Nearly A Month Was
Occupied In This Necessary Work, By Which Time The Place Was Entirely
Changed.
I had made a good road as an approach from the spring, with a
covered drain, dignified by the
Name of an "aqueduct," which led the
water when required to a little garden that I had constructed close to
the tent, where a nondescript slope had become a receptacle for filth. I
had cut this down from the road, and mixed the earth with the
accumulated dirt and manure, which I levelled off in successive layers,
so that the stream led from the spring would irrigate my beds in
succession. This garden was carefully fenced against the intrusion of
goats and donkeys, to say nothing of pigs, and it was already sown with
tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, barmia, and beet-root. The priests had a
grand bed of onions upon a terrace, which was usually occupied by the
pigs, goats, and donkeys, as they had been too lazy to arrange a fence.
The docks in the monastery gardens were at least six feet high; I had
these cut and collected to thatch the sides of a peculiar shed (in which
I am writing at this moment), which was a great comfort and formed a
very original retreat, combining a seat in an amphitheatre with a modern
summer-house. This was an oblong, of fifteen feet by twelve, erected
within three feet of the tent beneath the walnut-tree upon the extreme
verge of the abrupt incline.
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