Twenty-four kilometres from Tozeur is the little town of Nefta. I motored there on a beaten road across the stretches of sand. To our left the Shott shone like a great lake, streaked with faint grey and purple. As far as we could see, the desert stretched away interminably till it met the horizon. The track followed the telegraph posts, and we passed a few groups of Arabs with their camels, plodding along at a pace which they can keep up for days at a stretch. One seemed to be moving for ever through an immense space, almost with a feeling of being hypnotised. Then, ahead, there was a dark blur in the expanse. “Voilà Nefta!” said the chauffeur.
It is entirely an Arab town, the flat-topped houses and the clothes of the inhabitants all of the same colour as the surrounding sand. Thick groves of palms cluster along the streams that flow from a quantity of springs. The oasis is called the ‘corbeille’ and is aptly named, for it lies in a hollow over which the village, straggling along two small heights, looks down. The palms grow all up the edges of this cup, and through their stems one sees the glow of sand against a pale blue sky. Springs of clear water bubbled up everywhere in the oasis and round the feet of the palms was the tender green of growing things. Bushes of white jasmine scented the air. And within a stone’s throw of this verdure is the vast emptiness and silence of the desert. Far, far on the horizon, like the tender tints of Venetian glass, was the pale blue and rose of distant rocky hills.
The tiny hotel was in the market-place, and from its verandah we looked down on an animated scene. Camels laden with firewood came in from the far country, driven by uncouth-looking men wrapped in ragged cloaks, their feet covered with rough shoes made of camel’s hide tied round the ankle. Tiny children, naked but for their one hooded garment, crept to warm themselves by the fires where cooking was going on. The people seemed very poor, their clothes tattered and scanty. Small booths were set up in the market-place, where unappetising meat was sold, and flat loaves of bread. One shopman dealt in primitive rings set with beads, sheathed knives and the flat mirrors that the Arab woman loves to wear hung round her neck. Far into the night I heard the sound of voices in the market-place below, and caught the occasional flicker of a fire.
I. M. D.
Nefta seemed full of children, queer little elfin figures in their pointed hoods with their thin unchildlike faces. There had been three bad harvests in succession, and everyone was poor and hungry. I watched a tiny boy of about four years old who was left on guard over a heap of grass straw that his father had brought for sale. The little creature took his task very solemnly and hour after hour he sat there gravely, his trailing garment folded over his bare feet. It turned very cold as the sun went down, but still the small Casabianca stuck to his post. It began to grow dusk, and yet he sat there motionless, his eyes fixed on the bundles of straw. I thought how pleasant it would be to slip a coin or two into his frozen hands and started out full of this benevolent intention. But the sight of me was more than the poor little hero could stand. He had faced cold and hunger and the danger of possible thieves, but the terrifying sight of a white woman in strange garments was too much for him. He stood his ground bravely for a moment, but as it became certain I was coming straight to him, he fled, but hovered nearby in terror and perplexity like some shy bird whose nest is approached. I held up the money for him to see, but he did not understand. It proved useless to try to coax him back, and I went away, watching from a distance for his return. Like the bird, he slipped back to his post in the dusk as soon as he thought me safely gone, and now I waited till his father had appeared and then tried again. Again he wavered and turned to run as I drew near, but the father understood my gestures and caught him, smiling, by a flying end of his cloak. And so he stood, frightened but valiant, whilst I closed his tiny cold hand over the coins. I left him still bewildered, and could only hope the money served to buy a hot supper and perhaps firewood for the family.
Next day I rode along the route to Tougourt, in Algeria, a nine days’ journey by caravan. There seemed nothing to mark the road from the ocean of sand. It was edged in some places with a low parapet of banked sand and dry grass. Far below us was the dark mass of the ‘corbeille’ and above it the village of Nefta with its irregular line of houses, pricked here and there by a minaret and dotted with the white bubbles of marabou. On the other side, desert. The red-roofed douane on the frontier between Algeria and Tunis, looked like a child’s forgotten toy. Far off the minute silhouettes of distant camels paced slowly across the immensity. The air was clear and thin. One seemed alone in the world.
And suddenly, there at our feet we saw the delicate faces of tiny crocus-like flowers gazing at us from the level of the sand itself. Flushed with a faint lavender, the slender stamens stained with orange, they seemed indeed a miracle. From what nutriment had they woven their frail loveliness? The sand was friable and bare, the cold winds of night must pass like a scythe over these lonely places. But mysteriously, defying the vast world, minute trembling roots must have crept from the small bulbs, mooring the little plants to a firm anchorage. And the first few drops of warm rain had brought them to a fragile flowering. Crushed by the spongy feet of passing camels, unregarded, ignored, they spread their delicate carpet, earnest of the later more bounteous gifts of Spring. And in this land of life reduced to bare necessities, of a people living from hand to mouth, of the harsh nomad existence led by Bedouin tribes, these little flowers seemed a message linking us to a more gracious existence, a land of kindlier aspect, of softer skies, with its largesse of blossoms of which the desert knows nothing.