We head for another line. The wind is strengthening and the boat tossing ever more violently, but the third pot they pull out produces a great cry and the pink rubbery mass inside is tipped out unceremoniously onto the deck.
Then another and another. All hands are at the pots and I’m given the job of keeping the catch in a large blue plastic tray. This isn’t easy. The octopuses are not at all keen to stay on the tray and once they get a leg outside it their suckers clamp onto the wooden deck. By the time I’ve loosened one leg, the other seven are stuck fast. Clinging to the octopuses with one hand and a piece of superstructure with the other, I succeed in wrenching them off, only to be flung across the boat, octopus in hand and fast latching onto my arm.
Keeping the octopuses in the tray becomes like a routine invented for a Japanese game show, but it seems to cheer the fishermen up no end. Meanwhile, I’ve become quite an admirer of these tenacious creatures and am thinking of starting an Octopus Protection League.
Knowing the British, there probably already is one.
In the late afternoon, as the shops are opening, I walk through the souk, which seems well stocked with goods, mostly aimed at the tourist market. Rugs, tiles, lamps, hands of Fatima, pieces of Rose du Sable (natural sculptures of crystallised gypsum found in the desert), hubble-bubble pipes and the like. There are some superior items in a shop owned by a man known as ‘El Haj’, including a Turkish carpet woven with a million knots per square metre. El Haj (an abbreviation earned by anyone who has been on the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca) is a short, scholarly man with a neat moustache and thick glasses, wearing a cream gandoura over a tartan shirt. He speaks English well, and five other languages too, but almost apologetically, looking down as he does so.
Though tourism supplies 70 or 80 per cent of his trade, he is not entirely happy with its impact on the island. Local families won’t walk on the beach any more because of the number of naked and semi-naked tourists, a phenomenon which he thinks is encouraging some Muslim youths to drink alcohol and sell themselves for casual sexual encounters.
Sex tourism, in Djerba?
He nods. ‘When he sees a nude lady on the beach, he thinks it means she is looking for adventure. They should respect our culture, our religion. They can come for the sun but they don’t have to take all their clothes off and walk.’
When he was a boy, the north coast was wild and deserted. Now there are a hundred hotels there. They attract a large workforce from outside the island, which has to be absorbed. Thankfully, he says, Djerbans are traditionally tolerant.
‘I think this is the only place where you find Jewish and Muslims living together.’
Peacefully, he must mean.
‘We have the oldest synagogue in North Africa. I think 586 before Christ it was built.’
Many of the Djerban Jews have gone to France, often running corner shops known simply as ‘le djerbain’, but many come back to marry. There are 2000 of them in Houmt Souk.
‘I take my car to a Jewish man, I buy my jewellery from a Jew, a number of my neighbours are Jewish and I’m a Hajan practising Islam, and there’s no problem with it.’
On our way back, between the outskirts of Houmt Souk and the first hotel, there is a surprisingly tranquil stretch of national park. The air is now so still that sky and sea merge seamlessly, one reflecting the other like a continuous sheet of glass. In front of which, as if in a mirage, oystercatchers, herons and flocks of flamingos are feeding. But the hotels are getting awfully close.
Day Eighty-Nine
DJERBA TO EL HADDEJ
Before I set out on this Saharan journey southern Tunisia was the closest I’d ever been to the desert. That was in 1978 and I came here to be crucified. Security problems in Israel and an appetite for biblical epics had created a lucrative role for Tunisia as a stand-in for the Holy Land. Not only did Tunisia look right, it was also both friendly and stable, and when the producers of Monty Python’s Life of Brian approached the local authorities they agreed to let us use locations in Monastir and Sousse for urban Jerusalem, whilst the scenes set outside the city were to be shot in the bleaker, more desolate south, around Matmata on the edge of the Jebel Dahar mountains.
A wide bend in the road and a hill with a long flat-topped ridge spreading out below it has a curiously familiar feel, and as the bus climbs I remember, with a shock of recognition, that this is where we filmed the Sermon on the Mount. That day in November 1978, very similar buses, in which several hundred of our extras had been brought up earlier, appeared on this road halfway through the afternoon’s filming. The extras, who had been forced to stand around watching Englishmen do silly things all day, saw this as a sign that it was all over and began to stampede off the Mount and down to their buses. Terry Jones, our director, raced after them, urging them to come back. Unfortunately, he was dressed as the virgin Mandy at the time, and the memory of this black-clad old crone screaming at 500 joyful Arabs is an image of the Matmata hills which will give me pleasure on many a cold day.
So it is that, soon after lunch, in a flat hazy light, I find myself standing above the village of El Haddej, almost twenty-three years, to the day, since I hung on one of two dozen crosses, tapping my feet and singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.
El Haddej looks much as I remember it. It’s set in a landscape of low, yellowing hills scored by deep gullies, as if it had just dried out after a mighty flood. In fact, it has not rained here for three years, and the land is bone dry. There are the usual hardy bushes, a few palms, their lower fronds discoloured by drought, and on the side of a hill an old man is watering a single young olive tree, which won’t give fruit in his lifetime.
These hills were settled by Berbers over 2000 years ago. Finding little cover above ground, they took to the caves below, and to this day their descendants still live as troglodytes.
From up here their homes look like a series of lunar craters, some with cars or pick-ups parked on the rim, others barely visible in the folds of soft, friable rock around them.
The troglodytes of the Matmata hills are experiencing rapid change. The combination of a well-organised tourist industry and the choice of one of the caves as Luke Skywalker’s birthplace has, as in Djerba, brought lucrative tourist business to a poor area. Some caves have been turned into hotels, but when these proved too small to accommodate tour groups, hotels were built to look like caves.
I start to walk down the hill, passing a small dog, which barks ferociously at a line of sheep but rushes away in terror at the approach of a black plastic bag slowly twisting in the wind. I look down into two or three dwellings which appear to have been abandoned. Holes some 60 feet across and 30 feet deep have collapsed in on themselves. To add a final indignity, rubbish has been dumped inside them.
There is one cave which is still occupied and rents out rooms, or cavities, perhaps.
The only entrance is through a dimly lit tunnel. It’s some 30 yards long, and smells of fur and dung. At its darkest point I run slap into a donkey, which is quietly munching away at some straw. Emerging into the soft grey light of a courtyard, I see an elderly man and two women waiting to welcome me. The man’s name is Bilgessou. He stands straight-backed, wearing a fine red skullcap and a knee-length brown overcoat, his bearing matching a military-style silver moustache. Next to him, in brightly coloured Berber stripes, are his wife Manoubia and their daughter Jemila. They stand almost motionless, like a tableau waiting to be photographed.