CHAPTER VIII
THE SAND DIVINER
The little oasis town of Gabès is on the coast, quite in the south of Tunisia, the line to it being made by German prisoners during the War. After leaving the broad belt of cultivation that stretches some way out of Sfax, with its olives and corn and fruit trees, the train ran through bare open country with scattered flocks of cattle, sheep or camels grazing on a sparse and wiry grass. Here and there a few Arabs were laboriously tilling the soil with wooden ploughs drawn by lean bullocks or camels. The latter are harnessed by means of a broad band of sacking across the front of their humps, attached by ropes to the plough. But soon these signs of cultivation ceased, and I looked out on a sandy and desolate waste, only broken occasionally by tracts of rough grass, stretching to a far dove-coloured sky. We reached Gabès in the dark. All night a storm raged, and I heard the thunder of waves on the shore and the wind and the rain lashing the palm trees of the oasis. The next day it was still stormy, and the public garden opposite the hotel was bruised and battered, whilst the palms looked dishevelled and untidy with their hair all over their eyes.
Gabès is a very small place, just the French military cantonments, one street, and a few houses and shops. A little river flows into the sea here, and on its other bank is the oasis, full of running water and palms and fruit trees. I rode for a long way through it. Arabs were at work amongst the vegetable gardens or tending the palms. Some of the trees are tapped for the juice, which is made into an intoxicating drink. When drawn off, it is colourless and clear and very sweet. The top of the palm is cut off, a hole made down the centre and a jar put into it. This fills itself every twelve hours or so. The tree is treated in this way every two years three times, and it does the growth no harm. One can see by the notches in the stem where it has been cut.
About a mile and a half from Gabès are the queer little villages of Jarette and Vielle Jarette, the latter built largely of stone from Roman ruins. They consist of a perfect rabbit warren of native houses with passage-ways leading from one to the other, buttressed with old stone pillars. Huge blocks of carved stone, fragments of acanthus, etc., are built into the walls. I went into one minute interior, where two girls sat on the earth floor weaving at a hand loom, whilst another was grinding corn in a stone hand-mill. They took a deep interest in me and fingered my fur coat in astonishment. They were broad featured, with very thick wavy hair, and were covered with jewellery. My guide Mansour tells me the Arabs cannot understand why European women wear so few gems.
“Your ladies do not trouble to make themselves beautiful, do they?” said he. “With us, the women take so much trouble that even the plain make themselves handsome.”
He was an excellent guide, energetic and intelligent, talking French well, and had been a good deal with Englishmen on various shooting expeditions, so understood English ways.
I found the market-place of Jarette very interesting to sketch. There was always a great crowd in the morning, selling meat, vegetables, grain, tiny dried fish, poultry, etc. The walls were mostly mud coloured and the men in clothes the colour of earth, too, with only now and again the bright red or blue of a woman’s veil, or the striped skirt they wear in Gabès. But the brilliance of the sun made the whole scene sparkle and glow. The alley way in which I sometimes sat was roofed with palm leaf, through which one saw chinks of deep blue sky. The walls seemed to throb with refracted light, and at the end of the shadowed tunnel was a vignette of the busy market-place, sharp and clear in the intense sunlight. Figures squatted round wares arranged on the ground, others strode past carrying bags of grain. Here a negro was selling oranges, or a butcher auctioning pieces of horrid carmine to an intent crowd. Small boys looking like gnomes in their pointed hoods, with brown faces and bare legs, tiny girls carrying solemn-eyed babies, the black mysterious figures of veiled women, or a group of lightly veiled village girls coming past with a swing of drooping earrings and shapely arms holding burdens on their shoulder, swinging blue and red draperies, long dark eyes, and the blue tattoo marking on chin and cheek considered beautiful. Working away at my sketch I got a vague yet distinct picture in my mind of them as they passed; and the little donkeys, ridden by figures sitting on the rump and keeping up a flail-like motion of yellow slippered feet against their dusky sides, and shouting “Aarr-r-rh!”
All was bustle and excitement, and under the shelter of my roofed way were stacks of green vegetables and the cool purple and cream of turnips. The sunshine permeated everything outside, flooded market-place and crowd in a torrent of light, not golden, but a brilliant clear light in which things stood out sharply etched and distinct. A North African winter sunshine, amazingly brilliant, yet without much heat. The sun had not yet become the tyrant of summer, when men fly from his rays, and night becomes little less breathless than the day, when palms hang motionless in the sultry glare and people leave their mud dwellings for the shade of the oasis, when the glittering sea breaks on a blinding beach, and the earth lies panting and scorched. These are the days, I suppose, when the mind turns with longing to the grey washes of rain in England, to the cool depths of summer woods and the freshness of clear springs amongst green ferns. For the shadow of a rock in a weary land.
On my way back from the market-place one day I passed an old sand-diviner, who sat wrapped in his neutral-coloured robes by the roadside, foretelling the mysteries of the future to a negress who squatted in front of him, evidently come on behalf of her mistress. On his knee he held a large book, and in front of him was the little wooden tray spread with sand, in which he made mysterious signs with his fingers. He was a kindly-looking old man, wrinkled and brown, his grey beard giving him a reverend appearance. He gave me permission to sketch him, and went on with his fortune telling. Sometimes he would look at his book and then peer with his mild eyes into the blue of the sky above his head, whilst the woman watched his movements with apprehension. I finished the sketch of him and he was delighted with it, and said: