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But they wished Maïeddine to reach there first, so they stopped by the chott, and lunched from a smartly fitted picnic-basket Lady MacGregor had brought. Stephen paid his Arab coachman, told him he might go back, and transferred a small suitcase his only luggage from the carriage to the car.
Walking from Nefta to the Chott, you will reach, on the burning plain, a maraboutic shrine that might serve as an asylum for some conscience-stricken, malaria-proof penitent. They go well together, maraboutism and the Chott two factors that make for barrenness in man and nature. And Nefta is full of such shrines.
We rode out to the Chott to see the extraction of the salt, which is a Government monopoly; the track leads past a famous lotus, a Methuselah among trees, whose shadow covers 120 square metres of ground and whose branches are so long, so weary with age, that they bend downward and touch the earth with their elbows to rest, as it were and then rise up again, refreshed.
This marvellous palm-embroidered rift sunders Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills overhead, into two distinct towns or settlements. The eye follows the stream as far as the low-lying plantations and into the Chott beyond, resting at last upon the violet haze of its mysterious southern shores.
It undergoes no preparation whatever, but is sold as it comes out of the Chott, agreeable to the palate though rather yellowish in colour. Needless to say the Government runs no risk of the supply failing; there is salt, a swooning stretch of salt, as far as eye can reach.
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.
True, the great Lesseps had taken his part. Desolation reigns on this morass of salt, where the life of man and beast, and even of plants and stones, faints away in mortal agony. Unnumbered multitudes of living creatures have sunk into its perfidious abysses. "A caravan of ours," says an Arab author, "had to cross the Chott one day; it was composed of a thousand baggage camels.
For it was a lake, or series of lakes, and nothing else; geological evidence is opposed to the supposition that the Chott country was ever a gulf of the Mediterranean within historical times it was merely a chain of inland waters. And another surprising discovery has been made of late, namely, that these depressions lie at different levels and have, each of them, its own system of alimentation.
This first view of the oasis of Tozeur, and the Chott Djerid beyond it, has often been praised. To me, arriving at the water-shed on a cloudy afternoon, that line of inky-black palm trees with its background of blanched sterility melting into a lowering, leaden-hued sky, conveyed a most uncanny impression: the prospect was absolutely familiar!
Visible from here are also certain mounds at the eastern extremity of the oasis, near the Chott; they are marked on the map as "ruins of Zafrana." What this Zafrana was, or how it comes to have a name resembling that of a small Sicilian village, I cannot tell; thither, at all events, I bent my steps, having heard that ancient coins, as well as lamps, had been found here.
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