Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian _fellaheen_ were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It may well be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiastically declare, that Tripolitania constitutes a “New Italy” lying at the very ports of old Italy, but it is going to take many, many millions of lire and much hard work to make it worth the having. To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the East, a visit to the town of Tripoli is more interesting than enjoyable. Both its harbour and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no one ever visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. The harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if anything, than that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I know of which deserves to be classed with the Albergo Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to the native jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuccoed houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked Moslem women flit like ghosts, and vaulted, trellis-roofed bazaars where traders of two-score nationalities haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter the while they and their wares and the passing camels smell to heaven. Scattered here and there among the shops are native bakeries, in the reeking interiors of which, after your eyes become accustomed to the darkness, you can discern patient camels plodding round and round and round, grinding the grain in true Eastern fashion between the upper and the nether millstones.