The sun, a dazzling sphere of reddish gold, was sinking behind the Djebel Zaghouan when we left the Holy City by its eastern gate and took the road to Sousse. The multitude of towers and minarets and domes which proclaim afar the city’s sacred character rose, as though hewn from amethyst and coral, against the painted sky. To our ears, borne faintly on the night breeze, came the Angelus of Islam, the muezzin’s quavering call to evening prayer. * * * * * Though the regency of Tunisia barely exceeds in area the State of New York, it has an amazing variety of scenery, soil, and climate for so small a country. I can recall no other region where one can see so many of North Africa’s physiographical characteristics in so brief a time. In a journey no longer than from Albany to Buffalo, a journey which can be made quite comfortably by motor-car between dawn and dark of a single day, the traveler can see the sun rise out of the Mediterranean from the heights of Carthage; traverse a highly cultivated country-side checkered with prosperous farms and thriving gardens; plunge into great forests of cork and oak and pine; follow through leafy glens and rocky gorges the course of a river longer than the Hudson; climb a mountain range whose peaks tower for a mile into the blue; drop down upon treeless steppes carpeted with fields of grain; whirl through endless orchards of olive, fig, and orange; and dine on a desert oasis, amid a grove of date-palms, while the sun sinks behind the Saharan sand-dunes. [Illustration: THE MARABOUT IN THE DESERT A straggling, low, white building—the burial-place and shrine of some long-dead holy man—a mysterious green door, a plastered dome, a solitary palm-tree, the brooding desert all around, and the heavens aflame with the unforgettable glory of an African sunset] Tunisia may be divided into five districts, each having its distinctive topography, climate, and products. In the extreme north, in that little triangle formed by the Tunisian Atlas, the frontiers of Algeria, and the sea, is a mountainous, well-watered region with fertile, highly cultivated valleys and, on the slopes of the mountains, great forests of cork and pine. The northeastern corner of the regency, including the peninsula of Cape Bon, the country around Tunis, and the Carthaginian plain, has a soil and climate peculiarly adapted to the growing of citrus fruits—the land of the orange and the lemon. Extending from the Atlas southward to the fringes of the desert are the grain lands of Tunisia—a bleak, treeless, monotonous expanse of high plateaus and rolling steppes, normally arid but fertile under irrigation, known as the Tell. Lying to the east of the Tell, bordering the eastern coast of the regency from the Gulf of Hammamet to the Gulf of Gabés, is a slender strip of well-watered, highly fertile land, nowhere much over a dozen miles in width, called the Sahel. And far to the south, below both the Tell and the Sahel,