M. F. Mansfield

“ 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. ”

“ Carthage and its cathedral, and Sidi-bou-Saïd and its minarets are to port, the red soil forming a rich frame for the scintillating white walls scattered here and there over the landscape. La Marsa and the Bey’s summer palace loom next in view, Cap Carthage and Cap Bon, and then the open sea.
Midway between Tunis and Marseilles, one sees the red porphyry rocks of Sardinia. Offshore are the little isles which terminate the greater island, the “Taureau,” the “Vache” and the “Veau.” They are only interesting as landmarks, and look like the outcroppings of other Mediterranean islands. ”

“ At a certain moment of one’s progress in the desert, he sees nothing of distinction before or behind or right or left, and at the next finds himself close to a pyramid of rock fifty feet high. Really the desert is very bewildering and enigmatic, and the Arab who navigates it with his caravan is like the sailor on the deep sea. He has to take his bearings every once and again or he is lost and perhaps engulfed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Kabyle with his skins of oil, the Berber with his wool and leathers, and the town-bred Arab—half Turk, half Jew—occupying himself with all sorts of trading, give a local colour rich and unmixed, such as one finds nowhere else in the East,—either at Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, or Constantinople. What is lacking is mere size and grandeur,—the rest is all there. And the Moorish cafés and the sweetmeat and pastry sellers’ shops of Constantine’s Arab town, visited on the eve of Ramadan, give such a variety of surprises that no one who has once seen them can ever forget them. ”

“ Under the guidance of a zouave with baggy red trousers and a fez dangling on the back of his head, we walked and circumnavigated all of the paved and orange-planted quadrangles, and quite believed we were living in the days gone by, in spite of the fact that tram-cars were passing by the door, and inconsiderate, un-churchly chimes were ringing out ribald airs from the neighbouring cathedral tower.
On the whole the old Beylical palace of Constantine is far more elaborate and interesting than the Dar-el-Bey at Tunis—or the Bardo, usually reckoned the chief tourist sights of their class. ”

“ His is a lonesome life indeed, like that of a shepherd anywhere, and when night comes—often drear and chill even in the Sahara—he slips under his tent flap, pulls his burnous up around his ears and trusts to luck that no jackal will make away with a kid or lamb while he sleeps. He is not paid to sleep by the owner of the flock (a franc and a quarter a day, out of which he feeds himself) , but still, sleep he must. Fatigue comes even to a lazy Arab sheep-herder, and he’d rather fall sound asleep beside a brazier inside his tent than doze intermittently before a fire of brushwood in the open. ”

“ There is no more danger to the tourist travelling through Algeria and Tunisia by road than there would be in France or Italy—and considerably less than might be met with in Spain. There are some brigands and robbers left hiding in the mountains, perhaps, but their raids are on flocks and herds, and not for the mere dross of the gold of tourists, or the gasolene of automobilists. The desert lion is a myth of Tartarinesque poets and artists, and one is not likely to meet anything more savage than a rabbit or a hedgehog all the fifteen hundred or two thousand kilometres from Tlemcen to Gabès. ”

“ It is not the extraordinary thing that astonishes us to-day, for there is no more virgin land to exploit as a touring-ground. It is the rubbing of shoulders with the dwellers in foreign lands who, after all, are human, and have relatively the same desires as ourselves, which they often satisfy in a different manner, that makes travel enjoyable.
What Nubian and Arab Africa will become later, when European races have still further blended the centuries-old tropical and subtropical blood in a gentle assimilated adaptation of men and things, no one can predict. ”

“ The sauterelle, says the Arab, is the wonder among nature’s living things. It has the face of a horse, the eyes of an elephant, the neck of a bull, the horns of a deer, the breast of a lion,{25} the stomach of a scorpion, the legs of an ostrich, the tail of a snake, and is more to be feared than any of the before enumerated menagerie. It all but devastated the chief wheat-growing lands of the plateaux of the provinces of Alger and Constantine a generation or more ago, and brought great misery in its wake. ”

“ In the little oasis settlements where there are natural springs, and not at the Bordjs or government posts of relays, one’s sight is gladdened with flowering fig and almond blooms or fruits and bizarre spiny cacti with pink laurel and palms in all the subtropical profusion of a happy sunlight land. The chief characteristics of an oasis are the superb giant palm-trees, their aigrettes reaching skywards almost to infinity, the azure blue cut into fantastic, fairy shapes, which no artist can paint and no kodakist snap in all their fleeting grace. ”

“ Outside, all is twentieth-century; within, all is a couple of hundred years behind the times at least.
High up above all, behind the Dar el Bey and overlooking the roof-tops of the souks and the town below, is the Kasba and the quaintly decorated minaret of its mosque, the oldest in Tunis, and quite the finest of all the decorative minarets of the world of Islam.
Other mosque minarets at Tunis are svelt and beautiful, dainty and more or less ornate, but they lack the massive luxuriance of that of the Kasba, which was the work, be it recalled, of Italian infidels, not of Mussulman faithful. ”

“ They regard the daily round of liberty of the European woman as an unreal, undesirable state. The harem has been the theatre of their joys since infancy, and they have become so habituated to it that their life of seclusion becomes a second nature. They would not flee the sill of the great doorway into the outer world if they could, and their only change of locale is to pass from the harem of the husband of their mother to that of their spouse. In the harem the Arab woman is cared for with an unthought-of luxury. ”

“ THE OASIS OF TOZEUR
ONE arrives at Tozeur via Sfax and Gafsa and the light narrow-gauge railway belonging to the company exploiting the phosphate mines. Beyond Gafsa the line runs to Metlaoui, peopled only by six hundred phosphate workers of the mines, a mixed crew of Arabs, Sicilians, and Maltese, speaking a veritable jargon des ours, which nobody but themselves can understand. It is strange, this little industrial city of the desert, but it is unlovely, consisting only of little whitewashed cubes of houses, a school-house, a miniature church and mosque, and a few miserable little shops. ”

“ It is a delightfully soft, exotic land which the geographers know as Mediterranean Africa, and which is fast becoming known to the world of modern travellers as the newest winter playground. The tide of pleasure-seeking travel has turned towards Algeria and Tunisia, but the plea is herein made to those who follow after for the better knowing of the places off the beaten track, Bou-Saada, Kairouan, the Oasis of Gabès, Oued-Souf or Tlemcen, for instance, something besides Mustapha, Biskra and Tunis.
Darkest Africa is no more darkest Africa. ”

“ Apparently these Kabyle women are not coquettes, though they smile, always, with their pearly teeth, rouge-red lips, and flashing eyes, bespeaking the sensuality of a land and its customs entirely foreign to European civilization. Of beauty they have little according to other standards, although their features are not crude or unlovely. Rather is theirs the beauty of a high-bred animal, or the sculptured bronze ideal replica of a race. They are types of a species and are delightful to look upon, alike in face and figure. ”

“ The Arab never carries his burdens himself, as do other peasants. It is beneath his dignity; for no matter how ragged or rusty he is, his burnous is sacred from all wear and tear possible to be avoided.
Except for its great market back of its modern ugly mosque, there is not much to see in Arba. Here is even a more heterogeneous native riffraff than one sees at Maison Carrée, Blida, or Boufarik. And indeed it is all “native,” for the Turks and Jews of the coast towns are absent. The trading is all done in produce. ”

“ The round of Old Biskra and its villages is readily made on foot or by carriages; and one may even continue farther afield to the sandy, wavy dunes of the desert, and to the “Fontaine Chaude,” or to the Shrine of Sidi-Okba, twenty kilometres out over the camel trail of the open desert. This excursion to Sidi-Okba is classic.
Sidi-Okba sits in the midst of a fine oasis of some seventy thousand date-growing palms. It is a miserable, unlovely enough little village, but the memory of the Arab conqueror, Okba-ben-Nofi, has made it famous. ”

“ Constantine’s Arab town, too, is entirely a unique thing. It is complete, unspoiled, and genuine. It sits off at one side of the European town, sloping down towards the steep brink of the gorge, and is entirely uncontaminated with the contemporary life of the French. Its colouring is marvellous; and the comings and goings, and the daily affairs, of its Arab merchants and traders lend a charm{299}
of antiquity which not even the realization of the fact that we are living in the twentieth century can wholly spoil. ”

“ Practically it is the sole gateway or means of communication through which passes a great proportion of all the life and movement of the great province of which it is the capital. Contrastingly Constantine’s magnificently theatrical site gives entirely another view-point for the stranger within its gates. The great gorge of the Rummel cuts the city entirely off from the surrounding plateau by a thousand foot chasm, where the gathered waters of the plain roll and thunder with such regularity and force that the steep sides are cut sheer as if by the quarryman’s drill. ”

“ It is the cosmopolitan blend of the new and the old, of the savage with the civilized, that makes cosmopolitan Algiers what it is. This mixture of many foreign elements of men and manners is greatly to be remarked, and nowhere more than in Algiers’ cafés, where French, English, Americans, and Arabs meet in equality over their café-cognac, though the Arab omits the cognac. The cosmopolitanism of Marseilles is lively and varied, that of Port Saïd ragged and picturesque, but that of Algiers is brilliantly complicated. ”

“ 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 Arab eats his couscous out of a great wooden platter, and disdains knife or fork or spoon. A dozen Arabs sit around this shallow bowl of wood and dip their fingers into it, each in his proper turn. It is a sort of game of grab. One may get a choice morsel, or he may not. If not as cleanly a method of eating as that of the Chinaman’s chopsticks, at any rate one’s appetite is sooner satisfied. The Arab has the true spirit of camaraderie in his eating and drinking. ”

“ When the sun commences to lower, they quit the cemetery of Bou-Kobrin and file in couples and trios and quartettes back to their homes in the narrow shut-in streets which huddle about the grim walls of the hilltop Kasba. They toddle and crawl and almost creep, as if they{257} feared entering their homes again; they have none of that proud, elastic, jaunty step of the Kabyle women or of the Bedouins of the “Great Tents;” they are only poor unfortunate “Arab women of the walls.” ”

“ A few boulevard-like trees flank a group of transformed and remodelled Arab houses and give a suspicion of modernity, but the general aspect throughout is Oriental and mediæval. A regular ant-hill of hiving humanity: Moors, Arabs, Turks, Jews, Soudanese, and Touaregs, all with costumes as varied as their origins. Here a creamy-white burnous jostles with a baggy blue pantalon, and the cowled nodding head of a Bedouin rests on the shoulder of an equally somnolent red-fezzed soldier of the Bey. ”

“ Tlemcen under Arab rule was sovereign of all the Moghreb, one of the great capitals of the Khalifs, the rival of Granada, Kairouan, Damascus, Cairo, and Bagdad.
Above its rocky-red substructure the walls and minarets of Tlemcen still pierce the azure sky, but no longer do the Sultans rule its people. A wild, untamed, savage soldiery has given place to French civil and military rule, and everybody is the more happy therefore. ”