Fountains in the Sand | Page 9

and continuous
shower would be the ruin of Gafsa; the structures would melt away,
like that triple wall of defence, erected in medieval times, of which not
a vestige remains. Yet the dirt is not as remarkable as in many Eastern
places, for every morning a band of minor offenders is marched out of
prison by an overseer to sweep the streets. Sometimes an upper room is
built to overlook, if possible, the roadway; it is supported on
palm-rafters, forming a kind of tunnel underneath. Everywhere are

immense blocks of chiselled stone worked into the ephemeral Arab
clay as doorsteps or lintels, or lying about at random, or utilized as
seats at the house entrance; they date from Roman or earlier
times--columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern, the
majority unpretentious and solid.
[Illustration: A Street in Gafsa]
What do the natives think of these relics of past civilization? Do they
ever wonder whence they came or who made them? "The stones are
there," they will tell you. Yet the wiser among them will speak of
_Ruman_; they have heard of Ruman moneys and antiquities.
Arabs have a saying that Gafsa was founded by Nimrod's
armour-bearer; but a more reasonable legend, preserved by Orosius and
others, attributes its creation to Melkarth, the Libyan and Tyrian
Hercules, hero of colonization. He surrounded it with a wall pierced by
a hundred gates, whence its presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city
of a hundred gates. The Egyptians ruled it; then the Phoenicians, who
called it Kafaz--the walled; and after the destruction of Carthage it
became the retreat and treasure-house of Numidian kings. Greeks, too,
exercised a powerful influence on the place, and all these civilized
peoples had prepared Gafsa to appreciate the beneficent rule of the
Romans.
Then came Vandals and Byzantines, who gradually grew too weak to
resist the floods of plundering Arab nomads; the rich merchants fled,
their palaces fell to ruins; the town became a collection of mud huts
inhabited by poor cultivators who lived in terror of the neighbouring
Hammama tribe of true Arabs, that actually forbade them to walk
beyond the limits of the Jebel Assalah--a couple of miles distant. So the
French found them in 1881.
There are, however, a few decent houses, two-storied and spacious; in
one of them, I am told, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to
whom my fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He is absent at the
Metlaoui mines just now, and his wife and children in Paris.
The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not extend to the native
houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original,
inconceivable squalor--squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago
ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when
native secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the

inside of the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast,
abandoned pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman
building-blocks and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth
of generations--there is hardly a level yard of ground--rags and dust and
decay! Here they live, the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little
sense of home as the wild creatures of the waste. But at night, when the
most villainous objects take on mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand; they assume an air of biblical desolation, as
though the curse of Heaven had fallen upon the life they once
witnessed; and even as you look into them, something stirs on the
ground: it is an Arab, sleeping uneasily in his burnous; he has felt,
rather than heard, your presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and
rises out of the dust, like a sheeted ghost.
It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before you when least
expected; to be ever-present, emerging, one might almost say, out of
the earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and
you may be sure that there is an Arab, brooding among the rocks or in
the sand, within a few yards of you.
The stones are there. This is another feature which they have in
common with the beasts of the earth: never to pause before the
memorials of their own past. Goethe says that where men are silent,
stones will speak. If ever they spoke, it is among these crumbling,
composite walls of Gafsa.
A Roman inscription of the age of Hadrian, which now forms the step
of an Arab house, will arrest your glance and turn your thoughts awhile
in the direction of this dim, romantic figure. How little we really know
of the Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the
monuments that sprang up in his footsteps! Never since the world
began has there been a