THE real Barbary coast of the romantic days of the corsairs was the whole North African littoral. Here the pirates and corsairs had their lairs, their inlet harbours known only to themselves and their confrÈres, who as often pillaged and murdered among themselves as they did among strangers.

To-day all this is changed. It was the government of the United States and Decatur, as much as any other outside power, who drove the Barbary pirates from the seas.

Under the reign of Louis XIV Duquesne was charged to suppress the piracies of the Tripolitan coasts. The celebrated admiral—it was he who also gave the original name to the site of the present city of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela—got down to business once the orders were given, sighted eight of the Barbary feluccas and gave them chase. They took refuge in the Sultan’s own port of Chio, but, with the French close on their heels, they were captured forthwith, and the Pacha of Tripoli was forced without more ado to make a treaty containing many onerous conditions. The corsairs gave back a ship which they had taken, and all the French who had fallen prisoners in their hands and who were virtually held in slavery. The admirals of those days had a way of doing things.

After the French came the English. Blake, the British admiral, who never trod the deck of a vessel until he was fifty, did his part to sweep these fierce Mediterranean pirates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli from the seas. The United States Navy did the rest. This is history; let those who are further interested look it up.

The North African coast-line from Tunis to Tangier has the aspect of much of the rest of the Mediterranean littoral, but that strip sweeping around from Cap Carthage to Tripoli in Barbary, the shores of the great Tripolitan gulf, may still furnish the setting for as fierce a piratical tale as can be conceived,—only the pirates are wanting.

This low-lying ground south of Tunis is not a tourist-beaten ground; it is almost unknown and unexplored to the majority of winter travellers, who include only Algiers, Biskra, and Tunis in their African itinerary.

South from Tunis, the first place of importance is Hammamet, an embryotic watering-place for the Tunisians, called by the natives “the city of pigeons.”

This up-and-coming station on the route which binds “Numidia” with “Africa” is possessed of a remarkable source of fresh-water supply. The Romans in ancient times exploited this same source, and built a monumental arcade on the site. All vestiges of this architectural work have however disappeared.

At Nabeul, a few kilometres away, one gets a curious glimpse of native life interspersed with that of the Jews. Mosques, souks, and synagogues give an Oriental blend as lively in colouring and variety as will satisfy the most insistent. Nabeul’s industry consists chiefly in the fabrication of pottery,—a fragile, crude, but lovely pottery, which travellers carry afar, and which is the marvel of all who contemplate it. The enterprise is of French origin, but the labour which produces these quaint jugs, vases, and platters (which are not dear in price) is purely native. The potter’s thumb marks are over all. The pieces have not been rubbed and burnished down, and accordingly the collector knows he has got the real thing, and not a German or Belgian clay-thrower’s imitation.

Nabeul was the ancient Neapolis, which was destroyed by the Romans at the same time that Carthage came under the domination of Augustus.

South again from Nabeul, by road or rail, for the railroad still continues another hundred kilometres, and one is at Sousse. Change cars for Kairouan, the Holy City of Tunisia!

Sousse is an important and still growing port with as mixed a population as one will see in any Mediterranean town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The French number perhaps twelve hundred, the Italians three or four thousand, and the Maltese as many as the French. The rest are Arabs; you might call them seafaring Arabs rather than desert Arabs, for they are as often on the sea as off it.

The souks of Sousse are famous. There is no longer a great Berber or Byzantine city closed in with walls with a gate on each cardinal face; all this has disappeared in the march of progress; but the Arab town, everywhere in Algeria and Tunisia, is a feature of the life of the times, even though it has been encroached upon by European civilization. The souks, or markets, are here more bizarre and further removed from our twentieth-century ideas of how business is, and should be, done than in any other mixed European-Mussulman centre of population.

In the Souk des Herbages are sold roots and herbs of all sorts, pimento peppers, henna, garance, dried peas, and other vegetables. The Souk des Arabes holds the rug and carpet sellers, the armourers, the weavers of the cloth of the burnous, tailors, etc. In the Souk des Juifs, a dark, ill-smelling, tiny nest of narrow corridors, are found the jewelry makers and the broiderers.

This and more of the same kind is Sousse. In addition there are the brilliant variegated sails of the Italian and Maltese fishing-boats, the dhows of the Arabs, and all the miscellaneous riffraff which associates itself mysteriously with a great seaport. Sousse is an artist’s paradise, and its hotels are excellent,—if one cares for sea food and eternal mutton and lamb.

The Kasba of Sousse sits high on the hillside overlooking the Arab town and the souks. A long swing around the boulevards brings one to the same culminating point.

A Phoenician acropolis stood here before the eleventh century, and the remains of a pagan temple to-day bear witness to the strong contrast of the manners of yesterday and to-day. The great signal-tower of the citadel is a reconstruction of a pharo called Khalef-el-Feta, which stood here in 1068. Whatever may have been the value of this fortification in days gone by, it looks defective enough to-day with its hybrid mass of nondescript structures. At all times, and from all points of view, it is imposing and spectacular, and is the dominant note of every landscape round about. Its angularities are not beautiful, nor even solid-looking, and the whole thing is stagy; but for all that it is imposing and above all grim and suggestive of unspeakable Turkish atrocities that may have been carried on in its immediate neighbourhood.

Monastir is a near neighbour of Sousse, twenty odd kilometres away, over as fine a roadway as one may see anywhere. Automobilists take notice! The HÔtel de Paris at Monastir has a “sight” in its dining-hall, which alone is worth coming to see, aside from the excellent breakfast which you get for fifty sous. This apartment was formerly the great reception-hall of the Arab governors of the province, and as such becomes at once an historic shrine and a novelty.

Not a town in Algeria or Tunisia has so quaint a vista as that looking down Monastir’s “Grande Rue.” It’s not very ancient, nor squalidly picturesque, but somehow it is characteristically quaint. And it “composes” wonderfully well, for either the artist’s canvas or the kodaker’s film. Sousse and Monastir should be omitted from no artist’s itinerary which is supposed to include unspoiled sketching grounds.

Kairouan, the Mohammedan Holy City of Tunisia, lies sixty kilometres southwest from Sousse.

Kairouan dates only from the Mussulman conquest, having been founded by the propagator of Islam in Africa, Okba-ben-Nafi (50 Heg. 671 A.D.). Kairouan became the capital of what is now Tunisia in the ninth century, and Tunis itself was its servitor. Up to this day Kairouan has guarded its religious supremacy as the Holy City of the Eastern Moghreb, and accordingly is a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of all North Africa.

The French occupied the city in 1881 without resistance on the part of the inhabitants. And to-day it is a live, wide-awake important centre of affairs, besides being a Mohammedan shrine of the very first rank.

The native city is entirely free from French innovations and remains almost as it was centuries ago. The mosques and the native city are all-in-all for the stranger within the gates, particularly the mosques, for here, of all places in Tunisia, their doors are opened to the “dogs of infidels” of overseas. But you must remove your shoes as you enter, or put on babouches over your “demi-Americain” boots, which you bought in Marseilles before leaving France (poor things, by the way; one suspects they were made in England, not in America at all).

Of first importance are the mosques of Sidi-Okba, the “Grande MosquÉe;” and of Sidi-Sahab, the “MosquÉe du Barbier.” The Djama Sidi-Okba, or “Grande MosquÉe,” is a grandly imposing structure with a massive square minaret of the regulation Tunisian variety. Within it is of the classic type, with seventeen aisles and eight great thoroughfares crossing at right angles. It is a cosmopolitan edifice in all its parts, having been variously rebuilt and added to with the march of time, the earliest constructive details being of the third century of the Hegira, the ninth of our era.

The minbar, or pulpit, the faÏences, the ceilings and the best of Hispano-Arabic details are here all of a superlative luxuriance and mystery. The “MosquÉe du Barbier” (“Sidi-Sahab”) is built over the sepulchre of one of the companions of the Prophet himself. Legend says that he always carried with him three hairs of the beard of the Prophet. These were buried with him, of course, but whether that was his sole recommendation for immortality the writer does not know. Less imposing than

the “Grande MosquÉe,” this latter is quite as elaborately beautiful in all its parts. The carved wooden ceiling, the rugs and carpets of rare weaves, the stuccos and the faÏences, are all very effective and seemingly genuine, though here and there (as in the tomb of Sidi-Sahab) one sees the hand of the Renaissance Italian workman instead of that of the Moor.

Kairouan has a special variety of cafÉs chantants and cafÉs dansants, which is much more the genuine thing than those at Biskra or Tunis.

Still south from Tunis, further south even than Sousse, Kairouan, and Sfax, lies a wonderful, undeveloped and little known country of oases and chotts, the latter being great expanses of marshy land sometime doubtless arms of the sea itself. The oases of GabÈs and Tozeur are called the pays des dattes, for here flourish the finest date-palms known to the botanical world; while the oases themselves take rank as the most populous and beautiful of all those of the great African desert.

The chotts are great depressions in the soil and abound in the region lying between Touggourt and Biskra in Algeria, and GabÈs in Tunisia. The chotts are undoubtedly dried-out beds of some long disappeared river, lake or bay, and their crystallized surfaces are to-day veritable death-traps to the stranger who wanders away from the beaten caravan tracks which cross them.

The chotts are very ancient, and an account of a caravan which was lost in one of them was published by a Spanish historian of the ninth century. Herodotus, too, makes mention of a Lake Triton, probably the Chott-Nefzaoua of to-day, which communicated with the Syrte, now the Gulf of GabÈs.

The “Sud-Tunisien,” as all this vast region is known, is all but an unknown land to the tourist. Sousse and Sfax are populous, busy maritime cities, largely Europeanized, but still retaining an imprint quite their own. Kairouan, just westward from Sousse, where the railway ends, is the chief tourist shrine of Tunis outside Tunis itself and Carthage. But beyond, except for an occasional stranger who would hunt the gazelle, the moufflon, or the wild boar, none ever penetrate, save those who are engaged in the development of the country, and the military, who are everywhere.

Between Sousse and Sfax is El Djem, the Thysdrus of the time of CÆsar, and afterwards one of the richest cities of North Africa. Gordian, the proconsul, was proclaimed emperor of the colony in 238 A.D., and the present grand old ruin of an amphitheatre, a great oval like the Colosseum at Rome, served many times as a fortification against Berber and Vandal hordes, besides performing its conventional functions. El Djem and its marvellous arena, nearly five hundred feet in length and four hundred in width, is one of the surprises of the Tunisian itinerary.

From Sfax, which is linked with Sousse by a service of public automobiles, another apologetic loose end of railway takes birth and runs west to Gafsa, a military post of importance and not much else; a favourite spot for the French army board to exile refractory soldiers. They leave them here to broil under a summer sun and work at road-making in the heat of the day. After that they are less refractory, if indeed they are not dead of the fever.