and water-less, with gaunt brown hills receding into the background; by
midday, when Sbeitla was reached, it was blowing a hurricane. I had hoped
to wander, for half an hour or so, among the ruins of this old city of
Suffetula, but the cold, apart from their distance from the station,
rendered this impossible; in order to reach the shed where luncheon was
served, we were obliged to crawl backwards, crab-wise, to protect our
faces from a storm which raised pebbles, the size of respectable peas,
from the ground, and scattered them in a hail about us. I despair of
giving any idea of that glacial blast: it was as if one stood, deprived of
clothing, of skin and flesh--a jabbering anatomy--upon some drear
Caucasian pinnacle. And I thought upon the gentle rains of London, from
which I had fled to these sunny regions, I remembered the fogs, moist and
warm and caressing: greatly is the English winter maligned! Seeing that
this part of Tunisia is covered with the forsaken cities of the Romans who
were absurdly sensitive in the matter of heat and cold, one is driven to
the conclusion that the climate must indeed have changed since their day.

And my fellow-traveller, who had slept throughout the morning (we were the
only two Europeans in the train), told me that this weather was nothing
out of the common; that at this season it blew in such fashion for weeks
on end; Sbeitla, to be sure, lay at a high point of the line, but the cold
was no better at the present terminus, Henchir Souatir, whither he was
bound on some business connected with the big phosphate company. On such
occasions the natives barricade their doors and cower within over a
warming-pan filled with the glowing embers of desert shrubs; as for
Europeans--a dog's life, he said; in winter we are shrivelled to mummies,
in summer roasted alive.

I spoke of Feriana, and my projected evening ride across a few miles of
desert.