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Updated: June 5, 2025
His family, he explained, was away just now, but if I could arrange to delay my departure for a little while he would accompany me as far as Metlaoui, which lies on the Tozeur route, and show me over the mines. He was to return to his work there in a week or so. The proposal was too tempting to be refused.
Straining my eyes at the water-shed beyond El-Hamma, whence one has the first view of Tozeur and its palm forest, I thought to detect, at an immeasurable distance, two minute dusky streaks, swimming in air other oases, no doubt. They seemed to dangle, by some gossamer thread, from the grey vault of Heaven.
Near at hand lies the women's bath, which is built on the same primitive lines. A pious legend runs to the effect that this water of El-Hamma used to be cold, but an Arab marabout was persuaded to spit into it and, lo! it suddenly became hot and mineral.... As you approach Tozeur the landscape becomes more desert-like; mountains are left behind; stones are rarer; you wade in sand.
Then came a wise man who cut up and ploughed the watery district of Gafsa, Tozeur and Nefta; he planted trees and all the other growths useful to mankind; he divided the land into patches, led the water through them, and apportioned them among certain families in short, he gave these oases their present shape, and did his work so well that up to this day no one has been able to suggest any improvements or to quarrel with his arrangement.
This, I thought, was a most unusual type of Frenchman; and yet there was something in his language, or perhaps in his ideas, which was already familiar to me. "To be Sultan of Tozeur, for example ha! I would bend them to my will; I would lead them to battle and give them laws; I would have them about me as slaves and companions they should sing to me and tell me stories while I go to sleep.
But the cathedral-like gravity of Tozeur is lacking; there is too much riot and opulence, too many voluptuous festoons and spears and spirals, a certain craving, so to speak, after the purely ornate: if Tozeur represents the decorative style of Louis Quatorze, this is assuredly Louis Seize.
One great drawback is that the thick undergrowth often obstructs the view; and another, that you cannot walk about in all directions, as at Tozeur, because there is too much running water perhaps one should say too few paths and bridges. For the last two days a sand-storm of unusual violence has been raging.
Notwithstanding these difficulties, an enterprising Maltese runs a motor-car from Metlaoui to Tozeur and Nefta for all such persons as are prepared to pay his price, and I hear that the speculation has paid well.
In prehistoric days, maybe, the water gushed out somewhere near the Chott; the charming depression of the "corbeille" is perhaps the work of human hands. The same has struck me at Tozeur, which also marches horizontally away from its termination. An exquisite corbeille could be manufactured here; all the elements are present; it only requires a few thousand years of labour.
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.
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