h the
interior to the British colony on the east and the French on the west.

Each trade or business is segregated or localized. The jewelers, an
apparently thrifty lot and mostly Turkish Jews, are bunched on a street
near one of the hotels.

The meat market is quite interesting if you can stand the smell. The
natives eat the whole carcass.

The milkman, morning and evening, calls at the door of his customer with
his goods in the original package. The goats are more docile and better
behaved than the children. They stand and deliver the quantity demanded.
There is neither chance for nor great economy in adulteration--water is
too scarce. It is brought to the city mule-back in porous jars. You can
have your milk from the black, white or brown nanny as desired. A goat
is a respected member of the family and his odor by comparison not
offensive.

Never after four months in Tripolitania did John laugh at the Englishman
who carried his tub with him. He is an experienced traveler and knows
what he is about. A cold bath cost John $1.50. The Bedouins and Tuaregs
are proud, aristocratic, heroic-looking people; but they bathe in the
sand much as a mother hen dusts herself in a neighbor's flower bed.

John Cornwall was forced to go fifty miles south of Tripoli to Azizia in
the desert, where he found the thermometer 130 in the shade. At another
time when he went to Zavia, he found six had recently died of the
bubonic plague.

In this land of heat, of blindness, of leprosy, of flies, of fleas and
sandstorms, where the sun goes down red as the wounds of the slain, he
was required as regional director of a district seven hundred by sixty
miles to visit some thirty case del soldato, (houses of the soldier) in
any manner the gods of opportunity presented.

It was necessary to get something that beat the coast line vessels,
which with oriental slowness and uncertainty of schedule visited the
coast hamlets. A mule would not answer; a truck was furnished by the
army but almost impossible; a camel was too hard on the backbone;
besides at certain seasons they are vicious as a Hun and unless muzzled
will snatch your arm in their strong jaws and snap it as a clap pipe
stem.

In this land of rugs, where is the magic carpet? Why an army
Caproni--and the Italian army, until the Fiume question arose, refused
nothing to an American. So John went to the Governo della Tripolitania
Stato Maggiore and was given a general permit to make his tr