Yet such is the abundance of water that these Gafsa gardens have a character different from most African plantations. They are more artlessly furnished, with rough, park-like districts and a not unpleasing impression of riot and waste—waste in the midst of plenty.
Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of country—the temperate region at the tail-end of the grove. Only olives grow here; seventy-five thousand of them. Beside their silvery-grey trunks you may see herds of the small but brightly-tinted oxen reposing; the ground is pied with daisies and buttercups, oleanders border the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of the djouak, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound from some hidden copse.
There will be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the carefully-tended oases of the Djerid.
Chapter XI
A HAVEN OF REFUGE
The cold being past all endurance and belief, I was tempted to fulfil my promise and call upon Monsieur Dufresnoy. What kind of man was this that managed to survive it?
They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildings of the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle; only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused—it was grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment about the mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might turn on their rusty hinges.
Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly panic.
M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost ran into me. I tried to explain the sensations his domicile had aroused in my mind; he laughed at first, and then admitted that he had often felt the same thing. The house was apt to look like that, he said, when his wife was away.
The inside appearance, once that portal has been passed, is quite different, and I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing the place, as it is one of the surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-houses that date from better days, being built originally for some Turkish grandee or governor—for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing widow to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step through the gate into an open square patio, surrounded, on the sides not abutting on the street, by an arched passage that reposes on old Roman columns. This covered loggia, running round three fronts of the court, is the feature of the house: wonderful how a few arcades and pillars will impart an air of distinction and even luxury! Almost nothing has been done to change the old appearance of this small but well-proportioned patio; the walls have been freshly whitewashed, the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright flower-bed set in the centre—nothing more.