[126]Marmol, ii. p. 497.
[127]Guérin, i. p. 114.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DEPARTURE FROM SUSA — ES-SAHEL — EFFECTS OF THE DISFORESTING OF TUNIS — OLIVE-TREES — EL-DJEM.
On the 7th of April we left Susa in a carriage, having sent our horses and mules on in advance the night before. The journey occupied us ten hours, but the roads were very heavy, owing to a smart shower of rain which had just fallen; under favourable circumstances, the journey ought to have been done in eight hours.
We left by the Bab el-Bahr, and, crossing the Mohammedan cemetery, passed the Bab el-Djidid and the Bab el-Gharbi, and thence took a southern direction. At a distance of three miles is Zaouiat Susa, a poor little village, situated in the midst of a rich plain covered with olive-trees; beyond, on both sides of the road, are Roman ruins, but of no interest. At fifteen miles is Menzel, the only convenient resting-place between Susa and El-Djem. The wayside fountain here is the only water on the road. Beyond this the olive-trees cease, and the traveller enters a wide and treeless plain, part of the district called Es-Sahel, or coast region, extremely fertile when an unusual quantity of rain has fallen, but at other times almost uncultivated, and apparently hardly susceptible of cultivation.
We subsequently journeyed for many days in this region; everywhere we found extensive traces of Roman occupation—vast Roman cities as well as isolated posts, proving beyond doubt that it was at one time capable of supporting a dense population. The entire Regency of Tunis must, during the Roman occupation, have contained little short of twenty million inhabitants, while now, the most favourable estimate places the population at not more than a million and a half. Day after day, in traversing these arid and treeless plains, intersected by watercourses in which no water flows, the soil covered with sand and stones incapable of supporting vegetable life, we pondered over the causes which had turned a region once so fertile almost into a desert. The causes, indeed, are not difficult to find: they are written by the hand of nature on every hill we traversed, and confirmed by the daily actions of the inhabitants themselves. We know that at one time the country was covered with forests. I myself have travelled for days over plains where not a tree exists, and yet where ruins of Roman oil mills were frequently met with. Ibn Khaldoun, in his history of the Berbers, says: ‘El-Kahina caused all the villages and farms throughout the country to be destroyed, so that the vast region between Tripoli and Tangiers, which had the appearance of an immense thicket, under the shade of which rose a multitude of villages touching each other, now offered no other aspect than that of ruins.’[128] Even in modern days the same destruction of forests has been continued, if not wantonly or for purposes of defence, as in the time of the early Arab conquerors, still as surely, by the carelessness of their descendants, who never hesitate to set fire to a wood to improve the pasturage, or to cut down a tree when timber is required, but who never dream of planting another, or even of protecting those which spring up spontaneously, from being destroyed by their flocks and herds.
In Bruce’s notes, written 110 years ago, frequent allusion is made to forests through which he passed, where not a tree is now to be seen, and this is a work of destruction which must go on with ever accelerating rapidity year after year.
Nothing is more certain than that forests and tracts of brushwood not only prevent the evaporation of moisture by protecting the surface of the earth from the sun’s rays, but they serve to retain the light clouds which otherwise would be dissipated, until they attain sufficient consistence to descend in rain or refreshing mists. A hillside deprived of the forest whose foliage acted as a huge parasol to the ground, and whose roots served to retain the vegetable soil which was formed by its decay, very soon loses the power of generating vegetable life at all. The rich mould gets washed by winter rains into the valleys; in the summer months the sand is blown down on the top of this; succeeding rains carry down stones and gravel, till very soon all the most fertile portions of the soil disappear, leaving a residuum which is only capable of supporting vegetation when it becomes fertilised by an exceptional amount of moisture, which as time progresses must become rarer and rarer, like the efforts of the spendthrift to live off income, and spending every year a portion of his capital.