Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs
On June 15, I drove my jeep into a wobby C-47 and was flown a thousand miles over the Atlas Mountains. The flight lasted about five hours. When not asleep, I watched the green-and-brown mountains, some with small white patches of snow. We flew over the golden cultivated fields of Algeria. From the small window in the plane I could make out grove upon grove of what I later learned was a part of the main crop of Tunisia-the olive. We landed near a great walled city of white adobe houses with blue shutters.
I backed the jeep out of the plane, and we d rove some ten miles and set up a bivouac area within an olive grove near the small Arab village of EI EIen. We pitched tents under the wind-twisted olive trees, which, for all their short leaves, afforded some shade from the murderous sun. The large olive orchard was surrounded on four sides by a wicked cactus fence ten feet high. On three sides we cut an opening large enough for vehicles to pass through. This protected us from wandering camels and nomadic Bedouins. It also locked us behind a fiercely forbidding wall.
A few days after arrival, I drove into the large walled city with a huge mosque towering high above the wall and over all other buildings. Approaching the city, we whiffed the strong smell of sulphur coming from the graveyard near the edge of the city. Later we understood that this was a holy city and that many bodies, alive and dead, were brought here for burial, some above ground. The bodies were covered with sulphur. The city itself, with the walls, was, I now realize and did to some extent then, straight out of the Middle Ages. It is called Kairouan, a word derived from the Bedouin word caravan. The streets were unpaved and are still almost entirely unpaved. The whiteness of the houses, the whiteness of every single house, was, in the brilliant sun, a stunning
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