A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin Valley of California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic, turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants to the square mile—that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set squarely in the middle of the north African littoral; its capital almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal; and half the great ports of the Mediterranean not twelve hours' steam away, the strategical, political, and commercial position of Tripolitania is one of great importance. Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan oases. Under the Turkish régime the districts of Tripoli and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a _vali_, or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a _mutes-sarif_ directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely sand dunes blown in by the sea, such as may be seen elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast.