The white city which the Carthaginians built on the northern shores of the Gulf of Gabés was called Taparura by the Romans, but its Arab conquerors, finding that the _fakous_ (cucumber) grew there in great abundance, changed its name to Sfax. It may strike a European as somewhat curious to name a large and flourishing city after a vegetable, but that is because the European fails to realize what a gift from heaven a cool and juicy cucumber is to a parched and dusty land. In Mesopotamia cucumbers are sold everywhere and munched like apples, while in the desert they are considered a rare luxury, being regarded by the Arabs very much as we regard hothouse grapes and alligator-pears. Indeed, I have always maintained that, when I was captured by the Bedouins on the Upper Euphrates in 1920, it was the basket of cucumbers I presented to the sheikh which effected my release. Though named for a vegetable, Sfax does not vegetate. On the contrary, it is one of the most up-and-doing places in Tunisia, its eighty thousand inhabitants, of whom six thousand are Europeans, driving a prosperous trade in fruit, cattle, olive-oil, wool, and sponges. The Arab town, surrounded by a crenelated wall and dominated by the lofty tower of an ancient mosque, is noisy, busy, and dirty; but the European quarter is characterized by broad, scrupulously clean streets, a spacious tree-planted square, and new and handsome public buildings, including a really fine _hôtel de ville_ and a municipal theater, all built, appropriately enough, in the modified Moorish style of architecture which the French have used so successfully throughout North Africa. The people of Sfax are as justly proud of their water-system as are the inhabitants of Poland Springs. In addition to two enormous reservoirs or _fesquias_, owned by the municipality and supplied with water from the wells of Sidi Salah, ten miles away, there is, just outside the town, a large walled inclosure containing five or six hundred bottle-shaped reservoirs called _nasrias_, given by wealthy Arabs to the town. These cisterns are maintained by the municipality, and the water is supplied to those who prefer it to that from Sidi Salah. Sfax is the most important olive-growing center in Tunisia, for the beylical government has wisely encouraged the industry by liberal concessions, and it is estimated that there are upward of a million and a half olive-trees in bearing on the Bokaat-el-Beida plateau. What with its countless olive-groves and oil-presses, its almond-orchards, cucumber-gardens, henna-plantations, soap-factories, and sponge-fisheries, this remote African city plays a not unimportant part in supplying toilet accessories to the bath-rooms and beauty-parlors of the world. Its name might appropriately be changed to Cosmétiqueville. [Illustration: ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING RUINS IN THE WORLD