"Not if you give me a packet of cigarettes!" he said. "The brigadier"—in an awed whisper—"he sees everything."
Hearing that protective works of a new kind are being carried on at this moment, I walked yesterday to the bare slopes that lead down to the water-springs. A hundred or more Arabs were engaged, under the supervision of a keen-eyed young Frenchman, in digging a multitude of curved concentric ditches across the hollow of the catchment area, intersected by diagonal ones here and there; the general appearance of the work—the bright yellow of the newly excavated part set against the dark ground of the old—was as if some gigantic fishing-net had been carelessly thrown across the country. These little dykes were about two feet deep, and there must have been already some twenty miles of them. The overseer explained:
"You see what happens. Our putting this tract under the tabia-system had prepared us an unpleasant surprise. The rain formerly used to sink into the soft sand, but since the crust has formed, thanks to our efforts, it no longer sinks, but runs over the hard surface, pours in a flood down that steep incline at whose foot the fountains issue, and threatens to suffocate them with soil torn from its banks. The very life of the oasis was imperilled by our well-meant artifices. But now, with these little ditches, we hope to catch and tame the showers, and force them to wander about in these channels till they either sink into the earth or evaporate. Not a drop of liquid is to leave the catchment basin; it is exactly the reverse of what we desire in Europe."
It struck me as a simple and efficient device.
Midday came and the workers were paid off, each of them receiving a slip of printed paper for the half-day's work; the possession of four of these slips entitles them to exemption from the yearly tax of two francs forty centimes which they would otherwise pay: a good example of the "politique d'association." They trooped away gleefully, and I could not help remarking on their cheerful humour.
"They are gentle as young girls," he said, "and far more tractable; thievish, of course, and untruthful—but so are all children! They attach themselves to me in a pathetic, dog-like fashion, without hope of preferment or any ulterior object…. Yes, they have established themselves in my heart, somehow or other; perhaps because I am an orphan and rather lonely and susceptible…. I really love these poor Arabs, as a father might love them——"
"That stick of yours: it looks business-like. May I ask whether you ever chastise them?"
"Why not? Would I not thrash my own children if they deserved it? This work in Africa," he went on, "attracts and interests me. At home I lose my personality and become a sheep in a herd, but here, in the desert, I can create and leave a mark, which has always been my ambition. I think I could live in this country for ever. Can you understand such a feeling? None of my colleagues can; their minds are in France, and they complain of a colonial exile, as if Tunisia were the Devil's Island; they call me an enthusiast, because I think well of this warm, palpitating soil in which I seem, I don't know how, to have struck deep roots."
And he gazed lovingly over the sea of glossy palm-tops, down yonder, on our right. This, I thought, was a most unusual type of Frenchman; and yet there was something in his language, or perhaps in his ideas, which was already familiar to me.
"To be Sultan of Tozeur, for example—ha! I would bend them to my will; I would lead them to battle and give them laws; I would have them about me as slaves and companions—they should sing to me and tell me stories while I go to sleep. This fair land seems like the realization of some old, dimly remembered dream of mine. How does it all come about, I wonder?"