Part 7

"Hallo!" said the Englishman, "what's all this?"

"Bats, Monsieur."

"Eh? How much?"

"Bats; tirlils, chauve-souris, pipistrelli... They will need much bottles. Six hundred tirlils in each sack; ten sacks; six thousand tirlils. Much bottles! Three thousand francs, Monsieur. Shall I open him?"

The tourist cast a dismayed glance over the sacks, gently heaving with life.

"Look here," he said, "I'll give you fifty francs...."

The Arab was surprised and grieved. He thought he was giving a pleasure to Monsieur, who had asked for bats. He had been obliged to borrow money from his aged mother to help to pay the nine hundred francs which he had already disbursed for assistance in catching the tirlils; he had risked his life; there were the transport expenses, too: very heavy. He had travelled with many Englishmen and had always found them to be men of honour--men who kept their word. And in this case there were witnesses to the bargain, who would be ready, if necessary, to go into the French tribunals and testify to what they had heard....

"I see. Well, come to-morrow morning, but go away now, quick! before I break your head. Take your damned tirlils to your damned funduk, and be off!--clear out!--comprenni?"

And he looked so very angry that the Arab, a prudent fellow, walked backwards out of the room, more surprised and grieved than ever.

Thanks to the disinterested and strenuous exertions of a Jewish international lawyer, the affair was settled out of court after all--fifteen hundred francs, plus expenses of transport.

Chapter V

SIDI ARMED ZARROUNG

Sidi Ahmed Zarroung--that is the name of the miniature oasis visible from the Meda Hill, at the foot of those barren slopes. It is a pleasant afternoon's walk from Gafsa.

The intervening plain is encrusted with stones--stones great and small. Here and there are holes in the ground, where the natives have unearthed some desert shrub for the sake of its roots which, burnt as fuel, exhale a pungent odour of ammonia that almost suffocates you. Once the water-zone of Gafsa is passed, every trace of cultivation vanishes. And yet, to judge by the number of potsherds lying about, houses must have stood here in days of old. An Arab geographer of the eleventh century says that there are over two hundred flourishing villages in the neighbourhood of Gafsa; and Edrisius, writing a century later, extols its prosperous suburbs, and pleasure-houses.

Where are they now?

One of these villages, surely, must have lain near this fountain of Sidi Ahmed Zarroung, which now irrigates a few palms and vegetables and then loses itself in the sand; a second spring, sulphureous and medicinal, but destructive to plants, rises near at hand. This is the one which the gentleman of the Ponts et Chaussées recommended me for bathing purposes.

But I saw no trace of ancient life here; there is only a muddy pond, full of amorous frogs and tortoises, cold-blooded beasts, but fiery in their passions; and a few Arabs that live in the large white house, or camp on the plain around. They told me that the descendants of the holy man who gave his name to the place are still alive, but they knew nothing of his history beyond this, that he was very pious indeed.

If you do not mind a little scrambling, you can climb from here up to the last spur of the Jebel Guettor which overlooks the plain--it is crowned by a ruined building, once whitewashed, and easily visible from Gafsa. On its slopes I struck a vein of iron, another of those scientific discoveries, no doubt, like the flint implements, in which someone else will have anticipated me. And here I also found iron in a more civilized shape, a fragment of a shell--relic, perhaps, of the first French expedition against Gafsa, or of some more recent artillery practice.

From its summit one sees the configuration of the country as on a map; the high Jebel Orbata, 1170 metres, now covered with snow, coming forward to meet you on the other side of the wide valley. From this point it is easy to realize, as did the commander of that French expedition, the significance of this speck of culture, its strategic value: Gafsa is a veritable key to the Sahara. I daresay the abundant water-supply of the town is due to these two chains of hills which almost touch each other and so force the water to rise from its underground bed.

At this elevation you perceive that Gafsa is truly a hill-oasis, bleak mountains rising up on all sides save the south. There, where the two highest ranges converge from east and west, where the broad waterway of the Oued Baiesh has in olden days, when it wandered with less capricious flow, carved itself a channel through the opening--there, at the very narrowest point--sits the oasis. A tangle of palms that sweep southward in a radiant trail of green, the crenellated walls of the Kasbah gleaming through the interstices of the foliage--the whole vision swathed in an orange-tawny frame of desolation, of things non-human....

I was tempted to think that the sunset view from the Meda eminence was the finest in the immediate neighbourhood of Gafsa. Not so; that from the low hills behind Sidi Mansur, with the stony ridge of Jebel Assalah at your back, surpasses it in some respects. Through a gap you look towards the distant green plantations, with a shimmering level in the foreground; on your other side lies the Oued Baiesh, crossed by the track to Kairouan, where strings of camels are for ever moving to and fro, laden with merchandise from the north or with desert products from the oases of Djerid and Souf. The dry bed of the torrent glows in hues of isabel and cream, while its perpendicular mud-banks, on the further side, gleam like precipices of amber; the soil at your feet is besprinkled with a profusion of fair and fragile flowerlets.

Here stand, like sentinels at the end of all things living, the three or four last, lonely palms--they and their fellows lower down are fed by a silvery streamlet which is forced upwards, I suppose, by contact with Professor Koken's conglomerate; above and below this oasis-region the river-bed is generally dry. It must be a wonderful sight, however, when the place is in flood--a deluge of liquid ooze careering madly southward towards the dismal Chotts amid the crashing of stones and palm trees and the collapse of banks. For the Oued Baiesh can be angry at times; in 1859 it submerged fifty hectares of the Gafsa gardens.

Instead of returning by the main road from Sidi Mansur, one can bend a little to the right and so pass the military hospital, a large establishment which looks as if it could be converted into a barrack in case of need. This is as it should be. Gafsa is a rallying-point, and must be prepared for emergencies. Here, too, lie the cemeteries: the Jewish, fronting the main road, with a decent enclosure; that of the Christians, framed in a wire fence and containing a few wooden crosses, imitation broken columns and tinsel wreaths; Arab tombs, scattered over a large undefined tract of brown earth, and clustering thickly about some white-domed maraboutic monument, whose saintly relics are desirable companionship for the humbler dead.

The bare ground here is littered with pottery and other fragments of ancient life testifying to its former populousness: flint implements, among the rest. Of the interval between the latest of these stone-age primevals and the first Egyptian invasion of Gafsa we know nothing; they, the Egyptians, brought with them that plough which is figured in the hieroglyphics, and has not yet changed its shape. You may see the venerable instrument any day you like, being carried on a man's back to his work in the oasis.

Athwart this region there runs an underground (excavated) stream of water, led from Sidi Mansur to nourish the Gafsa plantations. Through holes in the ground one looks down upon the element flowing mysteriously below; figs and other trees are set in these hollows for the sake of the shade and moisture, and their crowns barely reach the level of the soil. This is no place to wander about at night--a false step in the darkness and a man would break his neck. There was talk, at one time, of leading this brook, which is sweet and non-mineral, into Gafsa for drinking purposes, but the native garden proprietors raised their inevitable howl of objections, and the project was abandoned.

If you ask a local white man as to the misdeeds of his administration, be sure he will mention the affair of the railway station which was built too far from the town, and this of the Sidi Mansur water. And who, you ask, was to blame for these follies? Oh, the controlleur, as usual; always the controlleur! It is no sinecure being an official of this kind in Tunisia, with precise Government instructions in one pocket, and in the other his countrymen's contrary lamentations and suggestions, often reasonable enough....

Loaded down with a choice selection of Sidi Mansur flints, which are singular as having a white patina, I returned to Gafsa in the late afternoon and entered my favourite Arab café. Here, at all events, if you do not mind a little native esprit de corps, you will be able to thaw your frozen limbs; all the other rooms of Gafsa, public and private, are like ice-cellars. There are many of these coffeehouses in the town, and this is one of the least fashionable of them. Never a European darkens its door; seldom even a native soldier; it is not good enough for them; they go to finer resorts.

At its entrance there lie, conveniently arranged as seats, some old Roman blocks, overshadowed by a mulberry, now gaunt and bare. It must be delightful, in the spring-time, to sit under its shade and watch the street-life: the operations at the neighbouring dye-shop where gaudy cloths of blue and red are hanging out to dry, or, lower down, the movement at the wood-market--a large tract of "boulevard" encumbered with the impedimenta of nomadism. There is a ceaseless unloading of fuel here; bargains are struck about sheep and goats, the hapless quadruped, that refuses to accompany its new purchaser good-naturedly, being lifted up by the hind legs and made to walk in undignified fashion on the remaining two. Fires gleam brightly, each one surrounded by a knot of camels couched in the dust, their noses converging towards the flame, while old desert hags, bent double with a life of hardship, bustle about the cooking-pots. There are brawls, too--Arabs seizing each other by the throat, raising sticks and uttering wild imprecations....