The Cave Dwellers of Southern Tunisia

The author describes his journey through the mountainous deserts where people live in dwellings excavated from the earth and gives a fascinating account of their lives and manners.

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Danel Bruun's The Cave Dwellers of Southern Tunisia was first published in England in 1898. It is surely one of the most extraordinary accounts produced by any of the nineteenth-century travellers in Tunisia. Although, by the 1890s, the French influence had somewhat refined the coastal inhabitants of Tunisia, the tribesmen of the interior were largely untouched by the hand of 'civilization'. Bruun describes his journey through the mountainous deserts where the people live in dwellings excavated from the earth. Some are spacious houses with 'regular well-shaped chambers', others are tenement-like, clustered one upon another as are the cells in a beehive. The poorest are mere holes driven into the mountainside which thus has the appearance of a giant termite mound standing high above the stark landscape. Indeed, the whole lifestyle of these cave dwellers takes on an insect-like quality, at once communal and predatory. The author has left to us a fascinating account of their lives and manners.