In Barbary

The wander-thirst is like the drug-habit. Once you acquire it you are done for. It will never let you rest. There is no mistaking its symptoms: a hatred of the prosaic, the rout...

Bizerta, the great naval base and fortress on the northern coast of Tunisia, is a French pistol aimed straight at the head of Italy—or perhaps it would be a closer simile to say...

The extraordinary success which has marked the rule of the French in North Africa is in large measure attributable to their policy of scrupulously refraining from encroachment o...

From the Porte de France, where Europe comes to an abrupt end and the Orient dramatically begins, the walls and roofs of Old Tunis rise like terraces, one above the other, to th...

Close on eight-and-twenty centuries ago (in 846 B.C. according to one historian) a young Phenician princess fled from her native country, Sidon, after abetting her brother in th...

Just as we make the mistake of studying geography with the aid of large-scale maps, so we are prone to use a magnifying-glass in the study of ancient history. We envision the cl...

It is a fortunate circumstance for foreigners of an inquiring turn of mind that the French occupation of Tunisia met with armed resistance from the fanatical inhabitants of Kair...

The white city which the Carthaginians built on the northern shores of the Gulf of Gabés was called Taparura by the Romans, but its Arab conquerors, finding that the _fakous_ (c...

To one who has been brought up in the belief that cleanliness is next to godliness, the most unpleasant feature of desert travel is the lack of facilities for bathing. You never...

The ring of colonies, regencies, protectorates, spheres of influence, military districts, and mandated territories which comprise France’s colonial empire on the continent of Af...

Tozeur, the ancient oasis town on the northern edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, is the jumping-off place for the desert; from here we were to plunge into the real Sahara. It was...

Linked to Biskra and civilization by the slender thread of steel which the French have thrown across some two hundred kilometers of dusty desert, Touggourt, the dark-green mass...

From a little triangle of green set in the middle of the Rue Berthe, the principal street of Biskra, rises in marble the commanding figure of a priest, a bearded, vigorous, eagl...

Some one has not inaptly compared the Barbary States—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—to an overseas cap perched jauntily on the bald head of Africa. This picturesque simile has, m...

“Travel,” Madame de Pompadour once remarked petulantly to her friend Louis XV, “is the saddest of all pleasures.” And, with two thousand miles of African desert and upland behin...

If you are of an imaginative and romantic turn of mind, if you have thought of Algiers as the Pirate City, the haunt of the Barbary rovers and the capital of the deys, rather th...

Bad news greeted us at Algiers. We were to change cars and drivers, so the officials of the company which had charge of our transportation informed us. Harvey, the young New Eng...

Half a hundred miles southwestward from Oran, set in the middle of a fertile plain which is traversed by the Mekerra and overshadowed by the escarpments of Mount Tessala, is Sid...

Those who are bored by history might do well to skip this chapter, for, though I shall do my best to brush away the accumulated dust of ages, so that the glittering romance of M...

On passing from one country into another, one instinctively expects the change in sovereignty to be signalized by some distinctive and dramatic landmark, natural or artificial,...

Morocco is unique among the countries of the world in that it has four capitals—Fez, Mequinez, Marrákesh, Rabat—and the names of all save the last, which is the seat of the Fren...

We Americans pride ourselves on being an exceptionally well informed people, yet it is curious how erroneous are the opinions which we hold on many subjects, and how tenaciously...