Only the most
reckless of nocturnal nomads will dare to violate these hallowed precincts
in search of firewood; the citizens have already learned to regard them
with reverential fear. At a long distance from the town I asked a small
boy to climb over the palisade.
"Not if you give me a packet of cigarettes!" he said. "The
_brigadier_"--in an awed whisper--"he sees everything."
Hearing that protective works of a new kind are being carried on at this
moment, I walked yesterday to the bare slopes that lead down to the
water-springs. A hundred or more Arabs were engaged, under the supervision
of a keen-eyed young Frenchman, in digging a multitude of curved
concentric ditches across the hollow of the catchment area, intersected by
diagonal ones here and there; the general appearance of the work--the
bright yellow of the newly excavated part set against the dark ground of
the old--was as if some gigantic fishing-net had been carelessly thrown
across the country. These little dykes were about two feet deep, and there
must have been already some twenty miles of them. The overseer explained:
"You see what happens.
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