It is curious to note how specially designed was this coast, and especially its north-eastern promontories, for the first landing-place of Asiatics upon our shores. The recess which is marked upon the map with an =X= and which is now called the Gulf of Tunis was designed in every way to arrest these merchants and to afford them opportunities for their future dominion. [Illustration: =A= Phœnicia =B= Berenice =C= Cyrene =L= Leptis =S= Syrtis ] They had sounded along the littoral of the desert: they were acquainted with the harbours which led them westward along the Libyan beach and with the little territories which were besieged all round by the sand and drew their life from the sea: where later were to rise Cyrene and Berenice and Leptis. [Sidenote: The Bay of Carthage] They had seen the mirage all along that hot coast, and bare sandhills shimmering above shallow roadsteads: they had felt round the lesser Syrtis for water and a landing-place and had found none, when the shore-line turned abruptly east and north before them. It showed first the rank grass of a steppe; it grew more and more fertile as they advanced: at last, as they rounded the Hermæan promontory, they opened a bay, the mountainous arms of which broke the Levanter and whose aspect immediately invited them to beach their keels. [Sidenote: “Afrigya”] It stands at the narrow passage between the eastern and the western basins of the Mediterranean; and the western basin had not as yet been visited (it would seem) by men capable of developing its wealth. This bay upon which the Tyrians landed was sheltered and deep: there was, as in their own country, a belt of fertile soil between the shore and the mountains; the largest river of Barbary was to hand. Their first settlements, of which Utica, near Porto Farina, was perhaps the earliest, began the new expansion of the Phœnician people. They called the shore their “Afrigya”—that is, their “colony.” The word took root and remained. It was in this way that Asia, much older than we are, much more wily, not so brave, came in as a merchant and crept along till she found, and landed on, the Maghreb, where it stands out across the entry to the western seas. [Sidenote: Carthage] When these first African cities had been founded for some centuries, there was built on the same gulf and at its head—perhaps as a depôt for Utica, more probably as a refuge for Tyrian exiles—a city called “The New Town”: it is of this title, whose Semitic form must have resembled some such sound as “Karthadtha,” that the Greeks made Carchedon and the Latins Carthago, and it was from this centre that there arose and was maintained for seven hundred years over the Western Mediterranean an Oriental influence which was always paramount and threatened at certain moments to become universal and permanent.