On the Shores of the Mediterranean (44 page)

Adept with their hands, the Carthaginians were not creative in the artistic sense. Although they manufactured rugs and tapestries and textiles and pottery and jewellery, their inspiration was Greek, Syrian or Egyptian. They were great carriers of merchandise and dealers in raw materials as were their ancestors, the Phoenicians, who had founded a trading station here and on other parts of the Tunisian coast, such as Sousse and Bizerta, early in the ninth century BC. They bought metal from Spain, Gaul and Britain, marble from all over the Mediterranean and from other parts of Africa timber, ostrich feathers and ivory.

If little belonging to the Carthaginians remains in these excavations, even less pertains to the Phoenicians, of whom very little is known at all. A dark-skinned, Semitic people, in about 1300 BC they moved westwards from Canaan, later to be known as the Holy Land, and occupied a narrow, cultivable strip, no more than 120 miles long and nowhere more than 30 miles wide, between the Lebanon mountains and the Mediterranean. Finding it too small to support them as agriculturalists, and being at the meeting point of the caravan routes from Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Asia and the Persian Gulf, after trading in cypress and Lebanon cedar wood for a while, they took to the sea. On the coast they built themselves a number of strategically sited ports, among them Aradus, otherwise Ruad, on an island, Byblos on a cliff, Sidon on a headland and Tyre, raised on some offshore rocks
and tenuously linked with the mainland by a neck of sand. Here, they became the ancient world’s greatest ship-builders and sea-carriers of other people’s merchandise in the Mediterranean and beyond.

By the beginning of the seventh century the Phoenicians controlled the whole of the trade with the Persian Gulf by way of the Red Sea. However, disaster was soon to overwhelm them on their own shores, where the Assyrians, advancing westwards to the Mediterranean, captured their cities one by one, driving out their inhabitants who sailed westwards to found colonies on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte (in Tripolitania), in Sardinia, in the Balearics, near the Pillars of Melcarth, otherwise the Pillars of Hercules, and at what was to be Carthage. In 666 BC, Tyre, the last of their cities, fell to the Assyrians, lamented by the Prophet Ezekiel, and the Phoenician domination of the eastern Mediterranean was at an end. But they survived, being known as the Kinaahu, the ‘People of the Purple’. They were so named because they manufactured a deep purple dye from a liquid secreted by
Murex brandaris
and
Purpura haemastoma
, shell fish that existed in vast quantities on the Mediterranean shore of what had been their kingdom. Their expulsion from their own land drove them to seek new sources for the dyes, and these they found in the Canaries and Madeira.

It was about this time that the Pharaoh Necho II despatched a Phoenician fleet to find a way round Africa. It is not known whether they succeeded or not, but Herodotus, writing 150 years after the voyage took place, recorded that on returning to Egypt by way of the Strait of Gibraltar, in the third year of their voyage … ‘they reported a thing which I cannot believe, but another man may, namely that in sailing round Libya [then the name for Africa], they had the sun on their right hand’, which although it must have sounded incredible to the Greeks, offers
the most conclusive proof that the voyage took place, as a ship sailing west while south of the Equator would find that the midday sun was on the right, that is to the north.

A similar voyage, better documented, but one undertaken basically for reasons other than discovery, took place
c
. 500 BC when Hanno, one of the suffetes of Carthage, set off with a fleet of sixty ships, each with fifty oarsmen and a large number of men and women – to settle them in new colonies along the west coast of Africa and so safeguard the Carthaginian trade route to the Canaries and Madeira, their newly-found sources of dyes. After founding a colony and building a temple on the site of present-day Mehediya on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, north of Rabat, Hanno continued to sail south, establishing six more colonies, the last of which, Cerne, possibly Herne Island on the Tropic of Cancer, was to be the leading trading centre on the West African coast for 400 years. Hanno left an account of his voyage, from which he had to turn back because of lack of provisions, in the temple of Baal Ammon when he and his men returned to Carthage. This journey was not to be emulated again for some 1900 years, when the Portuguese, with all their modern navigational aids, set out to find a trade route to India, and even then it took them over forty years to accomplish what Hanno achieved in a single voyage of more than 3000 miles and only a few months.

‘Listen,’ Wanda said, in a voice which told me, having been married to her since practically before the Flood, that something pretty shattering was looming up for public presentation in her Slavonic mind, something I could have done without, as peering down into these excavations under what looked like a snow-filled sky had given me a bad dose of what the Tunisians might call
la tristesse du dimanche
, reminding me of similar grey, featureless Sunday mornings in Barnes, SW13, as a boy before the war.

‘I’m listening,’ I said.

‘What I want to know,’ she said, ‘is what have you got in mind after Tunisia? You said you wanted to go to Morocco, but there’s Algeria in between. What are you going to do about Algeria? It’s enormous.’

‘Well,’ I said, and it sounded pretty feeble, ‘I suppose we ought to follow the coast, looking into all those coves the Barbary pirates used to lie up in, that sort of thing. Besides, I thought it would be a good place to have a look at the Sahara. We may never have a chance again.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, trying to ignore a man who was trying to sell her an enormous, trendy birdcage, big enough to hold a vulture, one of the local products from Sidi Bou Said, ‘how far do you think it is from here to Morocco?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I suppose about 1300 miles or so if you followed the coast. I’m not sure. Perhaps more.’

‘And how far have we travelled in the last seven days?’ She was like some inquisitor screwing up a heretic on the rack.

‘About 2500 miles. Something like that.’

‘And how are you proposing to travel to Morocco?’

‘Well, I hadn’t really thought. Even you said we can’t afford to hire cars any more. There’s a train service, I looked it up. It’s something like 1000 miles from Tunis to Fez but you have to keep on changing and most of the time it doesn’t go anywhere near the coast, except at Algiers and Oran. I suppose we’d have to go by bus.’

‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to say that after yesterday,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re all there. Aren’t you done in? I am. Anyway,’ she said, changing the subject in a typical Wanda way, ‘how long has this book of yours got to be?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘The contract said about 120,000
words. If it’s any bigger it will be so big that no one will be able to lift it, let alone afford to buy it.’

‘How many words have you written up to now?’

‘About 250,000, and we still have to go to Algeria, Morocco, Spain and France.’

‘Well, something’s going to have to go,’ she said. ‘I should start by leaving out Algeria.’

So I did.

After this, having made the momentous decision to give Algeria a miss, something that was hardly likely to break any Algerian hearts, we walked to the nearest station, which some imaginative fellow had named Carthage Hannibal, and boarded one of the now-that-it-was-broad-daylight no longer creepy trains back to Tunis.

There, Wanda was just in time to participate in the last part of a Catholic mass which was being performed in the Cathedral of St Vincent de Paul, a splendid neo-Gothic building put up by the French in 1882. There was quite a large congregation on this Sunday morning, seemingly made up (one could scarcely ask them) of converted Tunisians, what had once been
colons
and
their descendants, French colonialists, who had somehow managed to stay on after 1964 when the government of Bourguiba, the President,
¹
now into his second five-year term of office, had instituted a programme of nationalization and confiscation which had deprived them of their
domaines
, some Italian-speakers, including some rather gloomy-looking Maltese and various other Christian foreigners who, like us, had ended up on these exotic shores. One old Italian lady who stood next to Wanda during the service said that she disliked Tunis and the Tunisians intensely but had nowhere else to go.

Once the service was over the air became thick with the sort of salutations with which people tend to greet one another after church on Sunday mornings anywhere:

‘Madame, Monsieur, je vous souhaite le bonjour. Comment portez-vous, Madame? J’espére que vous êtes en bonne santé.’

To which Madame replied,
‘Merci, Monsieur, je me suis portée parfaitement’
(or if only so-so ‘
passablement
’). Or, if she was an Italian-speaking lady,
‘La ringrazio, Signore, sto bene’
(or
‘sono stato mediocremente bene’)
, which conjured up visions of someone who, rather like a cheese, was in the process of going off. They were jolly lucky to have a cathedral to grumble in and make
plaisanteries
to one another. If it had been in Libya it would long since have been turned into a mosque and there would have been no opportunity for such unbridled intercourse between the sexes.

After this, by which time it was raining heavily, we went into the Medina, the Old City, which had a pork butcher’s shop in one of its outer walls, with a sign depicting an enormous pig above it, something I had never seen before in a Muslim city, but with nothing
about being by appointment to anyone. Then through miles of what would have been wonderful
souks
, many of them covered ones. If only it hadn’t been Sunday – it would have been the same on Friday – when all the booths in them, apart from a few religious ones selling Korans, one or two selling tourist junk and an entire
souk
selling furniture, were shuttered and barred, as they were outside in the modern city, apart from the street markets and the food and vegetable markets, which were thronged with people.

Then to the food markets behind the dead-straight Avenue Habib Bourguiba which, if you persist in following it to its conclusion, lands you in the off-colour waters of the Lac de Tunis, otherwise El-Bahira, which is the nearest approximation in Tunis to the sea. There we ate in an open-fronted restaurant, well wrapped up against the cold, a delicious Tunisian repast,
Brik à l’oeuf
, triangular sheets of very thin pastry with a seasoned egg inside it, deep fried at such a high temperature that the outside becomes crisp while the egg remains runny, which when it is ready looks like the sort of letter that ought to be sent to the
Good Food Guide
. Then we had a delicacy called
harghma
, stewed calves’ feet, to keep the cold out, and a bottle of a good red wine called Morag which cost 1.3 Tunisian dinars, the equivalent of £1.30 ($1.80) a bottle.

After all this we felt strong enough for a visit to the Bardo Museum, half price on Fridays and Sunday afternoons; photography extra (no flash or tripods to be used except with special permission); transistor radios, parcels, etc., to be left at the entrance. And no jokes about the President being past it either, as he might quite easily be upstairs listening in, in what is now the Tunisian House of Representatives. Until the last one abdicated in 1957, this was the palace of the Hosainid Beys of Tunis, who for 200 years ruled the country with only nominal acknowledgement to the Turkish sultan whose vassals they remained.

The contents of this museum are remarkable. There are the most brilliantly-executed Roman mosaic pavements from the ruined cities of Tunisia, some of them enormous; depictions of bacchanalian processions of Neptune and his cortège, of fishing, hunting and maritime scenes, one showing every sort of Roman trading vessel, banqueting scenes of the greatest liveliness, heads of river gods, of Oceanus, Apollo and Diana, rural scenes, a country seat with park, stable, granary, sheds and wine cellar, Virgil writing the
Aeneid
.

Equally if not more memorable are the sculptures in bronze and marble and other artefacts including beds, most of them dating from the third and second centuries BC, found in the hold of a Roman ship sunk in 100 feet of water in the Gulf of Mahdia, south of Sousse, which is thought to have been returning with these wonders looted at the sack of Athens by Sulla in 85 BC, among them a bronze statue of Eros, perhaps a replica of one carved by Praxiteles in the fourth century BC. By now we were beginning to suffer from both cultural and gastronomic indigestion – the calves’ feet hung heavy on us – and not having slept for two days and a night, we took the train back to Sidi Bou Said and went to bed.

The next day, having overcome Wanda’s scruples about making use of a car, we set off in one to satisfy what can only be described as my irrational desire to see the Sahara, which I could only justify by telling myself that it was, like the Kras, one of the frontiers on which the Mediterranean world ended.

To tell the truth I was not all that happy about driving in a country in which I had already noticed, in the brief hours of daylight after we had entered it from Libya, that the rural inhabitants regarded the more dangerous bends in the roads as being good places to settle down for a leisurely discussion with one another about the state of the country, surrounded by their flocks,
and neither was Wanda, who was going to have to stand her tricks at the wheel so that I could absorb the atmosphere of Tunisia without hurtling off the road into some
wadi
. This was a country that still, I felt sure, punished any transgression of the law, such as running someone over, with the utmost severity. It was only comparatively recently that the practice had fallen into disuse of dropping offenders from the walls of Tunis on to hooks embedded in them, there to die a lingering death. Or it may have been Algiers, in which case I am doing the Tunisians an injustice. Anyway, it is now only a matter of academic interest, as the whole of the apparatus, with only too life-like figures hanging on the hooks, has long since been transferred to Madame Tussauds where it can be seen, on payment of a supplementary fee, in the Chamber of Horrors.

From Tunis, following a circuitous route to the Sahara so that we could see more of Tunisia on the way, we drove north-westwards through country which had once been one of the great granaries of Rome, crossing the valley of the Medjerda River, the only perennial river in the whole country, which has its origins in the Jebel Zellez in Algeria. This valley was one of the places where the French
colons
had engaged in intensive farming, using the local people as cheap labour, and where, after the land nationalization of 1964, young Tunisians were trained to carry on where the French had been encouraged to leave off, after which, when they were judged to be sufficiently competent, they were given their own farmhouses and freehold land.

Beyond the valley of the Medjerda the road entered an enormous fertile plain with big herds of cattle and sheep grazing in it and here and there one of the barrel-roofed buildings brilliantly white in the afternoon sunlight, for by now the clouds that had looked to be full of snow had rolled away. The plain partly encircled the Jebel Ichkeul, an isolated mountain, and also
a lake of the same name, a large, reed-fringed expanse on which what looked like rafts of waterfowl floated too far out to be identified. Its waters were partly rain, partly sea water which entered it from another lake, the Lake of Bizerta, which is connected with the Mediterranean.

Here, above the shores of the lake, on the stony slopes of the Jebel, there was a primitive village of stone huts roofed with reeds from the lake and hemmed in by enclosures of thorn, which prevented the animals from straying and on which the women, who were dressed in brilliantly-coloured clothes, hung their equally brilliantly-coloured washing.

Down by the lake itself, which at this point was an expanse of mud with scarcely any water in it, there were two little buildings with whitewashed walls and domes that looked like the tombs of holy men, but which inside were full of the jolly-looking menfolk of the women up the hill, all sitting contentedly up to their necks in the waters of a hot spring, their day’s work presumably done, for by now it was late afternoon and the sun was rapidly sinking. But what sort of work could they do here, on the slopes of a stony mountain, cut off from the rich grazing lands beyond by miles of mud, for they were certainly not fishermen?

Perhaps there were no fish. There were a lot of questions I would have liked to ask these friendly men, but they spoke nothing but Arabic, or perhaps Berber, and there was no one else to ask, and this is what travel anywhere so often leads to, the traveller being confronted with a series of what are often unsolvable mysteries while out in the sticks and then, once he or she has returned to civilization, where the answers are often available, forgetting to ask.

That night we slept at Tabarka, a small port on a wild coast, whose inhabitants lived mainly by fishing for fish and twigs of coral and
by processing cork from the forests, in a hotel full of Frenchmen, mild-looking little men, all dressed in camouflage clothing and armed to the teeth, who had come here to shoot wild boar in the nearby Khroumerie mountains on the Algerian border. Tabarka had originally been a Phoenician, then a Carthaginian port and then, after the fall of Carthage, Roman. At the mouth of the harbour there was a rock which had once been an island but was now joined to the mainland by a causeway. On it stood the shell of a Genoese castle where the wife of the lighthouse keeper, whose lighthouse rose above the walls, kept her chickens and dried her washing. The island had been given to the Genoese by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1542, to thank them, it is said, for having betrayed to him the great Turkish corsair Dragut; but this seems unlikely, as at that date Dragut still had a long and active life ahead of him.

This occupation of Tabarka by the Genoese, and other foreign infidels equally antipathetic to the Muslims, continued until 1741, when the Bey, Ali Pasha, a bloodthirsty, unbalanced despot (not to be confused with his equally bloodthirsty Albanian namesake), whose mercifully short reign came to an end when he was strangled in the Bardo, took Tabarka and the island with it, and consigned the inhabitants to slavery.

Tabarka was a pleasant place, apart from a rather weird off-licence to which the proprietor of a supermarket, not at that moment having any stock himself, sent us to buy a bottle of wine which we wanted to drink in our room, not liking the wine in the hotel. It turned out to be situated in an almost pitch black room packed with large numbers of very drunk and not particularly friendly Tabarkan Muslims, all brandishing large receptacles they had brought with them to get topped up with the stuff which was available from barrels on draught, and all pushing and shoving as if they were outside a bank that was about to go bust.

It was here, at Tabarka, in 1952, that the now President Bourguiba, then a revolutionary trying to liberate his country, was kept under house arrest before being transferred to France; and here, in the Hôtel de France, in the main street, we were shown the astonishing dining room in which he took his meals, a hecatomb of dead game, its walls covered with stuffed birds and the heads of other trophies of the chase, now past their best, all illuminated by candelabra ingeniously constructed from the legs of wild boar. Now a national monument, the table at which he used to sit is never allowed to be occupied.

The next morning we left the shores of the Mediterranean and drove southwards away from it over the Khroumerie range, home of the Khroumir Berbers, wild mountaineers who were such a thorn in the side of the French that they made them the excuse to invade Tunisia from Algeria, after the Khroumirs had made a raid across the border into Algeria in 1881. The road wound up the west side of the gorge of the Oued Kabir, at first through a tunnel of huge eucalyptus trees that were in the process of being cut down, then through woods of cork trees, evergreen oaks and pine trees with ferns and bracken growing beneath them, part of an immense and dense forest that was still the abode of wild-cats, civets, jackals, foxes and the wild boar, in which the last Tunisian lion was killed in the early years of the 1800s, in which the last panther survived until 1932, and in which boys now stood at the roadside, apparently miles from anywhere, selling wooden hatstands, eggs and objects made of cork. Finally we arrived at Aïn Draham, a little mountain resort with red-roofed houses that was more like some place in the Balkans than in North Africa. Here, at around 3000 feet, still below the watershed, we were only a few miles from the Algerian border.

Then we drove down the southern, sunny, less wooded flank of the range, passing through fruit orchards before entering the
wide green valley of the Medjerda River, where, in what was like springtime, men were ploughing with wooden ploughs and others were sowing the seed, broadcasting it by hand. How beautiful Tunisia was. How lucky we were to be in it, in what would have been in England the depths of winter. There, at the foot of a rocky slope, in the side of which, according to the custodian, slaves had been doomed to live in shallow caves, were the ruins of Bulla Regia, originally a Carthaginian city, then a city of the Numidian ruler Jugurtha, the grandson of Masinissa, who had successfully provoked the Carthaginians to break their non-aggression pact with Rome. Then, in the first century AD, the Romans annexed it after Jugurtha had been defeated, and it continued to flourish as a Roman city during the second and third centuries.