Even when a Medenine householder returns home completely soused, to put it inelegantly, he has no difficulty in finding his keyhole, which is so large that he could scarcely miss it. But to find the stairs, and, once they are found, to avoid falling down them, is quite another matter, for reaching the door of one of these troglodyte apartments is as hazardous a performance as entering an upper-story window of an American hotel by means of a fireman’s scaling-ladder. Occasionally, but not often, these lofty dwellings are reached by flights of rude stone stairs, extremely steep and narrow and perilously slippery in wet weather. But in most cases the inhabitants have to climb up and down by means of small stones, barely large enough to afford a foothold, which project a few inches from the face of the house. A monkey would experience no difficulty whatsoever in gaining the top floor of one of these singular houses, and neither would an experienced mountain-climber provided he was accustomed to rock-work, but it required all my strength and agility to reach a fifth-floor doorway, and even then I had several narrow escapes from very nasty falls. How a troglodyte who has imbibed over-freely of palm wine manages to get home at all is a mystery, for some of the doors are fifty feet above the ground, and, if his foot slipped, there would be “more work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.” What, you may ask, is the _raison d’être_ of these extraordinary habitations? The best reason in the world—self-protection. For it has always been a savage, untamed region, here along the Libyan border, and life was one desperate, unending struggle for existence until the white helmets came. There was, it is to be presumed, a semblance of law and order under the stern rule of Rome, but when the Roman power collapsed the land was overrun by the Vandals, and after them by the Arabs, and in the wake of Arabs came veiled raiders from the desert and loot-hungry corsairs from the coast. Hence it was essential that the inhabitants devise a form of dwelling which could be successfully defended against marauders, no matter how numerous or how well armed. And the _rhorfa_ answered the purpose admirably, for, being built of masonry, they cannot be burned down; the walls are of such thickness as to be proof against anything short of shell-fire; they are so arranged in squares and rows that a withering cross-fire can be brought to bear upon assailants; and they are easy to defend, for the ground floors are used only as granaries and storehouses, and the householder, living high above the ground, has only to shoot down through his keyhole, or to batter out the brains of the first enemy who attempts to enter, in the unlikely event that the stout door should be broken in.