NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE
There are cities in the East where, from ramparts that support fairy-like palaces—complicated assemblages of courts and plashing fountains and cool chambers through which the breeze wanders in an artificial twilight of marble screens pierced so craftily, one might think them a flowing drapery of lace-work—where, from such wizard creations of Oriental pomp, you glance down and behold, stretched at your feet, a burning waste of sand. A fine incentive to the luxurious imagination of a tyrant, this contrast, that has all the glamour of a dream….
But such abrupt transitions are not the rule. Midway between the pulsating town-life and the desert there lies, mostly, a sinister extra-mural region, a region of gaping walls and potsherds, where the asphodel shoot up to monstrous tufts and the fallacious colocynth, the wild melon, scatters its globes of bitter gold. For it is in the nature of Orientals that their habitations should surround themselves with a girdle of corrupting things, gruesome and yet fascinating: a Browning might have grown enamoured of its macabre spell.
No European cares to linger about these precincts after dusk; here lie the dead, in thick-strewn graves; here the jackal roams at night—it thrusts its pointed snout through the ephemeral masonry of townsmen's tombs or scratches downward within the ring of stones that mark some poor bedouin's corpse, to take toll of the carrion horrors beneath; so you may find many graves rifled. And if you come by day you will probably see, crouching among the ruins, certain old men, pariahs, animated lumps of dirt and rags. They are so uncouth and unclean, so utterly non-human, that one wonders whether they are really of the sons of Adam, and not rather goblins, or possibly some freak, some ill-natured jest on the part of the vegetable or mineral kingdoms. Day after day they come and burrow for orts among the dust-heaps, or brood motionless in the sunshine, or trace cabalistic signs with their fingers in the sand—the future, they tell you, can be unriddled out of its cascade-like movements.
It is one of the complaints of sentimentalists that the French are abolishing these picturesque Arab cemeteries in Tunisia; combining firmness with a great deal of tact, they insidiously appropriate these sanctified premises and deck them with timber as a solace for coming generations. Let them go! The undiluted Orient is still wide enough; and no one will appreciate the metamorphosis more than the native citizens themselves, who love, above all things, to play about and idle in the shade of trees; perhaps, in the course of time, they will realize that not only Allah, but also man, is able to plant and take care of them. Your Arab often has a love of nature which is none the worse for being wholly unconscious.
At Nefta there is no impure region, properly so called. The searching sunbeams and the winds are inimical to all the lush concomitants of decay; the sand also plays its part; so every dead dog, and every dead camel, arrests the flying grains and is straightway interred—transformed into a hillock, trivial but sanitary.
There are tombs, of course, tombs galore; but what strikes one most are the numerous shrines erected to saints alive or dead, of which I have already spoken.
You will do well to visit the Christian cemetery. It lies on an eminence above the town and is almost buried under deep waves of sand, which have risen to the summit of the surrounding walls and drowned the three graves, all but their tall stones that emerge above the flood. One of them is that of a controlleur of the district who died at his post while combating a cholera epidemic—there may be more of them, for aught I know, submerged beneath the drift.
It is surely in the interests of French prestige to pay a few francs for the cleansing of such a place in a land where, as conquerors, they live on a pedestal and are to assert their superiority in every way. It will be long ere Arabs can appreciate French art and science, but they understand visible trifles of this kind, and, conversing with them, I have found that, like many simple-minded people, they are disposed to contrast unfavourably their own burial-grounds with our trim method of sepulture, which assures to the defunct a few more years of apparent respect, while flattering the vanity of the living. To a sensitive Christian this cemetery of Nefta must be a sad and a scandalous sight; no humble nomad's tomb on the bleak hillside is more neglected than these memorials to his fellow-believers who have died, far from their homes, under the flaming sun of Africa.
From this point you can see the tail-end of the oasis. It lies in the Zafrana region, and is the worst nourished. This, I suppose, is inevitable; the gardens must be continually moving—moving away from the Chott towards their vital sources, which now lie under a respectable precipice of sand. It is hard to believe that the present site of the fountains is what one might call the natural, aboriginal one. I imagine that the cultivators, in the course of ages, must have tracked the element and followed it up, as a terrier will pursue a rabbit in its burrow, planting trees in proportion as they laid bare its once subterranean bed. Thus, the supply of liquid being constant, the oasis is impelled to wander in the direction of its springs; the more you add to the head, the shorter grows the tail. In prehistoric days, maybe, the water gushed out somewhere near the Chott; the charming depression of the "corbeille" is perhaps the work of human hands.