Perhaps the most dramatic chapter in the long history of the great building took place, however, shortly after the Arab invasion, when the Berbers, under the leadership of Koceila, rose in revolt against their Moslem conquerors. When, toward the close of the seventh century, Koceila fell in battle on the Medjerda, his place was taken by a remarkable woman, an African Joan of Arc, known to history as El Kahena, the Priestess, for her real name is unknown. Convinced that the Arabs were fighting only for booty, she met and defeated them in a great battle near Gabés and then proceeded to lay desolate the whole Sahel, razing the cities, destroying the water-systems, burning the forests and the orchards. But in 703, realizing that a further prosecution of the war was hopeless, she intrenched herself in the amphitheater of El Djem. Here she sustained a long siege, but, driven by starvation to lead a forlorn hope, she was killed in battle, her head being sent to the khalifa as a sign that Berber resistance to Arab rule was at an end. [Illustration: IN THE LAND OF POLYGAMY AND PASSION The heroine of Mrs. Hull’s novel ran away with an Arab sheikh. Would you care to run away with this one? But this beauty of the harem, though only her lustrous and provocative eyes show above her veil, is undeniably alluring] It is a little over two score miles from El Djem to Sfax, and, providing you have sufficient horse-power under the hood of your motor, you can cover the distance in as many minutes, for the road, like all of those which the French have constructed in Tunisia, must have been laid out by the simple method of laying a ruler down on the map and drawing perfectly straight lines from town to town. It utterly ignores such things as grades and contours, sometimes driving straight ahead for twenty kilometers at a stretch. There was no traffic to speak of, and, once clear of the town, Harvey pressed his foot hard upon the gas. The big car leaped forward like a thoroughbred at the raising of the starting-gate. As we topped the rises in the road its wheels seemed to leave the ground completely; it was like taking off in an airplane. With horn a-blare we went booming down into little valleys, sky-hooting across narrow bridges, and roaring up the opposite slopes. The country-side became a blur of green and brown. The white kilometer-posts seemed as close together as the beads of a necklace. The telegraph-poles slid past like the palings in a picket-fence. The needle on the dial of the speedometer rose to seventy ... eighty ... ninety ... one hundred kilometers.... Africa was slipping away beneath us at the rate of sixty miles an hour. CHAPTER VIII TROGLODYTES AND LOTUS-EATERS