Sultan of Tozeur—that gave me the cue, and I hazarded the guess that he had inherited his tastes from certain old rovers and conquerors of the northern seaboard.
"True," he said, "our family comes from Normandy, though we have lived in
Paris for two generations. Now how on earth did you find that out?"
These are the men whom the Franco-Tunisian administration will do well to encourage as officials and settlers in the wilder parts.
Chapter XXI
OLD TISOUROS
There is a daily recurring spectacle at Tozeur which enchanted me: the camping ground at dawn. Here the caravans repose after their desert journeys; hence they start, at every hour, in picturesque groups and movement. But whoever wishes for a rare impression of Oriental life must go there before sunrise, and wait for the slow-coming dawn. It is all dark at first, but presently a sunny beam flashes through the distant palms, followed by another, and yet another—long shafts of yellow light travelling through the murk; then you begin to perceive that the air is heavy with the smoke of extinguished camp-fires and suspended particles of dust; the ground, heaving, gives birth to dusky shapes; there are weird groans and gurglings of silhouetted apparitions; and still you cannot clearly distinguish earth from air—it is as if one watched the creation of a new world out of Chaos.
But even before the sun has topped the crowns of the palms, the element of mystery is eliminated; the vision resolves itself into a common plain of sand, authentic camels and everyday Arabs moving about their business—another caravan, in short….
And at midday?
Go, at that hour, to the thickest part of the grove; then is the time; it must be the prick of noon, for the slanting lights of morning and eve are quite another concern; only at noon can one appreciate the incomparable effects of palm-leaf shadows. The whole garden is permeated with light that streams down from some undiscoverable source, and its rigid trunks, painted in a warm, lustreless grey, are splashed with an infinity of keen lines of darker tint, since the sunshine, percolating through myriads of sharp leaves, etches a filigree pattern upon all that lies below. You look into endless depths of forest, but there is no change in decorative design; the identical sword-pattern is for ever repeated on the identical background, fading away, at last, in a silvery haze.
Here are no quaint details to attract the eye; no gorgeous colour-patterns or pleasing irregularities of form; the frosted beauty of the scene appeals rather to the intelligence. Contrasted with the wanton blaze of green, the contorted trunks and labyrinthine shadow-meanderings of our woodlands, these palm groves, despite their frenzied exuberance, figure forth the idea of reserve and chastity; an impression which is heightened by the ethereal striving of those branchless columns, by their joyous and effective rupture of the horizontal, so different from the careworn tread of our oaks and beeches.