_STONES OF GAFSA_


There are interesting walks in the neighbourhood of Gafsa, but I can
imagine nothing more curious than the town itself; a place of some five
thousand inhabitants, about a thousand of whom are Jews, with a sprinkling
of Italian tradespeople and French officials and soldiers. Beyond naming
the streets and putting up a few lamps, the Government has left it in its
Arab condition; the roadways are unpaved, hardly a single wall is plumb;
the houses, mostly one-storied, lean this way and that, and, being built
of earthen-tinted sun-dried brick, have an air of crumbling to pieces
before one's very eyes. A heavy and continuous shower would be the ruin of
Gafsa; the structures would melt away, like that triple wall of defence,
erected in medieval times, of which not a vestige remains. Yet the dirt is
not as remarkable as in many Eastern places, for every morning a band of
minor offenders is marched out of prison by an overseer to sweep the
streets. Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if possible, the
roadway; it is supported on palm-rafters, forming a kind of tunnel
underneath. Everywhere are immense blocks of chiselled stone worked into
the ephemeral Arab clay as doorsteps or lintels, or lying about at random,
or utilized as seats at the house entrance; they date from Roman or
earlier times--columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern,
the majority unpretentious and solid.

[Illustration: A Street in Gafsa]

What do the natives think of these relics of past civilization? Do they
ever wonder whence they came or who made them? "The stones are there,"
they will tell you. Yet the wiser among them will speak of _Ruman_; they
have heard of _Ruman_ moneys and antiquities.