We went out into the soft African night. As we strode northward through the Rue Berthe toward the European quarter we could hear behind us the clash of cymbals and the wail of reeds from the cafés where the Ouled-Naïl were dancing, the throbbing of the negro drums. But from the desert a clean and gentle wind was blowing, and the stars shone very bright. CHAPTER XIV FRONTIERS OF ROME Some one has not inaptly compared the Barbary States—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—to an overseas cap perched jauntily on the bald head of Africa. This picturesque simile has, moreover, some scientific justification, for geological authorities have frequently advanced the interesting theory that when the world was young this region, which has a compacted and clearly defined physical system of its own, was not a part of Africa at all, but, cut off from that continent by an ocean which covered what we now know as the Sahara, formed a great peninsula attached to Europe by the isthmus which at one time unquestionably spanned the present Straits of Gibraltar. Not being a geologist, I am incompetent to pass an opinion on this theory, but its plausibility must be apparent to any one familiar with the topography of North Africa. Barbary—I am here employing the term to designate the region lying between the Mediterranean and the main range of the Atlas—may be divided into two zones, wholly dissimilar from each other in character. Skirting the coast is a broad band of mountainous but, on the whole, fertile country, sprinkled with populous cities, watered by numerous streams, rich in forests and valleys, known as the Tell—the Arabic for “hill.” Behind the Tell, stretching southward to the barrier formed by the Great Atlas, is a region of lofty table-lands, or steppes, having an average elevation of three thousand feet, bleak and desolate in appearance, with a climate very different from the sunny warmth of the littoral, but providing fine grazing lands for cattle and bountiful crops of esparto grass and grain. Beyond the Atlas there occurs a still more sudden and startling change, as, descending its steep southern slopes, we come out upon the Sahara.