Kairwán is built in the centre of a wide-stretching sandy plain, fringed on three sides by mountains, and towards the west by a low range of hills which separates it from the sea-coast. This plain is traversed on the same side by two streams, dry in summer, but strong enough in winter to surround the city with a marsh. Excepting scanty tufts of esparto grass, no sort of verdure is to be seen in any direction. It was in such a spot as this that about the year A.D. 675 (A.H. 55), the Emir Okhbah Ben Nafi Ben Abdullah Ben Kaïs el Fahri laid the foundation of the Holy City of North Africa. For a thousand years, as far as can be ascertained, no Christian ever visited it. Since then a few travellers have been at intervals allowed to enter it on sufferance, the local authorities being entitled to reject the Bey’s order if so disposed. When once admitted, visitors were carefully allowed to see as little as possible. An entrance to any building was of course out of the question, and the traveller had to be generally contented with a rapid passage through the most unfrequented streets under a strong escort; and finding a prolonged stay useless, he generally seems to have taken his departure as speedily as possible. Dr. Shaw accordingly only devotes two pages of his book to his stay at Kairwán in 1730. He identifies it, however, on insufficient grounds, with the Roman Vicus Augusti, and says it contained 500 mosques. Sir Grenville Temple, just one century later, journeyed “to the present hotbed of all the bigotry of Muhammedanism in Africa.” He was, nevertheless, able to tell very little about it beyond the names of its gates, for his “promenade through the town was managed with the greatest mystery;” and after rejecting a proposal of the Caid to take a walk in the dark, he was finally allowed to parade the streets, “observing a most dignified silence and a steady solemn pace.” When the Marquis of Waterford entered Kairwán ten years afterwards, a riot ensued, in which he very nearly lost his life from a well-directed brickbat. Dr. Davis added nothing whatever to the information given by Shaw and Temple. In 1861, Monsieur Victor Guérin devoted three sultry days in August to an attempt to explore the mysteries of Kairwán. He remarks, that “although Tunis has become for centuries the political metropolis of the Regency, Kairwán has always held in the minds of the masses of its population the position of its religious capital. Founded by the conqueror Okhbah at the time of the invasion of North Africa by the Arabs, it has preserved on account of its origin a _prestige_ which no other place in the Regency even attempts to dispute. It is _the_ Holy City _par excellence_, the capital of a belief, the metropolis where the Crescent rules with undisputed sway. There the _muezzin_, who calls the faithful to prayer from its many minarets, has never yet seen the symbol of a creed which knows not Muhammed or a rival sanctuary. There, too,