Sfax, like Kairouan and Sousse, is a walled town and the Souks are even more fascinating than those of Kairouan. The European part of the town is quite separate, and is picturesquely built in the Moorish style, the wide streets planted with palms running across to the harbour with its busy shipping. It is a very flourishing place, the centre of the olive oil industry and also the port for the phosphates which are obtained in such quantities near Metlaoui and other places. These mines seem almost inexhaustible, and new veins are always being discovered. One sees truckloads and truckloads of the stuff, looking like sand, coming along the line. In running the hand through it, one finds quantities of fishes’ teeth, quite whole and perfect and so sharp that they can pierce leather. Some are as large as the teeth of a fox, pointed and white, and there are some that have two fangs or even three. The phosphates are one of the richest products of this country. The ‘ore’ is sometimes shipped direct from Sfax, being loaded into vessels specially prepared to carry it, or it is first chemically treated in the neighbourhood and then exported as super-phosphate. The mining districts contain a large population of workers, chiefly immigrants, with French managers in authority.

Outside the northern walls of Sfax was a large space where fodder was stacked, and charcoal and grain sold, and where the laden camels came stepping gravely along the white highway from the country, and here were small groups of men squatting round cooking pots, or Bedouins collecting round two negresses who were stirring beans over a charcoal fire, shredding in red pepper, the firelight playing on their broad features and flashing teeth.

The drone of native pipes from a ragged booth close under the walls, led us in that direction and we found two Soudanese doing a kind of dance, surrounded by a crowd of Arabs. They were in a medley of garments, one wearing an old khaki coat over his accordion-pleated shirt. It had once been white, but was stained and worn to an indeterminate shade. Dirty turbans were on their heads. One stood playing on a curious horned bagpipe, whilst the other revolved slowly round beating a drum, his hideous ebony face thrown back, his mouth opening and shutting, showing the pink interior and a thin tongue that quivered like an animal’s. Those who gave him money placed it in this horrid slot and he pouched it instantly in his cheek, all the time twisting and turning in a sort of dance. The last time I had seen anything of the sort was when I watched the ‘shimmy shake’ danced by Europeans on board a liner. There it had been an absurd travesty, civilisation playing at barbarism. Here was the original stuff, primitive and raw, under the intense blue of an Eastern sky, the sunlight pouring down on the scene and making great blocks of shadow under the awning and at the feet of stacked bales of pale yellow chaff.

The crowd were chiefly in neutral tints, broken with the bright crimson of a fez here and there, the warm madder of a cloak dyed in henna, or the brilliant lemon yellow of native slippers.

Along the road a group of Bedouins passed like a classic frieze against the white background of a marabou. Four camels in single file led by a man wrapped in a cloak, each laden camel topped by a huddled blue figure that bent and swayed to the motion. Two or three Bedouin women accompanied them on foot, in loose girdled robes, bearing burdens on their heads. Barefoot and erect they strode past, their olive throats covered with necklaces of coins, their handsome tattooed faces set to the open country. They are impatient even of the scant civilisation of the Souks. They are a people of free spaces and the wide sky; as soon might the kestrel companion with the dove, as these wild natures fraternise with city folk. And as they swung past, the frowning crenellated walls of the city looked down, as they have done for ages past, upon them and the bustle and crowd of the Souks, gazing beyond them to the gentian sea, whose calm they have watched ruffled by the prows of generations of conquerors who have come, have ruled, and in their turn become the dust blown hither and thither by the desert wind.

I found sketching in the Souks almost impossible at first, the people crowded round me so; but a champion suddenly appeared in the shape of an Arab waiter at the hotel whose eye fell upon my easel. I painted, did I? Et voilÀ, he too was devoted to art. Had he not accompanied artists on many expeditions? Was he not an accredited guide, with patrons in Paris et partout? For six months he had been guide to an English lady, a great painter—“Nous avons beaucoup travaillÉs,” and she had gained a prize in the Salon for one of her large pictures painted here, here, in Sfax. “I will accompany you gladly to the Souks, madame. I can show you all the points from whence one can make an effective picture. And the crowds will no longer trouble you. All the world knows me.” And when I came down in the afternoon there indeed was Rached ben Mohamed, a white burnous thrown over his waiter’s clothes, a cigarette in his mouth. He was as good as his word. From one intricate street to another he led me, pausing to show me a corner here, a group there. “This is a magnificent subject,” he would say, “but not for the afternoon. The shadows are wrong then. You want a morning light. Tiens! I shall finish my work always very early and then I am tout À fait À votre disposition.”

He was an amazing character, much darker than an Arab, and I suspect his mother of having listened to the blandishments of a Soudanese. He talked a peculiar French rather difficult to follow, with terrific rapidity. All the shopkeepers in the Souks seemed to know him, and he was treated with great deference as he swaggered past, wrapped in his burnous, with his crimson fez on one side, talking of the great artists he had been with, of the six months he spent in Paris, of the expeditions he had organised as guide.

“Comme dessin c’est trÈs joli,” he remarked kindly, on looking at my first hasty pencil sketch in the Souk aux Tapis, “Ça donne bien l’impression.”

My heart rather failed me when I heard of the great canvases painted by the French artist. I feared my efforts would be withered in his scorn, but “vous avez vraiment du talent,” he pronounced; and much heartened, I dashed on cobalt and aureolin in a wild effort to reproduce the brilliance of the scene in front of me.

I was painting in the Street of Stuffs. It was a narrow way, sloping down to an entrance to the Souks. A ragged awning was slung from a tumbledown balcony on one side to the roof of a shop on the other. Brilliant handkerchiefs and coloured stuffs hung on either side of the pathway; in the shade of a recess a tailor plied his trade, sitting cross-legged amongst billows of muslin. The sun beat down, slatting the roadway with glowing stripes, a continuous crowd surged up and down, men on their way to the mosque, countrymen staring at the goods proffered for sale, blind beggars tapping their way along and calling “Give, in the name of Allah!” and behind them rose the slender tower of a minaret.

I squeezed in between two shops and painted valiantly, whilst Rached kept the crowd from encroaching on me. He wielded his cane like a scythe from time to time, making a clean swathe amongst the onlookers. And all the time he kept up his lordly air, accepting a chair from one, a cigarette from another, a cup of coffee from a third. He bullied, he cajoled, or he flattered, and always with success. I suspect him of assuring the crowd that I was a person of vast importance. I wondered to myself over his mysterious employment as a waiter, for a large card hung in the office setting forth his prowess as a guide. I gathered from him that if a great artist came along (here a faint underlining of the adjective) he threw up his waitering, engaged a substitute in his place, and turned guide for several months at a time. “Ah yes,” he said, whilst we made our way back to the hotel down a white side street whose walls stood sharp against a blinding sky, “to travel is to live.” He snatched a narcissus from a passing Arab youth and presented it to me with a flourish, leaving the original owner too astonished to protest.

I. M. D.

Le marchÉ aux Tapis.

The Souks. Sfax.

21.2.23.