After we have introduced ourselves, they pull aside a palm wood door and usher me into a side room off the courtyard. The roof is a low, smoke-stained vault, lit by a single bulb (there is electricity here, but water has to be fetched from the well). Bilgessou sets to work making tea on a calor gas stove, Jemila sits down, revealing a bright and well-holed pair of yellow stockings, and she and her mother set to work rubbing the skins off peanuts and dropping them into a bowl. A rangy black and white cat appears from the depths of the cave, is shooed away but holds its ground, eyeing the preparations.
Once the tea has been made and poured, as it is throughout the Sahara, with a flourish from as far above the glass as possible, Bilgessou takes the bowl of nuts and scatters them onto a roasting tray, which he lays on the fire. Most of this is done in silence, as none of them speak French and I don’t speak Arabic, but Jemila has a sweet understanding smile and somehow it doesn’t feel wrong to be silent.
However, once the first glass of tea has been taken, Bilgessou begins to talk, in a powerful voice, with a lot of barking, back-of-the-throat sounds.
The young don’t want to live in the caves any more, he says. They’re moving above ground, tempted away by ready-made houses in New Matmata. The authorities don’t understand. They’ve shown little interest in preserving the troglodyte way of life, except for the tourists. He extends an arm towards his wife. She has never left El Haddej in her life. She can’t be expected to change just like that.
I’m handed a biscuit and a cotton cloth to put on my knee to catch the crumbs.
Anyway, he goes on, these troglodyte houses make sense. They’re safe and secure, warm in winter and cool in summer. The soft rock is easy to excavate, and, unlike the timber round here, there’s plenty of it.
When he stops, the silence returns, thick and heavy, deadened by the weight of the earth around us.
They show me my room. It’s across the courtyard and up a flight of irregular stone steps, cut from the clay. The coffin-shaped entrance has decorated stone dressings and inside is a vaulted space, some 20 feet deep, with just enough room to stand straight at its centre. The walls have been plastered and painted white at some time, but that’s faded now. A mattress is laid along one side where the wall slopes down quite sharply. Dangerous if you wake suddenly in the night.
Not far from here is a tantalising example of the old way of life that Bilgessou fears is disappearing for ever - an underground olive oil press, set into the side of a hill. Inside the cave is a circular chamber, consisting of a platform, around which is just enough room for a donkey to walk. The oil-maker tips a basket of olives - stalks, leaves and all - onto the platform. Then the donkey, harnessed to a pole, and wearing a pair of pointed woven blinkers that look like a large wicker brassiere, starts to plod round. The pole turns a spindle, which rolls a cylindrical stone block over the olives, reducing them to an inky mulch.
The mulch is then stuffed inside pancake-sized rattan discs, which are stacked one on top of the other, fourteen at a time, and squeezed in a wooden press. Every 100 kilograms of olives produces 35 litres of oil.
The reek of olives is quite heady and every inch of this dark, cramped, glistening chamber is thick and sticky with accretions, like the inside of an immensely ancient cooking pot.
Walk back to Bilgessou’s cave. What’s the address I wonder? What would I ask for if I were lost? Number 43, The Mountain? The family are in the courtyard, in exactly the same positions, Bilgessou standing like an old soldier, Jemila and Manoubia sitting on stones. Their life encompassed by this pit of crumbling red rock.
And later, as darkness falls, I find myself doing exactly the same thing, just sitting there, on the steps outside my room, looking up at the stars. It’s not that there’s nowhere to go, or anyone’s stopping me taking a walk out of the tunnel to see some other folks on the hill, it’s just that once you’re in here the outside world ceases to mean very much. There is no view but upwards.
Before I go to sleep I get out my portable DVD player, watch myself being crucified and feel better.
Day Ninety
EL HADDEJ TO SOUSSE
As we pick our way through the spare and stony cover of the Matmata hills I realise that this is the last I shall see of the desert for a while. The final leg of my journey will take me north and west to see the other side of the great desert countries like Tunisia and Algeria. The side where people live, where capital cities lie, where the great trans-Saharan trade routes began and ended, where the Sahara was talked about, its wealth evaluated, its various conquests planned.
It’s no coincidence that Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, the three richest countries of the Sahara, share a Mediterranean coastline. Their capitals are all much closer to the markets of Europe than those of Africa. The remains of so many Greek and Roman cities show how close the historical links have been. Yet all three are firmly Arab and Muslim countries. Together with Morocco and Mauritania they’re collectively known by the Arabic word Maghreb, the land of the West, and their political alliances are currently with each other, through the Maghreb Union Treaty of 1989, rather than with Europe. Libya, it seems, doesn’t mind this too much. It’s looking back into the desert. The conferences that were being prepared in Sirte and Tripoli are, some consider, the first step to Colonel Gaddafi’s goal of a United States of the Sahara. Will Tunisia and Algeria go along with this or might they be ready to look north again?
The last sand seas may be behind me, but the intellectual, cultural and political heart of some powerful Saharan countries lies ahead.
From Gabes the main road north follows the coastline, running between the sea and the railway, along avenues of eucalyptus with enormous olive plantations stretching away in long straight lines on either side of the road.
The industrial port of Sfax is signalled by a plume of black smoke trailing out across the Mediterranean, and for several miles we pass through a wasteland of spoil heaps and phosphate factories. I couldn’t help noticing the name of the road: Boulevard de l’Environment.
By lunchtime we have reached El Jem and are able to eat beside one of the finest sights in Tunisia, the honey-coloured walls of the third biggest amphitheatre the Romans ever built.
It’s a powerful presence. Fourteen hundred feet in circumference, it could accommodate over 30,000 spectators.
Gazing unhurriedly at it over a lamb kebab, I’m struck by the boldness of the design. The massive blocks of stone not only had to be hauled in from quarries 20 miles away, they also had to be stacked in an elliptical wall 100 feet high, supported entirely by its arches. No buttressing, no concrete, just a precisely calculated balancing act.
El Jem itself is a modest market town, whose entire population could fit in one end of the colosseum, and, like flies round an elephant, the locals get on with life apparently oblivious to the monster in their midst.
Unless, of course, they’re in the tourist business, which is not looking too bright at the moment. The shadow of September 11th means horses and carts go by unoccupied and there are plenty of spare tables to be had. Guides saunter about, but no-one looks desperate, or in any way resentful of our being here. One man in a striped robe, skullcap and dark glasses spies us and breaks into a broad grin.
‘Allo, allo, my friend, ‘ow are you? We are the Taliban. Only joking.’
Tunisia is the smallest and most compact of all the Saharan countries, and as we’ve been used to driving two or three hours between trees, let alone towns, our surroundings seem to be changing with indecent haste. Within half a day we’ve been from troglodytes to amphitheatres, and an hour later we’re at the gates of one of the largest and best-preserved Arab fortresses in North Africa, the Ribat of Harthouma in Monastir. Its towers, turrets and battlements stand proudly beside the sea, rich cream against azure blue. It may lack the majesty of El Jem, but it has a more subtle appeal, the quiet dignity of a fortress that has survived 1200 years of conflict. How, then, were we ever allowed to shoot Life Of Brian here? A party of schoolchildren is listening dutifully to an account of the history of this venerable building. I find myself longing to take them on an alternative history tour, to show them where John Cleese had a boulder dropped on top of him, where Brian leapt from a tower only to be rescued by a flying saucer, and where 500 Tunisian extras laughed at Biggus Dickus.