Here already, at the station settlement, there is more life than in Gafsa, though the surroundings are decidedly unpropitious—a waterless plain, with low hills in the foreground, phosphate-bearing, and wondrously tinted in rose and heliotrope. There are respectable stores here, very different from the shops of Gafsa. I entered a large Italian warehouse which contained an assortment of goods—clothing, jams, boots, writing-paper, sealing-wax, nails, agricultural implements, guns, bedding, mouse-traps, wire, seeds, tinned foods—and vainly endeavoured to think of some article which a colon might require and not find here. The only drawback is that there are no "colons" in the district.
While waiting for a conveyance to take me to the industrial settlement, I strolled about and found my way across a sad stretch of ground littered with tin cans, bottles, and other refuse, to a slight eminence whereon lay a cemetery. In this forlorn square are about twenty tombs, already crumbling to dust, although not one of those I saw was five years old. Humble victims for the most part—Italians in the prime of life who had come to these regions to gain a little money; or little children, carried off by the harsh climate (yet the climate of this place is preferred to that of Gafsa). The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered friend or parent, is soon effaced by winds and rain.
One is wholly unprepared for the appearance of Metlaoui proper. In ten years' time a village has sprung up here, partly of factories and smoky chimneys, but chiefly of trim bungalows, with white walls and red roofs, that are dotted over the uneven surface of the ground. The whole site is owned by the company, and inhabited by its officials and overseers. It has its own church, shops, schools, hospital, workmen's clubs, bakeries, and its air of neatness and well-being contrasts pleasingly with the forsaken landscape all around.
The higher posts are reserved for Frenchmen, but among the lower grades you may find a number of other nationalities; Spaniards and Sardinians—hardiest of white Mediterranean races—as well as some Italians, and not a few Greeks. The manual labour in the mines is performed by Africans.
Not along ago nearly every drop of water for this settlement had to be conveyed from Gafsa on the backs of camels. But the company has now captured a spring at the head of the Seldja gorge, about eight miles distant, which brings a copious flow of water into the place. Thus they have been enabled to plant a great number of trees, but I wish they could be persuaded to adopt a little more variety in their choice of them. One grows tired of the eucalyptus, that doleful and dismal growth, and even of the eternal pepper trees, green as they are; and the results, in a few years' time, would be far more charming if they would take the trouble to copy some of the Algerian municipalities in this respect, or—better still—obtain professional advice from the Agricultural Institute at Tunis, which could furnish them with a large list of ornamental timber and shrubs that would thrive equally well, and convert Metlaoui into a veritable garden city. The plants suffer at first from the strong winds, but they acclimatize themselves by degrees.
Remembering what had been told me of the unsuccessful attempt of the French to appropriate the water springs of Sidi Mansur, near Gafsa, I asked Dufresnoy whether the Arabs had not contested the action of his company at Seldja.
"I should think so!" he said. "They raised the devil. But we are not civil servants here, who must humour the caprices of half a dozen savages: the health of the settlement was dependent on our getting this water, and we took it, voilà! The great ambition of the company is to fix its people on the spot; to make life here so pleasant for them that they don't want to leave."
"You must find it difficult. The Arabs, I suspect, run back to the desert as soon as they have earned a few francs; and as for the European tradesmen, no doubt they get rich quickly, and then return to their homes again as soon as possible."
"That is exactly what the company manages to avoid. Let them prosper, we say; but slowly. And we succeed."
"How so?"