Strange figures flit past us in endless panorama as the big car hurtles southward, its siren roaring a hoarse warning. A group of Berber women, their garments of home-dyed blue cut in graceful, classic lines, their foreheads tattooed with the cross which is a reminder that the natives of this country were once Christians. A wealthy Arab, wrapped in a burnous of palest blue, astride a handsome mule with gold-incrusted saddle-cloth and scarlet leather trappings. A party of desert nomads, lean, hawk-nosed men, their mouths and nostrils swathed in blue veils against the suffocating dust, rock by atop of camels, driving before them a herd of other, camels, destined for the Tunis market. Close to the road a peasant is tilling his fields with a yoke of snow-white oxen, his plow an iron-shod beam of wood, as in the days of Abraham. On yonder hillside a slim, dark-eyed Bedouin girl tends her flock of painted sheep. We roar through straggling, mud-walled hamlets, before whose coffee-houses lounge turbaned, white-robed sheikhs—bearded, patriarchal figures who might have stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament. Droves of produce-laden donkeys scatter suddenly at the sound of our horn, the cursing muleteers sometimes throwing the stubborn little animals bodily into the ditch to give us room. We pass a compact column of khaki-clad, dust-caked _tirailleurs_, rifles bristling on their shoulders, sweating beneath their packs, foot-slogging over Africa. Herds of foul-smelling goats kick up tornadoes of yellow dust as they stampede across the plain. We take the narrow bridges, spanning the deep gorges which the mountain streams have gashed as with a knife in the soft soil, like a frightened cat on the top of a back-yard fence. And away to the southward, in the far blue distance, towering above Tunisia, rise the wild crags of the Djebel Zaghouan. For hour after hour we traverse waterless and treeless wastes, their yellow-brown expanses broken here and there by patches of bright green where peasant farmers are striving to wring a meager living from the arid soil. The hills which fringe the horizon have been stripped of their forest clothing by fire and wanton destruction, and now they rise, naked and grim, against the hot blue sky. It is hard to conjure up a picture of those golden days when to Horace an African farm was a synonym for boundless fertility, luxury, and wealth; or to accept the assertions of the early chroniclers that, before the Arabs laid the country bare, one could ride from Tripoli to the Atlantic with trees to shade him all the way.