Chapter 8

They showed me a map of this subterranean 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 deposits, the company has begun to attack those of Redeyeff, and will shortly open an assault upon the others at Ain Moulares, which lie 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 revolutionized 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 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 flint implements. Many of these writings date from the seventies and earlier; they have procured for him the membership of learned societies, as well as medals and decorations of all 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 Instruction, 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 chilling 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 l'agriculture française et algérienne._" Nevertheless, 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 all conscience, considering the millions he has gained for them. They further honoured him by changing the name of the station-settlement of Metlaoui into "Philippe-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 gully 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 served in the French Army, had long been laying in a store of warlike provisions; their secret was well 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, well 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 jollification; and they were so sagacious, that they actually induced a few drunken Tripolitans to insult them, before beginning the conflict. 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 well-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 ranks to finish him off with their knives; others, meanwhile, went to the locked huts and fired them, or burst them open with dynamite.

The explosions and lights began to attract attention 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 investigate. 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 hell let loose. Not content with killing, 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 till 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 probably 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.

Although, once roused, the Tripolitans fought like demons, they were worsted--the others were too numerous. They had a brief moment of revenge, however; for during their retreat, on Monday morning, they encountered two young Khabyle boys who had been on absence and were now returning to work at the mines, blissfully ignorant of what was going on. These unfortunate lads were literally torn to shreds.

I confess that, as a spectacle, I should have preferred that night's engagement to anything in modern warfare. It must have been a stupendous exhibition of the _bête 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 been telegraphically summoned and despatched by special train. And soon afterwards, elated by success, the Khabyles fell 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 management got wind of the project in good time, which was just as well, for the Moroccans are not only the 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 certain 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 allow 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 Tripolitans, we would have acted just the same; we cannot be bothered with decisions of civil courts, which would have satisfied nobody, besides depriving 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_"

"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 in his 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 well 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 venality and public credulity. Whoever 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."

"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."

_Chapter XV_

_THE SELDJA GORGE_

It is good, after such visions of human infirmity and of death, to ride over the plain to the Seldja gorge, an astonishing freak of nature. I was twice within its towering walls of rock; the first time on horseback, accompanied 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 still faster, and I confess to being not scandalized, not inordinately scandalized, at this performance. We grow hard among the implacable desert stones. Besides, it was only a hired beast. Any true lover of animals will understand.

Skirting the foot of the hills 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 chiselled 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 roof of yawning caverns; sandpipers and wagtails skim over the streamlet that glides in a smiling flood across reaches of yellow 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 midday 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 camels, groaning and snorting 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 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 stratification 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 cañon, 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 floods 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 hollow, he explained, was the bridal couch, in olden days, of an earthly maiden and her demon-lover. He was a simple fellow, unfortunately, who knew the story too well to be able to tell it coherently.

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. Gradually the aspect of the valley changes. It opens out; the rocks melt away into bare white dunes, the country assuming the character of a tableland; 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 delightfully, a smile playing about his kindly old face. He told me about 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 remains the favourite of modern African snake-charmers, who catch it after first irritating it by means of a woollen 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[1] [Footnote: 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 particular 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 technically) the soil.] 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 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 sometimes it rains scorpions."

I had heard that story before, from natives; and it may well 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.

_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 floor 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 demonstrate 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 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 travelled 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 summertime. 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, all 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 standing upon the summit of a high bank at whose foot there rolled 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 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.