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Updated: April 30, 2025
A mule, a sturdy beast, was waiting to convey me from Metlaoui to Tozeur. Leaving my heavier baggage to follow with some camels, I rode into the dawn. Considerably less than half-way stands the rest-house of Guifla, kept by an Algerian with a pretty wife. Here I saw a few carved Roman stones which had been found, the man told me, in the neighbouring Oued Baghara.
At Guifla, according to Valery Mayet, they killed an ostrich twenty years ago a rara avis in these parts. There were numbers of engineers and workmen at this place, engaged in laying down the line of railway which will unite Tozeur to Metlaoui.
This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the significance of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian hotels can only be inhabited by young hopefuls. The house contains a considerable library of local literature mostly technical and dealing with Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it intelligible to a simple traveller like myself.
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands Rifled the bowels of our mother Earth For treasure better hid.... Besides these tribes a certain proportion of Tunisian Arabs are employed, but they are too weak or timorous to relish underground work; a sprinkling of negroes, as well as some of the hillfolk from the district surrounding Metlaoui, who go by the quaint name of Boujaja.
There had certainly been some improvement within the last twenty years slight, but steady; the building of the railway station so far outside the town he considered a disgraceful piece of jobbery, a crime which had permanently injured the prospects of the place. Merchants, he said, are entirely dependent on the state of the Metlaoui mines.
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.
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.
The Tripolitan village has now been moved to another site a certain number of troops, too, are definitely stationed at Metlaoui. "As usual," said Dufresnoy, "we came in for the blame. They say that we did not allow the real authors, the Khabyles, to be punished, because they are French citizens, and all the rest of it. Don't believe a word of that.
It opens out; the rocks melt away into bare white dunes, the country assuming the character of a tableland; you begin to feel a sense of aloofness. There was blazing sunshine in these upper regions, but a fresh breeze; this is the Ras el-Aioun, where the French have bridled some of the wild waters, thrusting them into a tube that carries them in a mad whirl to their settlement at Metlaoui.
The enclosure is filling up with drift-sand; the inscriptions on the tombs, often a mere charcoal scrawl of some unlettered friend or parent, is soon effaced by winds and rain. One is wholly unprepared for the appearance of Metlaoui proper.
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