We grow hard among the implacable desert
L l6|

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
stones. Besides, it was only a hired beast. Any
true lover of animals wiU understand.
Skirting the foot of the hiUs that trend along,
apparently closed, one suddenly encounters a broad
stream-bed with a rivulet meandering down its
centre ; this is the Seldja-water (arabice, Thelja).
It issues out of a gateway, hitherto unrevealed ; and
here you may turn aside from the plain and enter
into the heart of the mountains, into a world of
nightmare effects. This very portal is fantastic,
theatrical ; it leads into an arena of riven rocks that
might serve as council-chamber for a cloud of
Ifrits, and is closed at the further end. There is a
second gateway to be passed before you can enter
the gorge itself.
The track winds upwards — the whole length of
the defile is about three miles — sometimes between
walls of rock which are chiseUed so smoothly by the
gentle waters that one can hardly believe them to
be of natural workmanship (and at these points, as
a rule, your only path is the stream-bed itself) ;
opening out again into wide amphitheatres, rose-
tinted cirques of desolation, where masses of debris,
slipped down from the heights, lie prone in
Dantesque confusion. There are rock-doves and
falcons fluttering about the sunny precipices ; cliff-
swallows build precarious habitations against the
162

THE SELDJA GORGE
roof of yawning caverns ; sandpipers and wagtails
skim over the streamlet that glides in a smiling
flood across reaches of yeUow sand. The charm of
water in the waste ! This Seldja-brook is a true
child of the sun ; cold in the morning and evening
hours, its restless little heart becomes tepid at mid
day with the glowing beams.
Spiky reeds and tamarisks trip alongside, and the
wild fig thrusts demoniac roots into the crevices ;
here and there you may see a group of oleasters,
descendants, maybe, of the now vanished Roman
olive plantations in the plain, or a stunted palm
that has shot up from the stone cast away by some
passing caravan. For these Oueds are all highways
dating from immemorial ages ; there is a ceaseless
passage of man and animals along them.
We passed numbers of canlels, groaning and snort
ing among the slippery rocks, with the water
splashing over their feet ; higher up, a large
descending flock of sheep, over six hundred of them,
completely blocked up the valley. They were being
led to the plain below, where, thanks to the recent
rains, a succulent but ephemeral crop of green had
sprung up. Their owner was a fine Boujaja, some
six and a half feet in height, accompanied by a
sturdy brood of children : milk-drinkers. The
upland pastures could wait, he said. Strange to
163

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
think that two more showers a year might make
settlers of these vagrants.
It was among these rocks that Philippe Thomas
first detected the traces of those phosphates that
have made his name famous. Tissot, in 1878,
already anticipated their discovery.
In point of sheer grandeur, of convulsed strati
fication and cloven ravine, of terrorizing features,
I have seen gorges far finer than this of Seldja.
Yet it contains one stretch of superlative beauty —
a short defile or canon, I mean, formed of two
opposing precipices with a chasm of some thirty
yards between them ; they wind and curve, parallel
to one another, with such magisterial accuracy that
one would think they had been designed with
mighty compasses from on high, and then carved
out, sagaciously, by some titanic blade.
Here we halted ; it was time to turn back. There
was an indentation in the rocks near at hand, fretted
away by hungry fioods of the past and overhung,
now, with creepers and drooping fernery, concerning
which my Tripolitan companion told me a long and
complicated legend. This shadowy hoUow, he
explained, was the bridal couch, in olden days,
of an earthly maiden and her demon-lover. He
was a simple feUow, unfortunately, who knew the
story too well to be able to tell it coherently.
164

THE SELDJA GORGE
On my second visit, however, I pushed vigorously
up the stream-bed in the heat of the morning,
determined to reach the head of the waters.
GraduaUy the aspect of the vaUey changes. It
opens out ; the rocks melt away into bare white
dunes, the country assuming the character of a table
land ; you begin to feel a sense of aloofness.
There was blazing sunshine in these upper regions,
but a fresh breeze ; this is the Ras el-Aioun, where
the French have bridled some of the wild waters,
thrusting them into a tube that carries them in a
mad whirl to their settlement at Metlaoui. Here,
too, they have planted a promising youthful oasis,
a kind of nursery garden of poplars and cypresses
and tamarisks and mimosas, in whose shade grow
geraniums, mesembryanthemum and other flowers
and creepers, as well as a host of vegetables of every
kind. I soon discovered a recess in this delectable
pleasaunce, and began my solemn preparations for
luncheon. Out of the pool below there resounded a tuneful
croaking of frogs : it spoke of many waters. . . .
Presently an Italian workman or gardener with
curly grey hair and moustache — the ubiquitous
Italian — came up and began to talk, per fare un
po" di compania. He conversed delightfuUy, a smile
playing about his kindly old face. He told me about
165

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
the garden, about the French engineers, about
himself, chiefly about himself, in limpid, child-like
fashion. He had travelled far in the Old and New
Worlds ; in him I recognized, once again, that
simple mind of the wanderer or sailor who learns,
as he goes along, to talk and think decently ; who,
instead of gathering fresh encumbrances on life's
journey, wisely discards even those he set out with.
Seldja, he told me, used to be a dangerous place
for Europeans to traverse ; many robberies and
even murders had taken place there in times past ;
the new regime, of course, had put an end to all
that. But there were still two perils : the frightful
flies that bred diseases and made the gorge almost
impassable in the hot months (every one suffered
from fevers), and the serpents. Ah, those maladette
bestie di serpenti — they swarmed among the rocks :
they were of every kind and size ; worst of all,
the spleenful naja. He himself had killed one that
measured two metres in length and was as thick
as a man's arm. They don't wait till you can hit
them, he said, but rush straight at you, swift as an
arrow, upraised on their massive posterior coils,
hissing like a steam-engine, and swelling out their
throat with diabolical rage.
This is the beast that figured in the competition
between Aaron and Pharaoh's conjurers, and it
1 66

THE SELDJA GORGE
remains the favourite of modern African snake-
charmers, who catch it after first irritating it
by means of a wooUen cloth wherein the fangs are
embedded and broken. It is also, no doubt, the
dreaded species which Sallust describes as infesting
the region of Gafsa. But Lucan goes a little too far
in his account of Cato's expedition into these parts ;
this veracious historian has inserted a few pages of
sublime serpent nonsense, exquisite fooling. . . .
Of all the deadly worms that breed in these
wildernesses the most formidable, because the most
sluggish, is the two-horned nocturnal cerastes,
the " pretty worm of Nilus." No sensible person,
nowadays, goes into the bled^ in summer-time
unless armed with a phial of the antidote — ^Trousse
Calmette or Trousse Legros — whose liquid is
injected with a hypodermic syringe above and below
the wound, and has saved many lives.
" And the scorpions, Signore ! We have to tie
cotton-wool round the legs of our beds so that
I This is one of the many Arabic words which admit of no
clear translation. As opposed to a town, it means a village or
encampment ; as opposed to that, the open land, a plain, or par
ticular district. When colonists talk of " going into the bled,"
they mean their farms ; in newspaper language it signifies the
country generally, inhabited or not — what we should call " the
provinces " ; oftentimes, again, the barren desert or (more techni
cally) the soil. 167

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
these infernal creatures cannot climb up while
we are asleep ; they get entangled in it, ha, ha !
And that is why we all keep cats and hens, who eat
them, you know, just like the Arabs do. And some
times it rains scorpions."
I had heard that story before, from natives ;
and it may weU be founded on fact. The
terrific gusts of desert wind overturn the stones
under which the scorpions lie; the fragile beasts
are exposed to the blast and, being relatively
light, swept skyward across leagues of country
with the flying sand. A similar explanation has
been given for those old accounts of frog and fish
rains. " Yes ; they drop from the clouds. During
certain storms I have picked them off my clothes,
three or four at a time. Rather a ticklish operation,
sir." So we discussed the world in that umbrageous
shelter, to the music of the frogs. He condescended
to partake of a microscopic share of my meal, and
thereafter left me, with some old-world compliment,
to irrigate his thirsty lettuces.

i68

Chapter XVI
AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS
I SAT alone, screened from the midday heat,
drowsy and content. It was a pleasant
resting - place, under that leafy arbour,
through which only a few rays of light could
filter, weaving arabesque designs that moved and
melted on the fioor as the wind stirred the foliage
overhead. And a pleasant occupation, listening to
those amiable amphibians in the mere below —
they carried my thought back to other frog-concerts,
dimly remembered, in some other lands — and gazing
through the green network of branches upon that
sun-scorched garden, where now a silvery thread
of water began to attract my attention as it stole,
coyly, among the flower-beds.
The day is yet young, methought ; it is too hot
to think of marching home at this hour. Now is
the time, rather, for a pipe of kif — if only to demon
strate the difference that exists between man and the
ape. For your monkey can be taught to eat and
drink like a Christian ; he can even learn to smoke
169

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
tobacco. But he cannot smoke kif : the stuff would
choke him.
Four pipes, reverentially inhaled ... it was
almost too much, for a mere dilettante.
But the mystery of the frogs, the when and where
of it, was solved. Slowly and benignly the memories
traveUed back, building themselves into a vision
so clear-cut and elaborate withal, that I might
have been holding it, as one holds some engraving
or miniature, in my hand. It was in the Rhine-
woods, of course ; long years ago, in summer
time. But the frog-music here was not amiable
at all ; never have I heard such angry batrachian
vociferations. They came in a discontented and
menacing chorus from ten thousand leathery
throats, and almost drowned our converse as we
crept along through the twilight of trees that shot
up from the swampy earth.
These Rhine-woods are like pathless tropical
jungles : everything is so green and luxuriant ;
and morning grew to midday while we threaded
our way through the tangle of interlacing boughs
and undergrowth. Yet we knew, aU the time,
that something else was in store for us, some joy,
some surprise. And lo ! there was an opening in
the forest, and we suddenly found ourselves stand
ing upon the summit of a high bank at whose foot
170

AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS
there roUed a sunlit and impetuous torrent. Too
staid for the formation of ripples, too swift for
calm content, the river seemed to boil up from below
in a kind of frolicsome rage. A blissful sight.
" Er spinnt," my companion was saying.
In what obscure chamber of the brain had those
words slumbered, closely folded, for thirty years ?
It was indeed an authentic weaving of arabesque
designs upon the even texture of the living liquid
mass ; multitudinous rings and ovals and lozenges
were cast up from the green depths as from a mighty
over-bubbling cauldron ; some fiercely engulfed
again, others torn hither and thither into new and
pleasing shapes, fresh ones for ever emerging ;
only a few contrived to linger unchanged, floating
in sunny splendour down the face of the waters.
A blissful sight ! The dark and mazy woodlands,
now, were left far behind — the croaking of the frogs
sounded strangely distant. We gazed in ecstasy
upon that shining flood. . . .
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
171

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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
172

AT THE HEAD OF THE WATERS
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 mechani
cal 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 weU 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.
173

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
It must have been a fit of temporary oblivious
ness, 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.

174

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 aU 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 un-
175

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
learns aU its sprightly grace and trickles discon
solately through the sands, expiring, at last, in th
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 actuaUy 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 aU 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
176

ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE
and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief,
changing arable land into pasture, which grows ever
poorer, and finaUy 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 mentaUy sterile.^
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 penu-
riously 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
I I have just re-perused Lapie's Civilizations Tunisiennes. He
says that "la ch^vre est le genie malfaisant de la Regence. . . .
Plus que le despotisme, plus que le fatalisme, elie a ruine le pays :
c'est la chSvre, en effet, qui deboise et surtout qui s'oppose au
reboisement, et I'on sait quelle influence a eue sur le regime des
eaux et sur la fertilite du sol le deboisement 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.
M 177

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 Caesar, 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 magnifi
cent forests of Khroumiria, forests such as certainly
never clothed these southern hiUs, 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 con
trivances were now in working order, supposing
them even to be furnished with such improve
ments as modern science could suggest, stiU 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. Archaeologists, for instance,
have discovered in the district of Gafsa alone
178

ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE
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 weUs 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 aU events, cannot have been
aU 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
179

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 de
scribe 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 stiU linger in the
country north of Feriana.) Stags can only live in
timbered regions. If these forests were stUl 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 aU 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.
180

ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE
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 foUow the
railway lines ; and nothing is a fitter
commentary on the mediaevalism which deplores
the building of railways into the desert than facts
like that of the plain of Maknassy — a sterUe 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 them
selves — round these new agricultural centres. In
1 890 there were still eight tents to every five houses
in Tunisia, but this proportion is rapidly changing.
And besides this, the railway, with its faciUty for the
182

THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
rapid conveyance of troops, has given security to
regions formerly so dangerous that no settler, how
ever favourable the soil, would have dared to estab
lish his home there ; it has awakened the date indus
try and created halfa deposits aU along the Une.
There is one of them at Gafsa station, for in
stance — 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.
183

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 P "
" 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 teUs 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 Ufe and directed their attention to
husbandry." Both administrations are necessarily based on
184

THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
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 Ue, 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 else
where. These phosphates are something of a
symbol : there are men and women fashioned after
this model.
I question whether the men of the Fax 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
i8s

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 inteUectual labour,
were enabled to foul the stream of human en
deavour. 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 Tripoli
tan 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
reaUties 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
1 86

THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
faun — half -man, half -goat ; he spoke to the creature
and was charmed by its edifying discourse. You
wiU object that Saint Anthony is known to have
been a haUucinated nevropathe ; 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 teUs 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 personaUy 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 particu
lar 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 ecclesice.
No ; phosphate-hunting was assuredly out of
the question under such conditions ; scientific
curiosity and commercialism, parents of fair talk
187

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
and fair deaUng 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 Fax 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 feUow, and the devil for work.
Married, and a good husband ; clear eyes ; spec
tacles, 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 garfon, 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 un
worldly ; too foolish, or too proud : who can tell ?
1 88

THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS
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 aUoy 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 miser
able 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 cate
gories permitted by ordinary words, we are driven
189

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
to refer him to some exemplar recognized in legend
or history — we talk of his being Epicurean, Vol-
tairean, 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.

190

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 neighbour
ing 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,
gunless sky, a gentle breeze. Another weary stretch
191

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 de
tachment off their horses, and finaUy 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).
192

Tozeur and its Oasis

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
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 weU. There were moments during my ride
when I regretted not having come to some under
standing 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 Une 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 — some
where else. Where — where ? Suddenly I remem-
N 193

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
bered : 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 iUusion ;
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 eye
lashes, 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
1 20 square metres of ground and whose branches are
so long, so weary with age, that they bend down
ward and touch the earth with their elbows — to
rest, as it were — and then rise up again, refreshed.
These salines are about tliree miles from Tozeur
and an uncommonly simple establishment ; they
dig a ditch in the morass which promptly fiUs 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
194

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
no preparation whatever, but is sold as it comes out
of the Chott, agreeable to the palate though rather
yeUowish in colour. Needless to say the Govern
ment runs no risk of the supply faiUng ; 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 aU 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
leafiess, like a tall orchid, out of the bitter waste ;
camels eat its fat, bulbous, snowy-white root ; the
Arabs caU 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 weU 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 weU, and so
195

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
were Oudiane and aU 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 ? Sacre 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
196

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
seemed a very simple request, but each time, un
fortunately, 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— ja/^ bete ! — said a
pious " bismiUah " at the critical moment, which
of course spoilt everything.
And here a wild craving came upon me : I wished
to foUow 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, crawUng 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 possi
biUty 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
197

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 kifP " 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. 198

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
" An Inglis " — perhaps he was saying to himself —
" one of those who joke and talk in such friendly
fashion, and then, when it comes to a sou's worth
of kif- — a single puff of his pipe. . . . ! Sacre
cochon ! That is how they grow rich."
Possibly he reasoned thus, but I fancy he reasoned
not at aU. 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 {edition mignonne) of the mektoub
profession. It gave a dignity to the fellow.
Presently I made him a gift of the whole appara
tus. 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
Uttle pieces."
And he unfolded a tale of love and revenge.
199

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 reaUy 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 aU, 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 de
praved memories of middle life towards certain
half-forgotten and holier ideals of youth that re
vived, at last, and took shape in the prime features

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR
of this — as he may have caUed it — pastoral diver
sion ; 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 idyU lasted for long, ere the awful retri
bution 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 Ufe 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 WATERT LABTRINTH
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 construc
tion, and not a few of them can boast of cool,
vaulted chambers and an upper story. Unfortu
nately 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
chiefiy 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
202

A WATERY LABYRINTH
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 stiU 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 earUest 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 com
plicated and apparently frivolous system of marking
203

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
the hours ; the water is cut off from a certain pro
perty, 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 wiU teU 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 micro
scopic brooklets. Allah is aU-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
204

The Waters of Tozeur

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 wiU
see that it is full of minute crystalUne 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
306

A WATERY LABYRINTH
the near-lying tracts of half-desert within low
mounds crowned by upright palm branches, and
forbidding aU access to man and beast. The flying
plague heaps itself against the palisade and sub
merges it ; a new set of branches is then inserted,
and so the structure grows higher and more effi
cacious every year. The soil within the enclosures,
meanwhile, grows hard ; wild shrubs sprout up to
help in the work, and though the crust yields,
Uke 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
wiU dare to violate these haUowed 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 paUsade.
" 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-
207

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
springs. A hundred or more Arabs were engaged,
under the supervision of a keen-eyed young French
man, 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 un
pleasant 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 weU-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."
208

A WATERY LABYRINTH
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 gleefuUy, 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 reaUy 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 chil
dren 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
0 209

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
mark, which has always been my ambition. I think
I could live in this country for ever. Can you under
stand such a feeling ? None of my coUeagues 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 Nor-
2IO

A WATERY LABYRINTH
mandy, 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 weU to encourage as officials
and settlers in the wilder parts.

211

Chapter XXI
OLD TISOUROS
THERE is a daily recurring spectacle at
Tozeur which enchanted me : the camp
ing 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 impres
sion 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 fiashes through
the distant palms, followed by another, and yet
another — long shafts of yellow light traveUing
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 stiU 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
212

OLD TISOUROS
of the palms, the element of mystery is elimi
nated ; 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
Ught 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, per
colating 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
213

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 geo
metrical design will be impaired. . . .
The origin of Tozeur is lost in the grey mists of
antiquity, since a site like this must have been culti
vated 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 proto
type — under high-piled mounds whereon have
arisen, since those days, a few mediaeval monuments
and crumbling maraboutic shrines and houses of
more modern date, patched together with antique
btiilding 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
214

OLD TISOUROS
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 re
markable ; 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.
215

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 beU-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
216

OLD TISOUROS
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 cipoUino columns ; they are still to be
seen, if you care to look for them, split up, since his
time, to mend waUs 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 de
grading 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 remark
able at any time.
The climate, and then their religion, has made
them hard and incurious ; it is a land of uncompro-
217

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
mising 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 sexu
ality, the constructive poets and dreamers, the men
of imagination and women of wiU, 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 refiection, 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 tUl, 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
218

OLD TISOUROS
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 aU
their freshness ! The happiest life, seen in per
spective, can hardly be better than a stringing
together of such odd little moments.

219

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 are 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, look
ing 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.

THE DISMAL CHOTT
For as it left the horizon, a counterfeit sun began
to unroU 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 fiaming 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 in
vaded the ground at our feet, fUtting like some
arterial riU 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 nightfaU ; 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 oppor
tunity 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-
221

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 en
tangled in the ooze ; I thought of Tritogeneia, the
savage, mud-born creature who, cast into the
purifying crucible of HeUenic 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 won
drous 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 im-

THE DISMAL CHOTT
precations long and loathsome, for his scorching
fires. Shaw, I believe, was the first to identify the
Chotts vdth Lake Triton.
There were islands in this sea ; the sacred isle of
Phia, for instance, which the Spartans were com
manded by an oracle to colonize, and whereon stood
a temple to Aphrodite, There are islands to this
day, great and smaU ; one of them is caUed Faraoun
— evidently an Egyptian name, for Egyptian in
fluence was felt early in these regions ; at Faraoun
grows a pecuUar 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 " galere antique " — ^it was
dismembered for fuel, and metal nails were found
in its framework.
Movers is probably correct in seeking at Nefta
the BibUcal 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 caUed it Nefta because it
was here that water boiled, for the first time, after
the Deluge. The Romans caUed it Nepte, but, in
223

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 Heca-
tompolis, 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 supposi
tion 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 asso
ciated with it, that of Roudaire, a man of science
dominated by an obsession, who clung to this pro
ject 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. 224

THE DISMAL CHOTT
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 multi
tudes of living creatures have sunk into its per
fidious abysses. " A caravan of ours," says an Arab
author, " had to cross the Chott one day ; it was
composed of a thousand baggage camels. Un
fortunately one of the beasts strayed from the path,
and aU the others foUowed 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, irre
mediable sterility. Its hue is ever-changing, as the
light faUs 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
P 2?5

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 wiU reach,
on the burning plain, a maraboutic shrine that
might serve as an asylum for some conscience-
stricken, malaria-proof penitent. They go well to
gether, 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 coUeague 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' sanctu
ary, among the sand-hiUs on the middle heights.
226

Nefta : The Shrine on the Chott

THE DISMAL 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 in
variably, 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 ex
pose 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 aU the worst
quaUties of the Arabs, improvident and incorrigible
loafers, besides affording an asylum to every criminal;
their zaouiahs, like our own mediaeval convents, are
often enough mere menageries of deformed minds
and bodies. As for the much-vaunted calm to
be found within their waUs, it is there, to be sure,
together with certain other things — ^there and no
where else, since the frantic religious passions, of
which such monastic institutions are offshoots, have
made peaceable living outside their walls an im
possibiUty. In a land where no one reads or writes or thinks
227

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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, be
cause they have freighted themselves with a cargo
of fond maxims such as " The World is IUusion : 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 eternaUy to the same theological chatter-
ings ; which accounts for a certain " family Uke
ness " between all of these mentaUy starved crea
tures, who are nevertheless favoured of AUah so
far as bodily comforts are concerned, inasmuch
228

THE DISMAL CHOTT
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 descen
dants of Mahomet's daughter is a marabout, and
aU their children, male and female, in scecula
sceculorum. God alone, who numbers the stars, can keep count
of their legions.

229

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 bUnding
showers, mighty squadrons of them careering across
230

THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
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
forcefuUy from a soil which seems to heave under
one's very feet. It is a moment of throbbing in
tensity. 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 foUowing legend. Long ago, he said, these
oases were wild jungles, and the few human crea
tures 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 ;
231

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
he planted trees and all the other growths useful tc
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 weU
that up to this day no one has been able to suggest
any improvements or to quarrel with his arrange
ment. 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.^
Yet the deglat palms which grow here in great
abundance — the finest in the world — with their
lower leaves pendent, sere and yeUow ; the figs,
lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in
savage meshes of unpruned boughs among which
the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers
I 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.
232

Marabout in the Nefta Gardens

THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
Uana-fashion, in crazy convolutions — aU these things
conspire to give to certain parts of the oasis, not
withstanding its high cultivation, a bearded, pri
meval 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 stiUness 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 Nean
derthal folk, would have become placid by this time ;
that aU 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
equaUy weU at the Poles or Equator, like that
233

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
" Brown or Hanoverian rat " which Charles Water-
ton — a glorious old zealot himself — so cordiaUy
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 employes or to see
the soldiers loitering at street corners, Uke 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 traveUer Temple was struck, at
Nefta, with the beauty of its " desart nymphs,
whose eyes are aU fire and brilliancy," and he might
have said the same of the boys.
But I observe a defect in the eyes of aU 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 aU
the expression they emit. They cannot even
wink. From the rising ground at the back of Nefta you
234

THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
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
corbeiUe." 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 " corbeiUe," join
their waters and speed downhill towards the oasis,
a narrow belt of trees running along either side.
This marveUous palm-embroidered rift sunders
Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills overhead, into
two distinct towns or settlements. The eye foUows
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 smaU Sicilian vUlage, I
cannot tell ; thither, at all events, I bent my steps,
having heard that ancient coins, as weU 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.
23s

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 per
ceives 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 reaUze how they must have inflamed the
236

THE GARDENS OF NEFTA
phantasy of those wandering mediaeval 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 pur
pose — ^were otherwise than an iUusion, 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 im
prisoned 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 enchant
ment 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 wan
derer who, stumbling fearfully through a labyrinth
of silent haUs, suddenly encounters, in demon-
guarded chamber, some ensorceUed maiden, frozen
to stone.

237

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 con
trast, 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
238

NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
surround themselves with a girdle of corrupting
things, gruesome and yet fascinating : a Browning
might have grown enamoured of its macabre speU.
No European cares to linger about these pre
cincts 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 toU 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
239

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 wiU appreciate the metamorphosis more than
the native citizens themselves, who love, above aU
things, to play about and idle in the shade of trees ;
perhaps, in the course of time, they wiU 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 whoUy
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 hiUock,
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 wiU do weU 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
249

A Beggar

NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
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 wiU 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 hiU-
side is more neglected than these memorials to his
feUow-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 gar
dens must be continually moving — moving away
q 341

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 foun
tains is what one might caU the natural, aboriginal
one. I imagine that the cultivators, in the course
of ages, must have tracked the element and foUowed
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 pre
historic days, maybe, the water gushed out some
where near the Chott ; the charming depression
of the " corbeiUe " is perhaps the work of human
hands. The same has struck me at Tozeur, which also
marches horizontally away from its termination.
An exquisite corbeiUe 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 viUages rise higher every year,
these gardens are slowly descending into the depths ;
they are already far below the circumambient
242

NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
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 be
come 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, feU 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 profun
dities of the earth than the already existing Sahara
plantations — with this difference, that here, to
obviate inflltration from the ooze of the Chott,
sturdy waUs must enclose them, Ages pass, and
StiU 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 de
scend. . . . One day the pale population engaged
in tiUing 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,
243

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
soon burst asunder and admit, from every side, a
wrinkled flood of slime which closes with suUen
murmur over the site of the drowned oasis.
Or if the weUs dried up ? One of those geo
logical displacements that have taken place in past
times would suffice td 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 contem
plation of the desert and vividly green oasis which
flows, like a grand and luminous river, into the very
heart of its flat dweUings. There is a note of pas
sionate 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 wiU 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 de
voured sundry oases by simply waiting till man is
preoccupied with other matters. And how rare
244

NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
they are, these specks of green, these fountains in
the sand — rare as the smiles in a lifetime of woe !
Beyond and aU around lies a grave and ungra
cious land, the land of the lawless, fanatical wan
derers. Those Romans and heathen Berbers, tiUers 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 Ufe 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 P instead of how P Whoever xlespises
the investigation of secondary causes is a menace to
his feUow-creatures.
Face to face with infinities, man disencumbers
himself. Those abysmal desert-silences, those spaces
of scintiUating 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 dis
carding much that seems inconsiderable before such
wide and splendid horizons, this nomad loads him
self with the incubus of dream-states ; while stand
ing alone, he grows into a ferocious brigand. Poets
Q 2 245

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND
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 moun
tains 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.

246

INDEX
Ain Moulares, 152
Aissouiyah, 68, 96

Bagdhad, 237
Bekri, geographer, 203
Bertholon, 233
Biskra, 196, 244
Bled-el-Adher, see Tozeur
Bordereau, Pierre, 13, 102, 113, 176
Boulanger, General, 153
Boujaja, 151, 163
Bournu, 40
Bruce, James, 180

Cambon, M., 153
Carthage, 43
Chotts, the, 13, S3, 123, 224-6, 235, 242-5
— el Rharsa, 176, 220
— Djerid, 193-5, 220
Couillault, M., 24

Desfontaines, 180
Djerid, the, 13, 53, 95, 115, 119, 123, 183, 220
247

INDEX
Dougga, 236
Dufresnoy, M. Paul, 18, 44, 82-7, 89, 120-6, 141, 158-60,

Eberhardt, Isabelle, 102
Edrisius, 50
EI Djem, 217, 237
El Hamma, 192-3
Eloued, 196

Faraoun, 223
Feriana, 14, 16, 17, 21, 152, 180, 182
Florentinus, Bishop, 216

Gafsa, 13-147, 157, 167, 178, 180,182,183, 202,215,216,
224, 230-1
— Meda Hill, 21, 27, 50, 53
Gordian, Emperor, 217
Guerin, 236
Guifla, 191

Henchir Souatir, 16, 152

Jebel Assalah, 44, 47, 53, no
Jebel Guettor, 23, 51
Jebel Orbata, 37, 52
Jebel Zitouna, 176 248

INDEX

Kairouan, 53, 112
Khroumiria, 178
Kocher, M., 102
Koken, Professor, 26, 53, 61

Leila (Lalla), 105-8, iii, 118, 121
Leo, John, 46
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 224
Lucan, 167

Majen, 17, 18
Maknassy, 182
Maltzan, 236
Mayet, Valery, 191
Melkarth, 43
Metlaoui, 82, 83, 90, 95, 123--4, 140-54, 156-8, 161, 165, 191,
193, 203
Mount Abu, 17
Movers, 223

Nefta, 13, 193, 220, 223, 224, 226, 230-44
Nefzaoua, 183

Orosius, 43
Oudiane, 195-6
Oued Baghara, 191
Oued Baiesh, 24, 27, 52-4, 127, 132, 142
249

INDEX

Phia, 223
Ptolemy, 214

Ras-el-Aioun, 165, 171
Redeyeff, 152, 157
Rogib (hill). III, 127
Roudaire, 224

Sallust, 47, 167
Sbeitla, 15, 18, 44, 179, 180
Seldja, gorge, 146, 147, 161-74, 184, 185, 189
— water, 162, 175, 179
Sfax, 14, 16, 20, 73, 90, 93, 105, 134, 141, 147, 182, 183
Shaw, Thomas, 180, 223
Sidi Ahmed Zarroung, 36, 50-6
Sidi Mansur, 24, 53-6, 59, 112, 147
Sidi Murzouk, 226
Souf, 53, 183, 194, 196, 198
Souk-el-Arba, 94
Sousse, 14, 141, 183
SufFetula, 15

Temple, 234
Thala, 124
Thomas, M. Philippe, 152-4, 164, 186, 188-90
Timgad, 236
Tissot, James, 164, 223, 224 250

INDEX
Tozeur (Tisouros), 13, 72, 73, 83, 191-220, 224, 230, 231,
233.236, 242, 244
Triton, lake, 223
Tunis, 78, 134, 141, 183

Udaipur, 17
Zafrana, 235, 236, 241

W. BRKNDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

3 9002 00991 0465 13 '86

r'^MSBpT^