At this elevation you perceive that Gafsa is truly a hill-oasis, bleak
mountains rising up on all sides save the south. There, where the two
highest ranges converge from east and west, where the broad waterway of
the Oued Baiesh has in olden days, when it wandered with less capricious
flow, carved itself a channel through the opening--there, at the very
narrowest point--sits the oasis. A tangle of palms that sweep southward in
a radiant trail of green, the crenellated walls of the Kasbah gleaming
through the interstices of the foliage--the whole vision swathed in an
orange-tawny frame of desolation, of things non-human....
[ILLUSTRATION: The Last Palms]
I was tempted to think that the sunset view from the Meda eminence was the
finest in the immediate neighbourhood of Gafsa. Not so; that from the low
hills behind Sidi Mansur, with the stony ridge of Jebel Assalah at your
back, surpasses it in some respects. Through a gap you look towards the
distant green plantations, with a shimmering level in the foreground; on
your other side lies the Oued Baiesh, crossed by the track to Kairouan,
where strings of camels are for ever moving to and fro, laden with
merchandise from the north or with desert products from the oases of
Djerid and Souf.
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