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Even before arriving at the spot, I had come to the correct conclusion that it must be worth more than a two days' visit. The book opens thus: One must reach Gafsa by way of Sfax. Undoubtedly, this was the right thing to do; all my fellow-travellers were agreed upon that point; leaving Sfax by a night train, you arrive at Gafsa in the early hours of the following morning.
And were it not for this railway the branch line to Tozeur would never have been contemplated; the oases of Souf and Djerid and Nefzaoua, with their teeming populations, would have slumbered the sleep of ages in their burning desert sands. And to realize what a change it has wrought in the appearance of the ports of Sfax, Sousse and even Tunis, one must have known these places in the olden days.
"After that, Lieutenant, at the Officers' Club at Sfax, they avoided like the plague any subject which risked leading the conversation back to Captain de Saint-Avit." Chatelain had spoken almost in a whisper, and the little people of the desert had not heard this singular history. It was an hour since we had fired our last cartridge.
Four launches sent out in different directions to the south and east reported no sign of land, but immense quantities of floating vegetable matter, yellow dust, and the bodies of jackals, camels, zebras, and lions. The fifth launch after great hardships reached the seacoast through the new channel and arrived at Sfax after eight days.
Perhaps there is no more perilous journey on earth than that, and if a traveller would vanish into the past, into such Oriental countries as the voyagers of Hakluyt saw with wonder, then to leave Sfax, and go across country to the Niger, would equal what once came of fooling with the arcana of the Djinn.
A Tripolitan fisherman, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, a holy man nearly seventy years of age, who had twice made the journey to Mecca and who now in his declining years occupied himself with reading the Koran and instructing his grandsons in the profession of fishing for mullet along the reefs of the Gulf of Cabes, had anchored for the night off the Tunisian coast, about midway between Sfax and Lesser Syrtis.
The railway to Sfax belongs to us, and we can regulate prices as it suits us; if we liked, we could choke off all trade. Ah, the company knows its business! Of course, that makes us many enemies; they call it high-handedness and brutality a concern like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks we call it common sense.
Go to the prison of Sfax, and you will realize that there may be some reason for the absinthe-drinker's remark as to the "organized bands of assassins" at that place. I speak of what I have seen with my eyes. The Arab boy, they will tell you, is full of guile, and must be repressed. Granted, but A colony, furthermore, is not an orchid. Granted.
Accordingly, in the depth of winter in the year 1548, at a time which was, as we have pointed out, a close season for piratical enterprises, and during which attack from the sea was not expected, he collected all the corsairs whom he could gather, and fell upon the Spaniards on the coast of Tunis, at Susa, at Sfax, and at Monastir.
Let me tell you that I have investigated it thoroughly, and find it most instructive. This young fellow is not yet twenty; he ran away from home for no discoverable reason, then signed on a merchant vessel at Marseilles and, disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a night-train, thinking to reach Tunis.
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