This really is the day for El Djem (also googlable as El Jem, which produced a whole new set of hits). We take the 11:41 train from Sousse Ville station, a handy five minute walk from Sousse Palace Hotel. Deux billets, première classe. I can't remember the term for one way - but when we see the tickets it's printed on them - allée simple. First class costs a little more than standard but is more comfortable. We wait on the platform, watching a half dozen women and a man, all of them equipped with short picks, removing the weeds from the stones between the tracks. Must be a brutal job in the summer heat. How do other countries do this? A second man is repainting the white stripe along the platform edge, which we stop over when the train comes.
El Djem, a pleasant hour's worth of almost non-stop olive groves, with the occasional bit of plowed reddish earth and bits of what looks like tumbleweed. El Djem train station is a squared off white building with its name clearly written on it in roman as well as Arabic letters, so there's no mistaking it, and El Djem's world heritage prize can be seen clearly from the station. The amphitheatre that dominates the town is clearly visible so that no directions are necessary. But we decide to start with the museum, perhaps half a mile away and covered by the same admission ticket.
The museum is an excellent introduction to the history of El Djem, known as Thysdrus in the Roman period. It's also a world heritage site in its own right - an astonishing collection of mosaics, mostly from the third century. There are dozens of them, many of them enormous and amazingly complete. Some are geometric or with patterns of leaves or flowers, but most are complex scenes depicting gods and goddesses - the Dionysius figure is popular - or scenes of violence with animals such as lions and tigers. J is especially intrigued by a round inset of Apollo, looking much like a Christ figure with halo. There is a wide range of colours in use and quite sophisticated shading and three dimensional effects. In addition to the several rooms featuring mosaics on both walls and floors (as we feel guilty even walking and experience an Old Testament urge to remove our shoes) there is an entire house in situ on the excavation site, the foundations and floor mosaics (roped off in this case) original, but the walls extended up to give the original effect. Purple bougainvillea grow outside the white walls and catches the sunlight and we are, for much of the time, the only patrons there in the quiet autumn sun, unbelievably privileged as we look at leisure at these stunning mosaics nearly two thousand years old. And next to the house are the foundations of several more houses. The modern town of El Djem is built on top of the ancient one, and much of the Roman settlement must still be beneath the present shops and cafés. Unfortunately there is little to excavate from the previous Berber community from which Thysdrus took its name.
It's a ten minute walk to the amphitheatre which towers above the town. It is, as the book says, more impressive than the colosseum at Rome, on which it was modelled. It's slightly smaller than Rome's but a little more sophisticated in design and more complete as a ruin. It would be still more complete had it not been used a number of times in the town's rebellious history as a refuge for locals resisting invaders or defying the authorities who imposed heavy taxes. The latter, in 1695, breached the walls with cannon fire and later centuries saw further damage, following which the ruin supplied building material for local houses as well as Karouan's mosues. However what remains is still enormous. It originally seated 27 thousand to 30 thousand spectators, and a fair number of these seats have been replaced. It's also possible to walk, as we do, through the underground passages and the rooms used as cages for wild animals and storage for the corpses of gladiators. Here too we're almost alone and we climb well up
into the seating and sit for over an hour in the sunny silence, contemplating the rising tiers of arches opposite, watching the birds nesting in the pale amber rocks and listening to a rooster crowing in the town and pigeons cooing above us. We leave at sunset as the rock colour becomes deeper and richer in the final glow.
Our train doesn't leave until 7:15, so we wander about the town in the dusk, watching the bustle - vegetable markets (fennel bulbs and feathery tops, enormous half squashes, huge bunches of carrots), school children returning home, motorized bicycles buzzing past, men having coffee at the plastic tables outside the small cafés. Pharmacies (all goods behind the counters) and small and hardware shops (paint tins, tyres, rope and fuel pumps outside) abound and the streets are full of both pedestrians and cars - often very old Mercedes. The streetlights are widely spaced and glow in the dark. Near us a man in traditional Arab headdress sits on the hood of his car enjoying the social scene until his friend arrives and they drive off. Near our bench a café employee delivers coffee to a man in a parked car, collecting, as he does so, an empty cup left on the pavement's edge. A pickup truck is parked nearby with a donkey and a horse standing in the back, and a long bendy bus passes, young boys standing at the windows. It's happy and busy and no one pays us any attention. We're no longer tourists to be sold wares at inflated prices, just spectators at the theatre of life.
Our train arrives. We have - locals as well - been sent to the far track and recalled, a minute or two before it zooms in, to the near - a western stationmaster's nightmare. The "confort" class, half a dinar more for the two of us than premiere classe coming, looks remarkably like premiere classe, though it`s more crowded. We get the last two seats together, and this only because a young woman sitting opposite motions to the middle aged Tunisians sitting facing us, indicating that they should cease occupying four seats and give us space. With fairly ill grace the wife removes her stockinged feet from the seat opposite her and covers her face with a shawl, blocking out the sight of me. J sits across from her husband, who gathers in his water bottles and stares stolidly ahead. Our advocate resumes reading her paper back - Mille Soleils Splendides, the French translation of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns.
But it's only an hour's trip to Sousse, and by 8:20 we're back in the dining room, just in time for the end of the dinner period.
JAWORSKI TRAVELS