Sahara—With “Every Mod. Con. ”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 26

Sahara —With “Every Mod. Con. ”

SEN thousand automobiles in modern Tunis, of which five hundred are auto-buses touring far into the Sahara Desert, stimulate the mind to consider how East and West have met since the after-years of the war. All over the globe, moreover, according to a contributor to the “Hamburger Nachrichten,” life has become more and more conventionalised and standardised since 1919. Writing after a tour in North-west Africa, he is impressed by the fact that the blessings of urban civilisation have “penetrated to the remotest oases.” At the same time he notes that while the natives of this far-away territory do their best to look and act and live like Europeans, the Europeans themselves seek to recapture the lost magic of romantic alien races. As evidence of the interchange of customs between East and West he points out that: “One enjoys Negro music in Berlin and drinks Bavarian beer in Shanghai; one builds skyscrapers in Cairo and Moorish houses in London. At the balls in Berlin, staid lawyers appear as sheiks from the Orient, whereas the real son of the East in his habitat wears Europe’s cast-off clothing and whistles—not to the tread of camels, but to the rhythm of the motor-car’s benzine heart, the tune of, ‘lt’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’ "Sober mediocrity decides all questions in the styles of life. Nowhere is there anything original, anything real left, and if one finds a bit of specialised quaintness, you may bo sure that it has been placed there

by a tourist agency which derives profit from it. The sanctification of mass production is the spirit of our times.” We are then reminded of the East of our fantasy, and of all that is recalled by the magic name of the Orient—of wise men on rugcovered donkeys, sheiks on noble steeds, nabobs in colourful array, and caravans of camels in the

Sahara but this informant assures us that the real Orient is not to be found in travel pamphlets, and he goes on to explain: “I met a real cadi in the dining-car of the Tunis-Sfax express, the Cid of Sfax, Mohammed Ben Mustafa Ben Chaloum. He was eating veal knuckles and drinking a bottle of nonalcoholic cider. His speech was grave and learned, but no words of Oriental wisdom passed his lips. He spoke of removable cylinder heads, self-starters, vacuum cleaners which annoyed him. and of his new loud-

speaker which brought dance music from Marseilles to his divan.” All the ten thousand automobiles in modern Tunis, we are then told, have a protective emblem on the radiator which may be a hand, a fish tail, a horseshoe or a pair of scissors. No Arab would enter an automobile without a fish tail or other emblem or a house without the extended white hand, it appears, and the reason is that: “The Arab of the twentieth century has great fear of the evil eye. He is afraid of the camera which ‘steals his face,’ of a French uniform, of the future and inevitable misfortune following upon the glance from an evil eye, but above all, of the secret power of a motor. “ ‘Why did you paint so many hands on your motor-cycle, Sidi?’ I asked a motor-cycle boy. “ ‘To ward off the evil eye, Sahib.’ “ ‘What is that?’ “ ‘Oh, it is nothing particular for strangers. Only one cracks into three parts because of it.’ “ ‘What do you mean —in three parts?” “‘Omar Ben Bennani has said: A man possessed of an evil eye crossed over the street. He looked upon a stone. Thereupon the stone cracked into three pieces.’ “The little motor-cyclist Sidi knows no more than this. He starts his machine and speeds at sixty kilometres an hour across the Bay of Carthage, where more than 2,000 years ago the Roman fleet brought destruction to Hannibal’s galleys. Such is the Orient of to-day.”