So the French found them in
1881.
There are, however, a few decent houses, two-storied and spacious; in one
of them, I am told, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom my
fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He is absent at the Metlaoui
mines just now, and his wife and children in Paris.
The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not extend to the native
houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original,
inconceivable squalor--squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago
ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native
secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of
the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast, abandoned
pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks
and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth of
generations--there is hardly a level yard of ground--rags and dust and
decay! Here they live, the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little
sense of home as the wild creatures of the waste. But at night, when the
most villainous objects take on mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand; they assume an air of biblical desolation, as
though the curse of Heaven had fallen upon the life they once witnessed;
and even as you look into them, something stirs on the ground: it is an
Arab, sleeping uneasily in his burnous; he has felt, rather than heard,
your presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and rises out of the dust,
like a sheeted ghost.
Pages:
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44