Chapter 2

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 will protect you from the cold and the stinging rays of the sun. But if a European wants a chill in the liver or any other portion of the culinary 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 this very moment. But not as the poorer Arabs do. Beneath it there is a suit of ordinary winter clothing, as well 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 rhinoceros. And the wind of Gafsa has this peculiarity, that it is equally 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.

_Chapter III_

_THE TERMID_

The chief attractions of Gafsa, beside the oasis, are the tall minaret with its prospect over the town and plantations, and the Kasbah or fortress, a Byzantine construction covering a large expanse of ground and rebuilt by the French on theatrical lines, with bastions and crenellations 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 solid 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, still call it. It is a large and deep stone basin, half full of warm water, in which small fishes, snakes 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 chilly, but later on it becomes a lively place, full of laughter and splashings. Here, for a sou, you may get the boys to jump down from the parapet and wallow 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 _panés 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 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 well 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 nationality--while allowing 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 all for keeping up local colour, even when it entails, as it generally 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_, especially 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 _Ponts et Chaussées_.

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? The key of the _piscine?_ He regretted he could give me no information as to its whereabouts--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 pestilentially sulphureous water. But "the key" was evidently a sore subject.

"There is no key, Monsieur"; and he accompanied 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 well-earned slumbers....

It is hard to understand what the guide-books mean when they call the market of Gafsa "rich and well-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----

Those peppers! An adult Arab will 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 "all peppers or all 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 believe to be a fact, namely, that there are more reclaimed drunkards among Arabs than among ourselves. They will 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 call it, inspiration; indeed, they regard our men of fixed principles as weaklings 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 infidels, trying to forestall by human devices the unascertainable decrees of Allah.

Allah wills 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 literally 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 will "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 will of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. 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?

_Mektoub_ is the intellectual _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 professional 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 loving them, for these are the little episodes that make life endurable.

The music was not altogether original; it reminded 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, all 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.

_Chapter IV_

_STONES OF GAFSA_

There are interesting walks in the neighbourhood 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 unpaved, hardly a single wall 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 medieval 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 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 chiselled 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 earlier times--columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern, the majority unpretentious and solid.

What do the natives think of these relics of past civilization? Do they ever wonder whence they came or who made them? "The stones are there," they will 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 wall pierced by a hundred gates, whence its presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city of a hundred gates. The Egyptians ruled it; then the Phoenicians, who called it Kafaz--the walled; and after the destruction of Carthage it became the retreat and treasure-house of Numidian kings. Greeks, too, exercised a powerful influence 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 gradually 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 actually 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 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 wild 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 biblical desolation, as though the curse of Heaven had fallen 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, like 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 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 will speak. If ever they spoke, it is among these crumbling, composite walls 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 really know of the Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the monuments 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 benevolence 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 of the Kasbah and other buildings? Not one is left: so much is certain.

I borrowed Sallust and tried to press some flavour out of his description of Marius' march to the capture of Gafsa. It was a fine military 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: all 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 life, his choice of words, are the note of tomorrow; 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 well worth a visit; legions of bats--_tirlils_, the Arabs call them--hang in noisome clusters from the roof.

Concerning these bats, the following story is told in Gafsa.

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 will rejoin me in Tunis in ten days. Bring me more bats--tirlils: _comprenni?_--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 Englishman, "what's all this?"

"Bats, Monsieur."

"Eh? How much?"

"Bats; _tirlils_, _chauve-souris_, _pipistrelli_... They will need much bottles. Six hundred tirlils 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.

"Look here," he said, "I'll 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 tirlils; he had risked his life; there were the transport expenses, too: very heavy. He had travelled with many Englishmen 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. Well, come to-morrow morning, but go away now, quick! before I break your head. Take your damned tirlils to your damned funduk, and be off!--clear out!--_comprenni?_"

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 exertions of a Jewish international lawyer, the affair was settled out of court after all--fifteen hundred francs, plus expenses of transport.

_Chapter V_

_SIDI ARMED 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 villages in the neighbourhood of Gafsa; and Edrisius, writing a century later, extols its prosperous suburbs, and pleasure-houses.

Where are they now?

One of these villages, 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 _Ponts et Chaussées_ recommended 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 still 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 climb 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, like the flint implements, in which someone else will have anticipated me. And here I also found iron in a more civilized shape, a fragment of a shell--relic, perhaps, of the first French expedition against Gafsa, or of some more recent artillery practice.