Gabés, the Tacape of the Romans, is to France’s Saharan frontier what Fort Leavenworth was to our own frontier in its wild and woolly days. In the edge of the desert, close to the borders of Tripolitania, it is the most important military outpost in the South, a large garrison being maintained there to hold in check the lawless nomad tribes. The town itself is wholly without interest, merely a collection of mud houses set in a large oasis amid a forest of palms. But the Hôtel de l’Oasis, run by a stout and jovial Frenchwoman, was tolerably comfortable, and the cuisine was surprisingly good, considering the difficulties of obtaining supplies, provided one did not object to the use of goat’s milk and butter, whose rancid taste and revolting odor I myself detest. The officers and men of the garrison are saved from ennui by the constant drills and occasional punitive expeditions which form the life of frontier posts; they have their little _cercles_, where they hold occasional dances; twice weekly, in the dusty _jardin public_, the band of the _tirailleurs_ plays the latest pieces from Paris; and on the beach, about a mile away, a ramshackle pavilion and a string of unpainted shacks, called by courtesy _cabines des bains_, make a pathetic attempt to bring to the frontier the distractions of Dinard and Deauville; but I felt sorry for the handful of Frenchwomen who had accompanied their soldier husbands into exile and who were dragging out an inconceivably dreary and monotonous existence in this lonely spot. I have always maintained that, whether in Africa, India, or the Philippines, it is the women who are the real builders of empire. They spend their lives far from home and friends, often separated for years from their children, yet they serve their countries no less faithfully than the men, but, unlike the men, without the stimulus of recognition or reward. * * * * * Along with their other legends and superstitions, the ancients had a vague tradition of a curious, semi-mythical people, dwelling in an inaccessible region near the Syrtes, who made their homes in the bowels of the earth. They were said to live upon the flesh of snakes and lizards, to practise customs strange beyond belief, and to speak some outlandish language which Herodotus compared to the cry of a bat. As Africa was gradually opened up to civilization these fantastic tales were set down as unfounded myths and were accounted but examples of the folk-lore which accumulates about a mysterious and unknown land. But there the scientists were wrong. For when, in 1869, the first French columns penetrated the great mountain ranges to the southwest of Gabés in their initial attempts to conquer the Sahara, they found the Troglodytes of the ancient tales in the strange inhabitants of the Matmata Plateau.