The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  To reach what remained of the ancient Phoenician harbour, once set within a well-protected bay where fresh river water had supplied the eastern sailors’ needs, proved problematic. A national demonstration had gridlocked the seaside resort. Sétif had been preparing theirs, too, as I drove away. An ‘antiterrorisme’ march, with white banners falling like chutes of snow in the streets. Algeria was vocalising its outrage, its determination that the country did not regress to the violence of the nineties. The modern port, constructed by the French in 1912, bombed by the Germans during World War II, had been cordoned off and the police turned us away. We were obliged to climb back up through the town and approach from another direction, but nobody complained. The demonstrators represented an essential step. Free expression had been denied to Algeria for too long. It was heartening to weave through streets surging with all generations. Predominantly in full Islamic dress, yes, but voices cast against extremism. Ringing through squares and avenues of decaying colonial elegance were booming, unified cries of ‘Non!’ ‘Non!’ to violence and repression, ‘Non!’ to Fundamentalist Islam and its Holy War.

  *

  My final trajectory inland, in a dinky yellow taxi with sinking seats, was in search of the oldest Roman mill in North Africa and then, ever southwards, to El-Oued, a late addition to my schedule, pasted in after my visit to the Olive Institute. Mostafa had organised the driver, Mohammed, and insisted the man stay with me for the duration because I was moving towards the mountainous portals of the Sahara and from there, desert-bound. The trip was calculated to take six days, and it was deemed dangerous.

  From Annaba, on a winding road that ascended towards the modern town of Souk Ahras situated along the higher plateaux, the clear blue sky was studded with swallows. Beyond the rattling windowpanes, the acrid yet seductive scent of blossoming asphodels. One of the excitements of these journeys was the new information gleaned along the way; the downside was that I inevitably ended up having to make choices. El Tarf, to the east, beyond sight, bordering Tunisia, I learned about during my last evening in Annaba, too late to include a stopover. There, grew ‘ten million’ wild olive trees. I wished I’d known sooner. The government’s regeneration programme was actively encouraging the husbanding of these forests. Five euros paid for every tree pruned, so much for a graft executed, another sum for a water basin constructed, irrigation aids, so on and so forth; scaled tariffs for each stage of the work. A massive redevelopment scheme to transform those wild forests into thousands of hectares of fruit-bearing groves, an attempt to return Algeria to its former agricultural glory. I wondered about the origin of those trees. Numidian? Phoenician? Roman?

  Instead, first stop Souk Ahras. Souk Ahras, originally Numidian, had been known as Tagaste in Roman times. Towards the village’s summit, Saint Augustine’s olive tree, purported to be 2000 years old, still grows. Beneath the tree, Augustine, later Bishop of Hippone (Annaba), had prayed and meditated. Compared to the Methuselahs from Lebanon, this was not such a remarkably aged fellow, but it warranted a salute of respect nonetheless.

  Augustine was born in Tagaste in AD 354. At that time, Rome’s dominance stretched unimpeded the entire length of a North African coast that today is Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and extended with diminishing influence inland towards the Sahara. The coastal regions were fertile and remunerative for the Romans, producing crops of grain and vegetables in the river valleys as well as massive forests of olive trees on the hillsides and high plains. Augustine quit his natal village to study rhetoric in Carthage, a mere 150 kilometres east of here, travelling overland through those endless groves. By that time, Phoenician Carthage had long been levelled by the Romans, but in 29 BC Emperor Augustus rebuilt it. During the years of Augustine’s studies there, it was the second largest city in the Western Empire. Only Rome outclassed it. A convert to Christianity, Augustine’s literary output was prodigious. He was judged to be one of the finest philosophers of his time, arguing always for the purity of man and the fallibility of the human condition. During his years in Tagaste, before he settled in Hippo, he lived the life of a penniless recluse.

  The settlements we were passing through were peopled by rough-hewn, emaciated mountain types where the women wore full-length robes and headdresses if not always the veil. Every village, no matter how humble, had a mosque with minaret and displayed the unsmiling faces of politicians on posters. I could not equate politics or religion with these remote landscapes where storks waded in mudflats and solitary shepherds stood guard over less than a handful of beasts. Occasionally, we drove through deserted stone hamlets, ghost settlements, and I learned they had been inhabited by Jews, French, Spanish, even Turkish Jews, who had upped sticks swiftly after Independence and fled to Israel.

  On the hillsides surrounding Souk Ahras, holm and cork oak forests had flourished and in these naturally wooded habitats had roamed lions and panthers. These big cats had been hunted with nets and shipped off to Rome for entertainment in its amphitheatres. Today, our route was flanked by dense olive groves. In these regions, many had confirmed it, though I found no evidence of it, women pressed the olives with their feet.

  ‘This region wants for nothing,’ I remarked to Mohammed.

  ‘Except honest men to govern it. It serves to allow the people to remain in a backwater state of mind. Then Islam extremism can pick and choose its youth for its own ends.’ I had not expected such a response, but it confirmed my thinking. Surely, our role in the West was not to close down but to open up communications, to offer access, to broaden the Algerians’ spectrum of choice?

  The outskirts of the town itself were unpromising: industrial activity, cement works, road blocks, the overwhelming smell of boiled meat, avalanches of black refuse bags with rotted rubbish spilling forth, swarming with a film of black flies. A filthy entry. The late morning hung with pigeon-grey clouds. Brightly coloured blankets and sheets had been draped from the balconies and windows of semi-constructed, inhabited homes. We found no directions to St Augustine’s tree. Enquiries returned only suspicion. Eventually, a toothless codger in a check jacket, a frayed rag of a man, offered to lead us to the ‘Christian spot’. We parked up. I followed him while my driver slipped off to a mosque for a few swift prayers. Was I Italian, my shuffling guide enquired. Pilgrims came regularly from Italy, arriving via Tunisia. He was carrying a newspaper. The front page was taken up with a photograph of military tanks.

  ‘Where is this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Algiers.’ He shook his head. ‘Not good news. Troubles not far from here, too.’

  Through a locked and guarded gate, climbing a curved flight of immaculately clean, newly laid steps, I was now in the hands of the gardien of the chapel and guide for the site as well as a small, incessantly yapping white dog. The spreading multi-trunked olive tree, undoubtedly of venerable years, stood alone; its roots entombed within a circular stone wall and low iron fence. It was in full flower. At its base were its black winter fruits, shrivelling. Overhead, a flock of storks in flight that seemed to hover momentarily above the Christian site. I climbed another short flight up into St Augustine’s chapel, a recent addition, and its privileged crowning views out across the city. Figs, vines were growing wild out of the walls of crumbling, abandoned properties, birds were nesting on terraces and rooftops within arm’s reach. Birdsong abounded. I spied a four-minaret mosque, a holy shrine, some way across the town. Then the recorded muezzin cranked into lugubrious life and the hum of everyday business settled into stillness for a moment or two. Returning to the taxi, no one requested money. Half a dozen colourfully attired women sat cross-legged on the steps of a doorway cawing and gossiping, photo-shy but willing. Even the local policeman shook my hand and kept company with me while we awaited the return of the driver.

  What would Augustine have made today of his alpine retreat?

  There is an Arab saying, Yesterday never existed. Aside from Augustine’s olive tree, here I could have believed it.

  The road, as such, to Tébe
ssa had vanished, or it had never existed. Dust tracks we bumped along, rattling through mile after mile of untenanted high-altitude plains where the sole signs of life were a small eagle that made an appearance, a thin man in blue uniform holding up a furled red flag by a barely visible rail track and another fellow sleeping on his side close to half a dozen olive saplings pushing upwards in arid desert. The track had been laid by the Algerians between Tébessa and Annaba. Horizontal to it could still be seen the uprooted, rusting remnants of an earlier line, possibly a French legacy. We passed through a village, dusty, dry, godforsaken. Sheep grazed on – what? The women were either in full chador or had covered their faces with white handkerchiefs, protection against the winds and dust as much as for God’s sake. The buildings were one-storey, biscuit-baked huts. The intermittent olive grove was a relief, a pleasing verticality in a horizontal void. How did these Chaouia Berbers survive? At El-Aouinet, an inconsequential nowhere, we found a substantial wheat factory. From here the basics for couscous and flour were produced and despatched by train, a seven-hour trajectory, to Annaba. From there the tons were shipped to other ports, other markets. Then came whistling tablelands of wheat backdropped by distant ranges of terracotta mountains, twisted and fretted like chewed sweets. It was empty, lonely, monotonous, yet lovely, but I was puzzled as to how the plains were irrigated. Water piped from where?

  The director at the Olive Institute told me this region had been one of Rome’s most bountiful granaries, a remarkably fertile spread with nothing but golden wheat. Closer towards Tébessa, where stood the oldest olive mill in North Africa, acre upon acre of silvery olive groves had been farmed. But as the parched desert conditions had crept further north all had been lost. Today, it was hard to believe that the land had ever been otherwise.

  The crippling effects of desertification.

  ‘Do the locals live off these wheatlands?’ I asked the driver.

  He shook his head. Some were hired hands at the factory but the bulk of their pittance incomes was generated by cigarettes.

  ‘Cigarettes?’

  ‘Contraband. We’re less than a hundred kilometres from the Tunisian border. The cigarettes are smuggled in and sold on.’

  My first response to Tébessa when we eventually, mid-afternoon, pulled into its dustbowl of a marketplace and bus station was to turn round and go straight back out again. Ali was the beekeeper in situ here, but connecting with him had proved difficult. He spoke little French and seemed incapable of settling a fixed rendezvous. Mohammed, who had been at the wheel since seven that morning, was exhausted and his temper was growing short. We sat in the car and waited. I stepped out to stretch my legs and take in the scene. Even at 1100 metres, a hot, gritty wind was blowing. Papers, bags, soles of shoes, cuts of cloth were flying here and there. Empty tins rolled and skittered. The poverty was shocking; women with bawling babes-in-arms covered in flies, three-legged dogs, buses that were not fit for the breaker’s yard, hobbling old turbaned men with rust-coloured skin. And chaotically busy. When Ali eventually pulled up, he was Arab-dark, handsome, robust; swashbuckling in a hinterland fashion. At every available opportunity he attempted to rid us of Mohammed. Ali was in the process of an acrimonious divorce, I learned within minutes, which in this Muslim nowhereland was rare. Having not understood what I was after – the whole subject seemed to puzzle or confuse him – he dragged me off to the museum. It was Thursday afternoon, closing for the weekend, Friday being the Muslim sabbath. The curator with a clanking set of horror-movie keys in hand was locking up. She was from Tizi and happy to assist, openly admitting that she was bored and had no work to be getting on with. Her office was piled high with files. Its odour was of mildew. The walls were stained with rivered patches of damp. On her desk, an old-fashioned computer, an Algerian flag and a small bronze head of Nefertiti.

  ‘Hélas, le Directeur was mistaken. The oldest mill in Africa? No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But we have the largest.’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  But the mill was not in Tébessa. It was another fifty kilometres south, on the outskirts of the Sahara. Mohammed was still at the bus station looking dust-filmed and fed up.

  ‘This extra hop calls for a renegotiation of my fee,’ he pouted.

  I agreed and off we set. Finding no shops, we pulled in at a one-pump garage where I purchased sweet black coffees, crumbling wafer biscuits, a stick of bread and a packet of utterly tasteless, plastic-wrapped, livid orange cheese. The provisions kept him fuelled and on we went. Back at base, part-time beekeeper Ali was arranging a hotel and dinner.

  Along the way, bitumen was being laid to improve the route and water pipes were being sunk into roadside trenches where donkeys pulled the loads. I wondered again at the transformation since the Romans had ruled this territory. The processes that had caused such drastic desertification. Was it reversible? Or was I staring the future in the face?

  Mohammed was growing irritable, moaning that we were lost, that we had no clear directions.

  I was attempting to brighten his mood. ‘There is only this one route, Mohammed.’

  He harrumphed and bitched about the cost of fuel, which I was paying for. Eventually, a man standing in the middle of nowhere, looking as though he was trying to decide whether or not to cross the road. We pulled over. The two shook hands and fell into discussion, talking fast in both Berber and Arabic. The desert man was wearing a bobble knit hat and a very bedraggled, faded French military jacket. His face was etched with desert hardships. On the horizon, a cargo train appeared from nowhere and chugged slowly north. Dalíesque in this windblown emptiness.

  ‘Up from the Sahara,’ our local informed us, ‘beating a path to the coast.’

  ‘Transporting what?’

  He shook his head. Crude oil, perhaps.

  Within my imaginings, I pictured camel trains trekking this immense African journey transporting tradeable riches and black slaves. I thought of legionnaires who marched these routes to protect and conquer, overseers of the slaves working the groves and wheatfields. Soldiers on horseback. Millennia later, French Foreign Legionnaires would have set their feet here. So, too, the Algerian resistance fighters. Berber warriors. For such an isolated desert spot, its history was busy.

  The wind was howling like a hyena. We were inching forward again, hailing every passing car – a total of three – all of which stopped. Hands were shaken, niceties exchanged, God’s blessing offered and returned. I was peered at, spoken of, as though I did not exist, but none knew the huilerie until finally one fellow provided the location. It involved turning off the road on to a sand track. Springs clanking, a descent into a dried-out wadi, riverbed, and seconds later, jammed wheels, spinning, and the rising smell of burning rubber. Mohammed bustled me off to retrieve any dried sticks I could find. These he laid beneath the tyres like straw matting and on we continued. And there, ahead, were the ruins. A magic castle rose up before us like a stupendous sandstone phoenix in the middle of nowhere: the largest Roman olive mill in North Africa, El Ma el Abiod. This was its Arabic name, of course, not its Roman appellation, which I failed to find. What I did discover later was that El Ma el Abiod was the name given to this entire vast plain and beneath it lay a substantial sandstone aquifer, slowly being contaminated by surface pollution. The aquifer was at least five million years old.

  I scooted from the car to the mill’s faded green gate. The site was fenced and protected, locked with a substantial padlock. A herdsboy with small flock and four barking dogs watched on. There was one habitation, drystone walled as though built of sandbags. An orange tractor, a few chickens offered a notion of domesticity. Mohammed ran, calling for the occupant. A Berber woman, ruddy-skinned, pronounced aquiline nose and startlingly clear eyes, with the largest, most pendulous breasts I had ever seen, waddled towards us in burgundy, crushed-velvet robe belted with string, brandishing the key.

  ‘These people never get sick,’ remarked Mohammed. ‘They just die of hard work, of old age.
Living up on these high windy plains with the desert on their doorsteps and life with the elements, you cannot be hardier.’

  Within the site’s grounds, a few straggly sheep were grazing on a yellow-flowered ground plant. The ruins were fascinating and entirely forgotten. I had rarely felt so excited, so triumphant. Algeria had unveiled a cache, a real jewel. There were settling tanks, pressing wheels, chunks of stone jars, carved ingresses where wooden beams would have been inserted … This may not have been the oldest huilerie in North Africa, but it was certainly Herculean. Roman mills lay scattered and forgotten everywhere. Here, when operational, immense olive activity had taken place, whereas now it was nothing more than a wind- and sand-blown portal to the not-so-distant Sahara. Here, more than anywhere, I understood the scale, the magnitude, of the commerce that had been developed and deployed by the Romans. Others, too, before them, perhaps. Myriad stone pressing wheels had turned here, crushing innumerable tons of olives and had brought forth more litres of green-golden oil than I could have envisaged. The riverbed that had trapped our tyres, today as dry as dead skin, would have been a flowing vital water source; it would have fuelled the mills. Lost within centuries and layers of sand and stones had lain this vital clue along one of the main east-west, north-south arteries of the Olive Route. At this lonely, evocative spot, I began to comprehend the extent of the olive tree’s history, as well as its potential for tomorrow. All across the Mediterranean had been these to-ings and fro-ings, these cross-fertilisations. The olive tree, like the mulberry in China with its silk offerings, had spawned not only a series of fruit products but trade, cultural exchanges, civilisations, marriages that had shifted the world’s perception of itself.

  I closed my eyes, wind whistling sharp round my head, and pictured an apocalyptic, what-if scenario that had been haunting me since Spain. The desert beating at our Western, twenty-first-century doors. In decades, centuries to come, if I were to climb those Andalucían olive groves, might sand, wind, soil-eroded nothingness be the scene that greeted me? Will that monster mill in Baena become a forgotten relic of a mismanaged past, just as this solitary, undiscovered skeleton, whose name I could not find, was today? Or was there another, arboreal forecast? Reforestation. Olive trees are an excellent water pump – hadn’t I discovered that during these travels? – they stimulate humidity. Can the olive tree contribute? Forests of olive trees feeding the soil, regenerating deserts, generating water, turning the wheels once again? I was confident that in El-Oued, with its programme to plant a million olives by 2010, I might encounter such a picture.