In a Tunisian Oasis
Waking
at dawn, I looked out of the window. We were in the desert. On either side of
the railway an immense plain, flat as Holland, but tawny instead of green,
stretched out interminably. On the horizon, instead of windmills, a row of
camels was silhouetted against the gray sky. Mile after mile, the train rolled
slowly southward.
At
Tozeur, when at last we arrived, it had just finished raining - for the first
time in two and a half years - and now the wind had sprung up; there was a
sandstorm. A thick brown fog, whirled into eddies by the wind, gritty to the
skin, abolished the landscape from before our smarting eyes. We sneezed; there
was sand in our ears, in our hair, between our teeth. It was horrible. I felt
depressed, but not surprised. The weather is always horrible when I travel.
Once,
in a French hotel, I was accused of having brought with me the flat black bugs,
of whose presence among my bedclothes I complained to a self-righteous
proprietress. I defended myself with energy against the impeachment. Bugs - no;
I am innocent of bugs. But when it comes to bad weather, I have to plead
guilty. Rain, frost, wind, snow, hail, fog - I bring them with me wherever I
go. I bring them to places where they have never been heard of, at seasons when
it is impossible that they should occur. What delightful skating there will be
in the Spice Islands when I arrive! On this particular journey I had brought
with me to every place on my itinerary the most appalling meteorological
calamities. At Naples, for example, it was the snow. Coming out of the theater
on the night of our arrival, we found it lying an inch deep under the palm
trees in the public gardens. And Vesuvius, next morning, glittered white, like
Fujiyama, against the pale spring sky. At Palermo there was a cloud-burst.
"Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily" we passed through a tempest of
hail, lightning and wind. At Tunis it very nearly froze. At Sousse the wind was
so violent that the stiff board-like leaves of the cactuses swayed and trembled
in the air like aspens. And now, on the day of our arrival at Tozeur, it had
rained for the first time in thirty months, and there was a sandstorm. No, I
was not in the least surprised; but I could not help feeling a little gloomy.
Toward
evening the wind somewhat abated; the sand began to drop out of the air. At midday
the brown curtain had been unpenetrable at fifty yards. It thinned, grew
gauzier; one could see objects at a hundred, two hundred yards. From the
windows of the hotel bedroom in which we had sat all day, trying - but in vain,
for it came through even invisible crannies - to escape from the wind-blown
sand, we could see the fringes of a dense forest of palm trees, the dome of a
little mosque, houses of sun-dried brick and thin brown men in flapping
nightshirts walking, with muffled faces and bent heads, against the wind, or
riding, sometimes astride, sometimes sideways, on the bony rumps of patient
little asses. Two very professional tourists in sun helmets - there was no sun -
emerged round the corner of a street. A malicious gust of wind caught them unawares;
simultaneously the two helmets shot into the air, thudded, rolled in the dust.
The too professional tourists scuttled in pursuit. The spectacle cheered us a
little; we descended, we ventured out of doors.
A
melancholy Arab offered to show us round the town. Knowing how hard it is to
find one's way in these smelly labyrinths, we accepted his offer. His knowledge
of French was limited; so too, in consequence, was the information he gave us.
He employed what I may call the Berlitz method. Thus, when a column of whirling
sand rose up and jumped at us round the corner of a street, our guide turned to
us and said, pointing: "Poussière." We might have guessed it ourselves.
He
led us interminably through narrow, many-cornered streets, between eyeless
walls, half crumbled and tottering.
"Village,"
he explained. "Très plaisant." We did not altogether agree with him.
A
walk through an Arab village is reminiscent of walks through Ostia or Pompeii.
Roman remains are generally in a better state of preservation, and cleaner;
that is all. One is astonished to see, among these dusty ruins, white-robed
families crouching over their repasts.
Our
guide patted a brown mud wall.
"Briques,"
he said, and repeated the word several times, so that we might be certain
what he meant.
These
bricks, which are of sun-dried mud, are sometimes, on the façades of the more
considerable houses, arranged in a series of simple and pleasing patterns -
diamonds, quincunxes, hexagons. A local art which nobody now takes the trouble
to practice - nobody, that is, except the Europeans, who, with characteristic
energy, have used and wildly abused the traditional ornamentation on the walls
of the station and the principal hotel. It is a curious and characteristic fact
that, whenever in Tunisia one sees a particularly Oriental piece of
architecture, it is sure to have been built by the French, since 1881. The
cathedral of Carthage, the law courts and schools of Tunis - these are more
Moorish than the Alhambra, Moorish as only Oriental tea-rooms in Paris or
London can be Moorish. In thirty years the French have produced buildings more
typically and intensely Arabian than the Arabs themselves contrived to do in
the course of thirteen centuries.
We
passed into the market-place.
"Viande,"
said our guide, fingering as he passed a well-thumbed collop of mutton,
lying among the dust and flies on a little booth.
We
nodded.
"Très joli," commented our guide. "Très plaisant." Noisily he spat on the ground. The
proprietor of the booth spat too. We hurried away; it needs time to grow inured
to Tunisian habits. These frightful hoickings in the throat, these sibilant
explosions and semi-liquid impacts are almost the national music of the
country.
There
are in the desert of southern Tunisia three great oases. These are all of much
the same size, each consisting of some six or seven thousand acres of
cultivated ground, and are all three remarkable for their numerous and copious
springs. In the middle of the desert, suddenly, a hundred fountains come
welling out of the sand; rivers run, a network of little canals is dug. An
innumerable forest of date palms springs up - a forest whose undergrowth is
corn and roses, vines and apricot trees, olives and pomegranates, pepper trees,
castor-oil trees, banana trees, every precious plant of the temperate and the
sub-tropical zones. No rain falls on these little Edens - except on the days of
my arrival - but the springs, fed from who knows what distant source, flow
inexhaustibly and have flowed at least since Roman times. Islanded among the
sands, their green luxuriance is a standing miracle. That it should have been
in a desert, with here and there such islands of palm trees, that Judaism and
Mohammedanism took their rise is a thing which, since I have seen an oasis,
astonishes me. The religion which, in such a country, would naturally suggest
itself to me would be no abstract monotheism, but the adoration of life, of the
forces of green and growing nature. In an oasis, it seems to me, the worship of
Pan and of the Great Mother should be celebrated with an almost desperate
earnestness. The nymphs of water and of trees ought surely, here, to receive a
passionate gratitude. In the desert, I should infallibly have invented the
Greek mythology. The Jews and the Arabs discovered Jahweh and Allah. I find it
strange.
Of
the three great Tunisian oases, my favorite is Nefta. Gabes runs it close for
beauty, while the proximity of the sea gives it a charm which Nefta lacks. But,
on the other hand, Gabes is less fertile than Nefta and, socially, more
sophisticated. There must be the best part of two hundred Europeans living at
Gabes. There is dancing once a week at the hotel. Gabes is quite the little
Paris. The same objection applies to Tozeur, which has a railway station and
positively teems with French officials. Nefta, with fourteen thousand Arabs,
has a white population of a dozen or thereabouts. A hundred Frenchmen can
always make a Paris; twelve, I am happy to say, cannot. The only non-Arabian
feature of Nefta is its hotel, which is clean, comfortable, French and
efficient. At Nefta one may live among barbarians, in the Middle Ages, and at
the same tune, for thirty francs a day, enjoy the advantages of contemporary
Western civilization. What could be more delightful?
We
set off next morning by car, across the desert. Every now and then we passed a
camel, a string of camels. Their owners walked or rode on asses beside them.
The womenfolk were perched among the baggage on the hump - a testimony, most
eloquent in this Mohammedan country, to the great discomfort of camel riding.
Once we met a small Citroën lorry, crammed to overflowing with white-robed Arabs. In
the Sahara, the automobile has begun to challenge the supremacy of the camel.
Motor buses now ply across the desert. A line, we were told, was shortly to be
inaugurated between Nefta and Touggourt, across two hundred kilometers of sand.
In a few years, no doubt, we shall all have visited Lake Tchad and Timbuctoo.
Should one be glad or sorry? I find it difficult to decide.
The
hotel at Nefta is a long low building, occupying one whole side of the
market-square. From your bedroom window you watch the Arabs living; they do it
unhurriedly and with a dignified inefficiency. Endlessly haggling, they buy and
sell. The vendor offers a mutton chop, slightly soiled; the buyer professes
himself outraged by a price which would be exorbitant if the goods were
spotlessly first-hand. It takes them half an hour to come to a compromise. On
the ground white bundles doze in the sun; when the sun grows too hot, they roll
a few yards and doze again in the shade. The notables of the town, the rich
proprietors of palm trees, stroll past with the dignity of Roman senators.
Their garments are of the finest wool; they carry walking sticks; they wear
European shoes and socks, and on their bare brown calves - a little touch
entirely characteristic of the real as opposed to the literary East - pale
mauve or shell-pink sock suspenders. Wild men ride in from the desert. Some of
them, trusting to common sense as well as Allah to preserve them from
ophthalmia, wear smoked motor goggles. With much shouting, much reverberant
thumping of dusty, moth-eaten hides, a string of camels is driven in. They
kneel, they are unloaded. Supercilious and haughty, they turn this way and
that, like the dowagers of very aristocratic families at a plebeian evening
party. Then, all at once, one of them stretches out its long neck limply along
the ground and shuts its eyes. The movement is one of hopeless weariness; the
grotesque animal is suddenly pathetic. And what groanings, what gurglings in
the throat, what enormous sighs when their masters begin to reload them! Every
additional package evokes a bubbling protest, and when at last they have to
rise from their knees, they moan as though their hearts were broken. Blind
beggars sit patiently awaiting the alms they never receive. Their raw eyelids
black with flies, small children play contentedly in the dust. If Allah wills
it, they too will be blind one day: blessed be the name of Allah.
Sitting
at our window, we watch the spectacle. And at night, after a pink and yellow
sunset with silhouetted palm trees and domes against the sky (for my taste, I
am afraid, altogether too like the colored plates in the illustrated Bible), at
night huge stars come out in the indigo sky, the cafés are little caves
of yellow light, draped figures move in the narrow streets with lanterns in
their hands, and on the flat roofs of the houses one sees the prowling shadows
of enormous watchdogs. There is silence, the silence of the desert: from time
to time there comes to us, very distinctly, the distant sound of spitting.
Walking
among the crowds of the market-place or along the narrow labyrinthine streets,
I was always agreeably surprised by the apathetically courteous aloofness of
Arab manners. There are beggars in plenty, of course, hawkers, guides, cab
drivers; and when you pass, they faintly stir, it is true, from their impassive
calm. They stretch out hands, they offer Arab antiquities of the most genuine
German manufacture, they propose to take you the round of the sights, they
invite you into their fly-blown vehicles. But they do all these things politely
and quite uninsistently. A single refusal suffices to check their nascent
importunity. You shake your head; they relapse once more into the apathy from
which your appearance momentarily roused them - resignedly: nay, almost, you
feel, with a sense of relief that it had not, after all, been necessary to
disturb themselves. Coming from Naples, we had been particularly struck by this
lethargic politeness. For in Naples the beggars claim an alms noisily and as
though by right. If you refuse to ride, the cabmen of Pozzuoli follow you up
the road, alternately cursing and whining, and at every hundred yards reducing their
price by yet another ten per cent. The guides at Pompeii fairly insist on being
taken; they cry aloud, they show their certificates, they enumerate their wives
and starving children. As for the hawkers, they simply will not let you go.
What, you don't want colored photographs of Vesuvius? Then look at these
corals. No corals? But here is the last word in cigarette holders. You do not
smoke? But in any case, you shave; these razor blades, now. . . You shake your
head. Then toothpicks, magnifying glasses, celluloid combs. Stubbornly, you
continue to refuse. The hawker plays his last card - an ace, it must be
admitted, and of trumps. He comes very close to you, he blows garlic and
alcohol confidentially into your face. From an inner pocket he produces an envelope;
he opens it, he presses the contents into your hand. You may not want corals or
razor blades, views of Vesuvius or celluloid combs; he admits it. But can you
honestly say - honestly, with your hand on your heart - that you have no use
for pornographic engravings? And for nothing, sir, positively for nothing. Ten
francs apiece; the set of twelve for a hundred. . .
The
touts, the pimps, the mendicants of Italy are the energetic members of a
conquering, progressive race. The Neapolitan cabman is a disciple of Samuel
Smiles; the vendors of pornographic post cards and the sturdy beggars live
their lives with a strenuousness that would have earned the commendation of a
Roosevelt. Self-help and the strenuous life do not flourish on the other shore
of the Mediterranean. In Tunisia the tourist walks abroad unpestered. The Arabs
have no future.
That
they might still have a future if they changed their philosophy of life must be
obvious to anyone who has watched the behavior of Arab children, who have not
yet had time to be influenced by the prevailing fatalism of Islam. Arab
children are as lively, as inquisitive, as tiresome and as charming as the
children of the most progressively Western people. At Nefta the adult beggars
and donkey drivers might leave us, resignedly, in peace; but the children were
unescapable. We could never stir abroad without finding a little troop of them
frisking around us. It was in vain that we tried to drive them away; they
accompanied us, whether we liked it or no, on every walk, and, when the walk
was over, claimed wages for their importunate fidelity.
To
provide tourists with guidance they did not need - this, we found, was the
staple profession of the little boys of Nefta. But they had other and more
ingenious ways of making money. Close and acute observers of tourists, they had
made an important psychological discovery about this curious race of beings.
Foreigners, they found out, especially elderly female foreigners, have a
preposterous tenderness for animals. The little boys of Nefta have
systematically exploited this discovery. Their methods, which we had frequent
opportunities of observing, are simple and effective. In front of the hotel a
gang of little ruffians is perpetually on the watch. A tourist shows himself,
or herself, on one of the balconies: immediately the general of the troop - or
perhaps it would be better to call him the director of the company, for it is
obvious that the whole affair is organized on a strictly business footing -
runs forward to within easy coin-tossing distance. From somewhere about his
person he produces a captive bird - generally some brightly colored little
creature not unlike a goldfinch. Smiling up at the tourist, he shows his prize.
"Oiseau," he explains in his pidgin French. When the tourist
has been made to understand that the bird is alive, the little boy proceeds,
with the elaborate gestures of a conjurer, to pretend to wring its neck, to
pull off its legs and wings, to pluck out its feathers. For a tender-hearted
tourist the menacing pantomime is unbearable.
"Lâche la bête. Je te donne dix sous."
Released, the bird flaps
ineffectually away, as well as its clipped wings will permit. In actual fact,
we observed, they never did their victims any harm. A bird, it was obvious, was
far too valuable to be lightly killed; goldfinches during the tourist season
laid golden eggs. Besides, they were really very nice little boys and fond of
their pets. When they saw that we had seen through their trick and could not be
induced to pay ransom, they grinned up at us without malice and knowingly, as
though we were their accomplices, and carefully put the birds away.
The
importunity of the little boys was tiresome when one wanted to be alone. But if
one happened to be in the mood for it, their company was exceedingly
entertaining. The exploitation of the tourists was a monopoly which the most
active of the children had arrogated, by force and cunning, to themselves.
There was a little gang of them who shared the loot and kept competitors at a
distance. By the time we left, we had got to know them very well. When we
walked abroad, small strangers tried to join our party; but they were savagely
driven away with shouts and blows. We were private property; no trespassing was
tolerated. It was only by threatening to stop their wages that we could
persuade the captains of the Nefta tourist industry to desist from persecuting
their rivals. There was one particularly charming little boy - mythically
beautiful, as only Arab children can be beautiful - who was the object of their
special fury. The captains of the tourist industry were ugly: they dreaded the
rivalry of this lovely child. And they were right; he was irresistible. We
insisted on his being permitted to accompany us.
"But
why do you send him away?" we asked.
"Lui
méchant,"
the
captains of industry replied in their rudimentary French. "Lui casser
un touriste."
"He
smashed a tourist?" we repeated in some astonishment.
They
nodded. Blushing, even the child himself seemed reluctantly to admit the truth
of their accusations. We could get no further explanations; none of them knew
enough French to give them. "Lui méchant. Lui casser un touriste." That was all we could discover. The
lovely child looked at us appealingly. We decided to run the risk of being smashed
and let him come with us. I may add that we came back from all our walks quite
intact.
Under
the palm trees, through that labyrinth of paths and running streams, we
wandered interminably with our rabble of little guides. Most often it was to
that part of the oasis called the Corbeille that we went. At the bottom
of a rounded valley, theater-shaped and with smooth steep sides of sand, a
score of springs suddenly gush out. There are little lakes, jade green like
those pools beneath the cypresses of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli. Round their
borders the palm trees go jetting up, like fountains fixed in their upward
aspiring gesture, their drooping crown of leaves a green spray arrested on the
point of falling. Fountains of life - and five yards away the smooth unbroken
slopes of sand glare in the sun. A little river flows out from the lakes, at
first between high banks, then into an open sheet of water where the children
paddle and bathe, the beasts come down to drink, the women do their washing.
The river is the main road in this part of the oasis. The Arabs, when they want
to get from place to place, tuck up their nightshirts and wade. Shoes and
stockings, not to mention the necessity for keeping up their dignified
prestige, do not permit Europeans to follow their example. It is only on
mule-back that Europeans use the river road.
A
fertile oasis possesses a characteristic color scheme of its own, which is
entirely unlike that of any landscape in Italy or the north. The fundamental
note is struck by the palms. Their foliage, except where the stiff shiny leaves
metallically reflect the light, is a rich blue-green. Beneath them, one walks
in a luminous aquarium shadow, broken by innumerable vivid shafts of sunlight
that scatter gold over the ground or, touching the trunks of the palm trees,
make them shine a pale ashy pink through the subaqueous shadow. There is pink,
too, in the glaring whiteness of the sand beyond the fringes of the oasis.
Under the palms, beside the brown or jade-colored water, glows the bright
emerald green of corn or the deciduous trees of the north, with here and there
the huge yellowish leaves of a banana tree, the smoky gray of olives, or the
bare bone-white and writhing form of a fig tree.
As
the sun gradually sinks, the aquarium shadow beneath the palm trees grows
bluer, denser; you imagine yourself descending through layer after darkening
layer of water. Only the pale skeletons of the fig trees stand out distinctly;
the waters gleam like eyes in the dark ground; the ghost of a little marabout
or chapel shows its domed silhouette, white and strangely definite in the
growing darkness, through a gap in the trees. But looking up from the depths of
this submarine twilight, one sees the bright pale sky of evening, and against
it, still touched by the level, rosily-golden light, gleaming as though
transmuted into sheets of precious metal, the highest leaves of the palm trees.
A
little wind springs up; the palm leaves rattle together; it is suddenly cold. "En
avant," we call. Our little guides quicken their pace. We follow them
through the darkening mazes of the palm forest, out into the open. The village
lies high on the desert plateau above the oasis, desert-colored, like an arid
outcrop of the tawny rock. We mount to its nearest gate. Through passage-ways
between blank walls, under long dark tunnels the children lead us - an obscure
and tortuous way which we never succeeded in thoroughly mastering - back to the
square market-place at the center of the town. The windows of the inn glimmer
invitingly. At the door we pay off the captains of industry and the little
tourist-smasher; we enter. Within the hotel it is provincial France.
(From "In a Tunisian Oasis," The Olive
Tree)
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