Medenine lies in a shallow depression in the desert, and you come upon it quite unexpectedly as you top a rise in the yellow plain. A curiously uncanny sensation is produced by the first sight of this most amazing city. You rub your eyes and wonder if you are not the victim of a hallucination. You feel that you are very near to the beginning of things. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was transported to the Age of Chivalry. But here you are back in the Age of Stone. The town consists of some two thousand dwellings called _rhorfa_, which rise from the ground as abruptly as the chimney of a factory. These dwellings are not detached, as in most communities, but are closely packed together in rows and squares. It is next to impossible to find words which will adequately describe them, for, as human habitations, they are absolutely unique. Seen from a distance, they look as much as anything else like enormous sewer-pipes of grayish concrete, ten feet in diameter, a few ranged in rows on the ground, but most of them stacked in tiers which in some cases rise to a height of half a hundred feet. Though there is no intercommunication, they are built side by side, their walls touching, so that a row of them looks like a series of inverted U’s—⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂⋂ But superimposed on the first row is a second, and on the second row a third, some of those primordial apartment-houses rising to a height of five, and, in a few cases, six stories, with a hundred or more rooms. Perhaps they might best be compared to the tiers of burial vaults which are to be seen in certain Italian _campi-santi_ or, better still, to the cells of a honeycomb.