The Pillars of Hercules

17 The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

Tunisia is another Mediterranean island, surrounded on one side by water and on the other by pariah states: fanatic Libya on the southeast, blood-drenched Algeria on the west, and the blue Mediterranean on its long irregular coast, scalloped by gulfs and bays. Foreigners do not enter Tunisia by road. There are planes, of course, and there are ferries to France and Italy. I sailed into Tunis on a ferry from slap-happy Trapani in Sicily, entering the harbor at La Goulette in the late afternoon and passing Carthage, the little that remained of it, just a rubble pile of marble where the glorious city had once stood.

I had now been on enough Mediterranean islands to sense that Tunisia was deeply insular. People said that Turkey and Syria were isolated, but that was not strictly true — there were buses from Turkey to Egypt, and from Syria to Jordan and Lebanon. Even poor miserable Albania had road and ferry access to Greece and Macedonia. My road and rail trip from Istanbul to Haifa had been slow and fairly awful at times — six border crossings and lots of irritation, but I had been safe; no one attempted to cut my throat.

Islamic militants in Algeria had carried out their vow to kill foreigners. Their aim was to destabilize the country by frightening foreigners, who were Algeria’s mainstay in running their oil-based economy. Seven Italian sailors — the entire crew of the ship Lucina—had recently had their throats slit as they slept in their bunks in the Algerian port of Jijel, not far from the Tunisian frontier; and a few months before that, twelve Croats had been found dead on their ship, their throats cut. Visitors to Libya sometimes simply disappeared. Such stories were a strong inducement to treat Tunisia as an island, and even Tunisians treated it that way. They never suggested crossing one of these borders, they seldom did so themselves — when they left Tunisia it was to go to France or Italy, to work at menial jobs.

Walking through the small pleasant city of Tunis to shake off the effects of my sedentary trip here I was reminded by the street names of its events. There was Rue 18 Janvier 1952 and Boulevard du 9 Avril 1938, and Rue du 2 Mars 1934, and Place 3 Aout 1903, and many others. I noticed that the sky was full of birds. They were like dark, madly twittering sparrows or swifts, and they swooped and roosted in enormous noisy flocks, blackening the sky and wheeling back and forth. As they rose in the air, they shat in tremendous squirts that splashed on virtually everyone strolling on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba. These pestiferous birds are called asfour zitoun by the Tunisians—“olive birds,” for their habit of snatching the olives from the great coastal crop.

I felt pleased with myself: I had arrived slowly by sea; I had discovered there was a railway network throughout the country; I was now resident in a thirty-five-dollar hotel. I liked the food, Tunis was the right size — not much more than a big town — and the people were approachable. Already I had met the Taoufiks — Mr. was Tunisian, Mrs. was from Birmingham — and their sixteen-year-old son. After seventeen years in the country none of them had been to either Algeria or Libya. “And nothing has changed here in seventeen years!”

Another man, Ahmed, had lived and worked in New York City for three years, at Forty-second between Seventh and Eighth. “I was working in a shop selling smoking things, like water pipes and souvenirs.” He had a Green Card. So why was he back in Tunisia? He hated New York City: “Too many people and too dangerous, because,” he said pointedly, “of black people and white people.” I met Mr. Salah, who had gone to college in Baltimore. “I was there, like, four and a half years, studying business management. It was a neat place.” Most of all, he missed basketball — the heroes, Jordan, Ewing, Rodman, O’Neal.

Tunisians seemed to me hospitable and pleasant, especially Ali, whom I bumped into at the railway station. He asked in Italian, “You’re Italian?”

This was another country, like Malta and Albania and Croatia, within range of Italian TV broadcasts, so that many of the people who owned televisions also spoke Italian. But Ali had also worked in Rome for a while. Then he came back, got married and now had three lovely children — he showed me their pictures.

We were walking along, chatting in Italian. He spoke it well. This was not some tout who wanted an English lesson, or a loan, or to offer me a deal on some local merchandise. He spoke about his children — three girls. He had an enlightened view of women and was eager, he said, for his girls to have the same chance as a boy in Tunisia.

He looked up and pointed ahead, beyond the people crowding the sidewalk. “The Medina is at the end of this street,” he said. “Incredible place — you’ve seen it?”

“I just arrived yesterday.”

“You’re in luck. There’s a big event this morning — the Berber carpet sellers’ market. You’ve heard of the Berbers? I’m a Berber myself, from a village near Gafsa.”

He unfolded my map of Tunisia and showed me the exact location of his village. I really ought to visit him there sometime, he said. He would introduce me to the elders and take me around. Berber culture was real Tunisian culture, and carpets were their masterpieces.

“But we haven’t got much time at the moment. This Berber market closes at noon and look — it’s eleven-fifteen. Berber carpets are lovely — but then I am biased, being a Berber myself. Right through here.”

It was a classic entrance to a bazaar, narrow, with fabrics hung up and fluttering like flags, and all sort of brassware and carvings stacked near it, and a beckoning fragrance of perfume and spices. Entering it reminded me of the souk at Aleppo — once I stepped out of the city heat and dust I was in the humid shadows of this labyrinth, in the passageways, where men in gowns sipped coffee at the entrance to their tiny shops.

Ali moved so fast through the crowd I had to hurry to keep up with him, dodging some people and squeezing past others. Fortunately, he was a tall fellow, and so much bigger than the other Tunisians that I could see him above the crowd of shoppers.

“I don’t want you to be late,” he called out, glancing back and moving a bit faster. “The Berbers will all be going home with their carpets pretty soon.”

We passed a shop selling books and papers.

“I need to buy a notebook.”

“Later,” he said, stepping up his pace. “When you have time to look calmly you will be able to buy many good things.”

He used a nice Italian phrase, tante belle cose, and I was reassured once again. He seemed the most sensible and helpful person I had met on my whole trip — not just in Tunisia but in the Mediterranean; he had the right priorities, he was the perfect host.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in the middle of the souk and I was utterly lost. Following Ali, I had not paid any attention to landmarks, and so I stayed as close to him as I could. We passed carpenters and barbershops and shops selling bolts of silk and finished clothes, bakeries, jewelers, tourist curio shops selling dead scorpions (“for good luck”), amber beads, crimson coral made into beads and necklaces, old muskets, brassware, inlaid boxes, carved boars’ tusks and more.

Seeing these robes, the Benedictine monk garb of the Berber, covering body and head, like a monk’s cowl, I contemplated going into Algeria as Sir Richard Burton would have done — as he did do in Mecca, totally in disguise, in the forbidden place that was dangerous to any unbeliever. But Burton spoke fluent Arabic, and he would have learned Maghrebi Arabic for such a venture, and his cojónes were of a legendary size.

“We’re almost there,” Ali said, turning a corner.

Just around the corner was a colorful shop, larger than any other, and stacked with carpets. Ali greeted the smiling man in the doorway.

“You’re just in time,” the man said in Italian — he spoke it even better than Ali. “Everything closes in twenty minutes.”

We hurried upstairs and I was offered a soft drink. I said no thanks, since I knew that accepting any sort of gift in a carpet shop would obligate me — a cup of coffee, a drink, food; anything.

“Where are the Berbers?” I asked. Somehow I had been expecting a compound where scores of men in robes were muttering encouragement for me to examine their carpets.

“There — there.”

He motioned me past a bed. Very large, with inset mirrors and ivory carvings, it stood against one wall, like a museum piece.

“The king’s bed. Why is it so large?” the manager said. “He slept there with his four wives. But when Tunisia became modern and got rid of kings they also got rid of polygamy, and we bought the bed. As you can see, it is very beautiful and very expensive. Fine work.”

“Please sit down,” Ali said. “Time is short.”

But it was only noon and we were in a carpet shop. I said, “I don’t understand why time is short.”

“The promotion — the carpet sale,” the manager said.

“What promotion? I thought the Berbers were going home with their carpets. Where are the Berbers?”

“Please look,” the manager said, growing irritable.

Small nimble men began unrolling carpets — lots of them, and the carpets were tumbling at my feet, being flapped apart and stacked. They were all colors, all patterns and sizes, rugs, prayer mats, kilims, runners. The manager was narrating this business, saying that this carpet was red because it was a marriage carpet, and this one was blue because blue was a favorite Berber color, and this was a kilim that was the same on both sides — see? And this carpet had a design to ward off the evil eye.

“Is there an evil eye in Tunisia?” I asked.

“There is evil eye in the whole world,” the manager said. “Which one do you like?”

“The red one, the blue one, this one — they’re all nice.”

“This is five hundred dollars. This is nine hundred dollars. This is—”

“Never mind.”

“You want to buy this one?”

“No.”

“Four hundred — what do you say? Go on, make me an offer.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You can’t think. You have to buy it by noon. When the promotion ends.”

Now, much too late, I realized that I had been hustled; so I resisted.

“I’ll come back.”

“You can’t come back. What do you offer me?”

“Nothing right now. Maybe tomorrow.”

“No! No!” he said. “There is no time. Just say a number!”

Just say a number? Hearing that, I laughed. The manager got angry and muttered harshly to Ali, who whispered back at him, and they began bickering in whispers, and every so often the manager howled, “Not much time!”

I thought: I am a fool. I am sitting here with one man howling and the other whispering and a third and fourth still unrolling carpets. I got up to leave. I said I would come back.

“You can’t come back — you can never come back!” the manager screamed at me, still in Italian—Mai, mai! Never, never!

Back in the twisting passageways of the bazaar, Ali — who was somewhat subdued — said, “Let’s say hello to my father,” and stopped in front of a perfume shop. There was no one in the shop. Ali snatched a vial of perfume.

“Jasmine! Special to the Berbers!”

“Not today.” I wondered whether he would persist.

“This is a present. No money! Take it!”

“I am afraid it will spill in my pocket,” I said, and defied him to answer this.

He shrugged and turned as the perfume seller, who was not old enough to be Ali’s father, entered the shop and exchanged greetings with him.

I walked away, but Ali was next to me. He said, “So, how much will you give me for taking you around?”

“I don’t want to be taken around.”

“I just took you around. What about baksheesh for everything that I showed you.”

“For everything that you showed me?” I said, thinking: Here is another pair of mammoth cojónes. “Nothing.”

He left, grumbling, yet I did not dislike him really. I hated myself for falling for the line We don’t have much time! But it was a brilliant gimmick. In the souk, in the street, at the station, the faces of Tunis were the faces of the Mediterranean in a much more remarkable way than anywhere else I had been on the shores of this sea. The Arab face predominated, but Arab faces ranged from pasty, freckled and pale-eyed to utterly dusty, almost Dravidian masks. The faces of Tunis could have been Italian, Spanish, Greek, Sardinian, Turkish, Albanian — and probably were. In Tunisia, Europe and all its colors met North Africa and all its colors, and one blended into the other. With its great ports, and its easy proximity to Italy — the country had always been a crossroads. When the Vandals conquered Spain and North Africa they sacked Carthage, reentered Europe by hopping over from here to Italy. It was an easy distance, for which Sicily was the stepping-stone.

Racially it was not monochromatic, and the clothes too were still reminiscent of orientalist paintings, the shrouded women, the veils, the shawls, as well as pale pouty girls in blue jeans and big bossy women in sunglasses and frilly dresses.

I went by train to Al Marsa via Goulette, Salambo, Carthage (Hannibal), Carthage (Amilcar), Sidi Bou Said and the Corniche. At Sidi Bou, a small town on a hill overlooking the sea, all whitewashed houses, I hiked around. The houses had blue shutters, blue doors, blue porches: the blue was supposed to keep the mosquitoes away. Down by the sea, the shore was littered — as bad here as it had been a thousand miles away on the Syrian beaches. In the thin woods beside the shore there were Tunisian lovers — couples smooching in the oleanders — and a profusion of stray cats.

There seemed to be nothing else at Sidi Bou. The vestiges of Carthage’s memory were remote conquests of the Phoenicians, Hannibal’s battles, the Punic Wars, St. Augustine (he had been a student there), and the Barbary pirates. The traditional date of the founding of Carthage was 814 B.C. But there were more recent memories. Robert Fox writes how, after the mysterious deaths of three Israelis in Cyprus, in 1985, Israeli planes appeared in the skies on this part of the coast and bombed the PLO compound, intending to kill Yassir Arafat. Seventy-two people died in this Israeli bombing. Arafat was not one of them. Fox goes on, “Two years later Israeli raiding parties landed from the sea at the village of Sidi Bou Said, the Saint Tropez of Tunis, to murder a senior PLO figure, Khalil al-Wazir, whose nom de guerre was Abu Jihad, in his bungalow; the Israeli government believed, erroneously, that he had organised the Intifada in the Occupied Territories.”

Black, yellow streaked clouds loomed over Carthage (Baedeker in 1911: “… the beauty of the scenery and the wealth of historical memories amply compensate for the deplorable state of the ruins”); soon the rain began. It was as strong as monsoon rain, and as sudden and as overwhelming, casting a twilight shadow over the coast and hammering straight down with a powerful sound, the water beating on the earth, smacking the street. At once the gutters were awash. Then the streets were flooded. The train halted, the traffic was snarled. Look, it’s like a dam! a woman cried out in French, at the sight of a field. There was a kind of hysteria, as the rain came down. People were gabbling, they were confused. The city began to drown, and then it simply failed.

It was a turning point, though I did not realize it until quite a while afterwards. From this moment onward in my trip the weather deteriorated. It went bad. It thwarted me. It frustrated my plans. Short periods of sunshine were separated by long spells of low cloud and wind, until the wind became a spectacular Levanter. The low pressure and all the damp rooms and shut windows and stale air also seemed to make me ill. Within a few days I had a severe cold — a sore throat, stomach trouble, achy muscles.

Deciding to leave Tunis, I solicited advice from Tunisians. See the desert! they said. See the cave dwellers at Matmata! Go to Tozeur and Djerba. There are Jews in Djerba! See the nomads and the camel sellers and the weavers! See the mystics who fondle scorpions! Go to Sousse — tourists love Sousse! Whatever you do, don’t go to Sfax. There is nothing in Sfax.

So I bought a ticket to Sfax. The ticket was ten dollars, for First Class, and another dollar for the Comfort Section of First Class. Sfax was about two hundred miles away, down the coast, where I hoped the weather was better. My idea was to go there and convalesce until I felt well enough to continue my traveling.

I would have preferred to take the train west to the Algerian border, to Bizerte, then Jendouba and on to Annaba (Bône) on the Algerian coast. In a more peaceful time it would have been a wonderful trip, from Tunis to Tangiers, along the coast. Before I started traveling in the Mediterranean it had been my intention to take this route. But then I had discovered that Tunisia was an island. Some other time I would return, and go to Beirut and Algeria and perhaps to Libya. It was impossible to be exhaustive on any trip — even living in another country had not allowed me enough time to go everywhere, to see everything. After eighteen years in Britain, much of it was unknown to me. For example, I never went to Shropshire, and I had always wanted to go there. After a year’s travel in China I had failed to get to Hainan Island. In the Pacific I never achieved my goal of sailing to Pitcairn Island. I was not dismayed. I turned them into ambitions. It was something to dream about, for unvisited places inspired greater dreams than places I had seen. The existence of the unknown was the wellspring of my dreams. And I also thought, I’ll be back.

The train was almost empty. The only people in the Comfort Section were a Vietnamese woman and a chain-smoking Tunisian man who was trying to woo a young Tunisian woman traveling on her own.

We were out of Tunis, beyond the slums, the suburbs, the refuse heaps and scavengers in shacks, in a matter of minutes, and then it was all olive groves for sixty miles. Like so many other parts of the Mediterranean shore, olive trees predominated. There were more here, and they were more orderly and fruitful, than in Greece. They were organized on terraces, with cactuses and spiky century plants arranged around them as perimeter fences, and with so much space between the trees the olives could be picked mechanically.

I saw an old woman riding a donkey through a herd of goats, I saw shepherds strolling behind flocks of sheep, and stumbling lambs, and in the geometric settlements there were low square houses on grids of streets. I had known nothing about Tunisia before I had gotten off the Sicilian ferry, and so I was pleased to see how orderly and apparently self-sufficient it was. And it was another secular place — at least there was no state religion, either theological or political.

Greener and tidier as we continued south, the countryside was flat and agricultural. It seemed a very peaceful land, in spite of the stormy weather. Passing through Sousse — the railway line went right down Sousse’s main street, along the promenade, around the port — I was reminded of how it had been recommended as a nice place to visit. It was clearly a tourist town.

Thirty or forty miles south of Sousse we came to El Djem. The town was insignificant, but the Roman amphitheater in El Djem was impressive.

“It’s in better shape and there’s more of it than the one in Rome,” an American man said to me, at El Djem. He was Mike from Louisiana.

Mike’s friend Steve said, “This thing is real old.”

They could appreciate the handiwork in El Djem because they were in construction themselves. They had been living in Sfax for almost two months, living alone in hotel rooms — going slightly crazy, they said — supervising the building of an oil-drilling platform offshore.

Steve went on. “It was built in something like 1720.”

“Isn’t it Roman?” I said.

“The guy didn’t say, but I’ll tell you one thing. This sucker is well built.”

“That’s for sure,” Steve said, and leaned way back to admire the complex arrangement of arches.

“Is this A.D. or B.C.?” Mike said.

“What’s the difference?” Steve replied.

Exactly, I thought. Surely the point was that it was about a thousand years older than any other building in the town and yet was stronger, more handsome and symmetrical and would probably outlast all the rest of them.

I got a later train onward to Sfax, and was at first alarmed by the ugly suburbs and tenements, and at last reassured. It was a more somber and quieter place than Tunis, with just a few main streets, and a boulevard and a harbor. Mike and Steve told me that the medina — the bazaar — was worth seeing. There were some islands fifteen or twenty miles offshore but they had not been there. It’s kind of a quiet place, they said. And they added, We’re going nuts here.

It was right for me. There was no traffic. There was a sea breeze. The hotels cost almost nothing. There were no tourists here, because the town supposedly lacked color. Yet people lived here, and they worked and prospered. They traded in salt and fish and phosphate and sulfur, as well as in the products of the poorer inland places — spices and handmade goods from Kairouan and Gafsa. On this cool damp night there was a crowd of milling men along the main boulevard of Sfax that resembled the passeggiata of Sicily and Calabria. I felt that I was outside the mainstream, on the sea. I liked the briny odor of the breeze, and the great clammy blankness at the shore that was like a black wall at night.

I did not feel well. I went through the medina the next day and had to ask permission of a carpet seller to sit in his shop for a while — I was dizzy and weak. While I sat and perspired, feeling ghastly, he unwrapped a Berber kilim. It was striped, vividly colored, handwoven of wool.

“I’ll wrap it for you, so you can carry it.”

“I am too ill to carry anything.”

But three days later I went back and bought it, for sixty dollars. It was ten feet by six feet. In a year and a half of travel on the shores of the Mediterranean, it was the only thing I bought; indeed, it was the only thing I saw that I wished to buy.

In those three days I vowed to get better. I knew I had a bad cold and some sort of low-grade infection in my lungs. I took aspirin. I tried to clear my lungs by eating spicy food, the soup they called h’lalem and couscous with hot pepper sauce and glasses of Tunisian mint tea.

Reading about the anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth, I had a context for examining my own bad state of health at the moment. I had become interested in him since reading about him in the Oliver Sacks book. “Fritz,” as his sister called him, had been born 150 years ago, in Rocken, Germany. He wrote Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. He loved music. Somewhat unfairly, he had been taken up by the Nazis, who admired his saying, “What fails to kill me makes me stronger.” He went insane in 1889 and returned home to live with his mother and sister. He spent his last seven years as a vegetable, and died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six. But some years before the end, there were signs of eccentricity.

“He was fond of playing the piano, splashing in the bathtub and occasionally carefully removing his shoes and urinating in them.”

This strange case history had the effect of making me feel that I was perhaps not so ill after all.

All my life I have hated being asked to explain what I am doing. I hate the question because I very seldom know the answer.

It was Sunday in Sfax, and everything was closed. After three days supine in the seedy grandeur of the Hotel des Oliviers I was feeling slightly better, though I was far from well. I woke thinking, What about Djerba? It was a whole day’s traveling south by train. Gabès was halfway. What about Gabès? But I hesitated when I realized there was a ferry this morning to Kerkennah. The two islands of Kerkennah were about fifteen miles offshore from Sfax. It took an hour and a half. It cost fifty cents. The ferry was leaving shortly and it was called El Loud III. All these details, especially the name, helped me make up my mind to go to Kerkennah.

I grabbed my bag and hurried to the ferry port. How would I have explained this apparently indecisive behavior to a traveling companion, who would ask the reasonable question, Where are we going? I would have to answer, I’m not sure.

Traveling in a general direction, without a specific destination, it was necessary for me to be alone. It wasn’t fair to expect anyone to put up with that much indecision or suspense. I was not sure why I had come to Sfax, until I got there. This may be another difference between a traveler and a tourist: the traveler is vague, the tourist is certain. But I was vindicated in my ignorant decision. My two-day trip to Kerkennah was pleasant.

There were about three hundred passengers on the ferry, all Tunisian, many of them returning to their island home for the day, some of them picnickers, a few going along for the ride. Being Tunisians, they were all sorts, but this was also a feature of the Mediterranean coast. There was no place that I had seen on my entire trip that was one thing — a single people, the same face, the same religion, all dressed the same. One of the pleasures of the Mediterranean was the way in which the complex cultures had intermingled, though what was true of the shoreline was not the case in the inland villages.

The passengers were all sorts, old, young, light, dark, orthodox, liberated, some in shawls, some in fezzes, others in baseball hats. One of the youths had a saxophone, and with a drummer he improvised Arabic melodies on the open deck. It was a good-humored and friendly crowd. They treated each other with courtesy, didn’t push, and were easygoing, high-spirited and respectful. One man had a sprig of jasmine stuck over his ear, like a Tahitian wearing a blossom.

There were cormorants diving into flat sea and there were distant fishing boats, but there was nothing else for almost an hour. It was not the distance of the island that made them hard to see; it was that they were low-lying, the highest one just a few feet above sea level. They came into view as smudges on the sea, and then looking like atolls, Gharbi first and then the edges of its sister island, Chergui.

Some old buses and taxis were parked in the dust at the ferry landing, waiting for passengers. The drivers sat on stacks of palm fronds that had been trimmed of their stalks. These palms were the only vegetation on the islands.

“Where do you want to go?” a driver asked me in French.

“To the town.”

“No town. Only villages.”

“Is there a hotel?”

“Get in.”

Where are we going, Paulie?

There were five of us in the taxi. Kerkennah was too small to show as anything but a dot on my map and so I really had no idea where we might be going, or what places existed on the islands. The only landscape I could see was perfectly flat and arid, stony yellow ground and dying palms with ratty fronds.

“Where are you going?” I asked the other passengers. “Remla.”

“Is that a nice place?”

“Very nice,” they said.

“I want to go to Remla,” I said to the driver.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

We passed two or three settlements of small square houses, some with flat roofs and some with domes, and scattered shops and chickens in the road. It was the simplest place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean coastline. The land was flat, the trees were few, the houses were small. It was not run-down, just silent, empty, lonely, one-dimensional. There were no power lines, apparently no lights.

What I took to be a village was a cemetery, with hutlike tombs, each one with the face of the deceased painted on the side, the size of a political poster, the same empty gaze.

We came to a crossroads, took a left, a right, a left. There were no signs. We were on gravel roads now. Then there were no villages at all, just those battered, withered palm trees. There were no people. We drove on for half an hour and then came to a sign, Grand Hotel, with an arrow. A high wall, a gate, a plaster building, a man.

“Welcome.” It was a Tunisian in his pajamas, speaking English.

There was no one else around. After the taxi left there was silence, like dust sifting down, a bird’s chirp that was so slight I realized that only this tremendous silence made it possible for me to hear it.

“Very quiet today.”

“No people.”

“Are they coming?”

“Later.”

“Today?”

He frowned. “No. Two months, three months from now.”

“But I am here.”

“You are welcome, sir.”

This was not the first time on my trip that I had achieved the distinction of being the only guest in a hotel, but it was the first time I had managed it in a hotel this large.

“This way, sir.”

I was taken through the hotel to the dining room and shown to table 23. I counted the other tables: there were seventy-two.

“I am Wahid Number One,” the waiter said, bowing.

“From Kerkennah?”

“From Kerkennah, sir. Is nice.”

In this utterly empty place I felt optimistic. I thought: I’ll stay here until I get well.

Wahid Number One served me brik, which was thin fried pastry, with canned tuna fish and a fried egg. That night’s dinner was turkey. It was a pressed slab of old turkey parts, with gravy. The next day it was brik again, and spaghetti, and French fries made of bad fat. They were disgusting, ocherous meals, with cold wobbly desserts.

“Is there another hotel nearby?” I asked Wahid Number One.

“Farhat Hotel.”

“Nice place?”

He shrugged. “Farhat Hotel they come French.”

“And Grand Hotel?”

“They come English.”

“In a few months,” I said.

“Two or three months,” he said.

Instead of retreating I decided to find out as much as I could about Kerkennah — give it a few days and then move on. In the meantime, two days here in this empty place was an experience unlike any I’d had on my trip. The ocean was gray in this threatening weather, the sandy narrow foreshore of the island was stacked with weed. I walked for several miles. Much of the shore was used as a dump — rusty cans, old cars, plastic bottles, trash. There were some houses, there was an old ruin. There were some date palms on the flat desertlike land. They had short orange fronds with clusters of dates. The dates had fallen and rotted, and so there were masses of buzzing flies.

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.

Tunis was busy with two important events — the Carthage Film Festival and a decisive soccer match, Tunisia against Togo, to determine which country would qualify to play in the Africa Cup. I watched the match on television at the cafe in a backstreet, with about two hundred people, men and boys. They were attentive, there were no outbursts, only murmurs. Tunisia was ahead, one to nothing for most of the match, and towards the end, when Togo kicked the equalizer, not a word was spoken. The only interruption came when the strangled cry of a muezzin gave his call to prayers. A number of people got down, faced east, and prayed — five minutes of this — then back to the match, which ended in a draw.

The Carthage Film Festival was promoted under the slogan “A Hundred Years of Tunisian Cinema!” This seemed to me as unlikely a claim as the centenary of Israeli railways that was being celebrated when I was in Haifa. Never mind. I pretended to be a movie critic and went to two of the movies. In spite of the name of the festival, the movies were shown in Tunis. Most had been made in the Mediterranean; France, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine were represented. There were ten films from Turkey. The rest were from places as distant as Brazil and China.

My interest was the Mediterranean. I chose two films about places I had been. But I had not been able to penetrate the countries to this extent. Couvre Feu (Curfew), directed by a Palestinian, Raschid Masharaoui, was an insider’s account of simple bravery and defiance against great odds, the stone throwers of the Intifada facing machine guns of the Israeli soldiers.

Throughout the Mediterranean, the most-quoted atrocity of Bosnia was not a list of the number dead but rather the deliberate shelling by the Serbs of the ancient bridge over the river at Mostar. The destruction of the bridge symbolized everything that was wicked about the war — the stupidity and meanness in the conflict, and all the atavistic cruelty that was still present in the Mediterranean. In Bosna (Bosnia) directed by Bernard Henry I saw the bridge destroyed — and much else. This documentary showed the carnage of the war, the pitiful merciless slaughter, the inert corpses by the roadside, the blood and broken glass and decapitations; the mass graves, weeping children, terrified adults and brutalized soldiers — snow, rain and ruin. But no atrocity in the film stirred the audience more than the shells — about a dozen of them altogether — falling on the bridge itself, which had stood for five hundred years, finally falling to pieces into the river. The people in the theater gasped, there were pitiful groans, and when the lights came up there were tears in their eyes.

I went back to my hotel after the film about Bosnia and listened to the news on my shortwave radio. “Serbian forces are advancing on Bihac to reclaim territory they lost to the Bosnians in the past two weeks,” I heard. The casualty figures for the dead and wounded and missing were given, and the news that Sarajevo (which I had seen shelled in the year-old documentary Bosna just an hour ago) was being shelled again.

The weather was rainy and cold. I was eager to move on. I returned to Mr. Habib, the agent for the shipping lines.

“We are waiting for notification,” the agent said. He was friendly. He spoke English well. He said that it would be an interesting voyage.

I said, “As it’s a Libyan ship I think I should tell you that I am an American.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to the captain, just in case anyone thinks of doing something stupid to you.”

I kept trying. But three days later Mr. Habib was still waiting for notification, and there was no word about the Garyounis.