Fountains In The Sand Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia

urious than the town itself; a place of some five thousand inhabitants, about a thousand of

Gafsa; the structures would melt away, like that triple wall of defence, erected in medieval times, of which not a vestige remains. Yet the dirt is not as remarkable as in many Eastern places, for every morning a band of minor offenders is marched out of prison by an overseer to sweep the streets. Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if possible, the roadway; it is

on: A Stree

hence they came or who made them? "The stones are there," they will tell you. Yet the

urrounded it with a wall pierced by a hundred gates, whence its presumable name, Hecatompylos, the city of a hundred gates. The Egyptians ruled it; then the Phoenicians, who called it Kafaz-the walled; and after the destruction

es fell to ruins; the town became a collection of mud huts inhabited by poor cultivators who lived in terror of the neighbouring Hammama tribe of

old, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom my fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave

into vast, abandoned pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth of generations-there is hardly a level yard of ground-rags and dust and decay! Here they live, the poorer sort, and no wonder they have as little sense of home as the wild creatures of the waste. But at night, when the most villainous objects take on mysteriou

g, one might almost say, out of the earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and y

arth: never to pause before the memorials of their own past. Goethe says that where men are sile

, romantic figure. How little we really know of the Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the monuments that sprang up in his footsteps! Never sin

nity of the termid, which we may suppose to have lain near the centre of the old town. And where are the paving-stones? The painstaking John Leo says that the streets of Gafsa are "broad and paved, like

ooty among his soldiers: all this without the loss of a single man. The natives needed a lesson, and they got it; to this day the name of Marius is whispered among the black tents as that of some fabulous hero. But what interests me most is the style of Sallust himself. How ultra-modern

nd, by Guerin; they lie in the flanks of the Jebel Assalah, and are well worth a visi

s, the following sto

put them into bottles with spirits of wine-he was an amateur of bats. On the day of his departure

g me more bats-tirlils: comprenni?-from this c

the folks of Gafsa, who, after certain reservations a

h tourist's hotel in Tunis, followed by

e Englishman, "w

, Mon

How m

tles. Six hundred tirlils in each sack; ten sacks; six thousand tirli

ed glance over the sacks,

N: Hadrian's

id, "I'll give you

hich he had already disbursed for assistance in catching the tirlils; he had risked his life; there were the transport expenses, too: very heavy. He had travelled with many Englishmen and had always found t

uick! before I break your head. Take your damned tirlils

prudent fellow, walked backwards out of the

sh international lawyer, the affair was settled out of court