These birds are
rather rare hereabouts, and shy of approach. Arabs say that the bustard is
like the camel: once it begins to run, you never know when it will stop.
They surround them therefore cautiously, and gradually close the circle to
within shooting distance.
Metlaoui is the name of two distinct villages which have been conjured out
of the waste by the discovery of its phosphate deposits--the station
village and, a mile or so further on, Metlaoui proper, with its big
establishments for working the minerals.
Here already, at the station settlement, there is more life than in Gafsa,
though the surroundings are decidedly unpropitious--a waterless plain,
with low hills in the foreground, phosphate-bearing, and wondrously tinted
in rose and heliotrope. There are respectable stores here, very different
from the shops of Gafsa. I entered a large Italian warehouse which
contained an assortment of goods--clothing, jams, boots, writing-paper,
sealing-wax, nails, agricultural implements, guns, bedding, mouse-traps,
wire, seeds, tinned foods--and vainly endeavoured to think of some article
which a _colon_ might require and not find here.
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