The railway to Sfax
belongs to us, and we can regulate prices as it suits us; if we liked, we
could choke off all trade. Ah, the company knows its business! Of course,
that makes us many enemies; they call it high-handedness and brutality--a
concern like ours is bound to expose itself to such remarks--_we_ call it
common sense. If the railway were not ours, if we were not practically
dictators of the country, those Americans, with their immense phosphate
importation into Europe, would eat us up; and then these local merchants
would lose everything. That is the justification of our so-called tyranny.
Are we to have nothing for our risks? Look at this installation of
machinery--all built, too, with a view to future aggrandizement: does it
strike you as a half-hearted speculation?"
Daring, on the contrary. Here are gargantuan sheds, capable of holding
thirty thousand tons of mineral apiece; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for
drying them artificially in winter-time, when the sun's heat is
insufficient; all around you a gehenna of mad industrial life, smoke and
steam, a throbbing agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons; there
are chains of buckets, filled with phosphates, wandering overhead in
endless progression or disappearing sullenly into the bowels of the earth;
passionate electric motors; mountains of coal and iron contrivances;
railway engines snorting and whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down
from the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them out of the cars to
dry, amid clouds of tawny dust.
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