At Sousse, as elsewhere in French North Africa, the modern city, the European quarter, has sprung up outside the walls of the old town. And in no other African city that I know is the contrast thus presented so striking. _La ville française_, with its broad boulevards and double rows of shade-trees, its banks, consulates, hotels, churches, brasseries, cinemas, and ornate public buildings, its numerous little parks and its inevitable Grande Place, is just such a provincial town as may be found by the dozen in the south of France. But stroll through one of the ancient gateways which give access to the Arab city, and you step backward a thousand years, for crowded within the bastioned and crenelated ramparts is a tangle of tortuous lanes and dim bazaars lined by hole-in-the-wall shops (here not a figure of speech, for many of them are actually built in the wall itself), while, high above the noisy, noisome town, rise, slender, serene, and snowy, the minarets of the Great Mosque and the frowning battlements of the Kasbah. One of the most conspicuous buildings of the old town is the Ksar-er-Rabit, originally a Byzantine stronghold, but upon the Moslem conquest transformed into a _rabit_, one of the military outposts, half-monastery and half-fortress, established by the Arabs along the frontiers of their far-flung empire. These rabits were garrisoned by a sect of militant monks, somewhat akin to the Knights Templars, known as _Mirabits_, who were praying when they were not fighting, and from their name was derived the word _marabout_—a religious ascetic, a fakir, a holy man. * * * * * The traveler in Tunisia cannot but be impressed by the evidences which he sees on every hand of the enormous population and amazing prosperity of this region under the Romans. The whole country-side is strewn with reminders of this vanished civilization, for Byzacium, as the Romans called this region, supported a numerous agricultural population and was dotted with flourishing cities and towns. Everywhere rise the ruins of cities, buildings, aqueducts, and arches, monuments, monoliths, and heaps of sculptured stones. Yet, despite these indisputable proofs of a one-time wealth and greatness, it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to realize that dense forests once spread themselves over yonder naked hills, that great cities stood on their flanks, and that from these arid steppes came the grain which fed the mouths of Rome.