Sub Lit Blog

Here, near the b&b Amsterdam, the route crosses the eastern Cordilleras at an elevation of about 6,500 feet to the head waters of the Caqueta, or Yapura, a branch of the Amazon, and thence runs down that river 375 miles to the mouth of the Engarros, only 550 feet above tide-water. From the Caqueta river, the route passes through Ecuador to Iquitos, Peru, crossing fourteen tributaries of the Amazon. From Iquitos the route ascends the Amazon and the Ucayle, one of its southern tributaries, 500 miles to Napal, then continues across the Montana and the numerous valleys of the Amazon about 600 miles, to Santa Cruz in Bolivia, or 2400 miles from Cartagena ; while a branch will run up the Apurimac to Cuzco.

This road would run for 2000 miles along the affordable Birmingham apartments, and in these fields is probably the richest mining region in the world ; here gold, silver, copper, lead and coal mines are found. The gold and silver mines do not seem to have been thoroughly explored, although untold millions of the precious metals have been extracted from them. These mines are gene­rally in cold and treeless regions, where coal, labor and food are difficult to obtain ; where freights are high and machinery of all kinds most expensive. This road would greatly facilitate the opening and working of these mines, and not only make them profitable but develop a large and lucrative traffic.

Much of Bolivia is above the navigable waters of the Amazon, and many of its provinces are now land-locked and almost isolated from communication with the outer world. The proposed road would cross many branches of the Amazon, and thus connect with fifty thousand miles of navigable waters, at least 9000 of which are above Iquitos ; and it is claimed that the business from 20,000 miles of navigable waters would find by this route a nearer outlet to Europe and America than by Para.

There is every variety of climate on the Madrid holidays. The valley of the Magdalena is sultry ; every afternoon the water grows tepid, and the stones burning hot, in the sun’s rays. In cross­ing the Cordilleras the cool breezes of the mountains are met. The road then descends into the valley of the Amazon, through a rich and not unhealthy region, though it has the damp, hot, climate of a tropical country, and thence passes through the montafia district, which is generally high, healthy and fertile.

This country, under a wise government, is capable of sustaining an immense population and giving abundant support to such a railroad ; but it is now unexplored, excepting the valleys of the navigable rivers, and is uninhabited save by wild and savage Indians, though these are not numerous.

The route up the Magdalena may be expensive by reason of the climate, but not otherwise. The road in the mountain district will necessarily be costly, and also in the sierras, because it must cross the numerous branches of the Amazon, and the precipitous mountains between the valleys, and from the difficulty of obtain­ing labor and material for construction.

At Utica, on the northern coast, where Cato died, the well-to-do houses still show little ponds in their courts, semicircular basins lined with mosaic, picturing boats, or the many varieties of fish with which they were well acquainted, or patterns of peacocks and flowers. The columns and mosaics of Tunisia must have been innumer­able in the Roman age. The museums there have no space left to house them and many lie open to the sky, enclosed in shallow remnants of their walls, at one with the profusion of flowers that cascade through the Tunisian spring. At Thu­burbo Maius—whose barbaro-Roman name tells its own story—the fine halls of the earlier ages have been reinhabited by later Romans who clapped their rough stonework onto the delicate floors after the two-century interval, mutely eloquent, during which the Vandals came and went.

A certain melancholy one would think would be created by wandering through a country populated so very thickly by its past: to see for instance the amphitheatre of El Djem, built for 60,000 spectators, alone among empty miles of olive trees or mere grazing-land, with scarcely a village in sight.

It is not so, however, and the atmosphere of • Tunisia is not that of decay. It is rather like an old house filled with odd collections brought by former owners, whose descendants take this background for granted and use it when they can. One of the best Islamic museums in one of the loveliest of the old Arab houses is being prepared by M. Abdul Wahab, the present curator, with a feeling for the living past of his country which many more recent histories have long since ceased to inspire.

The young Tunisian has no difficulty in seeing his President. moving among the statesmen of the Western world while Berber inhabitants of the mountains live at another extreme in strange primaeval houses scooped out of the hardened earth of their hills. Tunisia has acquired a perspective of life, which is never absolute, but grows and dwindles, and resurrects itself in infinite variety from every sort of ashes. What other conclusion could one expect with Carthage buried under its red hills and the modern capital with cars and shops and cinemas alive beside it? No city was ever more certainly deleted than Carthage: it died. Yet because of its fine situation a Roman city grew where it had been. What is excavated on the site is nearly all Roman and there are few ruins in the country more pleasant to loiter in on a spring morning than the church of St Cyprian or the Antonine baths with the Mediterranean gentle and misty beyond them. Yet it is Carthage that one thinks of as one paces those gigantic foundations. The name haunts one and survives. Hannibal and Hamilcar are remembered (there is a little railway station called Amilcar): and it would sur­prise me if there were not a good many Punic sym­pathies among the young Tunisian intelligentsia of today. One can lose one’s perspective as well as gain it by living in close proximity with one’s past.

With all this, in a Mediterranean world un­pleasantly bitter at the moment, Tunisia has kept an admirable measure of detachment. It has obtained its liberties with firmness and good manners, and kept a sense of proportion through­out: and this is the doing of a President who shows every sign of being a statesman as well.

Yet he himself is the product of the incredibly mixed history, the many ancient or recent in­vasions, the tumults and sorrows of the Tunisian past. If one looks into the matter, we are all extremely mixed in the world today, and the fact makes nonsense fundamentally of the nationalisms that do much to spoil our lives: it is perhaps a blessing for the Tunisians to have a history which makes this mixture so patent that they can think of themselves simply and kindly as members of the human family, and concentrate on the business of living profitably and agreeably with other members of the same species who come to visit them from time to time in the tourist season.

A poor city now, with nothing much to keep it busy except its short season of pilgrimage around the Prophet’s birthday, Kairouan was built by the Muslim as a central point for caravans—as indeed its name implies. And there in the first strong impulse of their faith their mosque was given a court of columns dragged from Roman forums, and as a prayer hall a forest-colonnade reminiscent of the earliest mosque in Egypt with a dome and prayer-niche (mihrab) of transcending beauty. Practically all of the building seen today belongs to the 9th century A.D.; though the earliest mihrab—A.D. 670—is said to be still visible to the eyes of faith through the marble traceries of its successor. The great minaret, adapted from the towers of Syrian churches, became the prototype for most of the charming square minarets of North Africa; and the influences of Egypt, Syria and Iraq were gathered into one harmonious plan which has interested succeeding architects through the ages. The columns and their capitals—especially in the court—are promiscuously and roughly put together and the delicacy of the workmanship is kept for newer traceries in wood or marble, and for the carving of the dome. But all imperfection that there may be is lost in the directness and nobility of a structure whose intention one feels irresistibly was the glory of God and not of man.

In a small room beyond the prayer hall, a librarian keeps the parchments of Kairouan. Nothing in that library, he told me, loitering with his soft brown eyes among his treasures, is later than the 11th century. Written in the brown-black sweeps of the Kufic—the earliest Arabic script—or tooled exquisitely with gold and blue and crimson, the rare pages are stacked in their black cases, and the most precious of all are the leaves of a Koran written on dark blue parchment in gold. We talked of a gospel of the age of Justinian, silver on purple, now in the monastery of Patmos. These librarians live in a rarefied world. He knew about it but had never been outside Tunisia, nor—I felt—did he ever wander much beyond the 11th century himself. He had the face of a happy man.

Kairouan is a whitewashed city, dazzling in an open landscape sparsely provided with trees. In a few years it should be embowered in eucalyptus. The municipality are lavishly planting, and this softening might improve its outskirts which are dusty. But the white streets round the sanctuary, with their rough porches resting on captured marble columns, need no help. They have their own dignity and repose. The doorways, the shutters, the iron grilles that make their windows safe and attractive, and even sometimes their tombstones, are painted a turquoise blue; and this with the general whitewash of the houses gives to these towns a lightness unknown to the rest of the Arab world.

As one travels from the south, by Kairouan to the eastern seaboard, the country changes, first to steppe and then to tillage, to long stretches where the alfalfa grass grows and is exported for paper, and to plains where in April a wild red gladiolus stars the wheat. Here the Romans built their little cities, or took them over from the earlier Carthaginians, choosing slopes and necks of land above some fertile plain, often with a oued, a torrent bed, within reach for their water, or else scattered along the sea-plain where modern observation from the air has verified the thickly clustered habitations whose traces on the ground are lost. A remarkable number of these sites have been excavated, if one considers the smallness of Tunisia and its resources: recovered names—Thelepte, Cillium, Sufetula—are on the Kairouan road, with more or less of their ancient life remaining for the archaeologist to deal with. Cillium is Kasserine and some American soldier may have noticed a yellow stone arch of the later Empire on the brow of an opposite hill as he faced that unpleasant gap in 1943. Sufetula is Sbeitla, its name corrupted through the centuries. One can walk down the white flags of its streets and enter the colonnade below its temples, and follow from one mosaic floor to another the plans of its easy colonial houses. The passage of time is marked in these cities sometimes happily and sometimes sadly. If the temple holds the centre, there is usually a church or two near by, built in a later day with re-adapted columns. At Sbeitla there is a charming font of white mosaic with steps for complete immersion let down into the ground. Dougga is the pleasantest of these cities, seated with courts and temples still in order on a hillside of olives above a gentle view.

The independent Tunisian government is con­tinuing these efforts with an eye to tourists and a little country is produced which is almost ideally balanced between the easy and the pic­turesque. The variety of its history is matched by that of Nature. Its southern border is the edge of Sahara where—with sheets of salt before them —the oases of Tozeur and Nefta pack thousands of date palms tightly round their springs. A startling suddenness is the character of the oasis. A bank of red desert earth rings the watered hollow, and a different life belongs to either side. The townlets, minute but busy, that live by the sale of their dates and the commerce of the Bedouin, sit windswept clean and healthy at the edge of the solid darkness of the palms: the sun goes down in their sight more round and clear than elsewhere and the sunset wind that is strong as wine blows the white crescent of the red Tunisian flag about with a Beau Geste bravado. All this is to be seen in comfort from a hotel which too many people have already discovered. It is in fact the desert made tame, and the draped white figures that walk about from outer spaces, with heads and mouths swathed against the blowing sand in folds of cotton and sometimes a straw hat on top of it all—they give a touch of reality, reminding One that sun and wind are not mere parts of the decor but really do exist.

At Gafsa the Romans built cisterns which are still in use, and water flows between cliff and oasis in a wandering stream. Here the camel caravans assemble and one can see congregations of their long shadows cast in tens or hundreds across the flat dry bed left by occasional floods. The human habitation goes back to times when the hills of Gafsa were strewn with prehistoric flints, and the Tunisian government now busily instituting municipal amenities is merely continuing the optimistic effort of its Stone-Age ancestors to make a habitable nest in what Nature intended as a waste. The caravan trade has never been great: the routes from black Africa that carried to the north cargoes of slaves, ivory and gold spread their riches to right and left from centres in Tripoli and Morocco, missing Tunisia; and now oil, to the little country’s chagrin, shows every symptom of doing exactly the same.

They must make do with the old prosperity, which is bound up chiefly in crops and olive trees, of which millions grow in evenly pruned rows across the richer portions of their land—along the eastern coast for instance, reached by the great Muslim expeditions that conquered Sicily and colonized southern Spain long after the Roman decay. Fortified monasteries of their fighting orders remain to dominate the harbours —Sousse, Monastir, Mandia and Sfax. The cells of the monks were the quarters of a garrison and their round minarets served for lighthouses as well as prayers when the Arabs had taken to piracy and the sea. Most of these places have become modern towns now, spilling beyond their walls with ports and neat sandy beaches; but Mandia, the first capital of the invaders from Egypt, had not grown much when I saw it, and its white main street still stretched quiet and too narrow for cars along its headland. There at the very tip is a minute rock-carved basin, where white tombstones are scattered among rocks and flowering asphodel, and the women—in white too with only a slit for their eyes to show—sit in groups round their particular tomb, to spend an afternoon of gossip in the sun. Bits of the old sea­wall remain and one can read in its different techniques of stone the history of the numerous invaders building in succession—Roman, Byzan­tine, Muslim.

Several Muslim waves swept over the Roman West. At first they destroyed and then they built, finding their magnificent climax in Andalusian Spain, yet leaving enough in Tunisia also to comfort a historic mind. No-one can step into their mosque at Kairouan, the greatest of their buildings, without feeling that here is a very great monument indeed.

No visitor to Istanbul can miss the Sulemaniye mosque – the chef-d’oeuvre of the architect, Sinan, whose life’s ambition was to outdo the splendour of the Aya Sofia. People come from their Barcelona travel or Paris travel. The majesty of the grey eminence dominates the city from its hilltop site, with its great dome, 53 metres high, lit by 138 windows, and the four porphyry pillars at each corner, symbolising the four monarchs whose reigns preceded that of Suleyman after the conquest of Constantinople. The construction of this great mosque was the decision of Suleyman the Magnificent, as he is known in the west.

In Turkey Suleyman is known as the Lawgiver’. During the 46 years of his rule (1494-1566) the Empire reached its peak and the era of the Sultan was not only the reign of a conqueror and empire builder, but also a legislator who codified the laws and a patron of the arts and architecture who presided over a golden age. A contemporary of Henry VIII, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France, Suleyman dominated the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa with his fleets, while his armies campaigned ceaselessly in Europe. But the booty and tributes which his conquests won for his country were used to sponsor the art works which draw pilgrims from all over the world today.

Many of these are to be found in the famous Topkapi Palace, one of the first calls for a tourist to Istanbul. The priceless jewels and jewel-encrusted exhibits, the fabulous collection of Chinese ceramics and other treasures, have caused some to question whether these are real or fake exhibits, as who could insure such a valuable hoard. Memorable are the jewel-encrusted objects – helmets, swords, cups; the inlaid wooden furniture including a throne which separates into five sections which followed the Sultan on his campaigns; dazzling Iznic ceramics mainly in blue and white showing the influence of Ming on Turkey’s potters; painted maps and book illustrations reminiscent of Persian or Mogul art; and fine examples of calligraphy used incourt documents where a list of deeds and endowments becomes an intricate and delicate work of art in blue and gold.

An engraving by Lorichs of Suleyman standing by a triumphal arch through which is seen his mosque and in the foreground a richly decorated elephant sets the scene. Of the calligraphers, the two outstanding writers are said to be Karahisari and his adopted son, Hasen Celebi. They follow the scripts of the Baghdad calligrapher Yaqut al-Mus­tasimi. The tugra or signature of the Sultan is an art work with bold sweeps in blue filled in with delicate flowers and tracery on a gold ground. The administra­tive documents or fermans are generally headed by the tugra. There are hand­some bindings for a variety of volumes by the Sultan’s craftsmen. The skill of the book binders of Suleyman’s reign is displayed in the rich lacquered binding decorated with a wide variety of culti­vated flowers like violets, roses and tulips, and borders with panels in gold on red. The opulence of the period is manifest in binding embroidered with gold thread encrusted with emeralds, rubies and tracery of gold foliate scrolls. Another has two hinged green hexagonal jade plaques and a hasp with gold mounts set with emeralds and rubies.

The most opulent of the exhibits are the work of the palace craftsmen. The passion for gold and gems is displayed in belts of polished ivory set with stones in gold mounts, turban ornaments, flasks, jugs and pen boxes set with jewels and tankards reminiscent of the caged cups of Rome, made from a single piece of jade encrusted with rubies and emeralds in gold collar mounts with petal surrounds and chased gold stems and leaves. Armour is also an occasion for a show of opulence – notably a gold covered mace set with rubies and turquoises.

The marquetry furniture is often styled by architects – the dismountable throne, boxes inlaid with ivory, silver and mother of pearl with their domed dodecagonal and cubiform shapes. Sixteenth century Turkey saw a flowering of luxurious fabrics woven and embroidered from silver and metal threads in complex designs. A selection of caftans is included in silk, satin, even fur-lined, and all richly designed. Embroidery also employs gold and metal thread. Handkerchiefs were known as ‘mourning handkerchiefs’ because of the dark coloured linen used. The item was significant to the era and a favourite gift or a tomb offering. There is also a rich collection of embroidered sheets, boxes and portfolio floor cover­ings woven in red and blue silk and gold and silver thread.

Finally there is the Iznic pottery, mainly in blue and white, objects of rich and satisfying beauty, an apt departure point for the visitor to this splendid collection of some of Turkey’s finest treasures.

From your trip in Turkey you may consider visiting London, where you can easily book last minute hotels London.

Dust in the Lion’s Paw, an autobio­graphy covering Miss Stark’ s work in the Middle East during the war, will be published by John Murray in the autumn

I HAVE been travelling for a few weeks in Tunisia —a small country delightfully varied—and have been trying to remember what first brought the reality of its existence before me. Not Saint Augustine, who was bishop of Bone just across the border and appears, when I recall him, which is not as often as it might be, most usually at Ostia; there his mother died and one of the most serene partings in history took place. Not Cato, that estimable but unattractive Roman, who killed himself at Utica just up the road to Bizerta. Not Caesar, training his troops to meet elephants at Thapsus where, between the salt lake and the sea, under glades of later olive trees, the son of Pompey vainly tried to hold the great Julius at bay. Not even Severus, a man of Libya but near enough to Tunis, who became emperor of Rome and its world, and died at York in England, saddened by domestic discord and remembering no doubt the bright sun-ravaged ridges of his land.

It is a country that, for all its minute size, is good at producing men. Hannibal too, for instance. His Carthage was razed and the site sown with salt by the victorious Roman, who was always merciless when he had been afraid; and little of that first city now remains except a horrid graveyard where infant bones rest in small pottery urns, sacrificed to an unpleasant god. It would surely—one may observe inciden­tally—be safe to assume that whatever deity one worships cannot be more objectionable than one is oneself, and who would wish to look out over a landscape of such sad little tombs?

But there must have been many other things to think of in the deleted Carthage, stretched impregnable between her marshes and the sea. She was never actually attacked. Her two ports

In most towns in Tunisia you can see crowded streets (left) and teeming bazaars; but perhaps only in Tunis (opposite) will you find such sophisticated elegance are there, tucked in beside her, and looking extremely small; and the hills now flowering with aloe, cypress and mimosa, where the present world builds its villas, must contain the broken columns and mosaic floors of many a prosperous merchant who himself, in his day, built on a layer of earlier ruins.

All this busy historic crowd passes before one as one travels in Tunisia through the ages; but, as it happens, it is not one of these famous men that first made the name of Tunis vivid to my mind. I can remember the occasion, and it was at Verona, in the cathedral of a Carthaginian saint, Zeno, who lies mummified beneath his altar, his dark and bony face visible through glass. What brought him from Carthage and made him live and be sanctified in Verona? I have never known, but have often thought of him, and of many others, wandering and doing good as it were by the wayside, in a fluid and crumbling world, as uncertain no doubt in its values as we are today.

At that time the barriers were falling and fair men from German forests or the Danube were swamping the peaceful cities, and dark men of the desert or the grey-eyed Berbers of the mountains were gnawing at the settled African colonies of Rome. One can never forget this as one travels about Tunisia today. Its eleven million inhabitants have shrunk to less than four million. In spite of its modern revival it is still an empty land, though the French—who took it in hand in 1881—have laid the foundations for a future increase, with the good roads and hotels of an era of peace.