Part 14

The natives are not of a kind to take much interest in its welfare. Gafsa has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches' cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some men that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the savage Neanderthal brood that lived here in prehistoric times, the only pure race-type that survives is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to which Monsieur Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa, has already referred. No wonder; since Egyptian invasions of this region went on for centuries, culminating in the extended sea-dominion of Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth century B.C.

A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the place up to the thirteenth century A.D.

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

There was a wild excitement over this little episode. The dog of a Frenchman killed, for culinary purposes, by an Arab; it was the comble of temerity! The owner of the animal, on hearing the news, buckled on his revolver and repaired to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already conjured into some safe place of custody. If he is wise he will languish in prison for some days longer.

Gafsa lies high, and I ask myself whether its fierce shiftings of heat and cold, its nocturnal radiation that splits the very rocks and renders life impossible for many plants (outside the cultivated zone, which equalizes these extremes)--whether all this has not had a numbing and stupefying influence on the character of the inhabitants. Would not a man, under such perennial vexations, end in bowing his head and letting things take their course? I notice the climatic effect upon myself is a growing incapacity for mental effort. It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun, they say, still exhales a certain amount of warmth.

Add to this, Arab frugality and the cheapness of native living throughout the country, which removes all stimulus to work. A middle-class citizen tells me that he has just returned from Tunis, where a lawsuit had kept him for two years. He went there with an overland caravan which cost next to nothing; he slept in a zaouiah, where he also obtained a bath gratis; he spent on his food four sous a day, neither more nor less, and by way of amusement took coffee with his friends or strolled down to the harbour to look at the ships. Six pounds in two years! And natives in authority, who are generally the richest, pay nothing whatever for their nourishment. Like the Kaid of Gafsa, they simply requisition it in the market; the sellers grumble, but conform to custom.

How quickly their looks can improve is shown by those who join the army. In a few months they grow fat, cheerful, and bright-complexioned, thanks to the hygienic life and better food. As it is, I have noticed single individuals among the poorest classes who look remarkably well as compared with their fellows. "They drink milk," was the explanation given me.

There is vitality enough among the young boys who play hockey--these ball games are non-Arabic, a relic of Berberism--and keep up the sport till late at night amid a good deal of ill-tempered fighting and pulling about. Their mothers' milk is still inside them; they have not yet succumbed to the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits of their elders. But soon manhood descends upon them like a cataclysm; it tears them with a frenzy which is anything but divine and thereafter absorbs them, to the exclusion of every other interest. Hockey-sticks are thrown away....

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

An old Arab song contains words to this effect: "Kafsa is miserable; its water is blood; its air is poison; you may live there a hundred years without making a friend." No doubt the plethoric Sicilian mason at the Leila fountain would thoroughly endorse this statement with his "Ah, signore--these Saracens!"... But one learns to like the people none the less. They are merely depressed; they are not deficient in mother-wit or kindliness; a little good food would work wonders.

The oasis people are milk-drinkers, and would be healthier than the townsmen but for the agues, fevers and troublesome "Gafsa boil" to which they are subject.

I go to these plantations at night-time, after dinner, when the moon plays wonderful tricks of light and shadow with the over-arching foliage. The smooth sandy stretches at the outskirts of the gardens shine like water at rest, on which the leaves of an occasional sparse tuft of palms are etched with crystalline hardness of delineation.

This untilled region is most artistic, the isolated clumps shooting up like bamboos out of the bare soil. The whole grove is still wrapped in its wintry sleep, and one can look through the naked branches of the fruit trees into its furthest reaches. Only the palm leaves overhead and the ground at one's feet are green; the middle spaces bleak and brown. But, do what he will, a man who has lived in the tropics becomes rather blasé in the matter of palms. Besides, there are no flints to be found here....

Yet such is the abundance of water that these Gafsa gardens have a character different from most African plantations. They are more artlessly furnished, with rough, park-like districts and a not unpleasing impression of riot and waste--waste in the midst of plenty.

Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of country--the temperate region at the tail-end of the grove. Only olives grow here; seventy-five thousand of them. Beside their silvery-grey trunks you may see herds of the small but brightly-tinted oxen reposing; the ground is pied with daisies and buttercups, oleanders border the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of the djouak, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound from some hidden copse.

There will be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the carefully-tended oases of the Djerid.

Chapter XI

A HAVEN OF REFUGE

The cold being past all endurance and belief, I was tempted to fulfil my promise and call upon Monsieur Dufresnoy. What kind of man was this that managed to survive it?

They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildings of the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle; only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused--it was grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment about the mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might turn on their rusty hinges.

Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly panic.

M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost ran into me. I tried to explain the sensations his domicile had aroused in my mind; he laughed at first, and then admitted that he had often felt the same thing. The house was apt to look like that, he said, when his wife was away.

The inside appearance, once that portal has been passed, is quite different, and I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing the place, as it is one of the surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-houses that date from better days, being built originally for some Turkish grandee or governor--for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing widow to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step through the gate into an open square patio, surrounded, on the sides not abutting on the street, by an arched passage that reposes on old Roman columns. This covered loggia, running round three fronts of the court, is the feature of the house: wonderful how a few arcades and pillars will impart an air of distinction and even luxury! Almost nothing has been done to change the old appearance of this small but well-proportioned patio; the walls have been freshly whitewashed, the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright flower-bed set in the centre--nothing more.

The five or six lower rooms to which the loggia gives access must be delightfully cool in summer, but they are dark and chilly at this season. Luckily, the mansion possesses an upper story where the family resides during the winter, in rooms that are actually floored with wood. From here, looking out of the windows, there is a wondrous view over a wilderness of decayed Arab dwellings upon the oasis beyond, and the distant purple mountains.

There is an irresistible air of geniality about this home: can it be the house itself? For a subtle influence, no doubt, penetrates to the heart of man from the mere form and disposition of inanimate things. I was prepared to be smothered in a profusion of local effects; of saddle-cloths, silk hangings, water-pipes, daggers and match-locks, dim nooks with divans, and those other decorations that suggest the glamour of the Orient to certain Western minds. Or again, I said to myself, this European wife will have imported certain tastes from over the sea; the house will be replete with trifles carefully disposed in negligent fashion, silver photograph frames and flower vases reposing on diminutive tables, and such-like indications of what our novelists call the "tender but indefinable touches of a woman's hand."

Nothing of the kind. The place is simply comfortable: it appeals to one's sense of propriety. There are carpets and genuine arm-chairs--unique phenomena in this part of the world; best of all, fire-places wherein ample logs of olive-wood glimmer and glister all day long.

And so the last few days have passed. Mentally, too, I am thawing once more; the hotel life and solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me disagreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps stimulating in youth and in the plenitude of health; but there comes a period when one lives less in future dreamings than in the experiences of the past--unpleasant company, for the most part; when one craves to see the faces and hear the opinions of rational fellow-creatures; when one requires, in short, to be distracted. This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the significance of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian hotels can only be inhabited by young hopefuls.

The house contains a considerable library of local literature--mostly technical and dealing with Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it intelligible to a simple traveller like myself. From certain books I have begun to make extracts concerning the places I am likely to visit: Metlaoui, the Djerid oases, and the Chott country.