Water-conduits, varying in size from a brook to the merest runlet, cross
and recross each other on palm-stem aqueducts at different levels; the
properties are served with the precious element according to time. And
inasmuch as the labourers have no clocks or watches, they have devised a
complicated and apparently frivolous system of marking the hours; the
water is cut off from a certain property, for instance, when a certain
shadow shall have attained the length of three footsteps of a man, and so
forth; the shadow varies according to the seasons, but, in the long run,
everybody is satisfied. There is peace now under the palms; the days are
over when the lean and hungry desert folk, who cannot climb trees, used to
ride hither and, pointing their guns at the terrified cultivators, make
them clamber aloft and throw down a month's provision of dates.
Arabs will tell you that there are 194 water springs at Tozeur; they are
ready to give you the names of every one of them, and several more; these
unite to form what might almost be called a river, which is then
artificially divided into three rivulets--divided so neatly, says an old
writer, that even some fragment of wood or other object drifting down the
current is split up, perforce, into three equal parts, one for each of
them; these three, later on, are once more subdivided into seven smaller
ones apiece--twenty-one in all; and these, again, into a certain fixed
number of almost microscopic brooklets.
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