UNDERGROUND IN TUNISIA

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PLAN NUMBER THREE

One good example of the third floor plan is the "House of the Peacock". Fourteen steps descend about ten feet . . . to a passageway with rooms on both sides. The first chamber to the left is a sleeping room: It was identified as such on the basis of the bed platform against the back wall. The large room to the right opens — on the south side — to a smaller chamber which has an apse with an almost effaced peacock mosaic.

(Across the road from "the Peacock" is another interesting Plan-Three house. Its ingenious owner simply transformed two pre-existing deep cisterns into rooms when the family decided to "move down".)

ESCAPE IN THE DESERT

But northwest Tunisia isn't the only place in the nation that's known for underground living. In the hills of the great desert that lies to the south, some 12,000 Berbers live in the earth .. . 3,000 in the town of Matmata alone. This barren terrain looks like Star Wars country, and — in fact — the "props" left here and there are reminders that movie cameras once recorded space fantasies in this desert.

Evidence of day-to-day life is usually first seen in the form of smoke escaping from the holes that pock the "lunar" land scape. The Berbers' dwellings are located around bowl-shaped depressions, perhaps 33 feet in diameter by 20 to 25 feet in depth. Families escape the elements in rooms carved into the rims of the craters: small cocoons in the rock — reached by descending stairs or ramps — which are cool in hot weather and warm in chilly times.

The tattooed Berber women are proud of their homes. Whitewashed walls and earthen floors, kept tidy by repeated scrubbings and sweepings, take the place of the ancient Romans' mosaics and marble . . . and the result is clean, cool, and inexpensive housing.

UNDERGROUND HOTELS

Tourists can even sample subsoil living themselves . . . in Matmata's two "crater" hotels. I recommend the Sidi Driss, which has 27 rooms — some with baths — connected by tunnels. Guests can sip tea in an enclosure ringed with white and ocher walls, and retire to pleasant chambers that are cooled by air flowing from the courtyard and corridors.

Underground housing may be part of a dreamed-about future for many of us, but in North African Tunisia it's a part of the past . . . and the present!

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