Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         By way of contrast to Russia, it was two years later, in the sands of the Sahara, or at least in that desert’s gravelly outcroppings, where, as previously noted, I caught one of my periodic glimpses of true wilderness. I was traveling in the south of Tunisia with another school group, friends from Geneva. We were on a malodorous bus on a narrowing ill-paved road south of the dusty and dreary town of Sousse. The bus stopped for refueling at a half-abandoned wayside filling station. All around was the desert, but not the swelling thighs of T. E. Lawrence’s Arabian sand dunes. Gnarled bushes and stunted thorn trees had given way to a melancholy emptiness. The warm wind howled and whipped up a dust devil or djinn or two. By the side of the road there was nothing, or rather: Nothingness, in which one might exist, but not for long, or to any purpose. No cigarette butts, no sandwich wrappers, not even an empty Coke can. There was no indication beyond the road and the little concrete filling station, over the sad knolls of gray dirt interspersed with weeds, that our species had ever passed that way. It was the void, and the indifference of the universe. (Think of the dour joylessness of Islam, desert-born.) So what did I do? I did what any self-respecting stage Irishman would do: I whipped ‘er out and had a slash.  

        Take that, ya feckin’ nothingness ya!

       But there were things about Tunisia that caught my fancy: Sidi-Bou-Said’s jumbled houses stark white against the blue Mediterranean; the broad French-style boulevards of Tunis, and that city's narrow, jumbled souks; the windswept ruins of Thuburbo Majus, a Roman city from which, like the Anasazi in the American Southwest, all the inhabitants had just walked away, sometime in the late 5th century, leaving behind a mystery and mgnificent mosaics; secretive Kairouan, fourth most holy city of Islam (after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem), which had about it a true air of the Arabian Nights, with shadowy souks and hidden courtyards and winding alleyways and discreetly scuttling women in abayas, every one an imagined Scheherazade. I bought a carpet there, and a foul-smelling muleteer’s coat, and went for a ride on a camel, poor beast. I could never muster much enthusiasm for the Muslim way of life, but Tunisia's easier-going in this regard, as in most others; it's a secular nation, God bless it, with (at least in Tunis) outdoor cafes and lively bars and girls in jeans and other symptoms of civilization.

      Still, when Sicily came into view on the return journey I was relieved to be back in what was, still then, Christendom, even in the guise of Palermo.