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.
Later on, when the intervening vines and fruit trees are decked in leaves, the purity of this geometrical design will be impaired….
The origin of Tozeur is lost in the grey mists of antiquity, since a site like this must have been cultivated from time immemorial; the first classical writer to mention the town is Ptolemy, who calls it Tisouros; on Peutinger’s Tables it is marked “Thusuro.” The modern settlement has wandered away from this ancient one which now slumbers—together, maybe, with its hoary Egyptian prototype—under high-piled mounds whereon have arisen, since those days, a few mediæval monuments and crumbling maraboutic shrines and houses of more modern date, patched together with antique building blocks and fragments of marble cornices: an island of sand and oblivion, lapped by soft-surging palms.
They call it Bled-el-Adher nowadays, and this is the place to spend the evening. I was there yesterday, perhaps for the last time.
It exhales a soporific, world-forgotten fragrance. There is no market here, no commercial or social life, save a few greybeards discussing memories on some doorstep; the only mirthful note is a swarm of young boys playing hockey on the sand-heaps, amid furious yells and scrimmages.
True hockey being out of the question on account of the deep sand, they have invented a variant, a simple affair: they arrange themselves roughly into two parties, and the ball is struck into the air with a palm branch from the one to the other; there, where it alights, a general rush ensues to get hold of it, clouds of sand arising out of a maze of intertwining arms and legs. The lucky possessor is entitled to have the next stroke, and the precision and force of their hitting is remarkable; they evidently do little else all day long.
I noticed an element of good humour and fair play not prevalent among the Gafsa boys; there was no peevish squabbling, and I only saw one fight which was a perfectly correct transaction—nobody interfering with the two combatants who hammered lustily at each other’s faces, and at last separated, satisfied and streaming with blood.
For some days past they had seen my interest in the game, and yesterday I observed that it was suddenly suspended; a consultation was taking place, and presently one of the boys approached me and politely asked whether I would not care to join; if so, I might have his club; and he placed the weapon and ball in my hand. The proposition tempted me; it is not every day that one is invited in such gentlemanly fashion to wallow on all fours with young Arabs. I made one or two strokes, not amiss, that called forth huge applause; and then returned, rather regretfully, to my sand-heap, to meditate on my own misspent youth, a subject that very rarely troubles me.
There is a tall, round building that stands within a hundred yards of where I sat; they call it the “Roman” tower, and the foundation-stones, though not in situ, are probably of that period; it was a Byzantine bell-tower, then a minaret, now a ruin. And here, confronting me, lie a few stones, that are all that remain of a pagan temple which became a Christian basilica and afterwards a mosque. In the fifth century Tisouros—this slumberous Bled-el-Adher—was a dependency of the Greek “Duke of Gafsa” (how strange it sounds!); Florentinus, its bishop, was executed by the king of the Vandals; Christian churches survived, side by side with mosques, as late as the fourteenth century. There seems to have been no great religious intolerance in those days.
They showed me a gold coin of the Emperor Gordian—the same who built the amphitheatre of El-Djem—which was found here, as well as some lamps and sculptured fragments of stone. Bruce speaks of cipollino columns; they are still to be seen, if you care to look for them, split up, since his time, to mend walls and doorsteps. Tozeur must have looked well enough under the later Empire.
And now, sand-heaps and a brood of young savages, shouting at their game. It is long since these people knew the meaning of refined things, although some of the houses, their fronts decorated with gracious designs in brickwork, testify to a not extinct artistic feeling—the citizens once enjoyed a reputation for delicacy and love of letters. There is nothing like systematic misgovernment for degrading mankind, and I think it likely that the gradual fusion of the Arab and Berber races, so antagonistic in all their aspirations, may have helped to abrade the finer edges of both parent-stocks. But the native civilization was not remarkable at any time.
The climate, and then their religion, has made them hard and incurious; it is a land of uncompromising masculinity. The softer element—thanks to the Koran—has become non-existent, and you will look in vain for the creative-feminine, for those intermediate types of ambiguous, submerged sexuality, the constructive poets and dreamers, the men of imagination and women of will, that give to good society in the north its sweetness and chatoyance; for those “sports” and eccentrics who, among our lower classes, are centrifugal—perpetually tending to diverge in this or that direction. The native is pre-eminently centripetal. His life is reduced to its simplest physiological expression; that capacity of reflection, of forming suggestive and fruitful concepts, which lies at the bottom of every kind of progress or culture, has been sucked out of him by the sun and by Mahomet’s teaching.
A land of violence, remorseless and relentless; the very beetles, so placid elsewhere, seem to have acquired a nervously virile temperament; they scurry about the sand at my feet with an air of rage and determination.
So I mused, while the game went on boisterously in the mellow light of sunset till, from some decaying minaret near by, there poured down a familiar long-drawn wail—the call to prayer. It was a golden hour among those mounds of sand, and I grew rather sad to think that I should never see the place again. How one longs to engrave certain memories upon the brain, to keep them untarnished and carry them about on one’s journeyings, in all their freshness! The happiest life, seen in perspective, can hardly be better than a stringing together of such odd little moments.