Reviewer:
gallowglass
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March 22, 2020
Subject:
Rambling writer
The sub-title ‘Rambles among the oases of Tunisia’ reveals more than the main title ‘Fountains in the Sand’. For there are no fountains as we like to visualise them, with muscular torrents erupting into the sky and cascading down into clear pools, but only the sluggish underground springs that brought water to the desert dwellers, via some of the most unhealthy channels ever built.
But Douglas the rambler is in evidence from the start. He is meant to be heading for the fertile gardens of the south, on the far edge of Roman Africa, but he has seen a book about Gafsa, which is on his route, and decides to stop over. He then keeps talking about pressing on south, as Gafsa proves to be so unappealing, yet he sees fit to stay on there for about half the book.
It is true that these were leisurely days when you could live two years in Tunisia on six pounds, and he was a gentleman of leisure, but I think we can see other reasons for certain impromptu changes of plan in his case. Try this for a discreet clue, when a group of young boys, playing a street game, ask him to join in. ‘The proposition tempted me; it is not every day that one is invited in such gentlemanly fashion to wallow on all fours with young Arabs. I made one or two strokes, not amiss… and then returned, rather regretfully, to my sand-heap, to meditate on my own misspent youth, a subject that very rarely troubles me.’ It was not only his youth that was mis-spent. Not long after this book was published, he had to leave England permanently for the same reason as Oscar Wilde.
Although a regional capital, Gafsa boasted a population of just 5,000 (compared to 105,000 today) and people had been chanting for centuries that ‘its water is blood; its air is poison’. By then, its importance was already starting to be eclipsed by Metlaoui with its huge phosphate mine, served by a neat and hygienic new dormitory town, unlike anything else in Tunisia.
By the time he gets to the two big southern oases, Tozeur and Nefta, linked by the treacherous quicksands of the Chott, he decides it’s time for some poetic writing, in which he goes a little overboard. As a travel-writer, Douglas is not really a stylist. He is partly a historian, reminding us that this desert was still wooded as recently as the 18th century, and identifying the mix of influences that still show up in the local character - the secretive Maltese, the Sicilian mafia-clans and those cave-hunting savages the Corsicans.
But his strongest appeal lies in his observing of minor themes and off-beat curiosities that so many others would have missed. How the dervishes only pretend to eat flaming coals. How labourers can only use one hand, as the other one is needed to keep hitching-up the awkward ‘burnous’ cloak. How dogs are so afraid of hyenas that they can’t bark (criminals rub hyena-fat on themselves before a burglary). And he is fascinated by the local flint pebbles, which he collects eagerly and declares at the frontier, to the deep puzzlement of the customs.