Chapter 64Tozeur — Sbeitla — Kairouan — Dougga — Bulla RegiaTOZER — SBEITLA — KAIRUAN — DOUGGA — BULLAREGGIA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
And then it went through a famous rocky valley, in which there are great industrial mines of artificial fertiliser saltpetre, on the new railway to Tozer1, or as the French say, Tozeur. There I stayed a few weeks — it was just the date harvest — and slowly grew well again. Or perhaps I was only getting used to the Tunisian water. I also found an Italian painter, Francesco Franchetti2, with whom I soon made friends and in whose studio (he lived in the old Arab house of the Caid) I found splendid Moorish interior motifs. We took long walks together through the oases and watched the date harvest everywhere. Then Signor Franchetti taught me to smoke hashish, and led me to Arab sheikhs and sages. New worlds opened to me here too. Tozeur is the most characteristic Sahara town with its fortress-like brick buildings, which reminded me of the ancient Mexican ruins of Mitla. I was in Nefta as well, the town built wholly of clay, which rests on its seven hills, overtopped by the great domed mosques. A great crate of dates which I sent off from Tozeur to the children caused such delight that I resolved to have these dates every year. And the next autumn, before the next date harvest even, came the World War!
When at last I had to leave, I travelled straight to the holy city of Kairouan, which was opened to Europeans only a few years ago3. That is to say, on the way I still looked over the huge Roman ruins of Sbeitla (the home of the “Tripolitan”). They impressed me enormously, as all the African Roman sites do; I also made an atmospheric sketch of the triumphal arch and the field of rubble.
In Kairouan there was still real Arab life! Wonderful, rich mosques; but the strangest thing was the situation of the town in a desert-like plain, ringed by thousands of Arab burial grounds with their white corpse-stones among the thickets of prickly pear and the hedges. It looked as though the whole world were a field of corpses. The view from the great minaret, at sunset, is overwhelming.
Here I came to know a very singular Austrian woman painter, thoroughly Parisian, whom the laurels of Rosa Bonheur gave no peace. She painted in a kind of calico cage in the market place, and before her “stood” her models, Arabs on horseback. She too said to me: “Paris is the only place where one flourishes, I shall never go away from there.” Where may the war have blown her?
Kairouan is as “charged with mood” as few other places are. Here too I often saw the dancing and howling dervishes, whom I first experienced years ago in Cairo. Since here one is allowed to sit close beside them, they work far more uncannily and more gruesomely still.
At the close of my Tunisian tour it went on to Téboursouk, Dougga. In the most glorious, broadly laid-out hill country, among forests of olive, lies the giant Roman ruin field of Dougga. An infinity of it is still standing. Especially in the theatre. (The only one in which the prompter's box is still to be seen.) Here too I was again escorted and guided by the kavass of the man in power at Téboursouk. I spent a whole day in the ruins, in which I painted with stiff hands as well, for unfortunately it was bitingly cold.
Of many temples the columns and pediments are still there, and sundials besides, wonderful marble paving — a sunken world, and yet a world fully divined.
But all that is nothing beside the brilliance and splendour of the excavations begun only quite recently at Bulla Regia4. Four summer palaces of Roman grandees are there — underground, so as to enjoy the cool in the hot African summer — and they have been uncovered. One goes down broad marble staircases into the depths and finds wonderful mosaic floors. The Palace of Amphitrite and the Palace of the Hunt are the loveliest. They are as well preserved as the best houses in Pompeii; lavatories and dinner lifts still there. In the piscina, the fish tank, one sees artistic fish mosaics of a delightful liveliness. At the great baths, too, the digging is now beginning. A number of well-preserved statues from Bulla Regia, set up in the Bardo at Tunis, had already given me there the impulse for my visit. Forsaken of the world and wild is the landscape, everything overgrown with reeds and lianas. The distant mountains stood a deep blue-black in the shadow of the clouds.
My host from the railway station had driven me out in the little carriage and told me on the way of the unsolved murder of a French lady5 committed in these ruins barely a year before. She had been found with her body cut open, and of the killer there was no trace. Countless Arabs were taken into custody, but had to be released again for want of evidence. Like a black cloud the mystery broods over the horrible deed of Bulla Regia. I thought again of my most recent experience at La Marsa, and I shuddered even in retrospect when I thought of the animal expression on my guide's face, of his trembling hands, his panting breath. — — —
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the new railway to Tozer — New in the strict sense: the line reached Tozeur in 1913, the year she came. The metre-gauge railway of the Compagnie des phosphates et du chemin de fer de Gafsa was built to carry phosphate to Sfax and was complete as far as Métlaoui by 1899; the extension to Tozeur opened in 1913, and Gabès followed in 1916. Her word neue is therefore exact, and it is the only outside date in this chapter: nothing here can be earlier than 1913. The vault had already fixed this journey to autumn 1913 – spring 1914 from her housekeeper's leaving date, by an argument made entirely inside the memoir. The railway is the first confirmation of that dating from a source outside it. (The Gafsa phosphate railway)
- ↑Francesco Franchetti — An Italian orientalist painter, and on the evidence assembled here the Livorno painter Francesco Franchetti (1878–1931). Born in Livorno on 4 July 1878 to Federico Franchetti and Fortunée Coriat — a Sephardic family out of Morocco settled in Tuscany, his mother Tunisian Jewish — trained in Rome under Cesare Maccari between 1896 and 1900, first in North Africa in 1909 and back repeatedly through the 1910s and 1920s; his orientalist painting is dated from 1913. He drowned himself in the Tiber in 1931. Name, nationality, profession, country and year all agree with the man she describes, and the biography we have read does not mention Tozeur. She supplies what it lacks: that he was living in the Caid's old Arab house at Tozeur in the winter of 1913–14, that he was a poet as well as a painter, and that he stayed a friend — he reappears at Biskra and Touggourt, and twice more before the war ends the journey. (Livorno)
- ↑opened to Europeans only a few years ago — Thirty-two years, not a few. Kairouan was closed to non-Muslims until the French took it in 1881. Meyers, in the edition on her own shelf generation, puts it plainly: Kairouan counts in the Muslim world as one of the four gates of paradise, and “to enter the town was not permitted to Europeans until it was occupied by the French in 1881.” She arrives in the winter of 1913–14, a full generation after the closure ended, and writes as though the gates had just opened. It is the kind of slip the memoir makes constantly — she is dating by feeling, not by record — and it is worth noticing because the sentence is doing work: the city has to be freshly forbidden for the chapter's excitement to make sense. (Kairouan)
- ↑the excavations begun only quite recently at Bulla Regia — Correct, and this is the second thing in the chapter that dates it from outside the memoir. Bulla Regia, near Jendouba in the north-west, is the Roman town that went underground: its wealthy households built a whole second storey below ground level, vaulted and colonnaded, to escape the summer heat, and the mosaic floors survived because the earth kept them. The French cleared the great houses in the first decades of the twentieth century, which is exactly what she found in progress — the baths, she says, are only being started now. The House of Amphitrite and the House of the Hunt, which she calls palaces, are still the two that visitors are taken to; the Amphitrite mosaic, a Triumph of Venus among sea-creatures and cupids, is third century and still on its own floor. (Bulla Regia)
- ↑the unsolved murder of a French lady — She had already told this story two chapters earlier, as the thing she was nearly the second instance of. In the Tunis chapter she says that in the dunes at La Marsa an Arab lured her astray and would probably have robbed and butchered her, had workmen not come along the road, “just as barely a year before a French lady in the wilderness of Bulla Regia.” The murder is named there before Bulla Regia is ever reached, and here, at the site, the innkeeper tells it to her as local news and the chapter closes on her own escape. It is one of the few pieces of construction in a memoir that is otherwise arranged by place and not by narrative. The case itself is not identified in this project: the French colonial press of 1912–13, the Dépêche tunisienne above all, would date it, and a date would in turn date her journey. (Bulla Regia)