Arabs have a saying that Gafsa was founded by Nimrod's armour-bearer; but
a more reasonable legend, preserved by Orosius and others, attributes its
creation to Melkarth, the Libyan and Tyrian Hercules, hero of
colonization. He surrounded 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 of Carthage it became the retreat and
treasure-house of Numidian kings. Greeks, too, exercised a powerful
influence on the place, and all these civilized peoples had prepared Gafsa
to appreciate the beneficent rule of the Romans.

Then came Vandals and Byzantines, who gradually grew too weak to resist
the floods of plundering Arab nomads; the rich merchants fled, their
palaces 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 true Arabs, that actually forbade them to walk beyond the limits of the
Jebel Assalah--a couple of miles distant. So the French found them in
1881.

There are, however, a few decent houses, two-storied and spacious; in one
of them, I am told, lives the family of Monsieur Dufresnoy, to whom my
fellow traveller at Sbeitla gave me a card. He is absent at the Metlaoui
mines just now, and his wife and children in Paris.

The cleansing of the streets by prisoners does not extend to the native
houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original,
inconceivable squalor--squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago
ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native
secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of