They are an attractive race, and the poorer classes seem to have the virtues and faults of children. They require constant supervision at their work and plenty of the syrup of praise when they do well, and like children they are quick to see and take advantage of any weakness in an employer. George Washington would have found himself lonely indeed amongst them, for they cannot speak the truth. They lie as a matter of course and often most inartistically. A servant will deny that he has been smoking, even with the half-consumed cigarette between his fingers. When it is pointed out to him he professes extreme astonishment and declares that Allah must surely have placed it there. It is difficult to receive such an excuse with calm. They are said to be untrustworthy, but I was not in the country long enough to be able to judge of this. Their dignity is admirable, they are gentle, charitable to the poor and treat the aged with reverence. They love flowers, scent, the shade of trees and the sound of running water. Missionaries say the children are very quick and intelligent up to the age of thirteen or fourteen when their minds seem to cease developing. If they make some impression on the girls when young, the influence of fathers and husbands tends quickly to destroy it. Education is looked on far more favourably than it was, however, and even the daughters of a family are now sometimes allowed to attend school, especially in the towns.
There are two opposing opinions as to the people of Tunisia. One side holds that they are a played-out race, of whom no further development can be expected. The other declares that their evolution was arrested by the triumph of Mohammedanism, that in earlier days there were brilliant intellects amongst them and that there is every possibility of an awakening of their slumbering mentality. The French scientist Saint Paul is of this latter belief. He was for years in the country living amongst the people and penetrating to their houses in his character of doctor, and in his book Souvenirs de Tunisie published in 1909 he made an exhaustive study of their psychology and testified warmly to their good qualities and intelligence.
CHAPTER XII
TUNIS
The town of Tunis itself is cosmopolitan. Approached by steamer, it spreads itself out in a white fan along the edge of a lagoon that has the effect of a bay, being only divided from the Gulf of Tunis by the merest strip of land. There seems scarcely a finger’s breadth between the two. In the early morning of a December day the town showed as a white blur in the haze that hung about the lake. The ship glided slowly through the narrow entrance at Goulette which leads into a canal deepened out in the shallow waters of the lagoon, marked on one side by floating buoys and on the other fringed by the narrow embankment on which runs the tramway to Carthage.
At first sight Tunis seems knee-deep in water she stands so low, and indeed a great part of the modern town is built on land reclaimed from the lake itself. But as one nears the shore the picturesque jumble resolves itself into flat-topped white houses, the domes of innumerable mosques, outlines of minarets, lines of dark foliage marking the whereabouts of central boulevards, and behind them all the wooded slopes of the Belvedere pleasure park. From here the eye is led by degrees to further and further hills. It is a picturesque setting. Backed by jagged rocky hills that glow deep rose and dusky purple at sunset, the capital gazes over the placid waters of the lake to the deep blue of the Gulf beyond, to the twin peaks of le Bou-Cornine on the north east and the low hill of Carthage to the West.
The French part of the town has broad streets with shady avenues of trees, modern shops with Paris goods displayed behind plate glass windows. Electric trams pass and re-pass. One could imagine oneself in the South of France. But by way of the archway called La Porte de France, left standing when the ancient walls were demolished, one escapes with a sigh of relief into the native town. Here too, everything is touched with Europeanism, but enough remains to prick the imagination. The narrow covered Souks or arcades, where the merchants sit in their tiny raised shops, their shiny yellow slippers ranged side by side ready to put on again when business is over, the crowd in flowing Eastern robes sauntering up and down languidly shopping, the red and green tomb of a holy man right in the gangway, with a blind beggar squatting beside it proffering an open hand for alms, the strange chrysalis-shaped white bundles with their tight black veils, that are women, the passing funeral with its swathed corpse carried shoulder-high and followed by a chanting crowd. All this breathes the East.
