Part 16

The next morning was bright and fair, and I went out to explore the land southward, a stretch of about twenty kilometres to the strait which divides the island from the mainland. We were soon out of the town and almost at once in the fields. The road, extremely dry and sandy, wound over a very open country of scattered farms, with lines and groups of palm and olive, besides other trees, on slightly rolling, bosomy slopes with long and gradual variations of level. It was a pleasant scene in the warm April air of sleepy peace and solitary silence, unbroken country quiet. One characteristic of the land was soon evident. The population, which is upward of forty thousand for the whole island and is of the pure Berber stock for the most part, has never gathered into towns and villages. The few central points are mere market-places for distribution and supply; the people live scattered on farms in their own demesnes. There are singular farmsteads, built for defence, actually fortified; a wall, enclosing a space large enough for cattle and whatever must be under cover in case of attack, surrounds the whole, with towers at the four corners. These farmsteads are near enough for mutual aid; and with only this system of protection the inhabitants of the island withstood the random nomad forays from the mainland and the pirate descents from the sea for centuries.

The island is really the edge of the desert where it makes down to the Mediterranean. It is, in effect, a farming oasis which has been reclaimed from the sands by its own people through the use of the underground waters. It is in a condition of varied cultivation throughout, but is more fertile in some parts than in others; for, if attention is relaxed, it reverts at once to the sterile, sandy state. A peculiar people inhabits it. They are dissident Mohammedans, and akin in their heresy to the Mzabites of the Sahara, whose _fantasia_ I saw, and who have made the oases to the west and southwest of Tougourt centres of prosperity, besides being a vigorous nomad race of merchants through all North Africa. The sect would be called Unitarians among us, because they carry their insistence on “the only God” so far as to deny divine authority to the prophets, including Mohammed. They have strange bits of mosques, diminutive little things, with a square minaret topped with a curious conical stone, and these are numerously scattered here over the whole island. They are also the Puritans of the Moslem world, strict in their manners, severe even, and very frugal. It is to this folk that the island owes its state of culture; they have created it as a habitable tract; nor do they confine their toil to the land. They weave excellent white burnooses of their wool, and bright, striped blankets, and mould pretty pottery; they engage in the fisheries; and with their nomad instincts they often seek occupation and trade abroad, like the Mzabites, who are credited with a Quaker-like prosperity in worldly affairs. This community, distributed broadly without towns in their own small domains, might seem a dream of the primitive—a frugal folk on a sterile land, in their rural Paradise of small economies and simple manners, leading uneventful lives of humble industry, far from the great world.

It was a curious country to look at—not rich, no bottom-lands, or waving acres, or luxury and exuberance of vegetation rushing forth; the nakedness of the land showed through. But the face of the country had lines of verdure and spots of spring-time and greening reaches over the dry acclivities; the mild warmth of the sun cheered everything to its brightest; there were plotted fields here and there, and the palms gave beauty to the sky and the olives gave character to the earth. There were some splendid olive-trees, old, hoary trunks, knobbed with age and contorted by ocean gales; massive columnar stems of incredible girth that lifted from near the ground immense rounds of heavy foliage impenetrably dark; and others, mere shells and ruins of time, that still shot green shoots from their tops to the bright wave of the sun. It was the scene of an old world; and there was something ancient and venerable to my eyes in the landscape that had seen so little change for centuries and yet had known human life, humble generations, for so long. Far away, beyond sloping breadths of dark, rough herbage whose sparse bunches hummocked the dry soil, glittered a low mass of white walls that slowly defined itself as a farmstead with orchards about; it had a rude, mediæval look in its exterior, and many offices, apparently, suggesting somewhat an old manor. Cattle stood round it lazily, and a couple of men were at work in the cluttered yard. On another ridge was one of those strange mosques, but larger and more important than usual, perhaps the memorial of some island saint. The blue sky shone through the window of the cupola of the minaret, with its conical stone at the top; on one side the olive-trees leaned away from it by twos and threes, and on the other high palms lifted their feathery tops, inclined at different angles, tall, slender, drooping stems with very small tufts. It was a very lonely and peaceful sight in that silent country, stretching far around. We met hardly any one on the road except, in the vicinity of the rare houses, groups who evidently belonged on the place. The houses were not the least curious feature of the landscape. They were roofed with little domes, as is usual on the island. This gave a certain solemnity to the scene—the grave aspect of the East. So we went on in the calm, warm day, mile after mile, undulating over the country, but with no real change of level, with glimpses of the old farms, the sharp-pinnacled, square minarets of the solemn mosques, the white domes, feathery palms, and rolling olives, through the monotony of a land where there was truly a great peace.

We reached Ajim, the southernmost point of the island, in the light of a blazing noon that bit every line of black shadow with a brilliant edge. Ajim was only a short, tumble-down street. The one-story buildings of sun-dried mud on either side presented a low, blank wall, continuous and irregular, broken by a succession of high-arched or elongated oblong openings, closed by rough boards. I think I never saw so poor a hamlet. There was a general look of shabby dilapidation, but this was due to the original poverty of the materials and the humbleness of the effort. There was no appearance of abandonment. On the contrary, there was building going on and the street was lively. I had much difficulty in keeping out of the way of donkeys and camels and porters, as I walked to the upper end and looked in at the _fondouk_ which was thronged with beasts and men. It was a characteristic scene as I turned back, for the walk was only of three or four minutes. The little vista was dominated at the lower end by the rising buildings, and the poor street lay below, half in the sunlight, with its sharp band of inky shadow on the southern side. The people were scattered from end to end, mostly in earth-brown, flowing garments, with here and there a snowy burnoose of some more important citizen; and there were caps and turbans of all sorts, and a dash of faded blue or green now and then showed in the sunshine; but the scene was sober-hued, white and black and brown for the most part, under the dazzling blue in the fresh sea air. The open doors of the street, as I passed along, let a dim light into the interior gloom of what seemed places for storage, cavernous and dark; and further on there were a few shops and cafés, a smith, a rope-maker. There were all kinds of ropes; and it gradually came on me that this was really a fishing village and a place for sailormen, a port. It was a little unlike anything I had elsewhere seen. I went through the rope-maker’s shop; such places always call me with their savor of the sea and its tasks. I had a good lunch at a café; one can always get food in the most out-of-the-way places, if he has any knack for travelling. I remember only the cup of coffee at the end, with some of those strange-colored liquids, exotic drinks that one finds at the ends of the world, bright, tonic, exhilarating; and over one of these I sat watching the little life of the street, a continual passing of men and boys and burdens, with dialogues and incidents, and a not infrequent disposition to take the stranger into confidence with looks and nods and smiles of intelligence. It was a pleasant and picturesque hour in the foreign sun, and ended happily; and I strolled down to the pier, which lies at a little distance from the village beyond a broad, open ground.

It was a fine pier and made out very far into the shallow waters. The mainland lay a mile or two away and was as desert a strand as I ever looked on, flat, bleak, uninhabited. The level waters stretched far away on either hand, blue and shining, and a fresh breeze sent the lively waves to chafe angrily against the pier. The near scene was quietly interesting. Small vessels were anchored at a little distance, and a hull seemed to be building or undergoing repairs near the shore, where there was a group with animals. Close to the pier leaned a tangle of slanting masts and ropes, the Arab fleet of sponge-fishers, not so numerous as the Greek fleet I had seen at Sfax, but similar in character and making a pretty marine view. Not far from it an Arab was sifting grain from a great heap by a moored vessel on the other side, and a camel was unloading. There were several walking figures on the pier, which was very long and narrow, and if one of them stood still he looked, in the strict folds of his Arab dress, like a statue on a bridge, relieved on the sky and the sea with perfectly defined lines. There was one group, however, that centred my attention—a true Bedouin scene. It was a family that had come over on some sort of a ferry from the other side. The man was unloading their belongings from the boat and piling them up on the pier, where a donkey was waiting to be loaded with them. On the heap sat two women, who looked like mother and daughter. The elder arrested the eye at once by her splendid physique and her dress. Her large figure sat in perfect repose on the coarse bagging, and she was clad with desert luxury. Heavy robes drooped voluminous folds about her, from which her dark-skinned head and shoulders, deep golden brown, freely emerged. Her arms were bare, showing the deep armpits and half the full breasts; her hair was raven-black, the eyes large and solemn, the features prominent. She was covered with desert ornaments; silver rings hooped her ears, strings of beads hung over a wide brooch on her bosom, bracelets enclosed her arms; but what most fascinated my eyes was two immense silver crescents, almost moon-size, that hung by either breast. She was a splendid figure there under the open sky by the edge of the desert—a true mother of Ishmael. I shall never forget that unregarding pose—a type of the ages. They told me she was a rich Bedouin woman. I lingered awhile among the boats, and when I came away she was still sitting there immovable.

We drove back, as the afternoon wore on, by a somewhat different route, taking a branching and rougher road; but there was no real change in the scene. It was a sterile land, much mixed with sand, which the labor of man reclaimed with difficulty. The other side of the island is said to be more fertile, and rich in gardens. It was the same very open country all the way, and league after league we left it behind us, rare farms and lonely mosques and dreamy domes sparsely scattered over broad areas of slightly broken land, wells, and little olive groves like apple orchards, fringes of palms on the dying orange sky, tracts of loose sand, speared over with tufted hummocks, until with the starlight we came back to the pleasant hotel with the inner courtyard and the climbing yellow roses.

III

I had never made a Jewish pilgrimage. The opportunities for one are rare, for the Jews are not a pilgrim people. There is on the island, however, a place which is described as a point of their pious journeying for centuries, and thither I repaired. It is the synagogue at Hara-Srira, a village of seven hundred inhabitants, which, with a neighboring and larger village, concentrates the Jewish population of the island in their segregated life. It was only a few kilometres away, and I reached it by a more settled and suburban road than that to Ajim. The little town was a picturesque sight, gathered none too closely about the synagogue, which was the principal building. The sexton and his son, grave persons in Arab costume, took charge of me with polite attention, and after the boy had assisted me to take off my shoes I was ushered into the little temple. It was divided into a series of compartments, and although none of the rooms was large, the general effect was impressive. I was struck by the richness of the interior, and its look of cleanliness and finish, for my eyes had been long unaccustomed to such a scene; the bright tiles, the lights, the walls, all the furnishings seemed quite new and modern, European in fact, as if I had stepped back at once into the familiar world; there was nothing barren or austere, nothing to suggest the neighborhood of the desert and its ways. It was the shrine of an alien religion, and wore the aspect of civilization and a better-provided world, a different economic type, not that of the gray old mosques in lonely places on the sandy downs. The priest in his vestments, a slight, middle-aged man, a sacred if not a stately figure, came to welcome me, and pointing out various details led the way through the half-darkness of the subdued light to a small chapel-like room where were the treasures that I had come to see.

They were books of the old Law and ancient writings that had found an asylum in the sands. I was glad to be where the object of pilgrimage was a Book. These venerated copies of sacred writings, more than libraries, symbolize to me the glory of letters; they are the founts of civilizations. I have seldom seen a more beautiful antique manuscript, or one so solemnly impressive, as the massive volume he showed me, their chief treasure, which, I think, he said dated from the eleventh century. It recalled lovely copies of the Koran that I have sometimes found in the mosques of the Levant. I wished he would read out of it to me, as the young _taleb_ at Kairouan had read the Koran to me by the fading evening light in the dark-browed court of the Mosque of the Barber, nigh the little stone cells of the students, after I had seen, above, the banner-hung tomb of the companion of the Prophet in its solemn desert state; the lean Arab stood, holding the book in his hands, with his face lighted up, intoning the verses, and a few others listening reverently made the group. I shall never forget the music of that unknown tongue, like the sound of winds in the forest or waves on the shore. But I did not like to ask the priest to read. There were other manuscripts, perhaps a score in all, and I spent a half-hour over them. It was pleasant to be in touch with such things once more; for, excepting the wide volume that I saw the seated Jew reading in the street of Tougourt, I did not remember having seen a book in the desert. The priest was proud of these treasures, and the boy also who stood by watching as I turned the leaves; scriptures and learning of long ago, that had survived in this remote niche, cared for and venerated like the gospels of some inaccessible Coptic monastery, they were worthy of a scholar’s pilgrimage and respect.

As I came out into the open I noticed two lines of figures coming across country in opposite directions like people returning from church. They were Mohammedans and Jews, each walking from their respective cemeteries which lay not far away. I thought it was a typical and happy scene of two religions dwelling together in unity and peace. The general appearance of the people was much the same, humbly prosperous and contented, and they were dressed alike. The Jews here are completely Arabized, except in the point of their religion, and it was interesting to observe how much they had become assimilated to the soil. The women especially looked to me like Bedouin women, and I was obliged to scrutinize their features to detect their race; but no burnoose nor haik can disguise the superior vitality and intelligence of the Jews. On my return I stopped to stroll through the market, and there they were much to be seen. It was an abundant market with the usual heaps and collections on the ground—grains, vegetables, utensils, and special quarters for wool, meat, and fish. It was a lively and thronged scene. An auction of donkeys and camels was going on in one place. My eyes were especially attracted by the piles of sheepskins and wool, and the men and boys lying lazily on them waiting for custom, their dark faces and bodies oddly relieved and picturesque on the wool. There were heaps of black sponges, too; and I noticed a curious white kilted costume which I had not seen on these shores, lending a new element to the crowd. Here, too, wandering about, I experienced the smallness of the world anew; for I fell in with some travelling merchants who had come to buy burnooses and blankets of Djerba, and who remembered me from Tunis; they were plainly pleased to find me in such a remote corner of their own country. I myself became sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the place to buy a few dates and figs, and more particularly some dried orange-blossoms, which were sold by the pound. I had never seen such a thing in Italy, and it gave me a lively idea of the orange gardens to the east of the island which were said to be so luxuriant.

As the day wore idly on, I explored the town, Houmt-Souk, for I believe I have not yet named it, which has fine, broad, curving streets and large, open places, a mosque with many domes and a high, square minaret, a tall artesian well, and a public garden where the French government experiments with plants and trees. The proprietor of my hotel was the gardener, and took me about and told me stories of his garden, but the spring was not far enough advanced for the soil to tell the same tale of its luxuriance and rarity. I had to content myself with seeing various shrubs and exotic trees. Then I wandered down to the beach, like all ocean beaches, with heavy, loose sand and a considerable tide, the broad view, sights of the sea, and a ruined Spanish fortress; but I went especially to see the spot where stood for centuries the great mound of Christian bones, Skull Fort they called it, which the pirate Dragut raised after the victory in which he broke the Spanish fleet in this offing, in 1560, taking five thousand prisoners and massacring the garrison. I suppose he massacred the prisoners, too; and here the ghastly memorial of his victory stood nigh the beach, till in recent years the bones were removed and buried in the Catholic cemetery. Before that, Norman raiders and Sicilians, when they harried all these coasts, had temporarily held possession in the Middle Ages; and all over the island are Roman ruins, decayed causeways, baths, temples, the subsoil of all the Mediterranean world. But nothing now stands out in the historic memory of the old lotus land except Dragut’s grim mound.

IV

I had not forgotten the hunting of the lotus, but it was now more clearly defined as a search for the _jujubier_, which is identified with the ancient plant. Persistent inquiry revealed the probability of a lonely specimen some five miles off in the country. We set off by a new route to the southeast, and away from the more travelled roads. The track was rough, and the horses toiled through heavy sands. The farm we were seeking was not on the road, and we left the carriage standing and tramped for about a mile or more across ploughed fields, little ditches, and stretches of white sand more than ankle-deep, till, asking our way of the rare people in the fields, we finally found the house we sought. It was a simple building of one story, with white walls about it, and the little dome at one end; a rustic garden of humble cottage flowers was before it, bright with spring blossoms, and here my guide introduced me to the proprietor, a thin old man with a boyish figure, keen blue eyes, and great alacrity in his motions. He led me in through the courtyard, which was of considerable size, to the house, which consisted of one very large room, with smaller apartments at the further end under the dome. The room was a surprise to me; it was a marine room, all the walls being loosely covered with sailor objects. The old man had followed the sea all his life, and served many years in the French navy; now, with his pension, he had found his snug harbor in this remote peaceful island as a colonist. It was an ideal place for a sailor’s retirement, with its flowers at the door, its profound country peace, and its relics of the sea. It had a Crusoe look, and so did the old man; and I gathered heart, thinking that here at least was a mariner, like the companions of Ulysses, who had found the port and elected to remain in the land. There were bones of fishes on the walls, implements from the South Sea islands, colored prints tacked all about, the curious things that sailors make, African oddities, a gun hung over the mantel, barbaric spears in corners; and the little collection was displayed and arranged with that neatness and order, almost pattern-like, which is a sailor instinct.

Yes, there was a _jujubier_ in the neighborhood. The old man, who had an alert, breezy way about him and was full of vigor, seemed to wonder that I had come to see it, but said nothing; he was for the time more intent on rites of hospitality, and I went about examining the curiosities. His wife and a little girl came in with a great pitcher and tall glasses and set them down before us, and the old man poured out generous draughts of bright-brown cider. I smiled to think into what a vintage my dreamed-of juice of the “enchanted stem” had resolved itself—a glass of russet cider! But I took the blow of fortune, as I have taken others, and tried to find its soft side, which is a good rule. It was excellent cider, and I took a second tall tumbler. On inquiry I found it was not even of the fruit of Djerba, but brewed from a preparation made at Paris, somewhat as root beer is with us. Meanwhile we had tales of the sea and old adventures on “the climbing wave,” pleasant talk, till I brought the conversation round to the _jujubier_. It bore a hard, brown fruit, I learned, sweetish, and a drink was made of it, like lemonade; and, yes, it had a sleepy effect. My hopes sprang up anew. No, it was not bottled. So, talking incidentally of many things, my host showed me the rest of the house, the little bedroom with his photograph of other days, and with a last health we went out into the garden, where the little girl was waiting with a bunch of the spring flowers, and we walked off to see the _jujubier_.