The Matmata region consists of an isolated, winding, highly mountainous ridge, with numerous rocky spurs, upward of a hundred and twenty-five miles in length. Commencing a score of miles or so to the south of Gabés, it winds southward and eastward across the desert like an enormous snake. On the backbone of this ridge, a quarter of a mile above sea-level, is a vast upland plain completely hemmed in by mountain peaks. Here, in a region of appalling loneliness and desolation, cut off from the outer world by leagues of mountain land and desert, is the home of the Troglodytes, among the strangest of the strange peoples who inhabit this earth. Provided your car is powerful enough to negotiate the precipitous ascents, and you are prepared to sacrifice its tires and springs, the Troglodyte capital, Bled Kebira, can be reached from Gabés in a long and exceedingly arduous half-day. But this means getting started at the crack of dawn. Until the foot of the mountains is reached the going is good enough, the road zigzagging in long salients across a dusty russet plain. An hour or so of rapid traveling amid clouds of suffocating dust, and then, reaching the foot-hills, the ascent begins. As the car pants upward, the terrain steadily becomes more stoney and broken, the country-side more desolate and forbidding. One moment the tires are gashed by beds of knife-sharp flints; the next they sink deep into patches of yellow sand. The way is not only steep and rough but very narrow, so narrow in places that there is scarcely room between the outer wheels and the edge of the sheer precipice for a starved cat to pass. Barring occasional patches of barley or small groves of discouraged-looking olive-trees, there is no vegetation, and the mountain slopes are as barren as the walls of the Grand Cañon. No people, no houses, no animals, unless we except a few stray goats, are to be seen. Solitude and desolation reign supreme. [Illustration: MEDENINE, THE STRANGEST CITY IN THE WORLD The _rhorfa_ look like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete stacked in tiers. Windowless, and with doors no larger than those of dog-kennels, they are admirably suited for defence The doors of these primordial apartment-houses are reached by small stepping-stones projecting from the face of the building; note the keyholes beside the doors]