The Pillars of Hercules

Oleanders, and date palms, and a green stagnant swimming pool. Except for the flies and the chirp of birds, not a single sound. Except for the manager and Wahid Number One, not another person. The houses a mile up the beach were empty. Amazingly, I was on the Mediterranean—the emptiest part I had so far seen, emptier than the emptiest part of Albania. There had been people here; they had come and gone. It was like a colony that had gone bust, an experiment that had failed.

All that I worked out on my first day. On my second day I went bird-watching. For all the reasons it had seemed dead and abandoned it was attractive to birds, and amounted to a bird sanctuary the like of which I had not seen anywhere on the Mediterranean shores, many different birds in great profusion. A number of them must have been migrants, since this had to be one of the stopping-off places for birds in their seasonal transit between Africa and northern Europe; others I took to be resident shore birds. The largest was a gray heron, about four feet tall and looking patient and important in its slow-motion strutting at the shoreline. I saw a little egret, and a quail that called out “Wet my lips!” Farther on I spotted a wader that turned out to be a curlew, some plovers, a crested lark, a linnet, a red-rumped swallow. A whitish bird with a black mask and a gray cap and black wing-marks was definitely a great gray shrike. I had no bird book. I sketched them and wrote descriptions of their peculiar marks and later identified them. In this way, by spotting birds, I have given the flattest days of travel some meaning and a sense of discovery.

Later that second day I went to Remla, in the old bus that passed by the Grand. Remla was like a town at the end of the world. Apart from the subsistence fishing there was nothing else. The soil was too poor to support vegetable gardens. There were no lights. The town itself was a huddle of square huts set in a maze of damp passageways.

“What about water?”

“We have fountains.”

The brackish undrinkable water came from wells. On the road, there was a bar, Al Jezira, where the local people congregated. When a motorbike crepitated past the bar, the boys and old men looked up. These were the men who owned the fishing boats. The boats had lateen sails, but the fishing was no good, the men told me. The desolation here surpassed anything I had so far seen. Taking it in my stride I regarded it as a personal achievement. And on the third day, wishing greatly to leave Kerkennah, I told myself I felt much better. I said good-bye to Wahid Number One and left the empty hotel on the deserted beach and took the bus to the ferry landing. There I met Mourad, who was heading to Sfax to visit his wife, who was ill in the hospital there.

My first impression of Kerkennah had been of a great emptiness—hot gravelly earth and dying trees and poor huts. But that appearance of nothingness was misleading. Everything here had a name. Remla was an important town, and without realizing—without knowing it—I had also been to El Attala and Oulad Kacem and Melita. This ferry landing was not just a ferry landing. The three decrepit houses here and the rutted road constituted the settlement of Sidi Yousef.

“What do you think of these islands?”

“This is my home,” Mourad said.

Like most other Tunisians he had an air of uncorrupted courtesy.

And so we sailed back to Sfax on El Loud III, and the morning light floated a russet color across the surface of the sea, while lambs bleated on the trucks belowdecks.

In Sfax I tried to solve the problem of traveling from Tunisia to Morocco, without stopping in Algeria. I was given the name of a company in Tunis which acted as the agent for a Libyan ship, the Garyounis. This ship took both passengers and cargo and sailed from Tripoli to Tunis to Casablanca. I did not really want to leave Tunisia. I liked it here, and now I was ready to follow all the advice I had been given, about seeing the desert and the cave dwellers at Matmata, and Tozeur, and the Jews in Djerba, and the nomads, and the camel sellers, and the weavers, and the mystics who fondled scorpions. I called the agent. He said the Garyounis would be leaving in a few days for Casablanca.

I picked up my sixty-dollar kilim from Ahmed Khlif in the medina of Sfax, in his narrow shop at the Souk des Etoffes. I took the train back to Tunis.