Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/216

 176 NORTII-WEST AFRICA. This runil retreat is directly connected by a short railway with Tunis and with Guletta, a small town of Italian appearance, occupying the western bank of the canal by which vessels enter the Lake of Tunis. On the eastern bank the only buildings are the barracks, a mosque, a manufactory, and the gate leading to Hades. The new houses, which already form a distinct quarter, are built farther west, at the narrowest point of the sandy spit of land known to the ancients as the ligufa. Still farther on the military hospital of Kram, or the " Fig-trees," forms the nucleus of a new district at the foot of the Carthage hills. On these heights Malka occupies the very site of the ancient Carthaginian suburb of the same name, and its houses, like those of Sidi Daud and Duar-esh-Shott, are built with the remains of the old cisterns, ramparts, amphitheatre, and circus. Finally, on the highest point of Cape Carthage, the white houses of Sidi Bu-Said are visible amid the surrounding olive groves. This town was formerly a sacred place, which Christians were forbidden to enter, but it is now much frequented by all classes of Tunisians. It is commanded, from an elevation of about 430 feet, by a lighthouse, and during the hot season it enjoys a fresh sea breeze blowing above the stagnant atmosphere of the plains. Carthage. The first Phoenician colony was probably built at the extremity of the cape, between the sea and the lake, at the spot where now stand the Kram hospital and the half-choked-up basins of the port. But Kombeh (Karabi or Kaccabi), the town of the Sidonian immigrants and, together with Hippone, the oldest colony on the coast, does not appear to have flourished until the arrival of the Tyrian immigrants, when a new city was founded under the name of Kiryath-IIadeshat or Kai'tadanh, whence the Roman form Carthago. The plateau on which the first Tvrian colonists excavated their tombs, outside the city, and where they afterwards built the citadel of Bi/rsa, has been clearly identified by archaeologists. Situated to the south in the Carthaginian hills, it stands at a lower elevation than the Sidi Bu-Said headland, but it offers a much more advantageous and regular site for extensive buildings. The work of nature also appears to have been perfected by the hand of man, by a levelling process similar to that which the Athenians executed on the summit of the Acropolis. In the centre of this platform stood the temple of Eshmun, and, under the Roman sway, Esculapius was worshipped here, representing the same divine force under a different name. Since 1842 this tract of land, presented to France, is commanded by a chapel dedicated by Louis Philippe to St. Louis. According to the local tradition, the French king embraced Islam before his death, and the Arabs still worship him under the name of Bu-Said, or the " Father Lord." A beautiful garden surrounds the chapel, in whose walls are embedded thousands of old remains — Punic, Roman, and Christian inscriptions, busts, bas-reliefs, fragments of sculptures, Wols, statues of saints and martyrs, altars and tombstones. The buildings of the great college which skirts one of the sides of the Byrsa terrace contain, on the ground-floor, fhe most valuable inscriptions of the collection, urns, sculptured stones, glass and metal objects.