There is a note of passionate solemnity about the place.
All too soon, I fear, the railway to Tozeur will have done its work; dusty
boulevards, white bungalows, eucalyptus trees and _bureaux de monopoles_
will profane its strangely wonderful beauty, its virginal monotone of
golden grey. Nefta will become a neurasthenic demi-mondaine, like Biskra.
Such, at least, is the prognosis.
But one is apt to forget on how precarious a tenure these gardens are
held, with the hungry desert gnawing ceaselessly at their outskirts; for
the desert is hungry and yet patient; it has devoured sundry oases by
simply waiting till man is preoccupied with other matters. And how rare
they are, these specks of green, these fountains in the sand--rare as the
smiles in a lifetime of woe! Beyond and all around lies a grave and
ungracious land, the land of the lawless, fanatical wanderers.
Those Romans and heathen Berbers, tillers of the soil, had remained in
contact with phenomena; unconcerned, relatively speaking, with the affairs
of the next world, they attained a passable degree of civilization in this
one.
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