We could now for the first time perceive some villages amongst the palm groves on either side of the half-dried water-course, called by courtesy the river Sel or the river Gabes. The name Gabes seems rather to denominate the whole neighbourhood than any particular locality. The little district of Gabes is as it were the connecting link between the Great Sahara and the Mediterranean, and is really only separated from the desert by a range of low sandy hills, and a series of chotts or marsh-lakes, more than a hundred miles in length, and generally known as the Sebkas Fejej, El Djerid, and Gharsa. Gabes itself is nothing more than an oasis or cluster of oases, through which the stream Sel or Gabes finds its way sluggishly across the plain to the sea beyond. As the Tacape (hence Cabes or Gabes) of the Phœnicians, and afterwards of the Romans, this place was the emporium of one of the richest provinces of Northern Africa. The sands of the Oued Sel have long since buried Tacape out of sight, and the modern Gabes was entirely unknown to fame, when in 1874, M. Roudaire gave it an unexpected celebrity as the Port Said of the projected inland sea, which was to be formed by the junction of the Tunisian marsh-lakes with the waters of the Mediterranean. A year later, an Italian expedition under the Marquis O. Antinori pronounced against the feasibility of M. Roudaire’s scheme, and the scientific world seems to have accepted this verdict. Gabes was again almost forgotten, when, as I have described in a former chapter, it became one of the centres of the Arab rising in July 1881, and was finally occupied, after the merest show of resistance, by the French troops. A French garrison has remained there ever since, under the shelter of the warehouses of an English firm, and intrenched behind a bulwark of iron-bound bales of esparto fibre. After the capture of Kairwán a march on Gabes was resolved on, with a view, if possible, of surrounding the Arabs, or of at any rate showing them enough pomp of war to convince them, that any further resistance to the French Protectorate was a useless kicking against the pricks. It was to this end that General Logerot set out from Kairwán on the 12th November, in company with Generals Sabatier and Saint-Jean, at the head of a force 6200 strong and with a large convoy of provisions.