Part 21

I must limit myself to three pipes, in future.

Chapter XVII

ROMAN OLIVE-CULTURE

Now, on the former occasion, instead of descending into the bordj from the railway line, I rode with the Tripolitan once more out of the rock-portal into the plain, that glowed with the fugitive fires of sunset. It is a treeless waste, bereft of every sign of cultivation.

And yet, if you look on your left hand as you issue from the gorge, you will perceive, at the very narrowest point, some fragments of ancient masonry adhering to the cliff; they are all that remains of a Roman dam which blocked up the valley, regulated the supply of water flowing from above, and purified it from stones and sand. The inference is clear: the plain must have been cultivated in those days. Likely enough, it was covered, like many other parts of "Africa," with olives, that drew their life from this judiciously managed water-supply.

The Oued Seldja to-day fulfils no such useful function. Once the rock-portal is passed, it unlearns all its sprightly grace and trickles disconsolately through the sands, expiring, at last, in the dreary Chott el Rharsa.

Monsieur Bordereau thinks that the ancient "forest of Africa" was composed chiefly of olive plantations, and proofs of the former abundance of these trees can be found in certain local names, such as Jebel Zitouna--the Mount of Olives--clinging to localities where not a tree is now visible; there are also sporadic oleasters growing near many Roman ruins. Strong evidence; and still stronger is this: that Roman oil-presses have actually been found, buried in the desert sand. Up to a short time ago the Arabs deliberately destroyed the olives, to avoid paying the tax on them; the French have changed all this, and though I am not aware that they go so far as did the Romans, who encouraged tree-planting by exemption from imposts, yet they have inaugurated a severe regime; one reads with satisfaction of exemplary penalties inflicted for illicit timber-cutting.

It is good to remember, also, that whereas the Romans had five centuries of peace to bring Tunisia to its high pitch of prosperity, the French only began yesterday. And they have a harder task before them, for in the interval the Arabs have arrived in the country. It is they, with their roving and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief, changing arable land into pasture, which grows ever poorer, and finally desert. The fertility of these regions may be said to have been annihilated by the goats of a nomad race, whose faith has made it improvident and mentally sterile.

Yet it may be disputed whether the land was as thickly wooded under the Romans as some would have us believe. If so, how was it that after three centuries of their rule there should come a drought lasting for five years? Wood brings water, and if things were so satisfactory, why did they penuriously hive and distribute the element? They described Africa as a "waterless land"; Marius, when he made his forced march across country to surprise Gafsa, took in at one place a sufficient provision of water to last for three days. This, however, may be due to the fact that he purposely kept to the desert lest, by following the main route, his designs should be made public.

One thing strikes me as conclusive evidence that the "Africa" of olden days was a different country: they had no camels. These beasts were unknown there at the time of Julius Cæsar, and only came into common usage towards the end of the fourth century. The Africa of to-day, without camels, would be almost uninhabitable.

Some years ago, whilst staying among the magnificent forests of Khroumiria, forests such as certainly never clothed these southern hills, I grew interested in this question of the old African water-supply. Comparing the accounts of classic authors with what has been written by modern students like Bourde, Carton and others, whose very names have faded from my memory, I remember coming to the conclusion--a very obvious one, no doubt--that supposing all the ruined Roman hydraulic contrivances were now in working order, supposing them even to be furnished with such improvements as modern science could suggest, still the French would be unable to obtain, at the present moment, the agricultural results of the Romans. The positive diminution in the supply of liquid has been too great. Archæologists, for instance, have discovered in the district of Gafsa alone over a hundred Roman wells and reservoirs, of every shape and size; but it would be sheer waste of money to re-activate many of these ancient works--there are wells which would remain dry from one year's end to another; the watercourses, too, have shrunk or altogether expired.

Quite apart from what the French have taken from it, this Seldja brook must have carried down a larger volume of water in those days, helped, as is very probable, by small tributary streamlets which have now ceased to flow.

Old Arab authors say that one used to be able to walk from one end of North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration, this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their goats had time--for it must have required time--to change the climate and aspect of the province.

These woodlands, at all events, cannot have been all of olives. There is Sbeitla, for instance, the Roman city whose remains I was unable to visit owing to the Arctic blasts of wind; viewed from the railway, its surroundings look so bleak and bare that nobody would believe they could ever have been timbered. Yet, concerning Sbeitla, we happen to possess the testimony of three independent older eye-witnesses, who visited the spot at different periods: first Shaw (about 1725), then Bruce, then the botanist Desfontaines. All three of them describe the region as wooded. And, as if to clinch the matter, Leo Africanus, writing in 1550, says that the inhabitants of Gafsa and its district made their boots out of the skins of stags. (These are no doubt the fortassa deer, a few of which still linger in the country north of Feriana.) Stags can only live in timbered regions. If these forests were still in existence there would be a greater abundance of water; the cold in winter would be less intense, and so would the summer heat, since forests are harmonizers of all climatic discords.

Now these woodlands were not composed of olives, but for the most part of junipers and of Aleppo pines, a precious growth to which the French began to pay attention some five years ago. These bright and graceful trees flourish on the poorest soil and multiply rapidly; they are valuable not only for their timber, but for their turpentine. You can buy, in the Gafsa market, a crude black tar made from this tree; the Arabs use it for impregnating the linings of their water-skins, like the Greeks for their receptacles of rezzinato wine.

The only drawback to these pines is that their inflammable branches are always suggesting a display of extempore fireworks to the Arabs, who are the veriest pyromaniacs.

Chapter XVIII

THE WORK OF PHILIPPE THOMAS

The old olive plantations are creeping back again into regions that have been deserted for centuries. They follow the railway lines; and nothing is a fitter commentary on the medievalism which deplores the building of railways into the desert than facts like that of the plain of Maknassy--a sterile tract up to a few years ago--which is now covered, for a distance of sixty kilometres, by olive groves. Why? Because the line from Sfax to Gafsa happens to pass through it.

The same will take place in due course along the Feriana and other southern lines, and thus one of the gravest problems that confront the Tunisian administration will be solved: the unstable nomads will fix themselves--they are already fixing themselves--round these new agricultural centres. In 1890 there were still eight tents to every five houses in Tunisia, but this proportion is rapidly changing. And besides this, the railway, with its facility for the rapid conveyance of troops, has given security to regions formerly so dangerous that no settler, however favourable the soil, would have dared to establish his home there; it has awakened the date industry and created halfa deposits all along the line.

There is one of them at Gafsa station, for instance--relatively small; and yet, in the season, two hundred camel-loads of this costly hay arrive there every day, to be dried, pressed and stored ready for transportation to the coast, whence it is shipped to Europe. In 1905 sixteen thousand six hundred tons of halfa were forwarded from the interior by the Sfax-Gafsa line alone!

And were it not for this railway the branch line to Tozeur would never have been contemplated; the oases of Souf and Djerid and Nefzaoua, with their teeming populations, would have slumbered the sleep of ages in their burning desert sands. And to realize what a change it has wrought in the appearance of the ports of Sfax, Sousse and even Tunis, one must have known these places in the olden days. The company pays yearly half a million francs to the Government; it contributes another yearly sum of 600,000 francs towards the harbour enlargement scheme of Sfax; indeed, it may be said to have created the modern town of Sfax, its hotels, banks, restaurants, theatres.

And what brought the railway?

The phosphates. But for their discovery no Utopian would have thought of constructing these lines just yet. An unlovely deposit of brown dust has worked a revolution upon the minds of men, upon the face of the country. It has even enriched the French vocabulary.

"Your friend, is he an alfatier?"

"No, sir; he is a phosphatier."

As I issued out of the rock-portal of the Seldja gorge and beheld that strip of masonry which told so plain a story, with the now barren plain at its foot, it struck me that this spot was pregnant with a romance beyond that of mere scenery. It was well, here, to pause awhile and contrast old and new notions of African prosperity. The Romans had the same difficulties to contend with as have the French: a harsh climate, and fickle and faithless natives who "cannot be bridled by threats or kindness." They had the same ambitions; so Strabo tells us that they used every endeavour to make settlers of them and fix them to the soil, and "paid particular attention to Masanasses, King of Numidia, because it was he who formed the nomads of civil life and directed their attention to husbandry."

Both administrations are necessarily based on military rule. And if the now uncultivated plain affronts our eye, there is already a set-off to this apparent superiority of the ancient regime in the new line of railway which, at great expense, has been made to climb up the sinuosities of the Seldja gorge itself.