"By manipulating the rates of merchandise transport. The railway to Sfax belongs to us, and we can regulate prices as it suits us; if we liked, we could choke off all trade. Ah, the company knows its business! Of course, that makes us many enemies; they call it high-handedness and brutality—a concern like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks—we call it common sense. If the railway were not ours, if we were not practically dictators of the country, those Americans, with their immense phosphate importation into Europe, would eat us up; and then these local merchants would lose everything. That is the justification of our so-called tyranny. Are we to have nothing for our risks? Look at this installation of machinery—all built, too, with a view to future aggrandizement: does it strike you as a half-hearted speculation?"
Daring, on the contrary. Here are gargantuan sheds, capable of holding thirty thousand tons of mineral apiece; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for drying them artificially in winter-time, when the sun's heat is insufficient; all around you a gehenna of mad industrial life, smoke and steam, a throbbing agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons; there are chains of buckets, filled with phosphates, wandering overhead in endless progression or disappearing sullenly into the bowels of the earth; passionate electric motors; mountains of coal and iron contrivances; railway engines snorting and whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down from the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them out of the cars to dry, amid clouds of tawny dust. One might well grow crazy at the idea of the primary difficulties involved in grafting upon the desert soil this ordered mechanical efflorescence, this frenzied blossoming of human activity.
What is happening?
They are separating the crude phosphate from its natural impurities; drying, pounding, and loading it upon trains for removal to the sea-board. That is all.
Chapter XIV
PHOSPHATES
A light railway leads up to the hills where the phosphates lie. Here you may see the fiends at work. A legion of wild-eyed, swart and nearly nude creatures are disembowelling the hoary mountain: visions such as this must have floated before Milton's eye when he drew his picture of Mammon, who, with his horde of demons, opened in the hill a spacious wound—
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of our mother Earth
For treasure better hid….
The workers are chiefly of three races: Tripolitan, Khabyle (Algerian), and Moroccan; they live in separate clusters among the rocks, each with their peculiar national traits and mode of building; there is hardly a woman among them all.
Besides these tribes a certain proportion of Tunisian Arabs are employed, but they are too weak or timorous to relish underground work; a sprinkling of negroes, as well as some of the hillfolk from the district surrounding Metlaoui, who go by the quaint name of Boujaja.