There are miles of them, and they are generally crowded from end to end with the white-cloaked Arabs and shrouded figures of women with black masks over their faces, all busy shopping, buying or selling.
Each trade has a souk to itself. Thus, in one souk you will find nothing but shoemakers' shops one after another, in the next will be all coppersmiths, in another the cloth merchants, and so on.
There still stand the "Bardo" or Palace of the "Bey" or King of Tunis, and the "kasbah" or castle in which the Tunisian pirates of old days used to imprison the Christians whom they captured at sea; and there is still the old slave market where they used to sell them.
Many an English sailor has been lost for ever to his home and friends in that dismal place.
But on one occasion the prisoners got the better of their captors. As many as ten thousand of them had been collected, and they made a plan to escape, and, rising against their captors, they overwhelmed them by force of numbers and got away.
"Home, Sweet Home,"
An interesting spot in the city is the old Christian cemetery, in which lies buried the man who wrote the well-known song, "Home, Sweet Home." Most people think that it is an English song, but the composer was in reality an American—a clerk in the Consulate—named John Howard Payne.
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CARTHAGE.
Close to Tunis is the site of Carthage, the capital of the great country of that name in North Africa.