The cave dwellers of Southern Tunisia

The Cave Dwellers of Southern Tunisia, by Daniel Bruun, is presented as recollections of a sojourn with the Khalifa of Matmata, translated from the Danish. In the preface, the writer says his journey among the cave dwellers of Southern Tunisia was essentially one of research, since he was entrusted by Doctor Sophius Müller, Director of the Second Department of the National Museum, with the honourable task of purchasing ethnographical objects for the said museum. The narrator steps into a little Moorish coffee-house and finds, to his astonishment, that the interior resembled in construction an old Byzantine basilica, and the place is named “el Kaunat el Kubba,” which may be translated Church Café.

The narrator sees a crowd of Arabs gathered behind an unfurled banner and is told that they were praying to Allah for rain. The text describes scenes in which four men dance in a circle while guns whirl in the air, and in which two men start their horses at a gallop, forcing them along at furious speed. The text says the Prophet organised the family on the lines best adapted to the nomad tribes, who were destined to be great conquerors.