Madder-Root And Tobacco Are Also Cultivated, Besides
Barley Sufficient For Consumption.
The wheat is brought from the Teli.
The Wad-el-Khalouf is dry, except in winter, but its bed is bored with
inexhaustible wells, whose waters are distributed among the gardens by
means of a _clepsydra_, or a vessel which drops so much water in an
hour.
The ancients measured time by the dropping of water, like the
falling of sand in the hour-glass.
Some of the houses in these villages have two stories, and are well
built; each place has its mosque, its school, its kady, and its sheikh,
and the whole agglomeration of oases is governed by a Sheikh Kebir,
appointed by the Sultan of Morocco. These Saharan villages are eternally
in strife with one another, and sometimes take up arms. On this account,
they are surrounded by crenated walls, defended by towers solidly built.
The immediate cause of discord here is water, that precious element of
all life in the desert. But the imaginations of the people are not
satisfied with this simple reason, and they are right, for the cause
lies deeply in the human heart. They say, however, their ancestors were
cursed by a Marabout, to punish them for their laxity in religion, and
this was his anathema, "God make you, until the day of judgment, like
wool-comber's cards, the one gnawing the other!"
Their wars, in fact, are most cruel, for they destroy the noble and
fruitful palms, which, by a tacit convention, are spared in other parts
of the Sahara when these quarrels proceed to bloodshed.
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