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Seldja, he told me, used to be a dangerous place for Europeans to traverse; many robberies and even murders had taken place there in times past; the new regime, of course, had put an end to all that. Ah, those maladette bestie di serpenti they swarmed among the rocks: they were of every kind and size; worst of all, the spleenful naja.
The plants suffer at first from the strong winds, but they acclimatize themselves by degrees. Remembering what had been told me of the unsuccessful attempt of the French to appropriate the water springs of Sidi Mansur, near Gafsa, I asked Dufresnoy whether the Arabs had not contested the action of his company at Seldja. "I should think so!" he said. "They raised the devil.
Quite apart from what the French have taken from it, this Seldja brook must have carried down a larger volume of water in those days, helped, as is very probable, by small tributary streamlets which have now ceased to flow. Old Arab authors say that one used to be able to walk from one end of North Africa to the other in the shade.
Not along ago nearly every drop of water for this settlement had to be conveyed from Gafsa on the backs of camels. But the company has now captured a spring at the head of the Seldja gorge, about eight miles distant, which brings a copious flow of water into the place.
"You never know what is going on in the minds of these savants. He told them he was a veterinary surgeon, and not a man of business. Can you understand such an attitude?" "I must think about it, Monsieur." And so I did, riding home that evening from the Seldja gorge and next day too; but, somehow or other, have not yet attained a mature opinion on the subject.
As I issued out of the rock-portal of the Seldja gorge and beheld that strip of masonry which told so plain a story, with the now barren plain at its foot, it struck me that this spot was pregnant with a romance beyond that of mere scenery. It was well, here, to pause awhile and contrast old and new notions of African prosperity.
A blissful sight! The dark and mazy woodlands, now, were left far behind the croaking of the frogs sounded strangely distant. We gazed in ecstasy upon that shining flood.... On my return journey down the Seldja gorge, that afternoon, I had a narrow escape.
The inference is clear: the plain must have been cultivated in those days. Likely enough, it was covered, like many other parts of "Africa," with olives, that drew their life from this judiciously managed water-supply. The Oued Seldja to-day fulfils no such useful function.
And if the now uncultivated plain affronts our eye, there is already a set-off to this apparent superiority of the ancient regime in the new line of railway which, at great expense, has been made to climb up the sinuosities of the Seldja gorge itself. Whither wending? To fetch more phosphates!
It was among these rocks that Philippe Thomas first detected the traces of those phosphates that have made his name famous. Tissot, in 1878, already anticipated their discovery. In point of sheer grandeur, of convulsed stratification and cloven ravine, of terrorizing features, I have seen gorges far finer than this of Seldja.
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