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Updated: June 5, 2025
Now how on earth did you find that out?" These are the men whom the Franco-Tunisian administration will do well to encourage as officials and settlers in the wilder parts. There is a daily recurring spectacle at Tozeur which enchanted me: the camping ground at dawn. Here the caravans repose after their desert journeys; hence they start, at every hour, in picturesque groups and movement.
How one longs to engrave certain memories upon the brain, to keep them untarnished and carry them about on one's journeyings, in all their freshness! The happiest life, seen in perspective, can hardly be better than a stringing together of such odd little moments. Hearing that there are few or no tourists in Nefta just now, I left Tozeur three days ago, an hour or so before sunrise.
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.
The export of these dates has been going on for centuries; in 1068 the geographer Bekri wrote that almost every day a thousand camels, or even more, leave Tozeur loaded with dates, and the trade will become still livelier when they have finished building the railway which is to connect this place with the present terminus Metlaoui.
Arabs will tell you that there are 194 water springs at Tozeur; they are ready to give you the names of every one of them, and several more; these unite to form what might almost be called a river, which is then artificially divided into three rivulets divided so neatly, says an old writer, that even some fragment of wood or other object drifting down the current is split up, perforce, into three equal parts, one for each of them; these three, later on, are once more subdivided into seven smaller ones apiece twenty-one in all; and these, again, into a certain fixed number of almost microscopic brooklets.
These salines are about three miles from Tozeur and an uncommonly simple establishment; they dig a ditch in the morass which promptly fills with water; the liquid evaporates, leaving the salt, which impregnates it, to be piled up in heaps on dry land. Next, they stow the mineral in sacks and transport it to Tozeur on donkeys.
This being the most exposed corner of the oasis, the tabias have grown to a fine size; I climbed over the inner one, which must be ten yards high and at least twenty in breadth. From its summit one perceives distant forms of ruinous buildings rising up in the Tozeur direction, on the slope which inclines to the Chott. Was this, perhaps, Zafrana? No.
For a brief moment I was transported.... It was not long before I found a companion at Tozeur. He was an Arab from the Souf, region of sand; dark-skinned, oval-faced, with straight eyelashes, straight nose, and an infectious, lingering smile; quite a worthless fellow; he had picked up a few words of French slang, and never tired of exhibiting them.
"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.
This region, the Djerid, is all sand; an isthmus of sand thrust in between the two Chotts of Djerid and Rharsa; the oases ara scattered about the country, says some old writer, like the spots on a leopard's skin.... The air was keen, and I shivered on my mule, looking back often at the dark forest of Tozeur, where I had spent some happy days.
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