Chapter 63Sousse — El Djem — Sfax — Gabès — GafsaSOUSA — EL DJEM — SFAX — GABES — GAFZA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
So I travelled southwards to Sousse, the old Roman Hadrumetum1. The catacombs there are immeasurable, and there is an old Roman cemetery above ground which is almost the only one of its kind. A visit to the museum, with its wonderful and unique mosaic floors, is also very rewarding. From the roof of the French government building I was allowed to paint an oriental sunset such as I had never seen before. It was like a transfiguration of world and life. I was as if intoxicated and could have embraced the whole world. Then I went on to El Djem2, the huge and perfectly preserved Roman amphitheatre, of which it is said that nothing was ever staged in it. It is far larger and more impressive than the one in Rome, because it lies in a sandy plain overgrown with prickly pear (whereas in Rome nowadays modern tenements look into the window-holes of the arena). I saw it at sunset and later by moonlight too, for at the last moment I decided to stay longer and take an evening train onward. That was to cost me dear. A rather wild-looking merchant from Sbeitla, who wanted to go to Tripoli and settle there, followed my example. So fate brought us together. The man was dreadful. But I strolled with him by moonlight around the arena, which alone I should never have dared, ate my supper at his side in a moonlit niche, and then we travelled on to Sfax. The train did not arrive until two in the morning. Because of some festival all the French hotels were full, and we now steered for a thoroughly Arab lodging house of the most dubious sort. Everyone was already asleep, only a few suspicious houris flitted about on the galleries. They declared that nothing was free, we would have to go into the common dormitory. Many doors stood open and showed sleepers in long rows. What was to be done? On the vigorous protest of the man from Sbeitla, five sleepers were at last thrown out of a large room. They staggered up from their beds, crashing and shouting; it really was not pleasant for them. But now the good Tripolitan believed he might share the conquered chamber with me, and when I showed him the door he trotted off, deeply offended, to the common dormitory. Had he known that, he would probably have exerted himself less! He had already been about to unpack. Thank God there was a solid bolt on the door. The black woman brought highly questionable bed linen. And the straw bed was still quite warm! All the same I thanked heaven for it.
The next day (fortunately I did not see the Tripolitan again) I looked over old and new Sfax. The old Moorish town with its battlemented city wall is the most picturesque piece of oriental huddle imaginable. But paint I could not. New Sfax is dreadfully metropolitan and modern.
At three in the afternoon we set off by post-bus through the desert to the oasis of Gabès. We drove for many hours, salted down like herrings. Only in the dark of night did we reach the little, French, overcrowded house.
In the night I had one of the attacks of colic which had visited me more than once since I set foot on Tunisian soil. It goes that way with many foreigners; it is the water. But I thought I was dying. The next day I had the senior French official to whom I had been recommended come to my bedside. Count Miremont (I think that was his name) was very kind, and consoled me that in today's sandstorm I had lost nothing anyway. The next day his kavass would take me round. And he duly reported for duty. I took one of the cheap cast-off cabs, and in two days I had crossed all the oases and made a few sketches as well. To the island of Djerba, lying off the Gulf of Gabès, Homer's famous island of the Lotus-eaters3, I unfortunately did not get.
On the fourth day I travelled on by post-bus, which left at four in the morning. In my haste I fell down the stairs, and very nearly broke my neck.
In Gafsa, another and far lovelier oasis, I had a fresh attack of colic. Again the local French dignitary sat by my bed. And the next day I roamed oasis and desert once more with his kavass.
Gafsa is a glorious spot. The peculiar quality of the Sahara came home to me fully there for the first time. How strangely it worked on me, with its endless camel caravans, its wonderful pictures of mood! I also visited the wife of the Caid, a full-blooded Arab woman, who made me a present of giant dates.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Hadrumetum — Sousse, on the Gulf of Hammamet. She prints a French-looking form, Hadrouméde. Phoenician Hadrumetum, later a Roman colonia and one of the great cities of the province. Its Christian catacombs are not a figure of speech: some five kilometres of galleries with thousands of burials, among the largest known outside Rome, and they had been under excavation for barely twenty years when she went down into them. (Sousse)
- ↑El Djem — The amphitheatre of Thysdrus, and her comparison is wrong. Built in the early third century and left unfinished, which is where the local tradition she repeats — that nothing was ever staged in it — comes from. It is the third largest Roman amphitheatre known, holding perhaps 35,000; the Colosseum, which she says it beats, is larger and held something nearer 50,000. What she is actually arguing is that the setting beats Rome's, and on that she has a case: she had lived in Rome and watched the tenements close in on it. (The amphitheatre of El Djem)
- ↑Homer's famous island of the Lotus-eaters — Djerba, identified with the land of the Lotus-eaters since antiquity. The Lotus-eaters are Odyssey IX, where the men who eat the fruit lose all wish to go home. Ancient geographers, Strabo and Pliny among them, put the episode at Meninx, the island now called Djerba, and every European guidebook of her day repeated it. She got within sight of it and no further — which, in a chapter where she has just crossed a desert on a bruised stomach, is worth pausing over: this is the one island in the Mediterranean whose legend is about not leaving. (Djerba)