On the Shores of the Mediterranean (43 page)

The head waiter, a moustached fellow, proved to be a mine of information. According to him there was
pas de problème
. There was a mini-bus leaving from a café across the road at ten o’clock, otherwise 22.00, and a bus at 22.15 from the station yard.

‘Don’t order anything,’ I said to Wanda, leaving her to thaw out in the draught, and raced what proved to be not just across the road but a couple of blocks to the café from which the minibus was due to leave in about forty-five minutes from now, where
nobody had ever heard of it, but from which I was sent to the office of a shared taxi service where the proprietor told me (he was shutting up, too) that one of these vehicles would be setting off, if a quorum could be found to fill it, at 03.00 the following morning. After this I walked back to the restaurant where the head waiter said he couldn’t understand it but there was
pas de problème
for the bus which stopped at the station yard every night at 22.15. We then ordered a dinner for two, which made the 17.00 lunch the Tunisian equivalent of a British high tea.

At 22.05, by which time Wanda was rigid with cold in spite of having been filled up with
agneau
and the good Tunisian red wine which turned out to be deep frozen rosé, having paid our modest bill which amounted to the equivalent of £7 ($9.80) for two, we set off, lugging our bags, for our tryst with the head waiter’s bus at 22.15 which, like the mini-bus due to leave at 22.00, proved to be a figment of his imagination. There, in the station yard, we waited until 22.30, by which time it was obvious to anyone, even me with my peanut brain, that it wasn’t coming.

Back at the restaurant we found it on the point of closing, the atmosphere no longer jolly, our table cleared with the chairs stacked on it, the now acrimonious drunks being ejected, having paid their bills, and the previously almost too friendly head waiter now unaccountably hostile, presumably because we hadn’t caught his non-existent bus. However, an under-waiter, who actually lived over the premises and therefore might be presumed to know, said that there was definitely a bus at 12.15, otherwise 00.15, the following morning and he suggested that the best place to wait for it, in fact the only place now in that they were closing, was an all-night café about fifty yards away, round the corner and in full view of the station where the bus would stop.

The only occupants of the café, which appeared to have no doors, was like a tomb and served no alcohol, were a very old,
nice man who was the proprietor and his friend who was younger but equally nice and looked like an emaciated version of Omar Sharif. Both of them were wearing thick overcoats and the friend of the proprietor said that he came to the café every evening in order to pass the night with him and keep an eye on things if he wanted to have a nap. I told him about our bus trouble and he took me round the corner and showed me a notice on the wall, more or less outside the restaurant in which we had had dinner, which stated quite distinctly that the next bus to Tunis was at 00.45, not 00.15.

Meanwhile Wanda was feeling so ill that she had retired to the upper floor of the café, which was equally cold but slightly less public, to lie down. Feeling heroic I took off my coat and put it on top of the blanket in which she was wrapped, now apparently fast asleep, which had presumably been lent to her by the proprietor, who had disappeared. By now it was midnight, 24.00 hours, and not believing anyone in Sfax any more so far as buses were concerned, I began to queue outside in the station yard for whatever might turn up. The 00.15, the brain-child of the under-waiter, failed to appear and so did the officially-accredited-on-the-noticeboard 00.45, by which time I was practically dead and went back to the café for what I felt was a well-earned rest, where I promptly fell asleep with my head on one of the tables, only to be woken at 01.30 hours by the friend of the proprietor in a high state of excitement to say that a real bus had arrived in the station yard on its way to Tunis and that he had managed to persuade the driver to wait for us.

I rushed upstairs to wake Wanda, cocooned in her blanket and further hidden by my coat, only to find that it was the proprietor whom I had tucked up and that Wanda was lying on a table at the far end of the room without any sort of covering at all. Followed by him and his friend manfully bringing up the rear with residual
bits of our baggage, we ran to the station and boarded what proved to be a big, luxurious and warm bus just at the moment when the driver was about to leave, no doubt fed up with waiting for potential passengers who in this part of the world at this time of night were probably as ephemeral as the buses appeared to be which were supposed to carry them. This time it was we who waved goodbye, to the owner of the café and his insomniac friend who had saved us from travelling on the almost certainly nonexistent shared taxi to Tunis at 03.00, otherwise 3 a.m.

We arrived at Tunis at half past five on a Sunday morning, while it was still dark, and in a sort of coma picked up a prowling taxi and ordered its driver, who wasn’t very full of fight either, to take us to a railway station from which we could catch a train to a village called Sidi Bou Said on the northern outskirts of Tunis where we had booked a room in a hotel. He took us through deserted streets past what looked like abattoirs to an equally deserted station where we boarded a train which appeared to have no guard and certainly had no other passengers besides ourselves, and which halted obediently at each station until we reached Sidi Bou Said which was the fourteenth or the fifteenth stop, I forget which. There we lugged our bags a mile or two uphill, finally reaching the hotel just after six o’clock, 06.00. There we had a hot bath and went to bed. We were whacked.

We were whacked because the nice warm bus we had been so happy to board had turned out to be a mobile oriental torture chamber. Its interior, brilliantly illuminated by fluorescent lights that were never for a moment extinguished, was also equipped with a short wave radio capable of picking up every Arab radio station in the Mediterranean basin as well as those in the Arabian peninsula, but all of them imperfectly and to the accompaniment of dreadful noises that one could only suppose were atmospherics, and this functioned at full blast throughout the night, the
conductor of the coach moving along the wave bands from one station to another every few minutes as the spirit moved him.

‘Do something,’ said Wanda, who was feeling terrible, putting on her outraged, Marguerite Dumond/Marx Brothers act. ‘Tell him to stop it.’

So I did, and he looked at me just as a British coach conductor would look at a Tunisian who told him to switch off a coach radio; and I had to tell her that she would either have to learn to live with it or, if necessary, die with it or get off the coach in the middle of darkest Tunisia, for we live in cruel times.

Knowing that what remains of ancient Carthaginian Carthage, which is almost nothing, was going to be a let-down, yet unable to sleep, at ten o’clock after about three hours in bed we got up and dressed and walked downhill from Sidi Bou Said in a nippy wind to view the various sites, through miles of streets, past filling stations and round roundabouts in modern, Sunday-morning Carthage which was full of bijou villas protected by wrought iron fences and savage Alsatian dogs, imported at Allah knows what cost to protect the Tunisian bourgeoisie from whatever fate they deserved.

Later, looking down at the only ruins of Carthage that really merit the journey, the Roman ruins of the Antonine Baths on the seashore which, like most of the ruins of Carthage, are displayed in what looks like a sort of municipal park, closed because it was Sunday, I realized why Rose Macaulay, that most masterly exponent of ruin writing, who could make even a disused gasworks sound exciting if she put her mind to it, found herself up against it when she came to write about Carthage not as it was but as it is. For there was nothing to go on, nothing to tell one what the city and its port had looked like in its pre-Roman glory before the three Punic wars with Rome.

The first of these wars, which began in 264 BC, she fought to maintain her position in the central Mediterranean. It ended with the partial destruction of her fleets, the loss of her bases in Sicily, and, after peace was made with Rome, the evacuation of Sardinia which was one of her colonies.

The Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to 201 BC, she fought to regain the position she had lost in the first one. It began with Hannibal and an army of 90,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry and 40 elephants crossing the Pyrenees from Spain, the Rhone Valley and then the Alps into Italy, probably somewhere near the source of the Po on Monte Viso, defeating the Romans in a series of actions and taking his armies as far south as Taranto, before being forced to return to Africa to defend Carthage, having spent fifteen years on enemy soil with his armies unconquered. It ended in 202 BC with his defeat at Zama, a site in Tunisia, never accurately determined, by Scipio Africanus, who had already driven the Carthaginians from Spain in 206 BC, after which he fled to Carthage. As a result of his defeat Carthage lost all her overseas possessions, her trade monopolies in the Mediterranean, her entire fleet apart from ten ships and was forced to agree to pay an enormous indemnity over a period of thirty years and an annual tribute, rather like Germany after 1918. All the Carthaginians retained was their autonomy within what were called the Phoenician Trenches, which more or less approximated to present-day Tunisia.

For the next six years Hannibal ruled Carthage as a suffete, a magistrate, encouraging constitutional reforms, diminishing the powers of the oligarchs in the Carthaginian Senate, earning their undying enmity by doing so, and putting the financial affairs of the state in such good order that the city was able to pay off her indemnity not in thirty years but eleven (in 191 BC), and without any great increases in taxation. Alarmed by his success and the
rapid resurgence of Carthage, Rome demanded that he be handed over and in 195 BC he was forced to flee, first to Tyre, the mother-city of Carthage, then to Ephesus where Antiochus, King of Syria, was planning what proved to be a disastrous campaign
³
against Rome, then to Crete and finally to Libyssa on the Asiatic shores of the Sea of Marmara, where he died by his own hand to avoid being handed over to the Romans by a King of Bithynia in 183 or 182 BC. Thus perished one of the greatest soldiers of his or any other age, who was also a great statesman.

There followed a long period in which Rome encouraged her ally, Masinissa, the ruler of the neighbouring Berber kingdom of Numidia, who had been brought up in Carthage and had fought with her armies against the Romans in Spain, to goad the Carthaginians into attacking him, thus breaking the non-aggression treaty they had made with Rome, which he succeeded in doing in 150 BC, defeating them in the ensuing battle. The following year, which saw the opening of the Third Punic War, the Roman armies invaded Carthage and the Carthaginians agreed to surrender, give hostages and lay down their arms, revoking this decision, however, when the terms, which included the total destruction of their city, became known. A three-year siege followed which ended in 146 BC after a most desperate resistance by the defenders, the wife of Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander (not to be confused with Hannibal’s brother of the same name), choosing death for herself and her children rather than capture and leaving Hasdrubal to surrender and become part of Scipio’s triumph.

‘Delenda est Carthago
,’ the elder Cato told the Roman Senate; ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ and so it was. It burned for seventeen days and when the fires were finally extinguished there was
nothing to be seen of what had been a great city except an immense heap of ashes, a gigantic version of the funeral pyre of Queen Dido, the legendary founder of Carthage, who immolated herself, having failed to deflect Aeneas from his destiny, which was to be the forefather of Rome. Only an enormous aqueduct fifty miles long remained, and no one is sure whether this was Carthaginian or Roman. After this the site was levelled, ploughed and the earth in what had been its fields drenched with salt as a sign, if nothing else, that this land which had been officially cursed should remain for ever sterile, this being the first task performed by the 50,000 survivors of the siege, all of whom were condemned to slavery. However, 117 years later, in 29 BC, it was colonized by Hadrian with 3000 veterans of the Roman legions and it eventually became, with its population augmented by Phoenician-speaking and Libyan subjects, not only the capital of Africa Proconsularis but, with Alexandria, one of the three most important cities of the Roman world. Later still it became an important centre of Christianity, its bishop regarding himself as the equal of the bishop of Rome, and was also famous for its orators and lawyers.

What therefore could one learn about the Carthaginians from looking at the remains of a Roman city that had subsequently been destroyed by Vandals, besieged by Byzantines, further destroyed by raiding Arabs, quarried, and, as a final indignity, had what was left of its marble walls taken to build a railway line? Nothing. Although they are known to have produced historians and geographers, the Carthaginians have left no written works. Even a work on agriculture, written by a Carthaginian named Mago, which became a standard work on the subject throughout the Roman Empire, has not survived in the original. It is known that they were very religious and frightfully cruel with it, at Carthage sacrificing hundreds of children to their god Baal
Ammon and the goddess Taanit, strangling them or cutting their throats before consigning them to a fiery furnace that stood before the image of the god. Among the few artefacts that have come down to posterity from the Carthaginians are the urns in which they buried the ashes of these children. They themselves were buried in sepulchres in a vast necropolis far from the habitations of the living for fear of contaminating them.