Chapter III: Part 3

I point out a genuine Arab who happens to be passing; he has come down from the hills and is leading a camel loaded with halfa; he is gaunt and ill-clad, but walks with a fine swagger, and is evidently a valuable young person, to judge by his tattooings.

"That? That's only a young savage from the mountains. How are you to find out anything about him? And I make a point, you know, of only recording what I see with my eyes. No theories for me! I mean to see everything and to set it down; to describe the Arabs as they are--as they _really are_, in all the circumstances of their daily lives. One must see everything."

As a painter, I urge, he must have discovered how useful it is to restrict the field of vision now and then; to be deliberately half blind.

"Painting, Monsieur, is one thing, and writing another. It is one of the few advantages of growing old that things begin to fall, so to speak, into their proper places. When I go to my studio, I go for distraction; art, it seems to me, is there to create moods, pleasurable or otherwise; a painter must seize impressions. But I go to my library for information; the business of a writer is to collect and arrange facts; a book, as I apprehend it, should be--a book. That is my quarrel with this Tunisian literature; many of the things that have been written about the country are not books at all; while others are full of mistakes. Look at these two volumes, for instance! Impressionistic realism, I suppose they would call it, scrawled down by an excitable female journalist who, I am sorry to say, has created quite a rage for European and American lady tourists among these Arabs, to the great discredit of our civilization. Read them, Monsieur, as a warning example, and perhaps you will give me your Bordereau instead; there may be something in it, after all."

I gladly make the exchange, and regard the transaction in the light of an omen, an epoch. I have been craving for something different from the facts of Bordereau, who has been my companion all these days. A solid little piece of work, by the way, which often set me wondering whether our British public would care to pay four shillings for a technical account of the climate, history and natural products of some remote Egyptian oasis. But perhaps the cost of production has been defrayed by some Government department.

These two volumes by Isabelle Eberhardt--where have I heard that name before?--look tempting. I promise myself some hours of pleasant reading.

"And then, for downright misstatement," he continued, "look at this. Here is a Monsieur Kocher, who passes for an authority, and who, describing the Arab marriage customs, talks of the 'brutalité du viol dans le marriage--un drame lugubre.' Now that comes of not examining things with one's own eyes. Since my arrival here I have already seen several Arab weddings and something of their married life, and I must say, candidly, that I find it full of romance. Say what you will, these Arabs are unconscious poets."

"And if you want still further information," I said, "ask the boy whom I saw blacking your boots this morning. He will describe to you the minutest details of his married life with surprising frankness. His father bought him a wife two weeks ago, under the condition, however, that his little brother is to be allowed to share in the joys of matrimony. That young savage from the mountains would blush, if Arabs ever could blush, to hear their revelations."

"Oh, oh, oh! You appal me! But I would like to make personal enquiries into the matter; that is, if I can make them understand me. It is my rule, you know."

"Do, Monsieur; question both the brothers, and write down their answers, the perusal of which will be a liberal education for our boys at home. Among other things, they say that whenever----But here is Madame coming!"

"Never mind her! She takes an interest in Arab institutions, as I do.... Only imagine, Amélie, our shoeblack is said to be actually married; and so is his little brother, and they have one and the same bride! Two husbands to one wife, or half a wife apiece--what do you think of that?"

"I think it's quite enough to begin with. Remember, _mon cher_, they are only children."

_Chapter X_

_THE OASIS OF LEILA_

I rode, for a farewell visit, to the small oasis of Leila, or Lalla, which lies a few miles beyond the railway station. It is one of several parasitic oases of Gafsa: a collection of mud-houses whose gardens are watered by a far-famed spring, the fountain of Leila.

The water gushes out, tepid and unpleasant to the taste--but health-giving, they say, like so many unpleasant things--from under steep banks of clay through which the railway to Sfax has been cut. It is a sleepy hollow of palms, a place to dream away one's cares. The picturesque but old-fashioned well at this spot has just been replaced by a modern trough of cement. I watched the work from beginning to end, ten or fifteen Arabs, supervised by a burly Sicilian mason, finishing the job in a few days.

"These Saracens!"--such was the overseer's constant lament--"these Saracens! You don't know, dear sir, what fools they are."

In never-ending procession of gaudy rags the village folk come to these waters, the boys mostly on horseback, the women afoot. Donkeys are loaded with the heavy black goat-skins of water; there is laundry-work going on, and a good deal of straightforward love-making under the shade. These children of nature have a wild beauty of their own, and the young girls are frolicsome as gazelles and far less timid. They have none of the pseudo-bashfulness of the townsfolk. For the rest, only the _dessus du panier_ of womankind goes veiled hereabouts--a few portly dames of Gafsa, that is, who are none the worse, I suspect, for keeping their features hidden. Perhaps the good looks of these Leila people are a heritage from olden days, for this oasis is known to be a race islet, inhabited almost exclusively by men of the Ellez stock--one of the three races that have chiefly contributed to the formation of the modern Gafsa type; a conquering brood of European origin, small but shapely.

But untold ages ere this the waters of Leila were already frequented by men of another kind, by the flint-artists. Among the relics of their occupation I picked up, here, an unusually fine implement of the "amygdaloid" shape.

Not a soul in Gafsa, native or foreign, could tell me who was the lady Leila that gave her name to this fountain. On the spot, however, I heard this tale: She was a young girl, madly enamoured of an Arab youth, but strictly guarded. Her married sister alone knew of their infatuation, and used to help her by keeping a look-out for him at the water-side; and when he appeared, she would return home and sing to herself (as if it were a snatch of some old ditty)--Leila, Leila, your lover comes! But the maiden understood, and swiftly, under pretence of fetching water, she would run to meet him at the well, and take her joy. The story has an air of probability; such things are done every day, at every fountain throughout the land. This lingering at the well is one of the moments when their hard life is irradiated by a gleam of romance.

An old man also gave me the following account:--

Ages ago, he said, when Gafsa belonged to the Sultan of Trablus (Tripoli) there was sad misgovernment in the land. The taxes became quite unendurable, and the city was half emptied of its inhabitants, who fled this way and that, rather than submit to the extortions of the Sultan's officers. And among those who escaped in this fashion was a god-fearing widow and her children. Her name was Leila. She took up her abode near this fountain, which was then little frequented. Here she dwelt, doing good works whenever occasion offered. And here, at length, she was received into the mercy of Allah and entombed. The country-folk gave her name to the water, to perpetuate the memory of her pious life....

The depression beyond this fountain is celebrated as the resort of game, and yesterday a French gentleman of my acquaintance went there, provided with all the accoutrements of sport, not omitting a copious luncheon-basket--there might be snipe or partridges, or perhaps a hare, a gazelle, a leopard--who knows?

He returned in good time for dinner.

"_Voilà ma chasse_!" he said, opening his bag. It contained a bundle of wild asparagus, for salad, and fourteen frogs, which he had killed with a rifle.

"You can't get frogs as easily in my part of France," he told me. "If the sport were not forbidden for seven months out of the twelve, the species would long ago have become extinct."

I enquired whether the close-season for frogs was officially set down, like that of hares or wildfowl.

"Frogs," he explained, "are not considered game in the governmental sense of that word; they fall into the category of fisheries which, as you know, comes under the jurisdiction of the respective prefects. Hence the close-time, though officially fixed, varies according to the different provinces. In my department, for example, it begins on the 15th of January. At Gafsa, if I may judge by certain indications, it would probably be arranged to commence still earlier."

Far be it from me to decry the succulent hams of _Rana esculenta_ (or rather _ridibunda_). I have been offered far more fearful wild-fowl nearer home--certain ornithological wrecks, I mean, that have been kept beyond the feather-adhering stage, and then reverently held before a fire, for two minutes, wrapped in a bag, lest the limbs should drop off.

There is considerable talk at Gafsa of the wild mountain sheep, the Barbary mouflon. They say that as late as the early nineties it was no uncommon thing to meet with flocks of over thirty grazing in the mountains. Although a special permit must now be obtained to be allowed to shoot them, their numbers have much diminished. But the accounts vary so wonderfully that one cannot form any idea of their frequency. Some talk of seventeen being shot in the course of two weeks' camping, others of three in a whole season. As a rule, they are not stalked, but driven, by an army of Arabs which the sheikh organizes for that purpose, towards certain openings in the hills where the sportsman takes up his stand. The desert lynx is sometimes met with, and hyenas, they say, occur as near to Gafsa as the Jebel Assalah. Arabs have told me that the fat of the hyena is used by native thieves and burglars to smear on their bodies when they go marauding. The dogs, they say, are so terrorized by the smell of it, so numbed with fear and loathing, that they have not the heart to bark. (Pliny records an ancient notion to the effect that dogs, on coming in contact with the hyena's shadow, lose their voice.)

Here, at the Jebel Assalah, I encountered a jackal--a common beast, but far oftener heard than seen. While resting in a sunny hollow of rock, I heard a wild cry which came from a shepherd who was driving the jackal away from his goats. The discomfited brute trotted in my direction, and only caught sight of me at a few yards' distance. I never saw a jackal more surprised in my life. When a camel expires in the plain near some nomads' tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap for jackals near the carcase--they eat these beasts and sell their skin for a few francs; the traps are craftily concealed underground, with a little brushwood thrown over them to aid the deception. It is impossible to be aware of their existence. But woe betide the wanderer who steps on them!

For the machine closes with the shock of an earthquake, a perfect volcano of dust and iron teeth leaping into the air. Its force is such that the jackal's leg is often cut clean off, and he hops away on the remaining three. For this and other reasons, therefore, it is advisable not to approach too near a dead camel.

The desert hare is shot or coursed with muzzled greyhounds, _sloughis_, who strike it down with their paws; unmuzzled, they rend it to pieces. There are few of them in Gafsa just now, on account of the cold to which they are sensitive; although muffled in woollen garments they shiver pitifully. Of falconers, I have only met one riding to the chase. It was the Kaid of Gafsa, a wealthy man of incalculable political influence both here and in Tunis. It is even whispered--But no; one must not repeat all one hears....

With the proprietor's permission I went over a young plantation of trees and vegetables that has sprung up near the railway line, about halfway between Gafsa and Leila. Excavating to a depth of six metres at the foot of the bare Rogib hill, they encountered an apparently unlimited supply of water, and here, where formerly nothing but a few scorched grasses and thorns could be seen, is now a luxuriant little oasis. More might be done with the place, but the owner seems to have lost interest in it; the locusts, too, have been rather destructive of late.

He had planted quantities of prickly pears, he said, but the Bedouins' cattle had devoured them. These are useful growths in Tunisia, requiring hardly any moisture and forming, when full-grown, impenetrable walls of spiky green. They also bring in a respectable revenue. In the district of Kairouan, for instance, many families draw their entire income from them. A few have been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near Gafsa, but they are unprotected and liable to be trodden down in their early years, or eaten. Barbed wire, herald of civilization, is almost unknown in these parts.

Like most tradespeople, this proprietor was rather despondent about the future of Gafsa. There had certainly been some improvement within the last twenty years--slight, but steady; the building of the railway station so far outside the town he considered a disgraceful piece of jobbery, a crime which had permanently injured the prospects of the place. Merchants, he said, are entirely dependent on the state of the Metlaoui mines. If, like last year, these do well, then Gafsa also thrives. If there is a strike or over-production, as at this moment, Gafsa suffers.

Tourists come to this town, he said, but they leave next day. Nothing is done to make their stay agreeable.

The natives are not of a kind to take much interest in its welfare. Gafsa has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches' cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some men that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the savage Neanderthal brood that lived here in prehistoric times, the only pure race-type that survives is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to which Monsieur Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa, has already referred. No wonder; since Egyptian invasions of this region went on for centuries, culminating in the extended sea-dominion of Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth century B.C.

A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the place up to the thirteenth century A.D.

This confusion of blood has done one good thing for them--it has given them considerable tolerance in matters of religion. They are the least bigoted Orientals one could wish to meet. Only fifteen in a hundred, perhaps even less, perform the devotions prescribed by the Prophet. And it is part of their charming heterodoxy to be dog-eaters. They will catch and devour each other's dogs; they even breed them for the market, though they dare not expose the meat publicly, any more than that of swine, which they eat with relish. But up to a few days ago they had never ventured to touch the dog of a foreigner. On Wednesday evening, however, a fox-terrier belonging to a French official was found in the street, dead, with its throat cut. A stream of blood was traced from that spot to the door of a native eating-shop, and enquiries from the neighbours elicited the fact that the cook of the establishment had caught the beast and cut its throat; that the miserable creature, in its dying struggles, had escaped from his grasp and run in the direction of home, only to stagger by the roadside and expire from loss of blood.

There was a wild excitement over this little episode. The dog of a Frenchman killed, for culinary purposes, by an Arab; it was the _comble_ of temerity! The owner of the animal, on hearing the news, buckled on his revolver and repaired to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already conjured into some safe place of custody. If he is wise he will languish in prison for some days longer.

Gafsa lies high, and I ask myself whether its fierce shiftings of heat and cold, its nocturnal radiation that splits the very rocks and renders life impossible for many plants (outside the cultivated zone, which equalizes these extremes)--whether all this has not had a numbing and stupefying influence on the character of the inhabitants. Would not a man, under such perennial vexations, end in bowing his head and letting things take their course? I notice the climatic effect upon myself is a growing incapacity for mental effort. It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun, they say, still exhales a certain amount of warmth.

Add to this, Arab frugality and the cheapness of native living throughout the country, which removes all stimulus to work. A middle-class citizen tells me that he has just returned from Tunis, where a lawsuit had kept him for two years. He went there with an overland caravan which cost next to nothing; he slept in a _zaouiah_, where he also obtained a bath gratis; he spent on his food four sous a day, neither more nor less, and by way of amusement took coffee with his friends or strolled down to the harbour to look at the ships. Six pounds in two years! And natives in authority, who are generally the richest, pay nothing whatever for their nourishment. Like the Kaid of Gafsa, they simply requisition it in the market; the sellers grumble, but conform to custom.

How quickly their looks can improve is shown by those who join the army. In a few months they grow fat, cheerful, and bright-complexioned, thanks to the hygienic life and better food. As it is, I have noticed single individuals among the poorest classes who look remarkably well as compared with their fellows. "They drink milk," was the explanation given me.

There is vitality enough among the young boys who play hockey--these ball games are non-Arabic, a relic of Berberism--and keep up the sport till late at night amid a good deal of ill-tempered fighting and pulling about. Their mothers' milk is still inside them; they have not yet succumbed to the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits of their elders. But soon manhood descends upon them like a cataclysm; it tears them with a frenzy which is anything but divine and thereafter absorbs them, to the exclusion of every other interest. Hockey-sticks are thrown away....

That witchery of Orientalism, with its immemorial customs, its wondrous hues of earth and sky--it exists, chiefly, for the delectation of hyperborean dreamers. The desert life and those many-tinted, mouldering cities have their charms, but the misery at intermediate places like Gafsa (and there are hundreds of them) is too great, too irremediable to be otherwise than an eyesore. They have not solved the problem of the simple life, these shivering, blear-eyed folk. Their daily routine is the height of discomfort; they are always ailing in health, often from that disease of which they plaintively declare that "whoever has not had it, cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven," and which, unlike ourselves, they contract by their patriarchal habit of eating and drinking out of a common dish. They die like flies. Naturally enough; for it is not too much to say, of the poorer classes, that they eat dirt, and that only once a day. A fresh shirt in the year is their whole tailor's bill; two or three sous a day will feed them; sunshine, and the stone floor of a mosque or coffee-house by night, is all they ask for, and more than they sometimes get.

An old Arab song contains words to this effect: "Kafsa is miserable; its water is blood; its air is poison; you may live there a hundred years without making a friend." No doubt the plethoric Sicilian mason at the Leila fountain would thoroughly endorse this statement with his "Ah, signore--these Saracens!"... But one learns to like the people none the less. They are merely depressed; they are not deficient in mother-wit or kindliness; a little good food would work wonders.

The oasis people are milk-drinkers, and would be healthier than the townsmen but for the agues, fevers and troublesome "Gafsa boil" to which they are subject.

I go to these plantations at night-time, after dinner, when the moon plays wonderful tricks of light and shadow with the over-arching foliage. The smooth sandy stretches at the outskirts of the gardens shine like water at rest, on which the leaves of an occasional sparse tuft of palms are etched with crystalline hardness of delineation.

This untilled region is most artistic, the isolated clumps shooting up like bamboos out of the bare soil. The whole grove is still wrapped in its wintry sleep, and one can look through the naked branches of the fruit trees into its furthest reaches. Only the palm leaves overhead and the ground at one's feet are green; the middle spaces bleak and brown. But, do what he will, a man who has lived in the tropics becomes rather _blasé_ in the matter of palms. Besides, there are no flints to be found here....

Yet such is the abundance of water that these Gafsa gardens have a character different from most African plantations. They are more artlessly furnished, with rough, park-like districts and a not unpleasing impression of riot and waste--waste in the midst of plenty.

Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of country--the temperate region at the tail-end of the grove. Only olives grow here; seventy-five thousand of them. Beside their silvery-grey trunks you may see herds of the small but brightly-tinted oxen reposing; the ground is pied with daisies and buttercups, oleanders border the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of the _djouak_, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound from some hidden copse.

There will be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the carefully-tended oases of the Djerid.

_Chapter XI_

_A HAVEN OF REFUGE_

The cold being past all endurance and belief, I was tempted to fulfil my promise and call upon Monsieur Dufresnoy. What kind of man was this that managed to survive it?

They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildings of the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle; only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused--it was grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment about the mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might turn on their rusty hinges.

Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly panic.

M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost ran into me. I tried to explain the sensations his domicile had aroused in my mind; he laughed at first, and then admitted that he had often felt the same thing. The house was apt to look like that, he said, when his wife was away.

The inside appearance, once that portal has been passed, is quite different, and I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing the place, as it is one of the surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-houses that date from better days, being built originally for some Turkish grandee or governor--for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing widow to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step through the gate into an open square patio, surrounded, on the sides not abutting on the street, by an arched passage that reposes on old Roman columns. This covered loggia, running round three fronts of the court, is the feature of the house: wonderful how a few arcades and pillars will impart an air of distinction and even luxury! Almost nothing has been done to change the old appearance of this small but well-proportioned patio; the walls have been freshly whitewashed, the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright flower-bed set in the centre--nothing more.

The five or six lower rooms to which the loggia gives access must be delightfully cool in summer, but they are dark and chilly at this season. Luckily, the mansion possesses an upper story where the family resides during the winter, in rooms that are actually floored with wood. From here, looking out of the windows, there is a wondrous view over a wilderness of decayed Arab dwellings upon the oasis beyond, and the distant purple mountains.

There is an irresistible air of geniality about this home: can it be the house itself? For a subtle influence, no doubt, penetrates to the heart of man from the mere form and disposition of inanimate things. I was prepared to be smothered in a profusion of local effects; of saddle-cloths, silk hangings, water-pipes, daggers and match-locks, dim nooks with divans, and those other decorations that suggest the glamour of the Orient to certain Western minds. Or again, I said to myself, this European wife will have imported certain tastes from over the sea; the house will be replete with trifles carefully disposed in negligent fashion, silver photograph frames and flower vases reposing on diminutive tables, and such-like indications of what our novelists call the "tender but indefinable touches of a woman's hand."

Nothing of the kind. The place is simply comfortable: it appeals to one's sense of propriety. There are carpets and genuine arm-chairs--unique phenomena in this part of the world; best of all, fire-places wherein ample logs of olive-wood glimmer and glister all day long.

And so the last few days have passed. Mentally, too, I am thawing once more; the hotel life and solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me disagreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps stimulating in youth and in the plenitude of health; but there comes a period when one lives less in future dreamings than in the experiences of the past--unpleasant company, for the most part; when one craves to see the faces and hear the opinions of rational fellow-creatures; when one requires, in short, to be distracted. This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the significance of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian hotels can only be inhabited by young hopefuls.

The house contains a considerable library of local literature--mostly technical and dealing with Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it intelligible to a simple traveller like myself. From certain books I have begun to make extracts concerning the places I am likely to visit: Metlaoui, the Djerid oases, and the Chott country.

Dufresnoy is essentially a mining engineer. He evidently knows his business thoroughly; he has been employed in various parts of the French dominions and likes the work; all of which has not prevented him from becoming a man of the world and keeping his other intellectual pores open. There is nothing of the professional in his conversation. He is rather undemonstrative, for a Frenchman.

He told me an odd thing about the native rising in Thala in 1896, when a marabout preached death to all foreigners, with the result that several white men were murdered (it was a hastily collected band of Italian tradesmen who put down the insurrection). They caught him, and in due time he died (?) in prison--they were probably afraid to execute him: perhaps he killed himself--and the odd thing is this: that although the necessary sum has been contributed for erecting a monument to these unhappy victims of native ferocity, yet the Franco-Tunisian authorities are averse to the plan, on the ground that such a public monument might offend Arab susceptibilities. This struck me as overdoing the "pacific penetration" policy; and he thought so too, more especially as there is a commemorative stone to some preposterous native bigot at the very place....

I shall be sorry to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui. In him I often admire that fine trait of his race: the clarifying instinct. He possesses--with no pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere--an innate rigour of judgment in every matter of the mind; he avoids crooked thinking by a process of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear intuitive. Even as a true collector of antiques has quite a peculiar way of handling some rare snuff-box or Tanagra statuette and, though unacquainted with that particular branch of art, yet straightway classes it correctly as to its merits, so, to him, an idea of whatever kind is an _objet de vertu_, to be appraised with unfailing accuracy. He is a connoisseur of abstractions. What the Goth carves out grotesquely after a painful labour of mental elimination, the right deposited, as residue, after a thousand wrongs--what the Latin smothers under a deluge of mere words: this your Frenchman of such a type will nimbly disentangle from all its unessentials; he presents it to your inspection in reasonable and convincing shape--purified, clipped, pruned. What is this gift, this distinguishing mark?

Discipline of the mind, culminating in intellectual chastity--in what may be called a horror of perverse or futile reasoning.

He mentioned, incidentally, the case of suicides among the natives to prove that the _Mektoub_ doctrine is not wholly pernicious. Suicides were quite unusual, he said; the Arabs do not seem to be able to fall in with the idea, preferring to bear the greatest evils rather than take an active part in the undoing of themselves. That was _Mektoub_: to bow the head, dumbly resisting. And were they not right? Did not the great majority of European cases of suicide imply a neurotic condition--such as when men of business have suffered reverses on Exchange or lost some trivial appointment? How easily things could be bridged over, or repaired, or even endured! The most hopeless invalid could testify to the fact that some pleasure can still be extracted out of a maimed or crippled existence; a man, however impoverished, might still live in dignified and fairly cheerful fashion.

He thought that in the matter of suicides, as in that of remorse, we were too "spectacular and altruistic"; that we lived in a rather unwholesome atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas concerning honour and duty; that the _Mektoub_ practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying primitive sanity which we would do well to foster within us.

_Chapter XII_

_THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT_

Gafsa, even Gafsa, has its enigmas.

I climbed this afternoon to the summit of the Rogib hill, which lies near the railway station, on the further side of the Oued Baiesh. This, presumably, is the site where Marius halted for the last time before attacking the town; and the spot was also interesting to me on account of its flint implements....

A sad and barren range of hills. There was no sunshine, for a scirocco-storm raised clouds of dust and obscured the sky; the wind was bitterly cold. Finding it impossible to attune my phantasy to the picture of Marius and his soldiers, I descended once more.

On the station turnpike I overtook a solitary foot-passenger, who plodded slowly along. It was the Polish Count. He had been absent from the hotel for several days, and now appeared to be in the gloomiest of humours.

Where had he been?

For a promenade, he said. It was too dreary sitting indoors, all alone. He had left the hotel. The place was too noisy: the dogs barked incessantly. He had taken rooms with a Jew, and arranged to have his meals at a small Italian _trattoria_.

This was a half-truth, I felt sure. The dogs of Gafsa, no doubt, are past all endurance; they are worse than in any Turkish village where they howl at least in unison, and so continuously through the night that one ceases to take note of them; but the man's real reason for this change of domicile was probably another one.

"You must find that much quieter," I said, "and cheaper as well. These hotels are rather pretentious."

"Pretentious and dear. Here I am, stranded in an unknown place, without friends; remittances are due to me, and they never come"--he broke into the subject without reserve--"and it is hard, I assure you, to deprive oneself of things, of trifles, if you like to call them so, to which one is nevertheless accustomed and entitled, so to speak, by birthright. But I am talking to the winds, no doubt. You, Monsieur, are one of the fortunate ones; you don't know--you don't know----"

"Yes I do," I replied, trying to think of something to say in the way of consolation. "I know quite well----"

"How do you know?" he interrupted. And next, with needless vehemence: "_What_ do you know?"

I was surprised at his sudden change of tone. It was awkward, all this. I gave utterance to such commonplaces on the instability of human affairs as occurred to me, and ended up by offering, I hope with sufficient delicacy, to assist him to the small extent that lay in my power.

"Ah!"

He seemed infinitely relieved by my words: he evidently expected some answer of quite another import. Turning his back to the wind, and pausing for a moment to adjust his clothing, he replied, with ambassadorial deliberation:

"You may be certain, Monsieur, that I would not easily forget a kindness of this nature; my lot in life has been far too unhappy to make me undervalue what you, a stranger, have just offered me. But I will decline: what are a few francs to me? Pray don't think me ungrateful, however. You have caught me in an almost delirious moment, and your friendly words just now, when I felt myself so abandoned and in so critical a state of mind, with this dreadful desert wind moaning and everything, as it seems, hostile to me: your kind words, I say, touched me more deeply than I can express." (Here he wiped away a genuine tear.) "But my luck may yet turn, and then, be sure, I will make you forget all my childish querulousness."

And he went on, almost gaily:

"I never could keep money! And the worst of it is, I hate work; I was not brought up to it, and you will admit that I am too old to begin life anew. Yet I object on principle to so-called charity, being intelligent enough to know that there is only one kind of charity, and Justice is its name. But what is justice? I suppose we all possess some kind of natural rights, according to our stations; justice, I take it, would consist in our being permitted to enjoy those rights. If this is correct, then--ah, Monsieur, the demoralizing effects of poverty, of non-justice, on a man like myself; how it lowers your self-respect and makes you capable of actions that you would reprobate, in your right mind--"

"In your right mind? Is a poor man, then, insane?"

"How can I make you understand? Tell me, is not poverty a kind of madness, an obsession that haunts you night and day? To puzzle, at every hour, how to meet this demand and how to shun that one; to deny yourself the necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you are yearning to bestow upon them--is it not a mental malady, a fever; is it not damnation itself? The thousand meannesses: how they degrade you; how they suck away your strength, your ambition, your faith! To see no openings before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair! I cannot hope to make you conceive such a hell: one must have been there oneself. But note this, Monsieur: never judge an impoverished man by your own standards of right and wrong--never! For the old-established meanings of things shift for him--they shift; and his temptations become formidably subtle beyond belief. When rich, he says calmly _Non; ça ne va pas_. But to forego an advantage, when poor, is the same as if--let me see ... as if one asked you to leave lying some fascinating flint in the desert waste."

"That simile, surely, is all wrong, Count. Nobody can be injured by my flint-mania, whereas----"

"I know, I know; I am not trying to excuse things; I am only explaining how they happen. But how explain to others? We always talk of putting ourselves in our neighbours' place; idlest of phrases! since we cannot possibly avoid bringing our personal apparatus to bear on their problems. There is a gulf between man and man. You will hardly believe that I used to take an interest--quite superficial, you know, but none the less real--in all those questions of the day that absorb the ordinary man of ease, in politics and art and whatnot; but nowadays all my interests are centred on one single point. On what point, do you think? On keeping up the external appearance, and the manners, of well-being. I have no energy left for anything else; and even this effort quite exhausts me. Art and politics! What, in the name of heaven, do I care for art and politics, with the knife at my throat? I only utilize these things; yes, I utilize them for conversational purposes, in order to deceive others as to my true, incessant and miserable preoccupations. Laughable, is it not? Why don't you smile, Monsieur--you, who have never known the bitterness?"

We were crossing the broad Oued Baiesh, a stretch of yellow sand and stones. To obviate damage by sudden floods, the French have covered this tract of the road with a coating of asphalt; but the busy life here, the droves of camels and sheep, the Arab folk laughing over their laundry-work in the shallow streamlet that trickles through the waste--all these things were gone for the moment.

But for the torn line of Gafsa palms that confronted us on the other side of the river-bed, we might have been in the veriest wilderness. Although the wind was lulled, petulant little pillars of sand still arose here and there among the boulders, and sank down again, as if exhausted; the descending sun had emerged, a lurid disk, framed in a sulphureous halo that melted imperceptibly into the gold of the west.

It was growing chillier than ever, and the Count, shivering with cold, drew his burnous more closely about him; he had bought one for fifteen francs, probably in imitation of myself, or because I once jokingly called it "a garment for millionaires who need not use their hands." He liked to be taken for a millionaire.

I looked at him awhile, wondering what thoughts were ruling the expression of his perplexed and sorrowful features, and then tried to turn the conversation into other channels.

"Are there interesting people at your Italian restaurant?"

"Well, there is Hirsch, the young German: you know him?"

"The police commissaire was talking to me about his case yesterday."

"Ha, was he? Let me tell you that I have investigated it thoroughly, and find it most instructive. This young fellow is not yet twenty; he ran away from home for no discoverable reason, then signed on a merchant vessel at Marseilles and, disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a night-train, thinking to reach Tunis. Instead of that, he woke up in the morning and found himself at Gafsa! Here, you see, are all the elements of wrong-doing, and the authorities have learnt his history from his papers which they seized. As a German and a Jew, the French instinctively dislike him; as a Jew and a foreigner--the Arabs; he is objectionable to look at, dull of wit, and knows not a word of French or Arabic. But he is poor, and therefore--every one loads him with kindness."

"And why not?" I asked.

"Why not, indeed? Your friend the magistrate has given him some money out of his own pocket; the restaurant proprietress refuses to be paid for his food, while another one, near the station, sends word to say that he can have a plate of soup there whenever he likes; a young Arab boy--these Arabs are really incomprehensible--gives him as many cups of tea or coffee as he can drink; a Jewish lawyer has sent him some clothes; a gentleman in your hotel a quantity of linen; the Italian barber shaves him gratis; a certain shopkeeper sends him a bottle of liqueur--of liqueur!--every second day; the commissaire has given him, free of charge, a decent unoccupied bedroom in the prison, where he can go in and out as he pleases; best of all, the _Ponts et Chaussées_ are now employing him at three francs a day--a princely income, they tell me--at some agricultural job: pure kindness, inasmuch as he has never handled a spade or pickaxe in his life. He can have a pleasant time in Gafsa; he can marry an heiress if so disposed; then, when the place begins to bore him, the German Consul in Tunis will repatriate him at his Government's expense. 'He's a poor devil,' they say. Why do I tell you all this? Because--well--I am also poor--"

Always harping on the old theme!

"The cases are not quite parallel, are they?"

"No. He is young, and fit for work, whereas I am past the middle term of life. Old age--another horror! Besides, I am a gentleman----"

"Exactly. We should be ashamed to shave you gratis."

"I suppose you're right, Monsieur. I was only trying to explain--to explain myself--to myself, I mean. Pardon me if I speak too much of my wretched affairs. But I'll tell you what I think. To endure this revolting destitution a man must be an Arab. Now, I cannot pretend to be an Arab; I would not adopt their ideals if I could. And yet, alas! I am beginning to believe in predestination, as they do; to believe that our faults and our virtues are distilled beforehand in the silent laboratory of the past. A sad creed, to think of men born to misfortune; to be obliged to consider yourself--how do you say in English?--_a stepchild of nature_...."

He was always a good talker, but it is impossible to describe the intensity of feeling in his speech to-day. He seemed to suffer from some imperious need of unburdening himself, even to a chance acquaintance like me; long days of loneliness, maybe, had worked on his nerves and produced a kind of congestion. But in his words and voice I detected lapses into other moods, into some other state of being; they gave me the impression as of two different individuals addressing me. The man did not ring true, altogether; he was mentally disorganized, disharmonious; those meretricious reasonings about justice, for example, struck me disagreeably.

And I could not help contrasting his rambling emotionalism with the logic--the relentless, diamond-like _justesse_--of the mining engineer. He is the very antithesis of that pellucid and homogeneous character. The sanguine temperament ...

What is a man of this type doing in Gafsa?

Mystery!

The rest of us, the cynical Greek doctor, the artist-sage and lover of Arab institutions, myself (flint-maniac)--to say nothing of men like Dufresnoy--we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we have a _raison d'etre_. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how incongruous a figure against that background of palms and barren mountains!

An enigmatical creature, and yet not wholly unlovable; he may be unsound or even unprincipled, he may be deficient in qualities that go to make men respected and satisfied with the world in general, but he possesses, I think, certain citizen-virtues unintelligible to the self-centred, rustic type of mind. He could be stirred to acts of unworldly enthusiasm; he would share his last crust with some shipwrecked sailor, or shed his blood gaily for a generous idea. And he is plainly in hard case just now.

_A stepchild of nature_....

"You have a very good English accent, Count."

"We were carefully brought up in languages. Not every one understands Polish, you know."

"By the way, how does it come about that you, being a Pole, should have a Russian family name?"

The question seemed to astonish and perplex him. At last he said:

"Oh, it's about the same thing, isn't it? Nowadays, I mean," he added, with grandiloquent pathos, "ever since the misfortunes of my unhappy country."

At the entrance to the town we separated, and I watched for some time his bowed form as it crept along the wood-market in the direction of the Kairouan road.

This is one of the figures that will persist in my mind very clear and pathetic, and I shall long remember those plaintive remarks about poverty that welled up, surely, from the bottom of his heart. How far, I wonder, is such a man the author of his own calamities, and how far have they _made him_? Academic questionings, based on out-of-date philosophy! Our vices, he said, are distilled for us beforehand in the dim laboratory of the past. His vice, evidently, is to hate work of every kind; his faculties, therefore, never undergo the rhythmic joy of reaction, for he is too well nourished to live the _vita minor_ of a starveling, to endure Arab acquiescence in non-production.

"I am only trying to explain myself--to myself." Half-truth, I imagine. He is probably conscience-stricken, or at least dissatisfied with his conduct for one reason or another, and endeavouring to justify some base plan of action by re-stating ethics in terms of hunger; a specious line of argument, since hunger is not the rule but the exception.

And then I shall think of his red nose and watery little eyes, his absurd jewellery--a fine presence, none the less, when he pulls himself together; there is about him an air of faded distinction that softly symbolizes the history of his adopted country.

The Count!

Why a count? Because all Poles are counts--those that are not princes. But why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as there is something international about a Pole--international, and yet neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know everybody, and everybody worth knowing is related to them, by marriage or otherwise, in this or some other century; as men of the world, they are ready to talk upon any subject with tolerance, geniality and a pleasingly personal note that withers up the commonplace, smoking, meanwhile, innumerable cigarettes out of mouthpieces which display a complex escutcheon contrived in gold and rubies upon the amber surface. Yes, his choice was good: Poles are gentlemen. But why caricature them? And why, above all things, select an inappropriate Muscovite name? That argues a lack of general intelligence and might easily spoil everything; so true it is, as a legal friend once observed to me, that "it takes a wise man to handle a lie. A fool had better remain honest."

What can be the meaning of this unlovely comedy? Some defalcation or forgery? Likely enough. But I think he lacks the cleverness requisite for a habitual criminal. Perhaps he is only a poor survivor, drifting about in lonely and distracted fashion while waiting for the inevitable end. Others may solve the enigma, but not I; for to-morrow we go to Metlaoui.

Yet I know that long after the palms and minarets of Gafsa have faded into the blurred image of countless other palms and other minarets, I shall be able to call up the figure of this forlorn and ambiguous fellow-creature, standing on the asphalt of the river-crossing with his cheap burnous wrapped around him, sighing, shivering, and setting forth certain views concerning human life for which there is, after all, a good deal to be said.

_Chapter XIII_

_TO METLAOUI_

I should be sorry to say how long the train takes to crawl through the thirty odd kilometres that separate Gafsa from Metlaoui. My companion on the trip, M. Dufresnoy, tells me that the return journey is still slower, because the line runs mostly uphill and the trucks, thirty or forty of them, are loaded with minerals. Fortunately, the car in which we travelled--each train has only a single passenger carriage--was comfortable, being built after the fashion of the Swiss "Aussichtswagen," with seats on the exterior platform whence one can admire the view.

It gave me some idea of the goods traffic (phosphates) along this line when he told me that during the past seven days 23,000 tons of mineral had been conveyed to the port of Sfax alone, to say nothing of those that had gone further on, to Sousse and Tunis. And not long ago, he said, the company had an unpleasant surprise: sixteen new engines of a powerful type, which they had ordered from Winterthur, were suddenly discovered to be liable to a duty of 1000 francs apiece as "imported articles."

"We can afford it," he said. "Our five hundred-franc shares are standing at three thousand seven hundred francs."

But he thought that a grave error had been committed in selecting the narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would have to deal with other material, such as tourists, that require fast services.

They had an accident last year. The couplings of a train, climbing uphill from Gafsa past the Leila oasis, suddenly broke, with the result that the rear portion rushed backwards again, careered through the Gafsa station and up the artificial incline which leads towards the Oued Baiesh, crossed the bridge, and thundered at a vertiginous pace into the desert beyond. As luck would have it, another train was just then approaching Gafsa. They collided with terrific force and, telescoping being out of the question since both were loaded with minerals, escaladed each other in Eiffel-tower fashion. Arab eye-witnesses say that the stoker of the up-train was thrown out by the impact and flew across country "like a bird" for half a mile; he alighted on his feet, and was found, after a week or so, wandering about the plain in a dazed condition. The driver was killed outright, and his widow draws a respectable pension from the company.

Since then two engines are always employed to move the train up the few miles beyond Gafsa.

The cream-tinted level is speckled with white incrustations and sombre tufts of desert herbs; here and there, where the winter's rain lingers underground, are spots of brilliant green; short-lived crops of corn, sown by the nomads. The hills to the right of the line are bare and torn into wild ravines; lilac-hued patches, ever changing and fair to see, move among their warm complexities: cloud-shadows. Here, if anywhere, one learns that shadows are not always grey or black; even those cast in moonlight have a certain ghostly coloration.

It was a marvellously clear day, and not many miles before reaching our destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible--white buildings piercing a dusky line of palms--an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed in the brushwood a couple of bustards, their heads peering above the herbage. These birds are rather rare hereabouts, and shy of approach. Arabs say that the bustard is like the camel: once it begins to run, you never know when it will stop. They surround them therefore cautiously, and gradually close the circle to within shooting distance.

Metlaoui is the name of two distinct villages which have been conjured out of the waste by the discovery of its phosphate deposits--the station village and, a mile or so further on, Metlaoui proper, with its big establishments for working the minerals.