In the hotel of one small oasis town I observed a tall and gaunt young man of indeterminable nationality, and as I rode back peacefully in the evening from my saunters in search of sketchable points of view I used to see the same youth striding along the road, the dust flying from behind his heels, whilst a weary guide tottered in his wake. Mansour was much amused. “Truly the foreigner is possessed of a devil,” he remarked, “I know his guide and he tells me that every day his employer sets forth with a map and walks with fury from the rising up of the sun to its going down. He is afflicted with a rage of walking. Mahmoud when first engaged by him rejoiced greatly, for he thought the newcomer to be inexperienced and foresaw fat profit for himself. But though it is but four days since he came, already is my friend so greatly exhausted that he can scarce put one foot before the other. He prays daily that the stranger may soon leave, for he is so young that there is still great strength in him. He is tall and his legs are of such a length that he takes but one step while Mahmoud must take two, and never will he take a car or mount a donkey.”
We were gently ambling home from a sketching expedition. It was getting late in the afternoon and the long shadows of the palms lay across the sandy road. Our steeds were beginning to mend their pace as they came in sight of their stables. I had been painting hard and was in the comfortably tired state induced by two hours satisfactory work. Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps and there shot past us the figure of the thin young man walking as if for a wager. His brow was unheated, his face serene. Close behind him panted the sorry figure of Mahmoud who cast an agonised look upon his friend as he limped past. His figure was certainly not adapted to violent exercise and he seemed at the last stages of exhaustion. And so he was. Next day the energetic pedestrian passed me where I sat sketching down by the river. The dust still spurted from below his feet. But he was alone. “Mahmoud hath taken to his bed,” explained Mansour, “he saith that if he gets up he will be made to walk fifteen miles. And indeed he cannot rise for he is naught but aches and pains from head to foot and is calling curses upon the foreigner. He had hoped to be given much money, for had he not ready two pairs of worn-out shoes to testify for him? But is not life sweeter than money? and he can do no more. The traveller has not been able to get another guide, for every man finds himself of a sudden too busy. Thus he will soon leave. And Mahmoud saith that never will he engage himself from henceforth to any stranger till he has first looked upon him to see whether or no his legs be long!”
In Tunis, forgetting that I myself was a tourist, I studied them with an interested eye. Sitting outside a small restaurant in the central boulevard where the heaped flower stalls made splashes of colour under the heavy foliage of the trees, I watched them pass, sipping my coffee and meditating their infinite variety.
And in the hotel drawing room that evening I was accosted by a grey haired and aggrieved spinster. “Can you tell me,” she asked, “where I can find a tea-shop in Tunis?” I explained patiently that tea-shops are not indigenous to the country, that tea can be served at any café or restaurant, but that coffee is the national drink and is beautifully made. “In a town of this size there must be a tea-shop,” she remarked firmly, “I mean the kind where there is a band and you can get muffins and scones as well as cakes. I am sure someone told me there is one here,” she added, casting a suspicious glance upon me. I mentally shrugged my shoulders and moved away. She spent three days in the place and every afternoon was devoted to her pathetic quest. And on the last day as she stood in the hall awaiting the hotel omnibus, her luggage about her feet and a neat waterproof upon her arm, I ventured to inquire as to its success. “I was here too short a time to come across it,” she answered coldly, “but I shall be returning.”
So I gather the search for a tea-shop is to be resumed, and I am very much afraid that in a year or two she may find it.
The history of Tunisia has been the record of a long sequence of civilisations that have possessed her in turn, have risen to fame and glory and one by one have gone down before a fresh power. As far back as the ninth century B.C., Carthage was founded by the Phœnicians and rapidly became a rich and powerful city. Her merchants trafficked all along the Mediterranean and even pushed as far as the little island of Great Britain wrapped in Atlantic fogs. Her riches were immense and she dared to enter the lists against Rome itself. This temerity cost her dear. After two long wars she was beaten, her fleet destroyed, and finally in 146 B.C. the Romans utterly destroyed the town, and the country became a Roman province. They rebuilt it later and Carthage again became rich and powerful. In 439 A.D. she was taken by the Vandals and about a hundred years later passed into the keeping of the Byzantine Empire. At the end of the seventh century the city was again utterly destroyed by Arab conquerors, and since then Carthage has remained a heap of ruins, the town of Tunis gradually growing in importance and wealth. The subsequent fortunes of the country since the Arab conquest down to 1575 were interwoven with the general history of Barbary, but at that date it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, till it threw off the Turkish yoke about the eighteenth century and became virtually independent. Finally, in 1881, France sent an expedition to Tunis with the proclaimed purpose of punishing the raids of Tunisian tribes into Algiers, and eventually the Bey, under compulsion, signed a treaty of suzerainty to the French Republic.
As each of the earlier conquerors in turn tried busily to destroy all vestiges of his predecessor’s reign, little else but fragments are left of the older civilisations. Carthage is not even a heap of ruins now. She is a handful of dust. Her stones were carried away for the construction of Arab houses, one comes across stray pillars wreathed with the acanthus of Rome, in the Souks of Tunis, huge blocks of stone are built even into the mud villages everywhere, marble pillars have been transferred bodily into the interiors of mosques. Carthage herself has become a desolation and a waste.
I went there on a day of hot sunshine and an intense blue sky. It is about ten miles from Tunis. As the train crawled like a caterpillar along the thread of embankment across the lagoon, an Italian steamer was gliding through the canal on my right; and beyond the pencilled edge of the lake was the deep blue rim of sea for which she was bound. On my left was the placid surface of the lake, dotted with waterfowl and with a few wooden stakes here and there, on which crouched the black figures of cormorants looking like dejected priests. On a tiny island were the ruins of a Spanish fort. Reaching Goulette, there were still a few small stations to pass, and then came Carthage.
The sandy soil seemed almost to throb in the warmth, hedges of cactus lined the broad road from the tiny station. Absurd modern villas stood about, flotsam of the new civilisation. But climbing upward I left the villas behind and turning on the slopes looked out to where the blue of the sea faded into a soft haze. To the west the red cliffs of Sidi bou Said caught the eye, and the clustering white houses of its beautiful village. On the summit of the hill of Carthage stands the ugly modern Roman Catholic cathedral, avenging by its presence the deaths of Saint Perpetua and the unfortunately named poor little Saint Felicity, Christian martyrs in the Roman amphitheatre of Carthage.
Adjoining the cathedral is the monastery of the Pères Blancs, who have a small museum filled with Punic and Roman remains. There are fragments of statues, broken vases, earthenware lamps, coins, medals, sarcophagi in which one can see frail skeletons preserved in their covering of aromatic gum. These haughty warriors and princesses lie helplessly exposed to the gaze of every idle tourist, the painted lids of their resting places standing sentinel-fashion behind each. I am no antiquarian. All I carried away was a confused impression of a débris washed up on the shores of Time; of delicate bracelets and gold rings, of tiny charms, of iridescent glass bottles dug up from the sand, of all the odds and ends that human beings gather round them. I think they were not so very different from ourselves, these people of long ago. And now conquerors and conquered mingle their remains in the sterile peace of museum shelves. In the garden outside were ranged pieces of pillars, fragments of vast statues, here a giant hand, there a colossal head.