V
Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold, and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the sponge. In the early morning light the open spaces about the market were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side—the vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory for years—the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.
Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals, as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with nothing to break the expanse—only millions of olive-trees regularly planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like an endless spider’s web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape, is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.