Chapter 1

Produced by Eric Eldred, S. R. Ellison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND

RAMBLES AMONG THE OASES OF TUNISIA

_By Norman Douglas_

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

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 CAFÉ

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

XXII. THE DISMAL CHOTT

XXIII. THE GARDENS OF NEFTA

XXIV. NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GAFSA AND JEBEL ORBATA

ENTRANCE TO THE TERMID

AT THE TERMID

A STREET IN GAFSA

HADRIAN'S INSCRIPTION

THE LAST PALMS

CAFÉ BY THE MULBERRY-TREE

MY FRIEND SILENUS

NATIVES OF GAFSA

THE ROMAN WALL

OLIVES IN THE OASIS

TOZEUR AND ITS OASIS

THE WATERS OF TOZEUR

THE SHRINE ON THE CHOTT

MARABOUT IN THE NEFTA GARDENS

A BEGGAR

_FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND_

_Chapter I_

_EN ROUTE_

Likely enough, I would not have remained in Gafsa more than a couple of days. For it was my intention to go from England straight down to the oases of the Djerid, Tozeur and Nefta, a corner of Tunisia left unexplored 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 Bordereau'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 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: _One 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'hôte, 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 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 hills 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 throughout 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 would be frozen to death. I must go as far as Majen, a few stations beyond Feriana; sleep there in an Arab funduk (caravanserai), and thank my stars if I found any one willing 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 accommodation for them; the towns that one sees so beautifully 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--well, they simply don't exist, _voilà_!

"That's not very consoling," I said, as we took our seats in the compartment again. "It begins well."

And my meditations took on a sombre hue. I thought of a little overland trip I had once undertaken, 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 well.

"If you go to Gafsa," he resumed, "--if you really propose going to Gafsa, pray let me give you a card to a friend of mine, who lives there with his family and may be useful to you. No trouble, I assure you!"

He scribbled a few lines, addressed to "Monsieur Paul Dufresnoy, Engineer," for which I thanked him. "We all 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 hereabouts," 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 till they offer a million."

Majen....

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 life 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, I had been assured, was awaiting me and which, as he truthfully informed me, was even then unoccupied. 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 indigènes_ 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 fellow. But he is not the _ponsechossi_."

"Ponsechossi. What's that?"

"THIS," he said, excavating from under a pile of miscellaneous rubbish a paper whereon was displayed the official stamp of the _Ponts et Chaussées_--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."

"Could I at least find a horse in the morning--a mule--a donkey--a camel?"

"We shall 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 excellent 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 which 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 families whose children were tearing out 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 seaboard. 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 hill near the entrance of the town (it is marked Meda Hill on the map) had attracted my attention as promising a fine view. Thither, after settling my concerns at the hotel, I swiftly bent 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 solitary 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 hollow rock. A high-piled heap of bones near at hand suggested cannibalistic practices.

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 little have they changed in the intervening thousands of years! The wild-eyed young wench, with her dishevelled hair, ferocious bangle-ornaments, 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 falls 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 Guetter, 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.

_Chapter II_

_BY 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 collection of these relics, casually picked up here and there, already numbers two hundred pieces, and illustrates every period of those early ages--uncouth battle-axes and spear-points; fine needles, apparently used for sewing skins together; the so-called laurel-leaves, as thin as card-board; knife-blades; instruments for scraping beast-hides--all 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 smaller 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-like shape--the cone pointing 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 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 believe, 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 collects 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 will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of Tübingen, in a learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the Mesvinian, Strepyian, Præchellean--to say nothing of the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other types. So be it. He further says, what is more intelligible 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, embedded since God knows when, already formed part of this natural conglomerate ere it began to uplift itself. This will 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 Hill. 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 Allah or his sacred book; he could only run, and throw stones, and endure, like a beast, those ceaseless illnesses of which only death, an early death as a rule, is allowed to cure them. His clothing was 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 ornamenting 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 prehistoric 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 construction; 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 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 silkworm in its cocoon--can anything more insane be imagined? Wrapped therein for nearly all their lives, the whole race grows round-shouldered; the gastric region, which ought to be protected in this climate 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 full.

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 practically atrophied. You will 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 effectually counteracts that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying vesture, a step in the direction of fossilification. Will the natives ever realize that the abolition of this sleeveless and buttonless anachronism is one of the conditions of their betterment? 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 inefficiency.

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 employed 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 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-like 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 galloping stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age, crouching at some street-corner in hieratic immobility.