At The End Of The Room Facing The Door, A Large Seat Of Mud Was Raised About Eighteen Inches High, And Twelve Feet In Length.

Heaps of this description, though higher, are found at the doors of most houses, and are covered with loungers in the cool of the morning and evening. The large room was fifty feet by thirty-nine.

From the sides, doors opened into smaller ones, which might be used as sleeping or store rooms, but were generally preferred for their coolness. Their only light was received from the door. Ascending a few steps, there was a kind of gallery over the side rooms, and in it were two small apartments, but so very hot as to be almost useless. From the large room was a passage leading to a yard, having also small houses attached to it in the same manner, and a well of comparatively good water. The floors were of sand, and the walls of mud roughly plastered, and showing every where the marks of the only trowel used in the country - the fingers of the right hand. There are no windows to any of the houses, but some rooms have a small hole in the ceiling, or high up the wall.

Near the house was the principal mosque, to which the sultan and the Christian party went every Friday, as a matter of course, and every other day they found it necessary to appear there once or twice. It is a low building, having a shed projecting over the door, which, being raised on a platform, is entered by a few steps. A small turret, intended to be square and perpendicular, is erected for the Mouadden to call to prayers. One of the great lounges is on the seat in front of the mosque, and every morning and evening they are full of idle people, who converse on the state of the markets, and on their own private affairs, or in a fearful whisper canvass the sultan's conduct.

In Mourzouk there are sixteen mosques, which are covered in, but some of them are very small. Each has an imaum, but the kadi is their head, of which dignity he seems not a little proud. This man had never, been beyond the boundaries of Fezzan, and could form no idea of any thing superior to mud houses and palms; he always fancied the Europeans to be great romancers, when they told him of their country, and described it as being in the midst of the sea.

They had many opportunities of observing the fighi and their scholars sitting on the sand. The children are taught their letters by having them written on a flat board, of a hard wood, brought from Bornou and Soudan, and repeating them after their master. When quite perfect in their alphabet, they are allowed to trace over the letters already made, they then learn to copy sentences, and to write small words dictated to them. The master often repeats verses from the Koran, in a loud voice, which the boys learn by saying them after him, and when they begin to read a little, he sings aloud, and all the scholars follow him from their books, as fast as they can.

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