Unlike the living ocean, this withered one never smiles: it wears a
hostile face. There is a charm, none the less--a charm that appeals to
complex modern minds--in that picture of eternal, irremediable sterility.
Its hue is ever-changing, as the light falls upon it; the plain, too,
shifts up and down with mirage play, climbing sometimes into the horizon,
or again sharply defined against it; often it resembles a milky river
flowing between banks of mud. The surface is rarely lustrous, but of a
velvety texture, like a banded agate, mouse-colour or liver-tinted, with
paler streaks in between, of the dead whiteness of a sheet of paper; now
and again there flash up livid coruscations that glister awhile like
enamel or burnished steel, and then fade away. These are the fields of
virgin salt which, when you cross them, are bright as purest Alpine snow,
and may blind you temporarily with their dazzling glare. Viewed from these
uplands, however, the ordered procession of horizontal bars stretching
into infinity, their subdued coloration, fills the mind with a wave of
deep peace.
Walking from Nefta to the Chott, you will reach, on the burning plain, a
maraboutic shrine that might serve as an asylum for some
conscience-stricken, malaria-proof penitent.
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