It is a fortunate circumstance for foreigners of an inquiring turn of mind that the French occupation of Tunisia met with armed resistance from the fanatical inhabitants of Kairouan. Had they peacefully accepted the protectorate, the beautiful and highly interesting religious sanctuaries of the Holy City of Africa would be rigidly closed to unbelievers, as is the case in all the other cities of the regency. But they did resist and were punished in a fashion peculiarly humiliating to the proud spirit of the Moslem by having their sacred places thrown open to the inspection of infidels, Kairouan being the only place in all of French North Africa where non-Moslems enjoy this privilege.

Personally, I always feel a sense of embarrassment upon entering a mosque; to do so is an affront, whether intentional or not, to another people’s religion. To see hordes of tourists, guide-book in hand, camera under the arm, over-size slippers flapping from their heels, shuffling about an edifice where men are engaged in their devotions, peering inquisitively into venerated shrines, commenting in audible whispers on the genuflections of the pious, always strikes me as a rather sorry spectacle, a breach of good manners and good taste. Were a party of Moslem visitors to enter a Christian place of worship and behave precisely as I have seen Christian tourists conduct themselves in Moslem mosques in Egypt and Turkey, a scandalized sexton would promptly ask them to leave, if, indeed, no worse befell them.

As the motor goes it is about six score miles, over a tolerably smooth highway, from Tunis to Kairouan, the route which we followed being the one taken thirteen hundred years before by the Arab invaders of Tunisia, though in the opposite direction. It has been in turn a highway of history, a course of conquest, a path of piety, a trail of torture, a thoroughfare of travel, a track of trade, a route of romance, this great trunk-road which leads from the Mediterranean to the desert. It has shaken to the ponderous tread of Carthaginian elephants, has been rutted by the tires of Roman chariots, has felt the padded feet of Numidian camels, has been trampled by the hoofs of Arab chargers, has known Berber slippers and Byzantine sandals, the calloused soles of monks and friars, the spurred heels of knights and men-at-arms, the dragging footsteps of slaves and captives, the measured tramp of modern soldiery. He who can travel that road without being stirred by thoughts of the mighty events which have taken place along it has no poetry or imagination in his soul; the only thing that would give pause to such a person is the upraised hand of a traffic-cop.

Strange figures flit past us in endless panorama as the big car hurtles southward, its siren roaring a hoarse warning. A group of Berber women, their garments of home-dyed blue cut in graceful, classic lines, their foreheads tattooed with the cross which is a reminder that the natives of this country were once Christians. A wealthy Arab, wrapped in a burnous of palest blue, astride a handsome mule with gold-incrusted saddle-cloth and scarlet leather trappings. A party of desert nomads, lean, hawk-nosed men, their mouths and nostrils swathed in blue veils against the suffocating dust, rock by atop of camels, driving before them a herd of other, camels, destined for the Tunis market. Close to the road a peasant is tilling his fields with a yoke of snow-white oxen, his plow an iron-shod beam of wood, as in the days of Abraham. On yonder hillside a slim, dark-eyed Bedouin girl tends her flock of painted sheep. We roar through straggling, mud-walled hamlets, before whose coffee-houses lounge turbaned, white-robed sheikhs—bearded, patriarchal figures who might have stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament. Droves of produce-laden donkeys scatter suddenly at the sound of our horn, the cursing muleteers sometimes throwing the stubborn little animals bodily into the ditch to give us room. We pass a compact column of khaki-clad, dust-caked tirailleurs, rifles bristling on their shoulders, sweating beneath their packs, foot-slogging over Africa. Herds of foul-smelling goats kick up tornadoes of yellow dust as they stampede across the plain. We take the narrow bridges, spanning the deep gorges which the mountain streams have gashed as with a knife in the soft soil, like a frightened cat on the top of a back-yard fence. And away to the southward, in the far blue distance, towering above Tunisia, rise the wild crags of the Djebel Zaghouan.

For hour after hour we traverse waterless and treeless wastes, their yellow-brown expanses broken here and there by patches of bright green where peasant farmers are striving to wring a meager living from the arid soil. The hills which fringe the horizon have been stripped of their forest clothing by fire and wanton destruction, and now they rise, naked and grim, against the hot blue sky. It is hard to conjure up a picture of those golden days when to Horace an African farm was a synonym for boundless fertility, luxury, and wealth; or to accept the assertions of the early chroniclers that, before the Arabs laid the country bare, one could ride from Tripoli to the Atlantic with trees to shade him all the way.

Yet, if the ancient writers are to be believed, what is now an exception must have been at one period the rule. Vast areas of plain and mountain, now destitute of tree or shrub, must have been green with forest or jungle. Great numbers of savage beasts once roamed a region which to-day can show no wild animals save prowling jackals and occasional gazelles. From the Tunisian forests came the wild beasts which were used not only in the arenas of Roman Africa but in the Colosseum of Rome itself. Elephants roamed the land in herds and were used as the first wave of attack by the Carthaginian armies; it is recorded that Juba lost the Battle of Thapsus because his war-elephants, recently captured in the forests, were untrained. The Roman mosaics preserved in the museums at Sousse and the Palace of the Bardo depict hunting scenes in which the game were lions, tigers, leopards, deer, and wild boar. In “Salammbô” Flaubert tells us how the mutinous mercenaries, marching upon Carthage, found the road through Sicca Veneria (the modern Kef) lined with crosses bearing crucified lions.

Insufficient rainfall, a scarcity of springs and streams—these always have been and always will be the chief problems of the Tunisian farmer. The soil itself, even the sand of the Sahara, is amazingly fertile; make no mistake about that. All that it needs is water to cause it to blossom like the rose. This difficulty the Romans overcame with astonishing energy, patience, and success, as is attested by the ruined waterworks which to-day strew not only the plains but the high, desolate plateaus. They did in Africa two thousand years ago what we are doing to-day in New Mexico and Arizona, transforming deserts into gardens by the miracle of water. Not a gallon of the precious fluid was permitted to go to waste. Every stream was dammed at frequent intervals, just as we have dammed the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Gila, the water thus impounded being distributed by a vast network of canals and aqueducts. Every farmstead had its wells and tanks, every city and town its elaborate water-system.

The land thus systematically watered was cultivated with a science and thoroughness which many of our own farmers might profitably emulate to-day. Horses and cattle, sheep and goats, found rough but ample pasturage upon the hills. Vineyards covered the lower slopes with their ordered rows. Figs, dates, apricots, and pomegranates flourished in the warmer districts. In the spring the alluvial plains became a sea of waving grain, which was produced in such quantities that Tunisia became the granary of Italy, and it was commonly said that he who held Africa could starve Rome.

Nestling in the shadow of the rugged Djebel Zaghouan, from whose summit, forty-two hundred feet in height, can be obtained a view which embraces half Tunisia, is the unkempt little village of Zaghouan. One’s first impression is of a pleasant, restful place, for in the outskirts are many gardens, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of roses, lilies, violets, and orange-blossoms; but the town itself, dirty, unpaved, and squalid, reeks with odors of quite a different kind. Zaghouan is the Danbury of Tunisia, having a virtual monopoly of the manufacture of chéchias, the tasseled caps of red felt which are the universal head-gear of the natives. A mile or so above the town are the ruins of the Nymphea, the colonnaded temple built by the Romans over the famous spring which eighteen hundred years ago supplied Carthage with water as it now does Tunis. Here commenced that remarkable system of conduits and aqueducts, constructed in the reign of Hadrian, whose mammoth arches still march across the Carthaginian plain.

Another hour or so of dusty motoring, and the domes and minarets and turreted ramparts of the Holy City rise to view. What induced the Arab conquerors to choose such a site for their capital and chief sanctuary passes the comprehension, for Kairouan lies in the middle of a dreary, waterless expanse, thirty-odd miles from the sea and even farther from the mountains, without an adequate water-supply or natural resources, swept by cold winds in winter and scorched by the pitiless summer sun. It does not even have military strength to recommend it, for it has never withstood a siege successfully, having been taken and retaken at least a dozen times. Though it is on the road to nowhere, so far as its geographical situation is concerned, the followers of Mohammed regard it as a half-way stop on the road to heaven, seven pilgrimages to Kairouan being deemed equivalent to a hadj to Mecca itself.

A distinctly medieval appearance is lent the city by its massive crenelated wall, pierced by five gates and broken by numerous bastions and towers. The essentially religious character of the place is immediately made apparent by its most fantastic sky-line, which is broken by the domes and minarets of the hundred or more zaouias and mosques, the whole dominated by the enormous tower of the Djamaa Sidi Okba, which, visible for many miles, rears itself skyward like a great brown finger pointing to heaven.

Bear with me for a single paragraph while I give a thumb-nail sketch of Kairouan’s history, which is the history of Arab rule in North Africa. Twelve years, then, after the camel-driver of Mecca who became the Prophet had gone to join the houris in the Moslem paradise, his son-in-law Othman ibn Affan (his son-in-law twice over, in fact, for he had married two of Mohammed’s daughters) was elected Khalifa, or Successor. To him fell the congenial task of carrying on the work of invasion and conquest which had been prosecuted with such success by the preceding khalifas, Abou Bekr and Omar, who, having subjugated the decaying empires of Byzantium and Persia, had turned their attention to the Maghreb—“the West.” When, in 644, Othman assumed the green mantle of the Prophet, Egypt had already been conquered by the Arab armies under Amr ibn al Asi, who, by way of celebrating his victory, destroyed the Alexandrine library, which contained the finest collection of books and manuscripts in the world. He gave as a reason for this utterly inexcusable act of vandalism—an act which at one stroke wiped out unique and authentic records of the ancient world covering many hundreds of years—the naïve explanation, “If these books contradict the Koran, they are false; if they agree with it, they are useless.” In the year of Othman’s succession, Amr ibn al Asi occupied Tripolitania, and three years later the Arab hosts poured through the south of Tunisia into Ifrikya and drove out the Byzantines. The administration of the new province was intrusted by the khalifa to that fiercest of all Moslem warriors, Okba ibn Nafi, better known as Sidi Okba, who, in the year 670, founded the city of Kairouan, which became in time the capital of all the Moslem possessions in the Maghreb, and, by virtue of the sanctity conferred upon the place by the saints who were buried there, a religious focus which drew pilgrims all the way from Egypt to Morocco.

By getting an early start from Tunis, one can lunch at Kairouan, spend the afternoon in visiting the principal mosques, and sleep that night in the really comfortable hostelry at Sousse. For the casual traveler this is perhaps the best plan, for the accommodations at Kairouan, though tolerable enough, are remarkable neither for cleanliness nor comfort, the Hôtel Splendide—named with a singular lack of appropriateness—being one of those cold, gloomy little hotels, so common in North Africa, where the sheets, table-cloths, and napkins are always damp, and where, between courses, the guest produces a fictitious warmth by sitting on his hands.

To visit the mosques of Kairouan an order is required from the controleur civil—a mere formality. That, together with a pair of red slippers large enough to pull over one’s shoes, and a handful of small coins with which to reward the numerous attachés of the ecclesiastical buildings and to bestow on the holy men and mendicants who crouch at their entrances, and we are all set for a tour of the sacred city.

On arriving in Rome for the first time, one’s footsteps turn instinctively in the direction of St. Peter’s; the visitor to Kairouan makes directly for the Great Mosque, the Djamaa Sidi Okba. As befits the premier sanctuary of Africa, it is of enormous size, covering an area of three acres. Next to nothing of the original structure remains, however, for it has been rebuilt four times, that which we now see dating from the early part of the ninth century. Just as the Campanile at Venice overshadows and dwarfs those two most beautiful buildings, St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace, so the tremendous height and bulk of the square minaret of the Great Mosque reduces the lovely cloistered building at its feet to comparative insignificance. As is the case with most of the famous sanctuaries of Islam, the mosque is built about an enormous court, surrounded by a very imposing double colonnade, paved with marble, and provided with fountains in which, as prescribed by the Koran, the pious must bathe their faces, hands, and feet before entering the place of worship. Rising from the center of the court is an ancient stone sun-dial. As the hour of prayer approaches a venerable employee of the mosque intently watches the creeping shadow, and from the summit of the lofty tower another attendant watches him. When the edge of the shadow touches the proper meridian, the man by the sun-dial abruptly raises his arm, like a semaphore, whereupon a large white flag is broken out from the gallows-like staff on the tower, and the musical drone of the muezzin floats out across the city summoning the faithful to prayer: “Ash hadu illa ill Allah, wa ash hadu inna Mohammed an rasool Allah!”

Though the exterior of the Great Mosque leaves much to be desired from an architectural point of view, the interior, with its maze of horseshoe arches supported on a forest of marble and porphyry columns, is a very miracle of form and color. At the end of the central nave, orientated, of course, toward Mecca, is the mihrab, or sacred niche, flanked by two magnificent columns of variegated marble from Cæsarea in Algeria, which, it is said, one of the Byzantine emperors offered to buy for their weight in gold. The mihrab is lined with glorious old tiles in the “lost shade” of Persian blue, brought from Baghdad by one of the princes of the Aghleb dynasty, who contributed them to the mosque, along with the rare Eastern woods which form the mimbar, or pulpit, as an act of penance for having defiled the sacred precincts by a drunken orgy. The endless vistas of columns and arches; the rich, mellow tints of the tiles, woods, and marbles; the soft light which filters in through the colored glass of the windows in the great dome—these combine to produce an effect of beauty, dignity, and solemnity unsurpassed by any religious edifice in the world.

Very imposing, with its five great domes, is the Djamaa Amor Abbada, or, as it is better known, the Mosque of the Saber. A purely modern structure, with an interior which has little to recommend it, it takes its name from the enormous saber, as long as a man and almost as heavy, which hangs against the mimbar as a reminder, I suppose, that Islam is a religion of the sword. It is venerated as the work of the founder of the mosque, Amor Abbada, an illiterate blacksmith saint, who, doubtless bored to extinction by the austere life expected of a marabout, amused himself by forging these huge clumsy swords. Another of his efforts took the form of a great pipe, fully five feet in length and painted a vivid green, which, so the attendant gravely informed us, the saint was wont to smoke. When my daughter flippantly remarked that it must have required two strong men to hold it and a five-pound sack of Bull Durham to fill its capacious bowl, the priest replied reprovingly that Amor Abbada was a giant and that such things were trifles to him. Which serves as an illustration of how quickly legends grow in the credulous and superstitious East, for Amor Abbada, far from being a figure of remote antiquity, died only a few years before the outbreak of our Civil War. As a matter of fact, it has never been very difficult to acquire sainthood in Moslem countries; almost any one can do it who has a well-developed sense of the dramatic.

By far the most interesting and important of all the religious edifices of Kairouan is the Djamaa Sidi Sahab, more usually referred to as the Mosque of the Barber. In it rests, within a richly decorated catafalque, the body of Sidi Sahab (the Companion), or, to give him his own sonorous name, Abou-Zamat Obeid Allah ibn Adam el Beloui, who earned his title by being one of the original ten disciples of Mohammed. Mortally wounded during the storming of Sbeitla in 656, he found his last resting-place in the soil of Kairouan. The frequently repeated assertion that El Beloui was the Prophet’s barber is absurd, as every student of Islamic history knows, for his nearest approach to the tonsorial trade was in shearing off the heads of unbelievers when he took part in the conquest of Egypt and the invasion of Ifrikya. Here is how the ridiculous legend arose. (It is Mr. Cyril Fletcher Grant who tells the story.) At the last solemn interview when the Prophet bade farewell to his Sahabs—his Knights of the Round Table—he gave El Beloui three hairs from his beard, that by them he might be recognized on the Day of Judgment. El Beloui directed that the precious relics should be buried with him, one to be laid on his lips, one on his heart, and one under his right arm, in token that his eloquence, his love, and his strength had all been devoted to the service of his adored master. And, as his reward for a loyalty which reached beyond the grave, he is to-day referred to as a barber!

“But,” exclaimed the American flapper whom we met in the hotel in Kairouan and to whom I repeated the story of El Beloui, “I always supposed that the mosque was named after the Barber of Seville. I thought he was one of those Moors who were driven out of Spain by Queen Elizabeth. But history is so hard to remember, isn’t it?”

The architectural glories of the Djamaa Sidi Sahab I shall leave to those who are better qualified than I am to describe them, and lead you straight through the bewildering series of tiled atria, colonnaded courts, and marble cloisters to the holy of holies itself, the shrine in which the Companion lies sleeping. He rests beneath a splendid catafalque covered, as is the Moslem custom, with magnificent shawls, brocades, and embroideries. Crossing the floor one’s slippered feet sink deeply into the soft mellow-toned carpets with which it is overlaid, and for the manufacture of which Kairouan is famous. The tomb is surrounded with an elaborately wrought iron grille on which tiny lamps, ostrich-eggs, glass balls, and little sacks of earth from the sacred soil of Mecca have been hung by the pious. From above droop, in folds of red and green, dozens of religious banners, sent by the rich and powerful from all corners of the Moslem world in tribute to this great Islamic hero.

The sun, a dazzling sphere of reddish gold, was sinking behind the Djebel Zaghouan when we left the Holy City by its eastern gate and took the road to Sousse. The multitude of towers and minarets and domes which proclaim afar the city’s sacred character rose, as though hewn from amethyst and coral, against the painted sky. To our ears, borne faintly on the night breeze, came the Angelus of Islam, the muezzin’s quavering call to evening prayer.

Though the regency of Tunisia barely exceeds in area the State of New York, it has an amazing variety of scenery, soil, and climate for so small a country. I can recall no other region where one can see so many of North Africa’s physiographical characteristics in so brief a time. In a journey no longer than from Albany to Buffalo, a journey which can be made quite comfortably by motor-car between dawn and dark of a single day, the traveler can see the sun rise out of the Mediterranean from the heights of Carthage; traverse a highly cultivated country-side checkered with prosperous farms and thriving gardens; plunge into great forests of cork and oak and pine; follow through leafy glens and rocky gorges the course of a river longer than the Hudson; climb a mountain range whose peaks tower for a mile into the blue; drop down upon treeless steppes carpeted with fields of grain; whirl through endless orchards of olive, fig, and orange; and dine on a desert oasis, amid a grove of date-palms, while the sun sinks behind the Saharan sand-dunes.

Tunisia may be divided into five districts, each having its distinctive topography, climate, and products. In the extreme north, in that little triangle formed by the Tunisian Atlas, the frontiers of Algeria, and the sea, is a mountainous, well-watered region with fertile, highly cultivated valleys and, on the slopes of the mountains, great forests of cork and pine. The northeastern corner of the regency, including the peninsula of Cape Bon, the country around Tunis, and the Carthaginian plain, has a soil and climate peculiarly adapted to the growing of citrus fruits—the land of the orange and the lemon. Extending from the Atlas southward to the fringes of the desert are the grain lands of Tunisia—a bleak, treeless, monotonous expanse of high plateaus and rolling steppes, normally arid but fertile under irrigation, known as the Tell. Lying to the east of the Tell, bordering the eastern coast of the regency from the Gulf of Hammamet to the Gulf of Gabés, is a slender strip of well-watered, highly fertile land, nowhere much over a dozen miles in width, called the Sahel. And far to the south, below both the Tell and the Sahel,

are the sand-dunes, shats, and oases of the Tunisian Sahara.

Of these five districts, the most important from an agricultural point of view is the Sahel. This narrow coastal plain, whose chef-lieu is Sousse, is a region of almost inexhaustible productiveness, a fat land, a land of live stock, grain, fruit, and vine. For ages past the rich earth has been washed down from the hills to collect along the shore in deep layers of alluvial soil, which, scratched and watered, becomes a Garden of the Lord.

That portion of the Sahel in the vicinity of Sousse is one vast forest of olive-trees. For miles we motored between the ordered gray-green rows, the trees so old, so bent, so gnarled, so twisted, that they might well have been planted by the Romans. Nor, indeed, is that at all improbable, for olive-trees frequently attain enormous age. In the Garden of Gethsemane, above Jerusalem, the monks reverently point out two venerable olive-trees beneath which, they assert, Christ was accustomed to converse with His disciples.

Sousse, the second most important city of Tunisia, is a charming place. Its buildings, white as though cut from chalk, are set on the slopes of a natural amphitheater which rises quite sharply from the harbor, so that, seen from the sea, it bears a certain resemblance to Algiers. The Hadrumetum of the ancients, it was already old when Dido ruled at Carthage; it was hoary with antiquity when London was a cluster of wattle huts inhabited by painted savages, when Paris had yet to be founded amid the swamps beside the Seine. In the beginning a Phenician commercial outpost, established by merchants trading out of Tyre, it become a Roman colony under Trajan and so remained until the second century of the Empire, when the Vandals came. But the Vandals were driven out by Belisarius the Byzantine; and the Byzantines, in their turn, gave way before the fierce onslaught of the Arab hosts; whereupon the crescent replaced the cross, its churches were destroyed or converted into mosques, the Citadel was renamed the Kasbah, and Sousse became a corsair stronghold, one of its rulers being the terrible Dragut, the most feared sea-rover of his time.

At Sousse, as elsewhere in French North Africa, the modern city, the European quarter, has sprung up outside the walls of the old town. And in no other African city that I know is the contrast thus presented so striking. La ville française, with its broad boulevards and double rows of shade-trees, its banks, consulates, hotels, churches, brasseries, cinemas, and ornate public buildings, its numerous little parks and its inevitable Grande Place, is just such a provincial town as may be found by the dozen in the south of France. But stroll through one of the ancient gateways which give access to the Arab city, and you step backward a thousand years, for crowded within the bastioned and crenelated ramparts is a tangle of tortuous lanes and dim bazaars lined by hole-in-the-wall shops (here not a figure of speech, for many of them are actually built in the wall itself), while, high above the noisy, noisome town, rise, slender, serene, and snowy, the minarets of the Great Mosque and the frowning battlements of the Kasbah.

One of the most conspicuous buildings of the old town is the Ksar-er-Rabit, originally a Byzantine stronghold, but upon the Moslem conquest transformed into a rabit, one of the military outposts, half-monastery and half-fortress, established by the Arabs along the frontiers of their far-flung empire. These rabits were garrisoned by a sect of militant monks, somewhat akin to the Knights Templars, known as Mirabits, who were praying when they were not fighting, and from their name was derived the word marabout—a religious ascetic, a fakir, a holy man.

The traveler in Tunisia cannot but be impressed by the evidences which he sees on every hand of the enormous population and amazing prosperity of this region under the Romans. The whole country-side is strewn with reminders of this vanished civilization, for Byzacium, as the Romans called this region, supported a numerous agricultural population and was dotted with flourishing cities and towns. Everywhere rise the ruins of cities, buildings, aqueducts, and arches, monuments, monoliths, and heaps of sculptured stones. Yet, despite these indisputable proofs of a one-time wealth and greatness, it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to realize that dense forests once spread themselves over yonder naked hills, that great cities stood on their flanks, and that from these arid steppes came the grain which fed the mouths of Rome.

Of all the monuments of this departed glory, the most impressive, the most astounding, is the amphitheater at Thysdrus, or, to give it its Arab name, El Djem. Set in a solitude of orange sand, where the Sahel runs out in the Sahara, it is one of the most remarkable structures that I have ever seen. It rises from a shallow, saucer-like depression in the plain, as grandly as the pyramids at Gizeh, as abruptly as the walls of the Grand Cañon. As we topped a rise in the road we could see its towering, rose-brown walls, honeycombed with arches, twenty kilometers away. From a distance it is profoundly imposing; close at hand it is positively overwhelming. The grandest Roman monument in all Africa, it is perhaps the best preserved building of its kind in the world, scarcely inferior to the Colosseum at Rome. There is nothing to compare with it in the monumental architecture of modern times. It is so large that it completely conceals the native town which lies behind it. Though used by the Arabs for centuries as a quarry, it was so colossal, so strongly built, as to defy their attempts at destruction. The achievement of building it is the more astounding when one realizes that the stones used in this mountain of masonry were hauled by gangs of slaves and teams of elephants and yokes of oxen, over roads specially constructed for the purpose, from quarries twenty miles away. The mere sight of that tremendous structure, rising solitary, majestic, and time-defying from the lonely plain, does more than all the histories ever written to impress one with the might of Rome.

Of Thysdrus, the splendid city which once stood upon the site of El Djem and which gave to Rome three emperors named Gordian, nothing remains save the amphitheater and some stones and marbles built into the wretched native dwellings. The construction of the amphitheater is attributed to Gordian the Elder, who sat on the imperial throne in the first half of the third century A.D. During the blood-stained years which followed its erection its arena was the scene of the torture and martyrdom of thousands of Christians; the dungeons in which the condemned were confined and the dens of the wild beasts may still be seen.

Perhaps the most dramatic chapter in the long history of the great building took place, however, shortly after the Arab invasion, when the Berbers, under the leadership of Koceila, rose in revolt against their Moslem conquerors. When, toward the close of the seventh century, Koceila fell in battle on the Medjerda, his place was taken by a remarkable woman, an African Joan of Arc, known to history as El Kahena, the Priestess, for her real name is unknown. Convinced that the Arabs were fighting only for booty, she met and defeated them in a great battle near Gabés and then proceeded to lay desolate the whole Sahel, razing the cities, destroying the water-systems, burning the forests and the orchards. But in 703, realizing that a further prosecution of the war was hopeless, she intrenched herself in the amphitheater of El Djem. Here she sustained a long siege, but, driven by starvation to lead a forlorn hope, she was killed in battle, her head being sent to the khalifa as a sign that Berber resistance to Arab rule was at an end.

It is a little over two score miles from El Djem to Sfax, and, providing you have sufficient horse-power under the hood of your motor, you can cover the distance in as many minutes, for the road, like all of those which the French have constructed in Tunisia, must have been laid out by the simple method of laying a ruler down on the map and drawing perfectly straight lines from town to town. It utterly ignores such things as grades and contours, sometimes driving straight ahead for twenty kilometers at a stretch. There was no traffic to speak of, and, once clear of the town, Harvey pressed his foot hard upon the gas. The big car leaped forward like a thoroughbred at the raising of the starting-gate. As we topped the rises in the road its wheels seemed to leave the ground completely; it was like taking off in an airplane. With horn a-blare we went booming down into little valleys, sky-hooting across narrow bridges, and roaring up the opposite slopes. The country-side became a blur of green and brown. The white kilometer-posts seemed as close together as the beads of a necklace. The telegraph-poles slid past like the palings in a picket-fence. The needle on the dial of the speedometer rose to seventy ... eighty ... ninety ... one hundred kilometers.... Africa was slipping away beneath us at the rate of sixty miles an hour.