Unlike most of my preceding volumes, this book deals with countries which are comparatively near to home. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco—which we know collectively as Barbary—lie at the very door of Europe; their principal ports are scarcely more than overnight from Naples, Barcelona, and Marseilles; scores of tourist steamers drop anchor in their harbors every winter, and they are visited by increasing numbers of Americans each year. Yet it is a curious fact, and one difficult to explain, that the popular misconceptions regarding these easily accessible lands are even more glaring than those in respect to far remoter regions which the white man penetrates at every risk. The truth of the matter is that most Americans, and most Europeans too for that matter, think of Barbary in terms of the corsairs, the Garden of Allah, the dancing-girls of the Ouled-Naïl, the Foreign Legion, Raisuli and Perdicaris, the squalor and confusion of Europeanized Tangier, the Riff and Abd-el-Krim, the luxurious resort hotels of Algiers, the Street of the Perfume-Sellers in Tunis, Moroccan leather-work, camels, tiled gateways, the utterly impossible sheikhs described by Mrs. Hull and interpreted by Hollywood, and the sand-dunes so frequently pictured in the “National Geographic Magazine.” With our unfortunate propensity for generalizing, we have assumed that these high spots were typical of Barbary, thus forming a mental picture which is as fantastic as it is inaccurate. For example, we speak of the inhabitants of North Africa as Arabs, who in reality are only a minority, the bulk of the population being composed of Berbers, the earliest known possessors of the soil, who still hold the highlands which stretch from the borders of Egypt to the shores of the Atlantic, from the sands of the Mediterranean to those of the Sahara, that vast extent of territory to which we have given their name, Barbary. We think of the Berbers as crude and uncultured, as barbaric, bloodthirsty, and backward as were the American Indians. Yet before America was so much as heard of, they, not the Arabs or the Saracens, had raised at Granada and Seville those glorious buildings which are among the architectural triumphs of the world. Because of their sun-tanned skins, and recalling, perhaps, the old term “blackamoor,” we assume that the Berbers are a colored race and are astounded when we are told that they are of pure Caucasian stock, racially as white as ourselves. Because it is in Africa we take it for granted that Barbary swelters in a torrid climate, whereas it is a cold country with a hot sun. In Algeria the week after Easter I have seen snow several inches deep, and the mountains to the south of Marrákesh are topped with snow nearly the whole year round.