THE RAMPARTS OF FACHI
Nearly empty of people, the lanes are full of shadows and a sense of a thousand mysteries. Everywhere there are shadows: and on the day that I first entered Fachi I found myself repeating, under my breath: “It is a lost city, and its name should be, The City of Shadows.
Shadows, always shadows, meet one at every turn in ever-changing phase. Weird, attractive shapes when cast from parts where unskilled, unplotted building has found a happy architectural result, or frowning nooks where lurk the sentiments of witchery or ghosts of the wicked dead.
A few natives pass. They brush against me because of the narrowness of the lane. Close to them I see that their clothes are dirt soiled, their features hard and villainous. They hurry on and vanish out of the street with a single step aside. They have turned a corner or entered a dwelling.
All the dwellings are entered directly from the alleys. The burrowing for shelter is increased in the dwellings; their floors are farther under the ground than the dusty lanes. (They have nothing to fear from rain and consequent flooding; for it does not rain.) A low, earthy parapet guards a few steps underground, and a tiny door, of hatchway size, through which only a stooping figure can pass. When there are no occupants at home, even during the day, these palm-plank, rudely anchored doors are closed and barred with the forbidding strength already described; as if neighbour trusted not neighbour.
But the issue that is vital to Fachi’s scheme of defence is in the fact that, from within, at a moment’s notice, the whole town can be barred and buttressed and placed under lock and key.
Packed like the skep of a hive, with intent to utilise space, Fachi is a regular honeycomb of crowded dens. They are salt-built, like the rest of the town, and as dark and shadowy and mysterious as the alleys outside. Each cell in the honeycomb has its narrow slit of a door, with a spy-hole, no larger than a halfpenny, drilled through the wall near the side of the jamb, so that folks may be peered at when approaching, or when arrived and knocking for admission.
Even by day nearly all the dwellings are locked and barred. When, perchance, a door stands ajar a feeble ray of light steals into a bare-walled, smoke-blackened den that has no more furnishing than a heap of dates on a mat and a skin of water hanging from the low ceiling. Once admittance has been gained from outside, it is seen that the interior of every home is comprised of den leading to den, each with its thick plank door and its air of suspicion and secrecy. Before entering a single dwelling I had already realised that every yard of the lanes within Fachi could be defended almost single-handed, and that, should defenders happen to be driven back or killed at any one point, a fresh rally could be made with success at every gateway in their course. In the barred doors within the dens themselves I again thought of the cunning strategy from the point of view of hand-to-hand defensive fighting.
PART OF FACHI, WHICH IS BUILT ENTIRELY OF SALT