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It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more palatable than this 'sweet of sweets." As we are writing of the country of dates, par excellence, I must needs give some description of the palm, but it will be understood that the information is Tunisian, or collected in Tunis, and may differ in some respects from details collected in other parts of North Africa.
A man who had gone to fetch the blacksmith, and found him not, demanded payment of two Tunisian piastres. The chaouch, suspecting that he never went at all, but concealed himself in the village, would not pay him. This brought on a collision. Sheikh Omer supported us; and so all the people of the other village took part against us.
However, as we have already remarked, their goal is not so much the erection of distinct Algerian and Tunisian "Nations" as it is creation of a larger North African, perhaps Pan-Islamic, unity. It must not be forgotten that they are in close touch with the Sennussi and kindred influences which we have already examined in the chapter on Pan-Islamism.
After a brief absence he reappeared dressed in his famous Tunisian costume, but that, alas! had also lost its pristine glory like everything else in this abandoned subterranean abode.
The sailors gave no sign of emotion, while Scudamore tried to lock arms with one after another of the pirates, constantly asserting that he had nothing to do with the other party. "Silence!" ordered Barthelemy sternly. "You will neither scuttle the ship nor hang the crew. That might do for miserable Spanish privateers, pitiful Tunisian cut-throats, but not for us, Englishmen and Frenchmen.
One of our first cares, after the completion of our conquest of Algeria, had been to insure tranquillity on its Moorish frontier to the west, and its Tunisian boundary on the east. On the Morocco side we had been forced to have recourse to heavy ordnance for this purpose.
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.
He came out of nowhere with a single ship and less than a score of attendants to be precise, two officers, a priest, a secretary, a major-domo, an under-steward, a cook, three Tunisian slaves, and six lackeys. He had sailed from Algiers, with a brief rest in the port of Leghorn, and he stepped ashore in Turkish dress, with scarlet-lined cloak, turban, and scimetar.
In the one country it is the ruling of a conquered people for the good of the conquerors alone, and in the other it is the ruling of an unconquered people by bolstering up and improving their own institutions under the pretence of seeking their welfare. The immense advantage of the Tunisian system is apparent on all sides.
The results of the French occupation were summed up to me by a Tunisian as the making of roads, the introduction of more money and much drunkenness, and the institution of laws which no native could ever hope to understand. But France has done more than that in Tunis, even for the native.
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