We rode out to the Chott to see the extraction
of the salt, which is a Government monopoly; the track leads past a famous
lotus, a Methuselah among trees, whose shadow covers 120 square metres of
ground and whose branches are so long, so weary with age, that they bend
downward and touch the earth with their elbows--to rest, as it were--and
then rise up again, refreshed. These salines are about three miles from
Tozeur and an uncommonly simple establishment; they dig a ditch in the
morass which promptly fills with water; the liquid evaporates, leaving the
salt, which impregnates it, to be piled up in heaps on dry land. Next,
they stow the mineral in sacks and transport it to Tozeur on donkeys. It
undergoes no preparation whatever, but is sold as it comes out of the
Chott, agreeable to the palate though rather yellowish in colour. Needless
to say the Government runs no risk of the supply failing; there is salt, a
swooning stretch of salt, as far as eye can reach.
Once you have issued from the oasis in this direction it is all a level of
dried-up mud, speckled with low shrubs and dangerous watery spots, where a
man may slowly sink down and disappear for ever.
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