The single inn boasted by Houmt-Souk is quite impossible, but we were befriended by fortune in the persons of the _controleur civil_ and his charming wife, who took compassion on us and invited us to stay at the residency. After dinner the caïd, who is the head of the Moslem community, the mayor, the doctor, and a few others dropped in for bridge, followed by music and dancing. The caïd, a swarthy, portly, black-mustached Arab in fez, dinner-coat, scarlet sash, and baggy Turkish trousers, was a most picturesque figure, somewhat reminiscent of one of the characters in Anthony Hope’s “Phroso.” He had been to Paris, could converse entertainingly on many subjects, and played a brilliant game of bridge, as I discovered when he bid six spades against my five no trumps—and made it. I had not forgotten that we had come to Djerba because of its renown as the home of the Lotophagi, and I had determined to do a little lotus-eating myself, provided, of course, I could get some lotus. To leave Djerba without tasting its lotus would be equivalent, it seemed to me, to visiting Astrakhan without trying its caviar or Mocha without sampling its coffee. But getting the lotus was not so simple a matter as I had assumed. Neither the _douanier_ at El Kantara nor the man who drove the car nor the landlady of the inn had so much as heard of it. The _controleur_ ventured the opinion that the lotus described by Homer was nothing more or less than the date, which here grows in great profusion, and cited several authorities in support of his contention. The doctor reminded us that the lotus of the Egyptians was a variety of water-lily, and that there were no water-lilies in Djerba for the excellent reason that there was no water in which to grow them. But the caïd maintained that the ancients had reference to a prickly shrub, indigenous to the island, known to botanists as _Zizyphus Lotus_, but locally as jujubier, from whose sweet-tasting fruit the natives have been accustomed from time out of mind to ferment a highly intoxicating drink. He promised, moreover, to procure me a sample of it, and the following day he kept his word. A single draft of that fiery liquor did more than all the Homeric verse I ever read to give me an understanding of the strange actions attributed to Ulysses. No wonder that he forgot his friends in Hellas, that he lost all ambition to go back and build up ruined Troy, after having had a dozen gourds or so of that prehistoric white mule. All he wanted to do was to stretch himself in the shade of a palm and sleep it off. * * * * *