As night settles in the mountain cave where she lives with her mother and her last younger brother, Halima Najjar gazes at her dwindling Village – a few dozen specks of light clinging to the misty mountainside – and wonders whether her Life will be something else for one day.

The chances were looking slim.

On this high, sun-bronzed dark cliff in Tunisia’s southern desert, where about 500 Amazigh farmers and herders live in rock-cut caves, people either hope that things remain as they have been for centuries – or to get Risking everything out.

But the old life of pressing olives and herding sheep is faltering in the face of a severe drought. And Ms. Najjar, 38, doesn’t want to risk death to emigrate by boat to a cold, hostile-looking Europe, as many siblings, neighbors and fellow Tunisians did.

“We still have some blessings here. We are a community,” Ms. Najjar said. “Still, I want to go for my future. I want to try something new, something to do with my life I want to. But it is difficult for us.”

In the silence of the evening, some goats were bleating, while some donkey was braying. A rooster crowed, announcing the dawn.

“We are together, and then, whenever someone grows up, they leave,” said his mother, Salima Najjar, 74. she sighed. “We’re left here alone.”

About a thousand years ago, the people who first built Chenini and nearby cave villages did so to protect their precious food stores from raiders. Using golden stone beneath their feet for camouflage, they erected a granary that crowned their chosen mountain like a fortified citadel, then hollowed out vaults to live just below the mountain.

They prospered by adapting to the harsh desert conditions, harvesting olives after they fell from the tree, which they said had long-lasting oil, and storing food against the next drought. Their olive groves and farm fields mapped out the desert for miles below.

On the mountain, their cave dwellings protected them from the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Some of their descendants – the modern-day Amazigh, as they call themselves, although most of the world knows them as Berbers – still live, sleep and eat in caves that have been somewhat modernized. They make and keep the animals in front of them.

The rest are going and going. From Chenini’s only cafe, villagers can overlook the concrete cluster that is New Chenini, settlements built by the government after Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956 to bring the region’s people down from the mountain peaks and into modern life is one of the

In New Chenni, there was running water and electricity, amenities the ancient hill village didn’t have until a decade or two ago. The 120 or so families living in New Chenini could come and go via a paved road, while their relatives in the original Chenini still pulled everything up the mountain by hand or donkey.

But there were neither enough jobs to go around in the village nor to entertain the youth. Over time, many moved to Tunis, the capital, or to other parts of France and Europe in search of work. Over time, as young men migrated, it was mostly women, children and old men who filled the villages.

Many other mountain villages in the region were abandoned, their granaries turned into tourist attractions or, in at least one case, a “Star Wars” filming location. But Cheney and a few others kept their romance to a point only, despite a separation.

Besides cafes, Chenini’s facilities include a single grocery store, a primary school, a mosque and a clinic where a doctor from the nearest town can visit once a week. High school students and medical emergencies must reach Tataouine, the area’s commercial center, about half an hour away. There is no movie theater, no playground, few streetlights. Internet did not come till 2013.

Against such disadvantages, the mountain provides pure air, head-clearing views and sound sleep. From the whitewashed mosque atop a high ridge, the muezzin’s call to prayer echoes solemnly from the surrounding rocky spurs, a sound that seems irrelevant to all else.

“Life is hard, but life is good,” said Chenini tour guide Ali Dignichi, 28. “Many people are rich – they have everything. But they are not happy. If we had everything, life would have no meaning. We need to work little by little.”

At the end of most years, the villagers harvest wheat, barley and lentils. At the height of summer they venture into the desert to collect figs and cactus pears; In October they shake dates from a nearby oasis. In December, they begin harvesting the all-important olive.

Starting in February, they take their olives to a traditional press. A camel circles for hours, rolling a huge stone that squeezes out dozens of liters of olive oil: a gift that could pay for a child’s schooling that year.

During the wedding season, in the summer, the whole village turns out to celebrate each couple for a week with music from the mizvad such as poppy seeds, lambs, drums and bagpipes, as well as, in recent years, a DJ if a family Not having enough, the villagers pool their pantry contents to ensure that everyone is fed.

But with the advent of TV, the Internet, and greater contact with the rest of the world, some traditions have begun to waver.

These days, almost nobody makes their own couscous anymore. There are only two cave-diggers left in the town who now build new houses with right angles, floorboards and tiles, as modern taste demands, instead of the old lime-painted vaults with their sand floors and curvy Walls that recall the lines of Georgia O. Keefe Painting. Inside, families sleep in a series of alcoves lit by kerosene lamps, keeping their belongings on shelves carved from the rock.

“Previously, it was enough to just eat, wake up and do it again,” said Mr. Dignichi, who made his living by busing tourists from the country’s coastal resorts to Chianti during the day. used to travel until the coronavirus pandemic. “We have ambitions now. We want holidays, a car, a house. The wife wants a house away from her in-laws.”

But the pandemic wiped out tourism, the only industry that created any jobs besides agriculture. Then came the drought – part of a nationwide drying-out linked to climate change that is depleting nations’ food supplies everywhere

There has been barely any rain in Chenini for four years, confounding centuries of drought-resistant farming methods. The olive trees are dying, and the village’s five remaining olive presses have closed due to a shortage of olives. The oasis is shrinking, and its palm groves are now only suitable for animals. The sheep grazing in the area have to be sold due to lack of fodder. Vegetables no longer grow, forcing the villagers to buy what they have always cultivated.

If Chenini’s grocery shelves are empty amid Tunisia’s deepening economic crisis, as they often are these days, villagers will have to find cash to pay for taxis to Tataouine, where nationwide inflation has made prices almost unaffordable. have make.

So it was that Mr. Dignichi’s older brother left for France in July, and a waiter at the cafe left for Tataouine in September. They are part of a growing exodus: Tens of thousands left the region last year.

Although many send money back, and others even build holiday homes in Cheney, the ties last only for several generations.

“One day, maybe, this village will be empty of people,” said Omar Moussaoui, 45, one of Chenini’s two remaining cave-diggers, as he sat in a cafe one evening overlooking New Chenini’s twinkling were looking at “And if we disperse elsewhere, our traditions will not be the same. If I go to Tunis, I will forget all these traditions.”

He exhaled, and the smoke from his cigarette spread across the scene.