The desert hare is shot or coursed with muzzled greyhounds, sloughis, who strike it down with their paws; unmuzzled, they rend it to pieces. There are few of them in Gafsa just now, on account of the cold to which they are sensitive; although muffled in woollen garments they shiver pitifully. Of falconers, I have only met one riding to the chase. It was the Kaid of Gafsa, a wealthy man of incalculable political influence both here and in Tunis. It is even whispered—But no; one must not repeat all one hears….
With the proprietor's permission I went over a young plantation of trees and vegetables that has sprung up near the railway line, about halfway between Gafsa and Leila. Excavating to a depth of six metres at the foot of the bare Rogib hill, they encountered an apparently unlimited supply of water, and here, where formerly nothing but a few scorched grasses and thorns could be seen, is now a luxuriant little oasis. More might be done with the place, but the owner seems to have lost interest in it; the locusts, too, have been rather destructive of late.
He had planted quantities of prickly pears, he said, but the Bedouins' cattle had devoured them. These are useful growths in Tunisia, requiring hardly any moisture and forming, when full-grown, impenetrable walls of spiky green. They also bring in a respectable revenue. In the district of Kairouan, for instance, many families draw their entire income from them. A few have been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near Gafsa, but they are unprotected and liable to be trodden down in their early years, or eaten. Barbed wire, herald of civilization, is almost unknown in these parts.
Like most tradespeople, this proprietor was rather despondent about the future of Gafsa. There had certainly been some improvement within the last twenty years—slight, but steady; the building of the railway station so far outside the town he considered a disgraceful piece of jobbery, a crime which had permanently injured the prospects of the place. Merchants, he said, are entirely dependent on the state of the Metlaoui mines. If, like last year, these do well, then Gafsa also thrives. If there is a strike or over-production, as at this moment, Gafsa suffers.
[Illustration: The Roman Wall]
Tourists come to this town, he said, but they leave next day. Nothing is done to make their stay agreeable.
The natives are not of a kind to take much interest in its welfare. Gafsa has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches' cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some men that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the savage Neanderthal brood that lived here in prehistoric times, the only pure race-type that survives is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to which Monsieur Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa, has already referred. No wonder; since Egyptian invasions of this region went on for centuries, culminating in the extended sea-dominion of Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth century B.C.
A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the place up to the thirteenth century A.D.
This confusion of blood has done one good thing for them—it has given them considerable tolerance in matters of religion. They are the least bigoted Orientals one could wish to meet. Only fifteen in a hundred, perhaps even less, perform the devotions prescribed by the Prophet. And it is part of their charming heterodoxy to be dog-eaters. They will catch and devour each other's dogs; they even breed them for the market, though they dare not expose the meat publicly, any more than that of swine, which they eat with relish. But up to a few days ago they had never ventured to touch the dog of a foreigner. On Wednesday evening, however, a fox-terrier belonging to a French official was found in the street, dead, with its throat cut. A stream of blood was traced from that spot to the door of a native eating-shop, and enquiries from the neighbours elicited the fact that the cook of the establishment had caught the beast and cut its throat; that the miserable creature, in its dying struggles, had escaped from his grasp and run in the direction of home, only to stagger by the roadside and expire from loss of blood.
There was a wild excitement over this little episode. The dog of a Frenchman killed, for culinary purposes, by an Arab; it was the comble of temerity! The owner of the animal, on hearing the news, buckled on his revolver and repaired to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already conjured into some safe place of custody. If he is wise he will languish in prison for some days longer.