Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  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.

  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.

  The truth is that the Ribat is now so squeaky clean that it’s lost a bit of character. Lew Grade’s Jesus of Nazareth set, which once loomed up beside it, has long gone, replaced by ornamental gardens, and where we lounged around between takes, being rude about each other’s beards, is now paved and swept clean as a whistle.

  Our art department and the current restorers were both in the same game, trying to bring an ancient, partly ruined fortress to life, and to be honest I think we did a better job. The Ribat is still a good place to visit, with high walls and battlements completely, indeed recklessly accessible, but I preferred it with the market stalls, exlepers and writing on the wall.

  We spend the night in nearby Sousse at another big, comfortable holiday factory by the sea. Though business is down by 50 per cent since September 11th, it’s still as busy as a railway station, and what it must be like at full capacity is terrible to contemplate.

  I meet up in a local cafe with a group of Tunisians all involved in the tourist industry. Around us are tables full of men playing cards. Some football game flickers away, largely ignored, on a wall-mounted television. El Mejid, a pale-skinned, squarely built Tunisian, who looks more Irish than Arab,
runs Berber evenings six days a week out at an old olive oil factory. Belly-dancing, bareback riders, waiters with bottles on their heads, a meal and all the wine you can drink for 13 dinars a head, roughly PS6.75. One of his friends puffs on a chicha, a hubble-bubble pipe; another, wearing a tracksuit, arrives late after a work-out. He looks tired and his back is giving him trouble. He’s the only one who breaks ranks and expresses any doubts about the benefits of tourism. He worries about the growth of the cities, with a corresponding break-up of family life and threat to traditions.

  ‘The wedding,’ he says, ‘the traditional wedding used to be about one week. Now it’s only one day or two days.’

  His colleagues shake their heads. They seem willing to pay almost any price to bring in the visitors. I ask if they see any point in limiting the new developments.

  ‘No limit, I think. We used to receive three millions and now about five millions. Maybe in ten years ten millions.’

  Ten millions. On current figures that’s more than the entire population.

  Day Ninety-One

  SIDI BOU SAID

  Sidi Bou Said is next door to Carthage and both are salubrious suburbs of the capital, Tunis. The town is up on a hill, and our hotel looks out over the green and swaying trees of the coastal plain, towards the Gulf of Tunis and the 2000-foot mountains of the Cap Bon peninsula. It’s a grand and comfortable view, full of colour and pleasant rambling houses dotted about. The only similarity with the bald slopes of the south are the small white-domed marabouts, tombs of holy men, which are scattered through the country. Sidi Bou Said was himself a holy man (‘sidi‘ in Arabic is equivalent to ‘saint’ or ‘master’), who, after a trip to Mecca at the end of the twelfth century, settled on this hill and lived a much respected ascetic life.

  Several centuries later, Sidi Bou Said’s fine location seduced a quite un-ascetic set of Europeans, led by a rich Frenchman, Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger, who built an Anglo-Oriental mansion which is still here today. He created an international appetite for these picturesque cobbled streets on the hill and, rather like Tangier, Sidi Bou Said was near enough to Europe for writers and artists to pick up the scent, Paul Klee, August Macke and Andre Gide amongst them.