398 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Kabyle farms and houses near the point of departure; but beyond it 

 stretched along narrow paths, winding around the brow of hills, up 

 towards the mountains, which form an extended amphitheater. The 

 horse furnished me by the proprietor of the hotel was a phenomenally 

 wretched steed, by no means boasting of Arab blood. 



After a couple of hours' march, we passed a <r douar' or Berber vil- 

 lage on our left, a little off the path, partially hidden among the 

 scrubby mastic trees. The little houses were built of stone and mud, 

 with thatched roofs. Three villagers came out to meet us, one of them 

 armed with a gun, and the question arose in my mind whether these 

 good people were honest or had no reputation to lose; but soon the 

 gunner left us, perhaps on the quest for partridges, while our betur- 

 baned Moors in their ragged burnooses spent the rest of the day with 

 us and seemed mild and inoffensive, receiving our parting salutations 

 and backsheesh with kindly glances. 



In another half-hour we reached the site of the necropolis. The 

 vast cemetery is finely situated on the brow of a hill, or range of hills, 

 facing west and overlooking the village of Eoknia at its foot. This 

 hillside or plateau itself is a spur of the Diebel-Debar range, some- 

 what elevated, being about 2,000 feet above the Mediterranean, and 

 surrounded to the west, northwest and north by an amphitheater of 

 distant mountains. The tombs themselves mostly occur in openings 

 among the low trees or shrubs, which are scattered over the plains, or 

 form dense thickets concealing the ruins of the dolmens. Scattered 

 about the vicinity of this once sacred ground are the farms of the little 

 hill villages, or 'douars' of the natives. 



The material for the rock structures crops out here and there, the 

 soil being thin — a pale gray, moderately hard limestone of cretaceous 

 age, not containing any fossils and evidently weathering somewhat rap- 

 idly, as it is naturally somewhat porous and cavernous. The rock was 

 not jointed, and evidently was not easily quarried; hence the blocks 

 are very irregular and were never hammered. 



The guide led us to the best preserved and most typical dolmen, 

 which was smaller than we expected, being much less than half as 

 large as those we had some years previously visited in Brittany. It 

 is built of three rude slabs of limestone, one on each side, and a shorter 

 stone at the end, the opposite end of the enclosure being open and 

 facing the east. The enclosure thus walled in was covered by a single 

 large slab, about six feet long, irregularly triangular in shape, the ends 

 of which projected beyond the enclosure. Another less perfect tomb 

 was built of two side-stones and an oblong slab on top, about five feet 

 long and two feet wide. The space thus enclosed averaged about four 

 by two feet. A still larger dolmen consisted of two side-slabs and one 

 at the end, covered by an irregular slab, about six feet long and four 



