the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking 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 mysterious shapes and meanings, these
courtyards become grand; they assume an air of biblical desolation, as
though the curse of Heaven had fallen upon the life they once witnessed;
and even as you look into them, something stirs on the ground: it is an
Arab, sleeping uneasily in his burnous; he has felt, rather than heard,
your presence, and soon he unwinds his limbs and rises out of the dust,
like a sheeted ghost.

It is an uncanny gift of these folks to come before you when least
expected; to be ever-present, emerging, one might almost say, out of the
earth. Go to the wildest corner of this thinly populated land, and you may
be sure that there is an Arab, brooding among the rocks or in the sand,
within a few yards of you.

_The stones are there_. This is another feature which they have in common
with the beasts of the earth: never to pause before the memorials of their
own past. Goethe says that where men are silent, stones will speak. If
ever they spoke, it is among these crumbling, composite walls of Gafsa.

A Roman inscription of the age of Hadrian, which now forms the step of an
Arab house, will arrest your glance and turn your thoughts awhile in the
direction of this dim, 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 since the world began has there