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Updated: September 13, 2025
To tease him, I quote the authority of Bordereau, who says that there are practically no Arabs in Gafsa; that the customs of this town are one thing and those of the Arabs another, unless he applies the word Arab to all the Mohammedan races of these parts. The objection is brushed aside; one word is as good as another, n'est-ce-pas?
Here and there are holes in the ground, where the natives have unearthed some desert shrub for the sake of its roots which, burnt as fuel, exhale a pungent odour of ammonia that almost suffocates you. Once the water-zone of Gafsa is passed, every trace of cultivation vanishes. And yet, to judge by the number of potsherds lying about, houses must have stood here in days of old.
What is a man of this type doing in Gafsa? Mystery! But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how incongruous a figure against that background of palms and barren mountains!
They follow the railway lines; and nothing is a fitter commentary on the medievalism which deplores the building of railways into the desert than facts like that of the plain of Maknassy a sterile tract up to a few years ago which is now covered, for a distance of sixty kilometres, by olive groves. Why? Because the line from Sfax to Gafsa happens to pass through it.
A tangle of palms that sweep southward in a radiant trail of green, the crenellated walls of the Kasbah gleaming through the interstices of the foliage the whole vision swathed in an orange-tawny frame of desolation, of things non-human.... I was tempted to think that the sunset view from the Meda eminence was the finest in the immediate neighbourhood of Gafsa.
"You will probably perish on the road to Tozeur, in a sandstorm." "Ah, those sandstorms: they interest me. Have you ever been to Tozeur?" "God forbid! Gafsa is quite bad enough for me. Or you may be strangled by the Arabs; such things occur every day. You smile? Read the papers! At some places, like Sfax, there are regular organized bands of assassins, the police being doubtless in their pay.
But, judging by the size of their implements, the hands of this prehistoric race can hardly have been as large as those of their modern descendants. Then, as now, Gafsa must have been an important site; the number of these weapons is astonishing.
I should be sorry to say how long the train takes to crawl through the thirty odd kilometres that separate Gafsa from Metlaoui. My companion on the trip, M. Dufresnoy, tells me that the return journey is still slower, because the line runs mostly uphill and the trucks, thirty or forty of them, are loaded with minerals.
Here, at all events, if you do not mind a little native esprit de corps, you will be able to thaw your frozen limbs; all the other rooms of Gafsa, public and private, are like ice-cellars. There are many of these coffeehouses in the town, and this is one of the least fashionable of them.
Just for the fun of the thing, and to while away his hours of enforced idleness, he is collecting facts for a book to be entitled "Customs of the Arabs," as exemplified by the life of Gafsa. The idea came to him quite suddenly, after reading some descriptions which he considered sadly misleading. Customs of the Arabs!
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