Fountains in the Sand | Page 4

bones near at hand suggested cannibalistic practices.
These, then, are the primitives of Gafsa. And for how long, I wonder, has this convenient shelter been inhabited? From time immemorial, perhaps; ever since the days of those others. And, after all, how little have they changed in the intervening thousands of years! The wild-eyed young wench, with her dishevelled hair, ferocious bangle-ornaments, tattooings, and nondescript blue rags open at the side and revealing charms well fitted to disquiet some robust savage--what has such a creature in common with the rest of us? Not even certain raptures, misdeemed primeval; hardly more than what falls to man and beast alike. On my appearance, she rose up and eyed me unabashed; then sank to the ground again, amid her naked and uncouth cubs; the rock, she said, was warmer than the black tents; they paid no rent; for the rest, her man would return forthwith. And soon there was a clattering of stones, and a herd of goats scrambled up and vanished within the opening.
The partner was neither pleased nor displeased at seeing me there; every day he went to pasture his flock on the slopes of the opposite Jebel Guetter, returning at nightfall; he tried to be civil but failed, for want of vocabulary. I gave him the salutation, and passed on in the gloaming.

Chapter II
BY THE OUED BAIESH
This collecting of flint implements grows upon one at Gafsa; it is in the air. And I find that quite a number of persons have anticipated me in this amusement, and even written tomes upon the subject--it is ever thus, when one thinks to have made a scientific discovery. These stones are scattered all over the plain, and Monsieur Couillault has traced the site of several workshops--_ateliers_--of prehistoric weapons near Sidi Mansur, which lies within half a mile of Gafsa, whence he has extracted--or rather retrieved, for the flints merely lie upon the ground--quantities of instruments of every shape; among them, some saws and a miniature spade.
[Illustration: Gafsa and Jebel Orbata]
My collection of these relics, casually picked up here and there, already numbers two hundred pieces, and illustrates every period of those early ages--uncouth battle-axes and spear-points; fine needles, apparently used for sewing skins together; the so-called laurel-leaves, as thin as card-board; knife-blades; instruments for scraping beast-hides--all of flint. What interests me most, are certain round throwing-stones; a few are flat on both sides, but others, evidently the more popular shape, are flat below and rise to a cone above. Of these latter, I have a series of various sizes; the largest are for men's hands, but there are smaller ones, not more than eleven centimetres round, for the use of children: one thinks of the fierce little hands that wielded them, these many thousand years ago. Even now the natives will throw by preference with a stone of this disk-like shape--the cone pointing downwards. But, judging by the size of their implements, the hands of this prehistoric race can hardly have been as large as those of their modern descendants.
Then, as now, Gafsa must have been an important site; the number of these weapons is astonishing. Vast populations have drifted down the stream of time at this spot, leaving no name or mark behind them, save these relics fashioned, by the merest of chances, out of a practically imperishable material; steel and copper would have rotted away long ago, and the stoutest palaces crumbled to dust under the teeth of the desert air.
The bed of the Oued Baiesh, which flows past Gafsa and is nearly half a mile broad in some places, is rich in these worked flints which have been washed out of its steep banks by the floods. Walking here the other day with a miserable young Arab who, I verily believe, had attached himself to me out of sheer boredom (since he never asked for a sou), I observed, in the distance, a solitary individual, a European, pacing slowly along as though wrapped in meditation; every now and then he bent down to the ground.
"That's a French gentleman from Gafsa. He collects those stones of yours all day long."
Another amateur, I thought.
"But not like yourself," he went on. "He picks them up, bad and good, and when they don't look nice he works at them with iron things; I've seen them! He makes very pretty stones, much prettier than yours. Then he sends them away."
"How do you know this?"
"I've looked in at his window."
A modern "atelier" of flints--this was an amusing revelation. Maybe--who knows?--half the museums of Europe are stocked with these superior products.
Sages will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of T��bingen, in a learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the Mesvinian, Strepyian, Pr?chellean--to say nothing of the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other