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Updated: September 13, 2025
The idyll lasted for long, ere the awful retribution came the element of insecurity acting, I suppose, as a cement. A perverse and sordid romance, you will say. And yet it endured, like many of its kind. Tozeur is more than twice as large as Gafsa, and the inhabitants are a healthier race, good-natured and docile, with much of the undiluted Berber blood still in their veins.
Gafsa has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches' cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers.
They told me that the descendants of the holy man who gave his name to the place are still alive, but they knew nothing of his history beyond this, that he was very pious indeed. If you do not mind a little scrambling, you can climb from here up to the last spur of the Jebel Guettor which overlooks the plain it is crowned by a ruined building, once whitewashed, and easily visible from Gafsa.
But the stone remained in my hand; I glanced at it, and saw that it was an implement of worked flint. Here was a discovery! Who were these carvers of stones, the aboriginals of Gafsa? How lived they? A prolonged and melodious whistle from the distant railway station served to remind me of the gulf of ages that separates these prehistoric men from the life of our day.
We spoke of the spirit of irritation and discontent that seemed rife among the Europeans in Gafsa. "Yes, the wind," he said; "or perhaps Africa generally. I've often noticed that men, and women too, put on new faces and characters hereabouts. This contact with an inferior race upsets their nervous equilibrium.
The painstaking John Leo says that the streets of Gafsa are "broad and paved, like those of Naples or Florence." Have they been slowly submerged under the debris of Arabism, or taken up and worked into the masonry of the Kasbah and other buildings? Not one is left: so much is certain.
The dogs of Gafsa, no doubt, are past all endurance; they are worse than in any Turkish village where they howl at least in unison, and so continuously through the night that one ceases to take note of them; but the man's real reason for this change of domicile was probably another one. "You must find that much quieter," I said, "and cheaper as well. These hotels are rather pretentious."
It was a French journal devoted to mining interests, and contained a long article dealing with the phosphate industry of Metlaoui, near Gafsa, with views of the works and portraits of its principal representatives. Beneath that of the speaker were printed the words "PAUL DUFRESNOY, Ingenieur civil des mines," and some other titles. An odd coincidence, this meeting, on the eve of my departure.
But untold ages ere this the waters of Leila were already frequented by men of another kind, by the flint-artists. Among the relics of their occupation I picked up, here, an unusually fine implement of the "amygdaloid" shape. Not a soul in Gafsa, native or foreign, could tell me who was the lady Leila that gave her name to this fountain.
They will tell you that there is nothing to be procured in the market; but if you proceed to the spot, you will at least see succulent legs of mutton exposed for sale. Tunisia is a sheep-rearing country there are sixty thousand sheep in the controle of Gafsa alone but you may live there a lifetime before seeing a leg of mutton at a country table d'hote.
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