outer wall, the road turns sharply round at right
angles and proceeds for some little distance through
a sort of tunnel parallel with the outer wall. The
wall which forms the inner side of this tunnel is
pierced at intervals with loop-holes, so that an enemy
entering the gate would be compelled to run the
gauntlet of some twenty or thirty guns before he
could enter the town.
Formerly Wargla was surrounded by a moat and
three loop-holed walls. Two of these walls have
now been pulled down by the French and, as its
stagnant waters were a source of much unhealthiness
to the town, the moat has now been filled up. The
space originally occupied by these fortifications now
forms a broad roadway encircling the remaining
wall. /
Wargla is one of those fortified posts which the
French, in order to obtain some control over the
desert, have erected at intervals of some hundred
and fifty miles along all the principal caravan routes
leading from Algeria to the Sudan.
The French fort at Wargla lies just within the
wall on the southern side of the town, and three or
four small stone blockhouses, built by the French at
some little distance beyond the walls, complete the
fortifications of the place.
A memorial tablet, let into the wall on the
southern side, of this fort, has been erected to the
memory of those officers and men who met their
death during the disastrous expedition of Colonel
Flatters into the Sahara.
The massacre of this exploring party by the