shadowy and fragmentary; but the work conducted by the “White Fathers” of Carthage, under the direction of Père Delattre, has provided at least a foundation for further researches and comparisons, which no doubt will soon be undertaken.

The recent discoveries of Carthage may well be described as fascinating. Take for example the sarcophagus of a Phœnician priestess unearthed in 1902. It is believed that she lived in the third century B.C. The coloured marble sarcophagus is of the best period of Greek workmanship. A Greek carved this tomb, no doubt, but in the representation of the priestess we have a figure of a type unlike any Greek art known,—a type of beauty delightfully strange, a countenance of a noble loveliness and charm.

A sympathetic French archéologue puts it in the following words:

“The brilliancy of colour and strangeness of attire, far from detracting from the dignity of her presence, seem to enhance the noble simplicity and reserve suggested by the figure. A rare and lovely personality seems to have been the inspiration of the sculptor. She was not a Greek, nor an Egyptian, and the Semitic features are hardly recognizable. The dove in the figure’s right hand may well be taken as a symbol of her own gentle beauty and sweetness. Surely this is a pure type of Phœnician womanhood. That majestic calm which is the outward and visible sign of the highest courage within comports well with the reputation of the women of Carthage, and their bearing in that terrible siege which tried them unto death.”

This is the sort of sentiment which still hovers over Carthage; but to sense it to the full, one must know the city’s history in detail, and not merely by a hurried half a day round, out from Tunis and back between breakfast and dinner. Another recent find is the unearthed Roman palace built up over an old Punic burial-place. Luxurious, though of diminutive proportions, this palace, or villa, possesses a pavement in mosaic worthy to rank with that classic example of the Villa Hadrian at Tivoli. It may be seen to-day at the Musée, and is one of the things to be noted down by even the hurried traveller.

En route from Tunis to Bizerta, thirty-five kilometres from the former city and about the same from Carthage, is the ancient Utica, founded by the Phœnicians centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, and which, after the destruction of Carthage, became the first city of Africa.

To-day the domain of Bou-Chateur, belonging to a M. Chabannes, contains all that remains above ground of this vassal city of Carthage. Once a seaport of importance, like Carthage, it gradually succumbed to a sort of dry rot and is no more.

The remains existing to-day are extensive, but very fragmentary. Only bare outlines are here and there visible; but from them some one has been able to construct a plan of the city on something approaching its former lines.

Immediately neighbouring upon Carthage is Sidi-bou-Saïd, easily the most picturesque village around Tunis, if one excepts the low-lying fishing village of La Goulette, better known by its Italian name of La Goletta. La Goulette itself played an important rôle in the sixteenth century. Charles V occupied it in 1535, and it became a fortified stronghold of the Spanish; but in spite of the fact that it was further fortified by Don Juan of Austria, after the battle of Lepanto, it was captured by the Turks under Sinan-Pacha the following year after a memorable siege. For the devout, La Goulette is of great interest from the fact that Saint Vincent de Paul was a captive here in the seventeenth century.

The little indigène village of Sidi-bou-Saïd sits on the promontory called Cap Carthage and has a local colour all its own. It is purely “native,” the land agent not yet having marked it for his own. The panorama of the snow-white walls and domes and turrets of the little town, the red-rock base on which it sits, the blue sea offshore, and the blue sky overhead, is a wonderful sight to the person of artistic tastes. Certainly its like is not in Africa, if elsewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean.

Beyond Sidi-bou-Saïd is La Marsa, without character or history, save that the Bey’s summer palace and the country residences of the foreign consuls are here. The site is delightful and looks seaward in most winning fashion. On the hillsides round about is grown the grape from which is made the celebrated “vin blanc de Carthage,” as much an accompaniment of the shrimps of the Lac de Tunis as is the “vin de Cassis” of bouillabaisse, or Chablis of oysters. In the neighbourhood are numerous caves, forming the ancient Jewish necropolis of Carthage under Roman domination.

Due north from Tunis a matter of nearly a hundred kilometres is Bizerta, now a French Mediterranean naval base as formidable, or at any rate as useful, as Gibraltar. It was the Hippo-Diarrhytus of the ancients, whose inhabitants were at continual warfare with those of Carthage. Under the Empire it was a Roman colony, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries became one of the refuges of the Moors expelled from Spain.

The French occupation has made of Bizerta and its lake a highly active and prosperous neighbourhood, where formerly a scant population of the mixed Mediterranean races gave it only the dignity of a fishing village. It is very picturesque, its waterside, its canals, and its quais, but the primitiveness of other days is giving way before the moves in the game of peace and war, until everywhere one hears the bustle and groan of ships and shipping, and sees clouds of smoke piling up into the cloudless sky from the gaping chimneys of machine-shops on shore and torpedo boats and battle-ships on the water. It is old Bizerta rubbing shoulders with new Bizerta at every step.

Bizerta is now the most important strategic point in the Mediterranean. Gibraltar is covered by the Spanish fortifications at Algeçiras and Ceuta, and Malta is merely a rock-bound fortress that could be starved out in a month. The Mediterranean is French,—a French lake if you will,—as it always has been, and as it always will be. Tripoli in Barbary and Morocco, when they come under the French flag, as they are bound to do, will only accentuate the fact.

CHAPTER XXV

THE BARBARY COAST

Under the reign of Louis XIV Duquesne was charged to suppress the piracies of the Tripolitan coasts. The celebrated admiral—it was he who also gave the original name to the site of the present city of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela—got down to business once the orders were given, sighted eight of the Barbary feluccas and gave them chase. They took refuge in the Sultan’s own port of Chio, but, with the French close on their heels, they were captured forthwith, and the Pacha of Tripoli was forced without more ado to make a treaty containing many onerous conditions. The corsairs gave back a ship which they had taken, and all the French who had fallen prisoners in their hands and who were virtually held in slavery. The admirals of those days had a way of doing things.

After the French came the English. Blake, the British admiral, who never trod the deck of a vessel until he was fifty, did his part to sweep these fierce Mediterranean pirates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli from the seas. The United States Navy did the rest. This is history; let those who are further interested look it up.

The North African coast-line from Tunis to Tangier has the aspect of much of the rest of the Mediterranean littoral, but that strip sweeping around from Cap Carthage to Tripoli in Barbary, the shores of the great Tripolitan gulf, may still furnish the setting for as fierce a piratical tale as can be conceived,—only the pirates are wanting.

This low-lying ground south of Tunis is not a tourist-beaten ground; it is almost unknown and unexplored to the majority of winter travellers, who include only Algiers, Biskra, and Tunis in their African itinerary.

South from Tunis, the first place of importance is Hammamet, an embryotic watering-place for the Tunisians, called by the natives “the city of pigeons.”

This up-and-coming station on the route which binds “Numidia” with “Africa” is possessed of a remarkable source of fresh-water supply. The Romans in ancient times exploited this same source, and built a monumental arcade on the site. All vestiges of this architectural work have however disappeared.

At Nabeul, a few kilometres away, one gets a curious glimpse of native life interspersed with that of the Jews. Mosques, souks, and synagogues give an Oriental blend as lively in colouring and variety as will satisfy the most insistent. Nabeul’s industry consists chiefly in the fabrication of pottery,—a fragile, crude, but lovely pottery, which travellers carry afar, and which is the marvel of all who contemplate it. The enterprise is of French origin, but the labour which produces these quaint jugs, vases, and platters (which are not dear in price) is purely native. The potter’s thumb marks are over all. The pieces have not been rubbed and burnished down, and accordingly the collector knows he has got the real thing, and not a German or Belgian clay-thrower’s imitation.

Nabeul was the ancient Neapolis, which was destroyed by the Romans at the same time that Carthage came under the domination of Augustus.

South again from Nabeul, by road or rail, for the railroad still continues another hundred kilometres, and one is at Sousse. Change cars for Kairouan, the Holy City of Tunisia!

Sousse is an important and still growing port with as mixed a population as one will see in any Mediterranean town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The French number perhaps twelve hundred, the Italians three or four thousand, and the Maltese as many as the French. The rest are Arabs; you might call them seafaring Arabs rather than desert Arabs, for they are as often on the sea as off it.

The souks of Sousse are famous. There is no longer a great Berber or Byzantine city closed in with walls with a gate on each cardinal face; all this has disappeared in the march of progress; but the Arab town, everywhere in Algeria and Tunisia, is a feature of the life of the times, even though it has been encroached upon by European civilization. The souks, or markets, are here more bizarre and further removed from our twentieth-century ideas of how business is, and should be, done than in any other mixed European-Mussulman centre of population.

In the Souk des Herbages are sold roots and herbs of all sorts, pimento peppers, henna, garance, dried peas, and other vegetables. The Souk des Arabes holds the rug and carpet sellers, the armourers, the weavers of the cloth of the burnous, tailors, etc. In the Souk des Juifs, a dark, ill-smelling, tiny nest of narrow corridors, are found the jewelry makers and the broiderers.

This and more of the same kind is Sousse. In addition there are the brilliant variegated sails of the Italian and Maltese fishing-boats, the dhows of the Arabs, and all the miscellaneous riffraff which associates itself mysteriously with a great seaport. Sousse is an artist’s paradise, and its hotels are excellent,—if one cares for sea food and eternal mutton and lamb.

The Kasba of Sousse sits high on the hillside overlooking the Arab town and the souks. A long swing around the boulevards brings one to the same culminating point.

A Phœnician acropolis stood here before the eleventh century, and the remains of a pagan temple to-day bear witness to the strong contrast of the manners of yesterday and to-day. The great signal-tower of the citadel is a reconstruction of a pharo called Khalef-el-Feta, which stood here in 1068. Whatever may have been the value of this fortification in days gone by, it looks defective enough to-day with its hybrid mass of nondescript structures. At all times, and from all points of view, it is imposing and spectacular, and is the dominant note of every landscape round about. Its angularities are not beautiful, nor even solid-looking, and the whole thing is stagy; but for all that it is imposing and above all grim and suggestive of unspeakable Turkish atrocities that may have been carried on in its immediate neighbourhood.

Monastir is a near neighbour of Sousse, twenty odd kilometres away, over as fine a roadway as one may see anywhere. Automobilists take notice! The Hôtel de Paris at Monastir has a “sight” in its dining-hall, which alone is worth coming to see, aside from the excellent breakfast which you get for fifty sous. This apartment was formerly the great reception-hall of the Arab governors of the province, and as such becomes at once an historic shrine and a novelty.

Not a town in Algeria or Tunisia has so quaint a vista as that looking down Monastir’s “Grande Rue.” It’s not very ancient, nor squalidly picturesque, but somehow it is characteristically quaint. And it “composes” wonderfully well, for either the artist’s canvas or the kodaker’s film. Sousse and Monastir should be omitted from no artist’s itinerary which is supposed to include unspoiled sketching grounds.

Kairouan, the Mohammedan Holy City of Tunisia, lies sixty kilometres southwest from Sousse.

Kairouan dates only from the Mussulman conquest, having been founded by the propagator of Islam in Africa, Okba-ben-Nafi (50 Heg. 671 A.D.). Kairouan became the capital of what is now Tunisia in the ninth century, and Tunis itself was its servitor. Up to this day Kairouan has guarded its religious supremacy as the Holy City of the Eastern Moghreb, and accordingly is a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of all North Africa.

The French occupied the city in 1881 without resistance on the part of the inhabitants. And to-day it is a live, wide-awake important centre of affairs, besides being a Mohammedan shrine of the very first rank.

The native city is entirely free from French innovations and remains almost as it was centuries ago. The mosques and the native city are all-in-all for the stranger within the gates, particularly the mosques, for here, of all places in Tunisia, their doors are opened to the “dogs of infidels” of overseas. But you must remove your shoes as you enter, or put on babouches over your “demi-Americain” boots, which you bought in Marseilles before leaving France (poor things, by the way; one suspects they were made in England, not in America at all).

Of first importance are the mosques of Sidi-Okba, the “Grande Mosquée;” and of Sidi-Sahab, the “Mosquée du Barbier.” The Djama Sidi-Okba, or “Grande Mosquée,” is a grandly imposing structure with a massive square minaret of the regulation Tunisian variety. Within it is of the classic type, with seventeen aisles and eight great thoroughfares crossing at right angles. It is a cosmopolitan edifice in all its parts, having been variously rebuilt and added to with the march of time, the earliest constructive details being of the third century of the Hegira, the ninth of our era.

The minbar, or pulpit, the faïences, the ceilings and the best of Hispano-Arabic details are here all of a superlative luxuriance and mystery. The “Mosquée du Barbier” (“Sidi-Sahab”) is built over the sepulchre of one of the companions of the Prophet himself. Legend says that he always carried with him three hairs of the beard of the Prophet. These were buried with him, of course, but whether that was his sole recommendation for immortality the writer does not know. Less imposing than

the “Grande Mosquée,” this latter is quite as elaborately beautiful in all its parts. The carved wooden ceiling, the rugs and carpets of rare weaves, the stuccos and the faïences, are all very effective and seemingly genuine, though here and there (as in the tomb of Sidi-Sahab) one sees the hand of the Renaissance Italian workman instead of that of the Moor.

Kairouan has a special variety of cafés chantants and cafés dansants, which is much more the genuine thing than those at Biskra or Tunis.

Still south from Tunis, further south even than Sousse, Kairouan, and Sfax, lies a wonderful, undeveloped and little known country of oases and chotts, the latter being great expanses of marshy land sometime doubtless arms of the sea itself. The oases of Gabès and Tozeur are called the pays des dattes, for here flourish the finest date-palms known to the botanical world; while the oases themselves take rank as the most populous and beautiful of all those of the great African desert.

The chotts are great depressions in the soil and abound in the region lying between Touggourt and Biskra in Algeria, and Gabès in Tunisia. The chotts are undoubtedly dried-out beds of some long disappeared river, lake or bay, and their crystallized surfaces are to-day veritable death-traps to the stranger who wanders away from the beaten caravan tracks which cross them.

The chotts are very ancient, and an account of a caravan which was lost in one of them was published by a Spanish historian of the ninth century. Herodotus, too, makes mention of a Lake Triton, probably the Chott-Nefzaoua of to-day, which communicated with the Syrte, now the Gulf of Gabès.

The “Sud-Tunisien,” as all this vast region is known, is all but an unknown land to the tourist. Sousse and Sfax are populous, busy maritime cities, largely Europeanized, but still retaining an imprint quite their own. Kairouan, just westward from Sousse, where the railway ends, is the chief tourist shrine of Tunis outside Tunis itself and Carthage. But beyond, except for an occasional stranger who would hunt the gazelle, the moufflon, or the wild boar, none ever penetrate, save those who are engaged in the development of the country, and the military, who are everywhere.

Between Sousse and Sfax is El Djem, the Thysdrus of the time of Cæsar, and afterwards one of the richest cities of North Africa. Gordian, the proconsul, was proclaimed emperor of the colony in 238 A.D., and the present grand old ruin of an amphitheatre, a great oval like the Colosseum at Rome, served many times as a fortification against Berber and Vandal hordes, besides performing its conventional functions. El Djem and its marvellous arena, nearly five hundred feet in length and four hundred in width, is one of the surprises of the Tunisian itinerary.

From Sfax, which is linked with Sousse by a service of public automobiles, another apologetic loose end of railway takes birth and runs west to Gafsa, a military post of importance and not much else; a favourite spot for the French army board to exile refractory soldiers. They leave them here to broil under a summer sun and work at road-making in the heat of the day. After that they are less refractory, if indeed they are not dead of the fever.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE OASIS OF TOZEUR

Gafsa is the chief metropolis of the region of the chotts. It is called by the Arabs the pearl of the Djérid, and is a military post, and the bled, or market town, for untold thousands of desert nomads. The same word bled, when used by the city dweller, means the desert. Such are the inconsistencies of Arab nomenclature. They almost equal our own.

Tozeur is reached from Gafsa by any one of a half dozen means. On foot, on bicycle,—if you will, by automobile,—if you have the courage, by diligence, calèche, or on horse, donkey, or camel back. If by either of the latter means, you will of course be accompanied by a grinning blackamoor who will respond to the name of Mohammed, and be thoroughly useless except to prod the animal now and then. You and he will understand each other by sign language, or by what might be called phonetic French, and you will get on very well. Tozeur is eighty odd kilometres from Gafsa over a “route carrossable,” as the French describe a carriage road,—sandy and rutty in places; but still a road which ranks considerably higher than most of those of Ohio or Indiana. There are no means of obtaining provisions, or even water, en route, so the journey must be made either in a day, or arrangements made for camping out overnight. With a good guide the journey might preferably be made at night, for a nocturnal ramble in the desert is likely to awaken emotions in the sentimentally inclined which will be something unique among their previous experiences.

An Arab horse or mule will think nothing of doing sixty kilometres between sunrise and sunset, but if a calèche is to be one’s mode of conveyance, thirty-six hours is none too long to allow for the journey from Gafsa to Tozeur.

The high-class Arab professes a contempt for the donkey or the mule, though this indeed is no part of his creed, for we must not ignore that it was a donkey that the Prophet most loved among beasts.

For the masses who have passed the bourriquet stage, the mule is the beast of burden par excellence. The Bey of Tunis, when he takes his promenades abroad, has a team of six mules attached to his band-wagon coach, and superb and distinguished-looking beasts they are; but the desert Sheik will have nothing but an Arabian horse, not the “charger shod with fire” of the drawing-room song, but a sound, sturdy, agile beast, a good goer and handsome to look upon.

The indigène’s mule will amble along over a desert track fourteen or sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, carrying his human burden in the characteristic Arab saddle known as a borda, and scarcely seeming to feel the weight.

The Arab is habitually kind to his beast of burden, at least he is no more cruel to him than most lighter coloured humanity, and not nearly as much so as the Sicilian and the Spaniard.

The little donkey to which the Prophet showed compassion was doubtless a contrary little beast at times; but, since he is reputed to have been able to go leagues and leagues without either eating or drinking, loaded with burdens at which a full-grown mule and horse had balked, the bourriquet of the desert Arab must have had (and has) some undeniable virtues. Not often is his lot an unhappy one, and the strangling curb and bit and the resounding whacks from a spade or shovel, with which the sunny-faced Italian usually regales his four-footed friends, are seldom to be noted in North Africa. The Arab is voluntarily just towards all living things, and if he sometimes forgets himself, and gives his camel or his donkey a vicious prod, he, perhaps, has had provocation, for both are contrary beasts at times.

En route one passes many caravans, fifty or a hundred camels in a bunch, half as many horses and mules, a score of donkeys, and a troop of women, children, and dogs bringing up the rear. Most of them are making for Kairouan or Gabès, coming from Algeria through the gateways of El Oued and Ourgala. The camels march in Indian file, loaded down with bales and barrels, a hundred, a hundred and fifty and more kilos to each. No other means of transportation is so practicable for the commerce of the desert, nor will be until some one invents a broad-tired automobile that won’t sink in the sand. The camel’s foot, by the way, doesn’t sink in the sand, and that is why he is more of a success in the desert than any other carrier. When the ideal automobile for the desert comes, the ship of the desert will disappear, as the horse is disappearing from the cities and towns of Europe and America.

Intermingled with the caravans are occasional flocks of sheep, black-faced sheep and rams, with two, three, and even four horns apiece, and fat, wobbly tails of extraordinary size, the characteristic, it seems, of the sheep of the Sud-Tunisien. Like the hump and the six stomachs of the camel, this fat caudal appendage of the Tunisian sheep is a sort of reserve supply of energy, and when it is dry picking along the route, they live on their fat. Other animals often starve under like conditions.

Long before Tozeur is reached one wonders if the guide has not lost his bearings. Probably he hasn’t, but it is all like the trackless ocean to the man in the saddle, and the mule or donkey or camel doesn’t seem to care in the least which way his head is turned so long as he is not made to push forward at full speed.

If one encounters a native, the guide being momentarily hidden behind a sand-dune, most likely a bonjour or a salut will be forthcoming; but that is all. The native’s French vocabulary is often small, and in these parts he is quite as likely to know as much of Italian, Maltese or Hebrew. One that we encountered looked particularly intelligent, so after the formal courtesies of convention, we risked:

“Tozeur? loin?”

“Là-bas.”

“Combien de temps?”

“Il en faut.”

“Quelle distance?”

“Au bout.”

Our interrogatory was not a success. Another time we should trust to our guide and bury suspicion. The Arab has some admirable traits, but he often does not carry things to a finish, not even for his own benefit, and his acquaintance with French is apt to be limited and his conversation laconic. The Oriental proverb on the life of the nomad suits the Arab to-day as well as it ever did.

Finally a blue line of haze appears on the horizon, something a little more tangible than anything seen before, unless indeed it prove to be a mirage. If not a mirage, most likely it is Tozeur, or rather the palms surrounding that sad, but interesting centre of civilization.

“Tozeur?” you ask again, of Mohammed this time, and that faithful Arab with a curt assent breathes the words “C’est bien ça.” Mohammed is learned, has mingled with the world, and is suspicious that your confidence in his powers is not all that he would have wished. “Well, here we are,” he thinks, “now what have you got to say?” “C’est bien ça: Tozeur! Oui! oui! Je n’ai trompé pas jamais, moi, Mohammed.” By this time he has thought it all out and is really mad, but his mood soon passes and he becomes as before, taciturn, faithful and willing. The Arab doesn’t bear malice for trivial things.

By contrast with the houses of Kairouan, Sousse and Sfax, which cut the blue of the sky with a dazzling line of white, Tozeur is but a low, rambling mud-coloured town of native-made bricks called tobs. The impression from

afar is one singularly sad and gloomy, for the architectural scheme of the builders of Tozeur is more akin to that of the Soudanese than to that of the Berber or Arab. In its detailed aspect the architecture of Tozeur is remarkably appealing, quaint, decorative, and founded on principles which the Roman builders of old spread to all corners of the known world of their day. This may be the evolution of the architecture of Tozeur or it may not, but certainly the flat-brick construction is wonderfully like that of the baths and cisterns of the Romans.

Tozeur itself is melancholy, but its situation is charming and contrastingly interesting to all who hitherto have known only the Arabe-Mauresque architecture of the cities of the littoral, or the Roman ruins of the dead cities of Lambessa, Timgad and Tebessa. The little garrison which the French planted here some years ago has gone, and only a few European functionaries remain, those in control of the impôt, a doctor and an innkeeper, who doubtless means well, but who has a most inadequate establishment. And this in spite of the fact that Tozeur is the capital of the Djérid.

The Djérid itself is a great expansive region between the plateau steppes and the desert proper. The natives are Berbers who have become what the French call Arabisé, though many of their traditions seem to be paganly Roman rather than Mussulman.

The hotel accommodations of Tozeur are endurable, but as before said they are inadequate. Travellers are rare in this desert oasis, and two or three sleeping-rooms scantily furnished—a bed, a chair and a wash-basin—are the extent of the resources of Mme. Besson’s apologetic little hotel.

Tozeur’s market is a mere alley of inverted V-shaped huts of reed, wherein are sold—after much solemn bargaining and drinking of coffee—all the small wants of the desert Arab, such as a morsel of town-baked bread, hobnails for his shoes, a piece of tanned leather—with the fur on—with which to make a new sole, a hank of thread, a tin pot or pan, or a bandanna handkerchief—which however must have stamped upon its border some precept from the Koran. The Arab’s personal wants are not great, and as he almost invariably carries his worldly goods about with him they are accordingly not bulky.

Our only diversion at Tozeur was watching an hysterical fête or pilgrimage to the neighbouring tomb of a marabout who died in recent years richly endowed with sanctity. The history of this holy man was told us as follows:

This man, Alfaoui, had lived all his life in Algeria, practising the virtues of the Koran so assiduously that he was reckoned by his friends and neighbours as one of the good and great. Having taken too active a part in the insurrection of 1871, when the whole country—except Kabylie—was ablaze with sedition, he fled precipitately from Algeria and settled with his goods and chattels at Tamerza in Tunisia, one of the oasis villages of Tozeur, arriving in time to great repute and respect among the people.

Alfaoui’s compact with Allah was not however so intimate but that he occasionally conspired against the French, who, in the eighties, came to occupy Tunisia, as they had Algeria fifty years before. His conspiracies were in a way harmless enough, and consisted principally in “doing” the French officials at every opportunity. He refused to pay his taxes, and advised his followers to do the same; he smuggled tobacco, firearms and matches, and trafficked in them among the natives, to the loss of a certain revenue to the fiscal authorities, who, when they finally ran him to earth en flagrant délit, found only some thousands of empty match boxes with English labels,—but made in Belgium nevertheless,—the kind of matches where you scratch three before you get one to burn, or as the French say of their own abominable allumettes, it takes a match to light a match.

Alfaoui was tried and condemned by the French tribunal, and it was this ready-made “martyrdom by infidels” that caused the faithful roundabout to elevate the meddlesome Alfaoui the Algerian to the distinction of a marabout, and a house or kouba was built for him entirely of brick taken from the sepulchres of a neighbouring cemetery. Thus are holy reputations made to order in the fanatical faith of the Mussulman. Alfaoui’s followers to-day are many, and without knowing why they venerate him, thousands make the pilgrimage to his shrine, and wail and chant and weep and have a good time generally. The government says nothing. It fears nothing to-day, and since the Mussulman must have many and convenient shrines for the excesses of his devotion to the principles of the Koran, why that of a contrebandier and agitator serves as well as any other and no harm done.

The great date-palm plantations of Tozeur are watered by a complicated system of irrigating canals whose flood-gates are opened every morning by the authorities. A very deep spring gives an abundant supply of sweet, limpid water which runs in miniature rivulets around and through the tentacle-like roots of the Djérid’s million palm-trees, bringing the means of livelihood and prosperity to a conglomerate population of thirty thousand souls. Thirty millions of kilogrammes of dates bring a considerable profit to the cultivator, even if a goodly share does go to the exploiter, the transportation company and the middleman. Four hundred thousand frances in taxes and duties are collected yearly, from this most fertile of all African date-growing regions.

All this is something to think about and marvel at when one is threading his way slowly through the palisaded trunks of a grove of a million palm-trees. The Arab knows the value of dates as a food product, but it needed the European to exploit the industry profitably.

The Arab’s veneration for the date-palm is great, and he affectionately refers to it as “the tree which grows with its feet in the water and its head in the fire of the sky.”

There is another product of the palm-tree less beneficial to man, and that is a sort of wine or sap which is gathered much as the Mexican gathers pulque, or as the resin is sapped from the pine-tree. It’s a soft, pleasant, somewhat sticky liquid, seemingly innocuous, but its after effects may be safely guaranteed as being of the “stone-fence” variety. The Arab, by tradition, is a temperate person in food and drink, but the European has taught him to drink white wine and he himself has copied the French and taken (in small numbers fortunately) to absinthe, and now he has got a ready-made distillery of lagmi in every palm-tree. The government proposes some sort of control of this “moonshining,” but the wheels of the law, like those of God, move slowly, and the seed of dissolution may yet be sown among the Arabs of Tozeur before the fiscal authorities find a way to levy a tax on lagmi.

No one who ever saw the indigène villages attached to a fertile Saharan oasis will fail to remark that in spite of the proximity of the cool, welcome shadow of the thick-growing palm-trees, the adobé (tob) huts are invariably huddled together upon some blazing, baked spot of ground with not so much shelter from the sun’s rays as is given by a flagpole. Why indeed is it so? The Arab may be like the Neapolitan in his contempt for those who walk or live in the shade, but certainly the sun-baked existence which most dwellers in Arab mud houses live for twelve months out of the twelve must be enervating and discouraging, or would be if the Arab ever felt the effects of heat and cold, which apparently he does not. Perhaps this is the explanation of the motive which prompts him to select his town sites where he does. The case is not so hopeless though; the palm-tree grows quickly; and a dozen years would transform the most dreary, monotonous Arab town of sun-cured mud walls and roofs into a garden city which would rival Paradise. Perhaps some day the “movement”—as we call the latest vogue in America and England—will strike North Africa, and then we shall have graded streets, lamp-posts on every corner and artificial lakes with goldfish in them. And then where will be the rude picturesqueness of the Arab town which charms us to-day?

Tozeur is not a lovely town, even as African towns go, but it is interesting, comfortable, and accessible, after you have once got to Sfax and Gafsa. It is altogether a little bit of mediævalism which even the life of the Arab of to-day cannot change. And there is scarcely any evidence plainly visible to indicate that Tozeur is not living three centuries back in the past.

The environs of Tozeur offer views of ravishing beauty to the artist or the more sentimentally inclined. From the height of the minaret of Ouled-Medjed one commands a view of the entire oasis of Degach, with here and there a clump of dismantled ruined habitations and on the horizon the illimitable, miraculous desert mirage.

To the direct south is the great chott, so shallow that the trail to Gabès can cross it at its widest part. To the four cardinal points one frames his views of that marvellous African landscape; seen only at its best from within a horseshoe-arched window, the invariable ogive accompaniment of the true Arab replica of Moorish architecture.

The view from the height of Tozeur’s mosque is a replica of that of which Richepin sang. It is not Kipling, but it is good sentiment, nevertheless.

Coming down to earth, and making our way gropingly back to Mme. Besson’s humble rest house, a storm broke over our heads. It came with the suddenness of night; and sticks and stones and much sand, and hailstones as big as plover’s eggs, fell through a suffocating stillness with blinding force. It was all over in a moment. It came and went like the characters of the stage, without announcement and without adieu, and Tozeur settled down again to its wonted calm.

The muezzin calls to prayer at sundown and night falls brusquely on the silent desert air as if an inky wave had engulfed all before it.

THE END.

Index

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, Y, Z