Djerba has a large and prosperous Jewish population, Hara Srira, a little town in the center of the island, having been a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews for untold centuries. In the middle of the town is the synagogue, a very ancient building, its interior being most curiously decorated in marbles of various colors, crude but interesting tiles, and carved and painted wood. The chief rabbi, a white-bearded patriarch in flowing robes who might have posed for a portrait of Moses, met us at the door and conducted us through the semi-darkness of the nave to a sort of sacristy at the back of the high altar, where he proudly displayed the ancient manuscripts and massive silver plate which are the synagogue’s chief treasures. He showed me one splendid volume, a copy of the Talmud, I believe, its cover studded with semiprecious stones, which had been in this same synagogue for close on fifteen hundred years; others of the sacred manuscripts were engrossed on long rolls of vellum which were contained in cylindrical cases of silver, curiously chased and wrought. Across the street from the synagogue is the pilgrims’ house, a kind of religious hostelry, like those common in medieval Europe, containing hundreds of small rooms, not much more than cells, opening on a spacious inner court. Here, packed in like sardines, a dozen or more to a room, are lodged the thousands of pilgrims who, during the season of the pilgrimage, flock to Djerba not only from Tunisia and Tripolitania but from all of the Mediterranean countries. I once had the unforgettable experience of crossing the Mediterranean on a ship loaded with Russian pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, so I had no difficulty in imagining what the hostel at Hara Srira must be like—and smell like!—when, in the heat of an African summer, it is packed to the doors with the pious but unwashed. Houmt-Souk, the island capital, is a charming, restful little town with fine, broad streets, white houses embowered in flowers, and a _jardin public_ where a French horticultural expert does interesting things with shrubs and trees. On the beach, not far away, stands an old fort, a relic of the Spanish power, built some two hundred years before Columbus sailed westward out of Palos, with carronades still frowning from its bastions. But the rule of the Dons in Djerba came to a bloody end in 1560, when a Turkish squadron under Piali Pasha and the corsair Dragut annihilated the Spanish fleet and took the Spanish fort, along with five thousand prisoners. They were massacred to the last man, and with their bones was raised a great mound, twenty feet in height, Skull Fort, it was called, which stood nigh the beach until the middle of the last century, when it was pulled down at the instance of the Christian community and the bones given decent interment in the Catholic cemetery.