The white city which the Carthaginians built on the northern shores of the Gulf of Gabés was called Taparura by the Romans, but its Arab conquerors, finding that the fakous (cucumber) grew there in great abundance, changed its name to Sfax. It may strike a European as somewhat curious to name a large and flourishing city after a vegetable, but that is because the European fails to realize what a gift from heaven a cool and juicy cucumber is to a parched and dusty land. In Mesopotamia cucumbers are sold everywhere and munched like apples, while in the desert they are considered a rare luxury, being regarded by the Arabs very much as we regard hothouse grapes and alligator-pears. Indeed, I have always maintained that, when I was captured by the Bedouins on the Upper Euphrates in 1920, it was the basket of cucumbers I presented to the sheikh which effected my release.

Though named for a vegetable, Sfax does not vegetate. On the contrary, it is one of the most up-and-doing places in Tunisia, its eighty thousand inhabitants, of whom six thousand are Europeans, driving a prosperous trade in fruit, cattle, olive-oil, wool, and sponges. The Arab town, surrounded by a crenelated wall and dominated by the lofty tower of an ancient mosque, is noisy, busy, and dirty; but the European quarter is characterized by broad, scrupulously clean streets, a spacious tree-planted square, and new and handsome public buildings, including a really fine hôtel de ville and a municipal theater, all built, appropriately enough, in the modified Moorish style of architecture which the French have used so successfully throughout North Africa.

The people of Sfax are as justly proud of their water-system as are the inhabitants of Poland Springs. In addition to two enormous reservoirs or fesquias, owned by the municipality and supplied with water from the wells of Sidi Salah, ten miles away, there is, just outside the town, a large walled inclosure containing five or six hundred bottle-shaped reservoirs called nasrias, given by wealthy Arabs to the town. These cisterns are maintained by the municipality, and the water is supplied to those who prefer it to that from Sidi Salah.

Sfax is the most important olive-growing center in Tunisia, for the beylical government has wisely encouraged the industry by liberal concessions, and it is estimated that there are upward of a million and a half olive-trees in bearing on the Bokaat-el-Beida plateau. What with its countless olive-groves and oil-presses, its almond-orchards, cucumber-gardens, henna-plantations, soap-factories, and sponge-fisheries, this remote African city plays a not unimportant part in supplying toilet accessories to the bath-rooms and beauty-parlors of the world. Its name might appropriately be changed to Cosmétiqueville.

Instead of wearing the flowing burnous which is the universal costume of the natives elsewhere in the regency, the Arabs of Sfax are distinguished by their short, hooded jackets of dark brown, hand-woven wool or camel’s-hair elaborately worked with light brown embroidery. These, with the troops of the garrison—officers of chasseurs d’Afrique in tight-waisted sky-blue tunics and enormously baggy scarlet trousers; spahis with great crimson capes, their enormous turbans bound with agals of camel’s-hair; black tirailleurs from Senegal whose high tarbooshes, trim uniforms, and smartly wound puttees are all of khaki—to say nothing of the strange desert types who drift in from the Saharian provinces and Tripolitania, lend to the streets and souks of Sfax a diversity and color not found in the more northerly cities of the regency.

A few hours by native sailing-boat off this storied coast are the Kerkenna Islands, Chergui and Gharbi, which in ancient times were joined by a bridge whose traces are still visible, but now separated by a channel of considerable width. They are interesting to every student of ancient history because of their tragic associations, for it was here that the fugitive Hannibal, seeking to escape the wrath of Rome, found refuge for a time, and from here that he fled to Asia Minor. The Kerkennas were the home, in later years, of another illustrious exile, that Sempronius Gracchus who dared to lift his eyes to Julia, daughter of the Emperor Augustus, and paid for his presumption with banishment and eventually with his life. But the Kerkennas, despite their hectic past, are to-day a pleasant, friendly, dolce far niente spot, the islanders, a mixture of many nationalities, being engaged in sponge-fishing and the manufacture of an inferior but very potent variety of date brandy.

Sfax is the “farthest south” for most visitors to Tunisia, but we kept on along the edges of the gulf to Gabés, which is the starting-point for those, prepared to put up with discomforts if not actual hardships, who wish to visit the cliff-dwellings of Matmata, the rhorfas of Medenine, the island of Djerba, and the military provinces which adjoin the Tripolitanian frontier. Though so difficult of access, so far removed from the beaten paths of travel, as to be rarely visited by Europeans, these regions are by long odds the strangest and most interesting in Tunisia, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. Not to see the underground city of Bled Kebira and the desert sky-scrapers of Medenine is to miss two of the most extraordinary communities on earth.

Gabés, the Tacape of the Romans, is to France’s Saharan frontier what Fort Leavenworth was to our own frontier in its wild and woolly days. In the edge of the desert, close to the borders of Tripolitania, it is the most important military outpost in the South, a large garrison being maintained there to hold in check the lawless nomad tribes. The town itself is wholly without interest, merely a collection of mud houses set in a large oasis amid a forest of palms. But the Hôtel de l’Oasis, run by a stout and jovial Frenchwoman, was tolerably comfortable, and the cuisine was surprisingly good, considering the difficulties of obtaining supplies, provided one did not object to the use of goat’s milk and butter, whose rancid taste and revolting odor I myself detest.

The officers and men of the garrison are saved from ennui by the constant drills and occasional punitive expeditions which form the life of frontier posts; they have their little cercles, where they hold occasional dances; twice weekly, in the dusty jardin public, the band of the tirailleurs plays the latest pieces from Paris; and on the beach, about a mile away, a ramshackle pavilion and a string of unpainted shacks, called by courtesy cabines des bains, make a pathetic attempt to bring to the frontier the distractions of Dinard and Deauville; but I felt sorry for the handful of Frenchwomen who had accompanied their soldier husbands into exile and who were dragging out an inconceivably dreary and monotonous existence in this lonely spot. I have always maintained that, whether in Africa, India, or the Philippines, it is the women who are the real builders of empire. They spend their lives far from home and friends, often separated for years from their children, yet they serve their countries no less faithfully than the men, but, unlike the men, without the stimulus of recognition or reward.

Along with their other legends and superstitions, the ancients had a vague tradition of a curious, semi-mythical people, dwelling in an inaccessible region near the Syrtes, who made their homes in the bowels of the earth. They were said to live upon the flesh of snakes and lizards, to practise customs strange beyond belief, and to speak some outlandish language which Herodotus compared to the cry of a bat. As Africa was gradually opened up to civilization these fantastic tales were set down as unfounded myths and were accounted but examples of the folk-lore which accumulates about a mysterious and unknown land. But there the scientists were wrong. For when, in 1869, the first French columns penetrated the great mountain ranges to the southwest of Gabés in their initial attempts to conquer the Sahara, they found the Troglodytes of the ancient tales in the strange inhabitants of the Matmata Plateau.

The Matmata region consists of an isolated, winding, highly mountainous ridge, with numerous rocky spurs, upward of a hundred and twenty-five miles in length. Commencing a score of miles or so to the south of Gabés, it winds southward and eastward across the desert like an enormous snake. On the backbone of this ridge, a quarter of a mile above sea-level, is a vast upland plain completely hemmed in by mountain peaks. Here, in a region of appalling loneliness and desolation, cut off from the outer world by leagues of mountain land and desert, is the home of the Troglodytes, among the strangest of the strange peoples who inhabit this earth.

Provided your car is powerful enough to negotiate the precipitous ascents, and you are prepared to sacrifice its tires and springs, the Troglodyte capital, Bled Kebira, can be reached from Gabés in a long and exceedingly arduous half-day. But this means getting started at the crack of dawn. Until the foot of the mountains is reached the going is good enough, the road zigzagging in long salients across a dusty russet plain. An hour or so of rapid traveling amid clouds of suffocating dust, and then, reaching the foot-hills, the ascent begins. As the car pants upward, the terrain steadily becomes more stoney and broken, the country-side more desolate and forbidding. One moment the tires are gashed by beds of knife-sharp flints; the next they sink deep into patches of yellow sand. The way is not only steep and rough but very narrow, so narrow in places that there is scarcely room between the outer wheels and the edge of the sheer precipice for a starved cat to pass. Barring occasional patches of barley or small groves of discouraged-looking olive-trees, there is no vegetation, and the mountain slopes are as barren as the walls of the Grand Cañon. No people, no houses, no animals, unless we except a few stray goats, are to be seen. Solitude and desolation reign supreme.

Now the ascent becomes so steep that Harvey is compelled to stop at frequent intervals to cool his engine. The rapid reports of the exhaust echo in the still mountain air like the clatter of a machine-gun. Still the interminable trail leads on, dropping down into the beds of dried-up rivers, crossing by narrow bridges the arroyos cut in the soil by smaller torrents, crawling cautiously around rocky shoulders, skirting the brinks of chasms whose walls drop away from our wheels half a hundred fathoms sheer, scaling the face of towering cliffs by a series of narrow shelves hewn from the living rock, but climbing, climbing, always climbing, that portion of the road which is yet to be traversed unwinding itself before us like an endless yellow ribbon as it reaches toward the higher levels. It seems as though we would never reach our destination; but at long last, topping a final rise, we debouch upon a lofty table-land, sprinkled with palms and sparsely covered with ill-nourished grass, with the great peaks of the Djebel Matmata rising in a rocky rampart all around. Bled Kebira, the largest of the troglodyte towns, is on the plateau, just ahead, but to reach the far older and fortified village of Gelaa Matmata, now deserted, we must leave the car and climb another half a thousand feet or so, for it is perched on the very summit of the mountain. Even when we gain this fortress in the clouds there is no sign of human habitation, barring a few fortifications, now in ruins, but the flanks of the mountains are pitted with what appear to be the entrances to gigantic rabbit-burrows, which are in reality the doorways to the former homes of the cave-dwellers.

Though the Matmatas are unquestionably of pure Berber stock, a fine, upstanding people possessed of extraordinary tenacity and courage, their origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. They themselves claim to have been led to this mountain refuge by that remarkable woman, El Kahena, the African Joan of Arc already mentioned, who made her last desperate stand at El Djem after defying for years the Arab invaders of her country. That the Matmatas were originally lowlanders, pasturing their flocks and tending their olive-trees on the rich plains bordering the Syrtes, there is good reason to believe. But, constantly harassed by bands of Arab raiders from Tripolitania and the desert, who burned their towns, drove off their flocks, and killed those whom they did not carry into slavery, the Berbers realized that their only hope of existence lay in seeking refuge amid the wild fastnesses of the Matmata Mountains. Here, within sight of the fertile plains which they had been forced to abandon, they intrenched themselves, and, resisting all attacks of their enemies, succeeded in eking out a precarious existence for centuries, though how they managed to obtain sufficient food remains a mystery. As the years passed, however, they grew weary of their enforced seclusion upon the mountain-top; so, coming to terms with their hereditary enemies, the nomad tribes, they abandoned Gelaa Matmata and descended to the arable plateau, five hundred feet or so lower down, where, in the soft, porous soil, half-clay, half-sandstone, which forms the sides of the hills, they built, or, rather dug themselves, the present town of Bled Kebira.

They continued to live in their subterranean dwellings partly because they had become accustomed to them, no doubt, but primarily because they were still necessary as a defense against marauding bands, for it was not until the French bayonets came that this much persecuted people acquired even a speaking acquaintance with peace and security. Now, their stronghold on the mountain-top long since abandoned, the Matmatas have their chef-lieu at Bled Kebira, where some twelve thousand of them live like moles beneath the surface of the earth. Though Bled Kebira has a population equal to that of many an American community holding a city charter, there is nothing to suggest its presence, for a small, whitewashed mosque and the caserne occupied by a handful of French troops are the only structures above ground.

The troglodyte dwellings of Bled Kebira are extremely difficult to describe because I can think of nothing which will serve as a satisfactory basis of comparison. The method of digging one of these ghars, as they are called, is as follows. Selecting a site where the soil is firm and where there is good drainage, the home-builder proceeds to sink a shaft, perhaps twenty feet square and from twenty to thirty feet deep. The bottom of this shaft is leveled off and forms a patio or courtyard. The next step is to excavate the rooms, the doors of which open on the shaft; some are on the same level as the courtyard, others are higher up and reached by ropes. Finally, a tunnel, sometimes several hundred feet in length, is driven from the courtyard to the surface of the earth, its entrance, usually in a cranny of the hills, secured against intruders by a stoutly timbered door with enormous hinges of hand-wrought iron. Some of these massive doors, like the dwellings to which they gave admittance, were quite obviously of enormous age, possibly a thousand years or more.

The rooms, generally of good size, with vaulted ceilings, were astonishingly neat and clean, their walls whitewashed and decorated with primitive designs in vivid colors; the scanty furniture—beds, tables, and divans—cut from the rock itself. The disadvantage of this is that the furniture cannot be moved, but it has its compensation in the fact that dust cannot be swept, and refractory collar-buttons cannot be lost, under pieces of furniture which rise solidly from the floor, of which, indeed, they are a part. In one dwelling which we visited, that of the sheikh, the bed, which was about the size of a billiard-table, had been plastered over and the plaster whitewashed, and the whitewash, in turn, had been rudely frescoed in brilliant reds and greens. Ranged along one side of the kitchen, which was separated from the bedroom only by a calico curtain, stood great jars of pottery, recalling those in which the Forty Thieves were boiled alive, but here used for such prosaic purposes as the storage of water, olive-oil, and wine.

Though from the open patios, which served as stable-yards for camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, and chickens, a stench rose to high heaven, we were impressed with the scrupulous cleanliness which characterized the interiors of these underground dwellings: the earthen floors had been scrubbed and sanded; the beds were made up with spotless linen; the copper cooking-utensils hanging on the walls had been scoured until they shone like mirrors. Despite the fact that many of these troglodyte dwellings are thirty feet or more below the level of the ground, I should imagine that in dry weather they must be quite comfortable to live in—indifferently lighted, perhaps, but cool in summer and quite immune from the chilling winter winds. But I must confess that I should not care to live in one during the rainy season—and when it rains in Tunisia, it rains—for, though there is a certain amount of drainage, I could see no reason why a really torrential downpour would not transform the central courtyard, which is really nothing but a large well, into a cistern.

In their stooped shoulders and prematurely wrinkled faces the Matmatam women show the effects of their bitter struggle for existence; but some of the young girls were really lovely, with slim, supple figures, clear olive skins, and large, lustrous eyes. At the house of the sheikh, with whom the guide we had brought from Gabés was acquainted, we found his wives and numerous children assembled in the courtyard to greet us; but in most of the other dwellings the women fled into their burrows on our approach and remained concealed until my departure, though, once I had left, they were shyly eager to welcome my wife and daughter, crowding about them, fingering their clothes, and asking innumerable questions.

I had rather expected that the Matmata dwellings would contain some specimens of indigenous art, such as one finds among other very ancient peoples, as, for example, the Hopi. Yet, so far as I could discover, the Troglodytes possess no art of their own. The walls of the tunnel-like entrance to one of their houses, it is true, were decorated with a sort of dado of colored hand-prints, easily recognizable, however, as the hand of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, and hence an Arab form of decoration. The people seem to have an innate if quite undeveloped love for the beautiful, however, as is evidenced by the pride with which they display the paltry trinkets—bits of the cheap pottery common in North Tunisia, gaudy lithographs of Turkish origin, empty wine-bottles with flowers stuck in the necks, looking-glasses, cracked pieces of European chinaware, in one case a tin which had contained a well-known smoking-mixture—which are objets d’art to them. These things are not beautiful, it is true, but many of the objects which we treasure because of their rarity are not beautiful either.

A funeral was held in Bled Kebira while we were there, but on account of the presence of numerous women, and of the fact that the Matmatas object to having their religious ceremonies witnessed by non-Moslems, we could view it only from a distance. The services were conducted in one of the larger ghars, and at their conclusion the coffin, borne on the shoulders of several men, was carried through the winding tunnel to the open air and thence up a precipitous foot-path to the little unkempt cemetery, where deceased Matmatas are laid to rest beneath far less soil than they are accustomed to live under when alive. It was one of the most bizarre spectacles I have ever witnessed: the multitude of white-veiled, white-robed figures issuing in seemingly endless procession from a black hole in the ground, their voices raised in a plaintive, barbaric chant.

“It reminds me,” said Mrs. Powell, “of Doré’s picture of the Day of Judgment, when the sheeted dead arise from their graves.”

Just then there came from the French caserne on the hill the shrill notes of a bugle sounding the noon mess-call.

“Yes,” remarked my daughter, “and there goes Gabriel’s horn!”

Midway between the eastern slopes of the Matmata Plateau and the coast, close to the Tripolitanian border, is Medenine. It is one of the most extraordinary places in the world; I know of nothing even remotely like it. Here too the inhabitants are troglodytes, if by troglodytes are meant those who creep into holes, which is the classic definition. But, whereas the troglodytes of Matmata lives in holes beneath the ground, those of Medenine have their holes above it, in what might be termed desert apartment-houses, four, five, occasionally even six stories in height.

Medenine lies in a shallow depression in the desert, and you come upon it quite unexpectedly as you top a rise in the yellow plain. A curiously uncanny sensation is produced by the first sight of this most amazing city. You rub your eyes and wonder if you are not the victim of a hallucination. You feel that you are very near to the beginning of things. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was transported to the Age of Chivalry. But here you are back in the Age of Stone.

The town consists of some two thousand dwellings called rhorfa, which rise from the ground as abruptly as the chimney of a factory. These dwellings are not detached, as in most communities, but are closely packed together in rows and squares. It is next to impossible to find words which will adequately describe them, for, as human habitations, they are absolutely unique. Seen from a distance, they look as much as anything else like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete, ten feet in diameter, a few ranged in rows on the ground, but most of them stacked in tiers which in some cases rise to a height of half a hundred feet.

Though there is no intercommunication, they are built side by side, their walls touching, so that a row of them looks like a series of inverted U’s—⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂ But superimposed on the first row is a second, and on the second row a third, some of those primordial apartment-houses rising to a height of five, and, in a few cases, six stories, with a hundred or more rooms. Perhaps they might best be compared to the tiers of burial vaults which are to be seen in certain Italian campi-santi or, better still, to the cells of a honeycomb.

The walls, of enormously thick rubble roughly plastered over with a sort of adobe, are windowless, each rhorfa obtaining light and air only through the single narrow doorway, not much larger than that of a dog-kennel, about two feet wide and three and a half feet high, or just large enough to permit a man to squeeze through if he enters on his hands and knees. The doors are of wood very stoutly built and secured by enormous wooden bolts. To the right of the door, some two or three feet from it, is the keyhole, which consists of an aperture in the wall just large enough to permit a man to insert his arm. When a troglodyte leaves home his method of locking up the house is a most curious and ingenious one. His key consists of a piece of wood two or three feet long, its end fitted with pegs which exactly correspond in size, number, and position with holes sunk in the end of the bolt. When he is ready to leave he pulls the door to from the outside; then, inserting his arm in the keyhole, he gropes about until the pegs on the key drop into the holes in the bolt, which are spaced differently on each lock, the bolt thus being drawn forward to lock the door, or pushed back to unlock it. The system, though clumsy, is much more effective than it sounds, for the bolt is too far from the opening to permit of its being reached save with the key, and, unless the holes in the one exactly correspond with the pegs on the other, there is no way to gain admittance except by breaking the door down. His door locked, the householder slings his enormous key, as large and heavy as a policeman’s night-stick, over his shoulder by a leathern thong. He is not likely to lose it, or to forget it, and in it he has a formidable weapon. In Medenine, as has been remarked, we are very near the beginning of things, for this is the “key of the house of David,” which Isaiah saw resting on the shoulder of Eliakim, that, in the quaint phraseology of the Scriptures, “he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.”

Even when a Medenine householder returns home completely soused, to put it inelegantly, he has no difficulty in finding his keyhole, which is so large that he could scarcely miss it. But to find the stairs, and, once they are found, to avoid falling down them, is quite another matter, for reaching the door of one of these troglodyte apartments is as hazardous a performance as entering an upper-story window of an American hotel by means of a fireman’s scaling-ladder. Occasionally, but not often, these lofty dwellings are reached by flights of rude stone stairs, extremely steep and narrow and perilously slippery in wet weather. But in most cases the inhabitants have to climb up and down by means of small stones, barely large enough to afford a foothold, which project a few inches from the face of the house. A monkey would experience no difficulty whatsoever in gaining the top floor of one of these singular houses, and neither would an experienced mountain-climber provided he was accustomed to rock-work, but it required all my strength and agility to reach a fifth-floor doorway, and even then I had several narrow escapes from very nasty falls. How a troglodyte who has imbibed over-freely of palm wine manages to get home at all is a mystery, for some of the doors are fifty feet above the ground, and, if his foot slipped, there would be “more work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”

What, you may ask, is the raison d’être of these extraordinary habitations? The best reason in the world—self-protection. For it has always been a savage, untamed region, here along the Libyan border, and life was one desperate, unending struggle for existence until the white helmets came. There was, it is to be presumed, a semblance of law and order under the stern rule of Rome, but when the Roman power collapsed the land was overrun by the Vandals, and after them by the Arabs, and in the wake of Arabs came veiled raiders from the desert and loot-hungry corsairs from the coast. Hence it was essential that the inhabitants devise a form of dwelling which could be successfully defended against marauders, no matter how numerous or how well armed. And the rhorfa answered the purpose admirably, for, being built of masonry, they cannot be burned down; the walls are of such thickness as to be proof against anything short of shell-fire; they are so arranged in squares and rows that a withering cross-fire can be brought to bear upon assailants; and they are easy to defend, for the ground floors are used only as granaries and storehouses, and the householder, living high above the ground, has only to shoot down through his keyhole, or to batter out the brains of the first enemy who attempts to enter, in the unlikely event that the stout door should be broken in.

Not far from Medenine is the smaller community of Metameur, which is a fortress rather than a village. Here all the houses are built in the form of a hollow square, inclosing a spacious courtyard, from which they rise to a height of five or six stories. As has already been mentioned, none of the houses have windows, and so the outside of the square is merely a blank wall of rough stone covered with cement, too lofty to be scaled and too thick to be breached except by modern artillery. In the center of the courtyard is a well, which insures the inhabitants of a water-supply should they be besieged. Access to the courtyard is gained through a tunnel-shaped entrance, so low that one has to crawl through it almost on all fours. But once inside the inhabitants were perfectly secure, as long as their food and water held out, for there was no means by which an enemy could dislodge them. To me these troglodyte towns were particularly interesting because they illustrate how, even in a region wholly destitute of natural defenses, a primitive but ingenious people can protect themselves when dire necessity compels.

As, even to-day, the southern marches of Tunisia are not wholly immune from attacks by bands of raiders from the desert, Medenine is garrisoned by a considerable force of méharistes, tirailleurs, spahis, and chasseurs d’Afrique, whose trim white barracks are in the outskirts of the town. Rising beyond the squat, vault-like rows of rhorfa, perhaps the most primitive dwellings in the world, and in striking contrast to them, are the slender masts and cobweb-like aërials of the military radio station—the last word in twentieth-century civilization.

Circumstances made it necessary for us to lunch at Medenine. It was the last place on earth where I should have expected to get a decent meal, for the single European café in the town was at first sight anything but appetizing. But appearances are sometimes deceiving, for, as it turned out, the proprietor had once been a chef in a famous Paris restaurant, and he set before us one of the best-cooked déjeuners that we had in Africa. My recollections of it are particularly vivid because for the modest sum of ninety cents I obtained a bottle of fine old Château Yquem!

In pushing so far southward into Tunisia we had a double-barreled motive: to see the troglodyte communities which I have just described, and to visit Djerba, the Island of the Lotus-Eaters. This fabled isle, so alluringly described in the Odyssey, was known to those mariners of ancient Greece who ventured beyond the rim of their world before the dawn of history, and the reports which they brought back served as foundation for the epic tales of Jason and Ulysses. There the Argonauts dwelt for a time in happy idleness; there they ate of the lotus and the sweet fruit of the date-palm; there they found a land where it was always afternoon and life passed like a dream.

Djerba, which in ancient times was connected with the mainland by a causeway, lies within cannon-shot of the Tunisian coast. It can be reached in a few hours from Gabés by a coasting-steamer, small and none too clean; but we chose the longer and more interesting land route, through Medenine and Zarzis, once an important seaport of the Romans, to the tip of the peninsula, whence there is a ferry service across the narrow strait, here barely four miles wide, to El Kantara.

The French resident-general at Tunis had notified the controleur civil at Houmt-Souk, the island capital, of our intended visit, and had obtained the promise of a launch to take us across the strait to El Kantara and a motor-car to take us across the island. But when we arrived at the place of embarkation, marked only by a police post and a small stone pier, no sign of a launch was to be seen. After several hours spent in fruitless attempts to reach Houmt-Souk by telephone, we arranged to be ferried across to El Kantara by an Arab boatman, a swarthy, black-browed ruffian who, if appearances count for anything, must have been descended from the pirates who once terrorized this coast. Judging from the price demanded, I had assumed that we were chartering the whole boat, a broad-bowed, clumsy craft with an enormous lateen-sail, but, once we had paid our passage-money, the skipper insisted on taking aboard not only a varied assortment of lousy native passengers but donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, even a camel, as well, crowding them in until the boat looked—and smelled—like Noah’s famous vessel. But eventually the tawny lateen-sail was hoisted with much shouting and we got under way, a leaning boat on the tranquil turquoise waters, with a palm-fringed strip of shore to lead us on. As a matter of fact, we could almost have walked across, for the water of the strait is very shallow, and the stones of the great Roman causeway which once connected the island with the mainland were plainly visible, a foot or so beneath the surface.

We landed at El Kantara (the name means “bridge”), the ancient Meninx. Once a magnificent city, as attested by the sculptured stones, broken columns, and fragments of marble sarcophagi which still strew the site, it is now a mere cluster of mud hovels inhabited by native sponge-fishers, the sole Europeans in the place being the French douanier and his young and pretty wife. The controleur civil had telephoned from Houmt-Souk that a car had been sent for us, but as it had not shown up and as it was now long past noon and breakfast ancient history, the douanier took pity on us and invited us into his little house, bringing out for our entertainment a plate of biscuits and a bottle of the rather pungent cordial called Cap Corse. When at last the car sent by the controleur made its appearance—it belonged, as might have been expected, to the ubiquitous Ford family of Detroit—the plate had been emptied, the bottle had been drained, and the hospitality of our host and hostess had been strained to the breaking-point, I fear.

It is about five-and-twenty kilometers across the island, the smooth white road skirting the edges of venerable olive-groves or running between the walls of prosperous farms. I had expected to find a rugged land, with lofty peaks and brawling streams and leafy glens and lush green valleys, for Homer speaks of the “three mountain peaks” and the “gleaming river” and the high cascades of “downward smoke”; but there was not a hill or valley worthy of the name; not a single stream of any sort, let alone a river; nor was there a mountain anywhere in sight. Physiographically, Djerba is, as might be expected, merely a continuation of the mainland, but, unlike the mainland, every foot of its gently rolling surface has been irrigated and cultivated and fertilized until its naturally arid soil has attained an amazing degree of productiveness. Numerous palms give it a semi-tropical appearance; the fields are carpeted with wild flowers; the climate is delightful; and the vast groves of old, old olive-trees provide ample shade; so it is easy to understand how the Hellenic mariners, coming here from the bleaker shores of the Ægean, thought it was a paradise indeed.

The villages are immaculately neat and clean; the little white-walled houses rise from blazing gardens whose fragrance fills the air; the fortified farmsteads, built for defense, are cultivated with meticulous care; half a million olive-trees and three times that number of palms cover the island with a sea of verdure; and in the spring, when we were there, the poppies overlaid as with a scarlet mantle the green of the sprouting grain. Barring only central Morocco, I have never seen any country where wild flowers grow in such amazing variety and profusion. During a brief halt while our driver was changing tires Mrs. Powell gathered specimens of twenty different kinds in half as many minutes. In places they were so thickly intermingled that the country-side seemed to be covered with a gorgeous Oriental rug.

The islanders are a simple, friendly folk, willing, industrious, and hospitable. They have numerous industries, including sponge-fishing, the making of oil, the manufacture of a kind of white pottery, and the weaving of the silk and woolen tissues known as burnous stuffs, though agriculture is their chief pursuit. There are few evidences of poverty, the inhabitants being, on the whole, extremely prosperous, with quite a sprinkling of men who, according to island standards at least, are wealthy. In dress they are distinctive from their fellows of the mainland, the men wearing the short brown coats of loosely woven homespun which, being characteristic of the island, are called djerbas: the short but extremely baggy Cretan trousers, so loose in the seat that it is often used for carrying groceries, chickens, and other objects; the whole being topped off by the jaunty Tunisian chéchia with its long blue tassel. The women, when at work, wear dresses of blue cotton and broad-brimmed hats of braided straw with enormously high crowns, so that, seen from a little distance, they look like Chinese coolies. They are of Berber stock and commonly speak a Berber idiom, though the use of Arabic is rapidly increasing. Curiously enough—for in most things they are tolerant and easy-going—the islanders are Wahabis, the most fanatical of the various sects of Moslems. The Puritans of Islam, they practise a faith of the utmost austerity: they frown on all forms of religious pomp and circumstance; their places of worship are of the simplest character, destitute of all decoration; and they carry their insistence on “the only God” so far as to deny divinity to Mohammed.

Djerba has a large and prosperous Jewish population, Hara Srira, a little town in the center of the island, having been a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews for untold centuries. In the middle of the town is the synagogue, a very ancient building, its interior being most curiously decorated in marbles of various colors, crude but interesting tiles, and carved and painted wood. The chief rabbi, a white-bearded patriarch in flowing robes who might have posed for a portrait of Moses, met us at the door and conducted us through the semi-darkness of the nave to a sort of sacristy at the back of the high altar, where he proudly displayed the ancient manuscripts and massive silver plate which are the synagogue’s chief treasures. He showed me one splendid volume, a copy of the Talmud, I believe, its cover studded with semiprecious stones, which had been in this same synagogue for close on fifteen hundred years; others of the sacred manuscripts were engrossed on long rolls of vellum which were contained in cylindrical cases of silver, curiously chased and wrought. Across the street from the synagogue is the pilgrims’ house, a kind of religious hostelry, like those common in medieval Europe, containing hundreds of small rooms, not much more than cells, opening on a spacious inner court. Here, packed in like sardines, a dozen or more to a room, are lodged the thousands of pilgrims who, during the season of the pilgrimage, flock to Djerba not only from Tunisia and Tripolitania but from all of the Mediterranean countries. I once had the unforgettable experience of crossing the Mediterranean on a ship loaded with Russian pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, so I had no difficulty in imagining what the hostel at Hara Srira must be like—and smell like!—when, in the heat of an African summer, it is packed to the doors with the pious but unwashed.

Houmt-Souk, the island capital, is a charming, restful little town with fine, broad streets, white houses embowered in flowers, and a jardin public where a French horticultural expert does interesting things with shrubs and trees. On the beach, not far away, stands an old fort, a relic of the Spanish power, built some two hundred years before Columbus sailed westward out of Palos, with carronades still frowning from its bastions. But the rule of the Dons in Djerba came to a bloody end in 1560, when a Turkish squadron under Piali Pasha and the corsair Dragut annihilated the Spanish fleet and took the Spanish fort, along with five thousand prisoners. They were massacred to the last man, and with their bones was raised a great mound, twenty feet in height, Skull Fort, it was called, which stood nigh the beach until the middle of the last century, when it was pulled down at the instance of the Christian community and the bones given decent interment in the Catholic cemetery.

The single inn boasted by Houmt-Souk is quite impossible, but we were befriended by fortune in the persons of the controleur civil and his charming wife, who took compassion on us and invited us to stay at the residency. After dinner the caïd, who is the head of the Moslem community, the mayor, the doctor, and a few others dropped in for bridge, followed by music and dancing. The caïd, a swarthy, portly, black-mustached Arab in fez, dinner-coat, scarlet sash, and baggy Turkish trousers, was a most picturesque figure, somewhat reminiscent of one of the characters in Anthony Hope’s “Phroso.” He had been to Paris, could converse entertainingly on many subjects, and played a brilliant game of bridge, as I discovered when he bid six spades against my five no trumps—and made it.

I had not forgotten that we had come to Djerba because of its renown as the home of the Lotophagi, and I had determined to do a little lotus-eating myself, provided, of course, I could get some lotus. To leave Djerba without tasting its lotus would be equivalent, it seemed to me, to visiting Astrakhan without trying its caviar or Mocha without sampling its coffee. But getting the lotus was not so simple a matter as I had assumed. Neither the douanier at El Kantara nor the man who drove the car nor the landlady of the inn had so much as heard of it. The controleur ventured the opinion that the lotus described by Homer was nothing more or less than the date, which here grows in great profusion, and cited several authorities in support of his contention. The doctor reminded us that the lotus of the Egyptians was a variety of water-lily, and that there were no water-lilies in Djerba for the excellent reason that there was no water in which to grow them. But the caïd maintained that the ancients had reference to a prickly shrub, indigenous to the island, known to botanists as Zizyphus Lotus, but locally as jujubier, from whose sweet-tasting fruit the natives have been accustomed from time out of mind to ferment a highly intoxicating drink. He promised, moreover, to procure me a sample of it, and the following day he kept his word. A single draft of that fiery liquor did more than all the Homeric verse I ever read to give me an understanding of the strange actions attributed to Ulysses. No wonder that he forgot his friends in Hellas, that he lost all ambition to go back and build up ruined Troy, after having had a dozen gourds or so of that prehistoric white mule. All he wanted to do was to stretch himself in the shade of a palm and sleep it off.

Instead of returning to the Tunisian mainland as we had come, we chose another route, motoring to Adjim, on the southern coast of the island, and crossing thence by sailing-boat to Djorf. It was a holiday, and our fellow-passengers had evidently imbibed too freely of the juice of the lotus, for they were boisterous when we started, and when, half-way across, the skipper attempted to collect their fares, they became threatening and abusive. The argument culminated in a fair imitation of an old-time sea-battle—just such an episode, I imagine, as Ulysses and his companions would have loved—the shipmaster and his sailors beating the obstreperous passengers over the head with the oars, while the cargo of braying donkeys, bleating sheep, and cackling fowls contributed to the confusion. It was most entertaining for a time, for no one offered to molest us, but the boat was small and laden to the water’s edge, the wind was rising, and the sea, like the passengers, was beginning to get distinctly rough. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see Harvey and the faithful Cadillac awaiting us on the shore.