Part 22

Whither wending?

To fetch more phosphates!

Here they lie, the quintessential relics of those little Eocene fishes and other sea beasts, if such they were, that swam and crawled about the waters many years ago--piled up on terraces so high that the mind grows dizzy at contemplating their multitudes, or the ages required to squeeze them into this priceless powder; piled up for 500 miles along their old sea-beach--an arid inland chain of hills, nowadays, where hardly a blade of grass will grow; sterile themselves, the cause of surpassing fertility elsewhere. These phosphates are something of a symbol: there are men and women fashioned after this model.

I question whether the men of the Pax Romana could ever have reached the phosphate-extracting stage. They were not trending in that direction. Eyes were turning inwards, and the age of sober thinking was past and over for the time being, since the Orient began to infect the world with the mephitic vapours of self-consciousness. Truth was a drug in the market; for twenty long centuries the Banu-Israel, with their ferocious contempt of craftsmanship and honest intellectual labour, were enabled to foul the stream of human endeavour. It is gratifying to think how thoroughly the modern Jews have shaken off their ancient bigotry--a good refutation, by the way, of those scholars who still argue about the "immutability of race-characters."

But those earlier and artless Galileans, methinks, must have been on the mental level of the Tripolitan savage running beside my horse: it needs no very cunning marabout to convince him that his little troubles will be set aright in a world hereafter, where he shall sit comfortably enthroned and listen to his enemies gnashing their teeth. For the poor in mind are like children in this, that they create realities to coincide with emotional states; and for such as these, they say, is the kingdom of Heaven reserved.

Nevertheless, though men sought the "inner light" and not phosphate deposits in those days, yet certain men of God, roaming about these same stony wildernesses, made discoveries in natural history no less surprising than that of Monsieur Philippe Thomas. Saint Anthony encountered a faun--half-man, half-goat; he spoke to the creature and was charmed by its edifying discourse. You will object that Saint Anthony is known to have been a hallucinated neyropathe; that the story, therefore, may not be true. So be it.

But such a description can hardly be applied with decency to certain holier and wiser men, who saw with their own eyes things yet stranger. The great Augustin tells his congregation--it is in one of his sermons, I believe--that in these deserts there are men without heads, men who have one single eye placed in the centre of their breasts. You may suggest that the saint was quoting from the heathen pages of Herodotus, the Father of Lies. Nothing of the kind. He is too conscientious to speak from hearsay of such marvellous matters; he says that he personally went among these headless monocular folk; he says that he spoke to them and lived with them; that he made a study of their morals and social institutions, which, in this particular sermon, he holds up as an example to his two-eyed Christian hearers.

And Saint Augustin has the reputation of being a fairly truth-loving saint and doctor ecclesiæ.

No; phosphate-hunting was assuredly out of the question under such conditions; scientific curiosity and commercialism, parents of fair talk and fair dealing among men, retire discomfited when there are immortal souls to be saved. And soon enough they came, those Ages of Faith, of moral dyspepsia and perverse aspirations, when truth-seeking, useless under the Pax Romana, became much worse than useless--perilous, that is, to life and limb. So quickly do we forget past torments, that some of us continue to yearn for those picturesque days of burnings and thumb-screwings.

Meanwhile, if truth is found useful for the moment, it is due to the humanizing work of those quiet investigators like Philippe Thomas--to the men who have armed their country for the heroic task of cleansing the Augean stables.

Monsieur Dufresnoy had never met the phosphate discoverer, but another gentleman described him as follows:--

"He is a simple fellow, and the devil for work. Married, and a good husband; clear eyes; spectacles, a short beard, rather stout, and not dark; never so happy as when he is examining old bones and trash of that kind. A bon garçon, mind you. And yet--Lord! what a simpleton. He could have become a millionaire if he had managed the thing properly. Too modest, perhaps--too unworldly; too foolish, or too proud: who can tell?

"You never know what is going on in the minds of these savants. He told them he was a veterinary surgeon, and not a man of business. Can you understand such an attitude?"

"I must think about it, Monsieur."

And so I did, riding home that evening from the Seldja gorge--and next day too; but, somehow or other, have not yet attained a mature opinion on the subject. It may be, however, that there is nothing to prevent a man from being simultaneously modest and proud--nothing, save the fact that we have not yet coined a word for an alloy of these particular ingredients. We have words, always either too few or too many; words which are for ever emancipating themselves from our control and becoming masters instead of slaves, so that our ideas, which ought to be formed by independent cerebration, are half derived from mere verbal symbols, which become a kind of intellectual pepsine that weakens the strongest systems. So when we speak of a man being "proud," that miserable expression is apt to engross and dominate us, conjuring up an image which excludes certain others: that of modesty, for instance.

It comes to this, that if we wish to describe a man who does not seem to fit into any of the categories permitted by ordinary words, we are driven to refer him to some exemplar recognized in legend or history--we talk of his being Epicurean, Voltairean, and so forth.

Let us say, therefore, that Monsieur Thomas, like Pasteur, is of the Promethean type--a seeker after verity, a light-bringer.

POSTSCRIPT.--This is surely a land of coincidences. In a Tunisian paper of this very morning I read of the death, on the 13th of February, of Monsieur Thomas. It describes him as "one of the most perfect citizens of our poor humanity." He only lived a year to enjoy the annuity of six thousand francs which the Government of the Regency, with belated thoughtfulness, had granted him.

Chapter XIX

OVER GUIFLA TO TOZEUR

A mule, a sturdy beast, was waiting to convey me from Metlaoui to Tozeur. Leaving my heavier baggage to follow with some camels, I rode into the dawn.

Considerably less than half-way stands the rest-house of Guifla, kept by an Algerian with a pretty wife. Here I saw a few carved Roman stones which had been found, the man told me, in the neighbouring Oued Baghara. At Guifla, according to Valery Mayet, they killed an ostrich twenty years ago--a rara avis in these parts.

There were numbers of engineers and workmen at this place, engaged in laying down the line of railway which will unite Tozeur to Metlaoui. It cannot help being a paying concern, I should think, to judge by the traffic that passed me in the course of this day, for I was hardly ever out of sight of a caravan.

It was an ideal day for desert travelling--a grey, sunless sky, a gentle breeze. Another weary stretch brings one to El-Hamma, a small oasis fed by hot springs which the Romans long ago utilized, and where I had hoped to refresh myself with a Turkish bath. Alas! the hammam is only a shallow tank covered with palm-thatching; there were some twenty Arabs splashing about this establishment and soaping themselves and their boy-children--bathing was out of the question. Near at hand lies the women's bath, which is built on the same primitive lines. A pious legend runs to the effect that this water of El-Hamma used to be cold, but an Arab marabout was persuaded to spit into it and, lo! it suddenly became hot and mineral....

As you approach Tozeur the landscape becomes more desert-like; mountains are left behind; stones are rarer; you wade in sand. One realizes how useless it would be to construct a good road in these parts, since every storm would drown it. And such storms are sometimes of great force; there was a celebrated one in 1857 which lasted for seventy-two hours. It threw some of the riders of a French detachment off their horses, and finally obliged the whole company to stamp up and down for twenty-four hours in the twilight of raging sand for fear of being buried alive. It submerged several hundred palm trees of the Tozeur oasis up to their crowns (they are 60 to 100 feet high).

Notwithstanding these difficulties, an enterprising Maltese runs a motor-car from Metlaoui to Tozeur and Nefta for all such persons as are prepared to pay his price, and I hear that the speculation has paid well. There were moments during my ride when I regretted not having come to some understanding with him; when I grew tired of the jolting mule, the rough track and an Arab saddle which keeps one's legs at an angle of 179 degrees. True, my conveyance had only cost four francs....

Straining my eyes at the water-shed beyond El-Hamma, whence one has the first view of Tozeur and its palm forest, I thought to detect, at an immeasurable distance, two minute dusky streaks, swimming in air--other oases, no doubt. They seemed to dangle, by some gossamer thread, from the grey vault of Heaven.

This first view of the oasis of Tozeur, and the Chott Djerid beyond it, has often been praised. To me, arriving at the water-shed on a cloudy afternoon, that line of inky-black palm trees with its background of blanched sterility melting into a lowering, leaden-hued sky, conveyed a most uncanny impression: the prospect was absolutely familiar! Yes, there was no doubt about it: I had seen the place before; not in Africa, of course, but--somewhere else. Where--where? Suddenly I remembered: it was a northern landscape, a well-known forest of sombre firs, rising out of the wintry plain. The white, salty expanse, filling up the interstices between the palms, helped to complete the illusion; it was powdered snow among the tree-tops. For a brief moment I was transported....