Entrée d’un Souk
Tunis
I. M. D.
2.23.
And yet the flavour of it is spoilt by the touch of unreality about it all. Tawdry European goods are presided over by a dignified Mussulman in a fez who will perhaps accost you in excellent English. From under flowing robes appear narrow French shoes. One groans. And then, of a sudden, you may look up an alley way, and it is the real thing again. A strip of blue sky, hot sunshine, the blue-green of a small dome, men in statuesque drapery outside the carved entrance of a mosque. A glimpse within of kneeling silent figures in white, in dove colour, in grey. And your flagging spirit fires again. Tunis is a beautiful Arab woman in European dress, and as such she frequently puts one’s teeth on edge. But push into the country and you will find the native life untouched, the peasant people leading the same lives as generations before them led, no hint of the uneasy modernism that spoils the capital.
One must remember too that the town of Tunis cannot be treated as a homogeneous entity. It is composed of many elements, all keeping to their own customs and habits and mixing not at all. The French took over the Protectorate of the country in 1881, but their race does not predominate here. There is an immense population of Jews who inhabit their own quarter, and an even greater number of Italians and Maltese as well as the natives of the country itself. One hears Italian spoken as often in the street as French, and I suspect a certain jealousy and suspicion on the part of the French.
The country is ruled by a Bey under the protection of the French Government represented by a Resident General. The different provinces are under the management of Kaïds appointed by the Bey and answerable to French ‘Contrôleurs Civils.’ The system seems to work well, and undoubtedly the country has prospered under French protection, even though that protection was originally thrust upon her. Good roads are made, a plentiful supply of water is brought to each town, the country is linked up by railways and telegraphic communication, and schools are opened in even the smallest places. It seemed to me the inhabitants live on happy terms with their ‘protectors,’ and I was struck by the absence of any insolence in the attitude of the latter to the dark-skinned races. Arabs and Europeans travel in the same railway carriages and trams, sit perhaps at adjoining tables in restaurants, take their turn at the booking offices, naturally and without resentment on either side. I had known India well many years ago, and the difference of our attitude to a subject race could not but come into my mind now. The British rule is a beneficent one, and just. But it is the rule of a kindly master over subordinates. The French method appears to me a happier one.
The town of Tunis itself seems to be spreading rapidly, large hotels spring up as suddenly as mushrooms after a night’s rain, and the streets are full of sight-seeing tourists. At times a cargo of as many as five hundred of them may be dumped on shore, earnestly ‘doing’ Tunis in a few hours or a day and a half. The town Arab adapts himself to his environment and becomes one of that race of beings without nationality, familiar to all who have travelled in distant lands, a hybrid creature of most distasteful qualities. Where the carcase is to be found there shall the vultures be gathered together, and as the troops of admiring tourists debouch upon the street one is irresistibly reminded of a shoal of herring in shallow water with its accompanying clamour of predatory gulls. If Allah has caused the harvest to fail, he has at least provided the tourist.
They are of all varieties: from the superior person sheltered from any contact with the vulgar world behind the glass windows of his touring limousine-car, and the crowd that moves from one cosmopolitan hotel to another, carried about almost without volition like goldfish in a bowl, to the traveller who perhaps has saved up enough just to do a Mediterranean trip and to stare with delighted bewilderment at a life so different from that to which he is accustomed.