Nothing is
done to make their stay agreeable.
The natives are not of a kind to take much interest in its welfare. Gafsa
has gone through too many vicissitudes to be anything but a witches'
cauldron of mixed races. Seldom one sees a handsome or characteristic
face. They have not the wild solemnity of the desert folk, nor yet the
etiolated, gentle graces of the Tunisian citizen class; much less the
lily-like personal beauty of the blond Algerian Berbers. Apart from some
men that possess, almost undiluted, the features of the savage Neanderthal
brood that lived here in prehistoric times, the only pure race-type that
survives is one of unquestionably Egyptian origin, one to which Monsieur
Bordereau, in his book on Gafsa, has already referred. No wonder; since
Egyptian invasions of this region went on for centuries, culminating in
the extended sea-dominion of Thotmes III at the end of the seventeenth
century B.C.
A bastard Greco-Latin was the language of the place up to the thirteenth
century A.D.
This confusion of blood has done one good thing for them--it has given
them considerable tolerance in matters of religion.
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