Seeking through a honeycomb of dens with curiosity thoroughly aroused, I eventually came out into daylight in a tiny courtyard in the centre. Thence an outside stairway mounted to the roofs. Climbing it, I viewed a panorama of the flat, parapeted housetops of Fachi. Beside me were attic store-rooms, locked and barred like so many of the chambers, and a confusion of jagged parapets, well-nigh impassable to anyone who might try to scale them. Weedy dates, old bones, broken earth-jars, all the odd refuse of primitive homes, lay scattered on these roofs; and I realised that the rubbish-heaps of Fachi’s den-dwelling people lay over the roofs of their burrows, and not in the alleys or in the dwellings. It was a condition of things that revealed the animal sense of people accustomed to stick closely to their warrens. These roofs, outside, were the nearest spaces to the open air; moreover the unsightly squalor seldom waxed fetid there owing to the baking sun and extreme dryness of the atmosphere: a state of affairs that did not exist when old bones, or aught else outcast, lay fly-festering in the shade below.
I came out from investigating a honeycomb of dwellings with a back that ached with stooping through hatchway doors.
I moved on. There was one more sight to see.
I had by this time, by promise of food, persuaded an ill-clad, hungry-looking individual to act as guide; one of the most villainous, indolent-looking men I have ever seen. I asked him to lead me to the fortress of the town, which I had seen from the outside, standing behind the double ramparts of the exterior, near to the remarkable “Seven Palms of Fachi,” which stand in a stately group close to the north front.
I am led through a maze of alleys. A heavy door, barring our path, is reached and unlatched, and a final lane lies before me. My guide vouchsafes the information that the fort is at the other end.
In a few moments we reach the rear courtyard of the fort, the largest open space in Fachi. It is uninteresting, for it is empty for the time being, and its high, unscalable walls seem stiffly posed like a petrified place awaiting the assembly of war-girded hordes.
We pass on inside—and I stand amazed. Before me is the den of the Forty Thieves, or a scene equivalent; but real, and not imaginary. The fort, with high, naked walls towering around it, looks like a gigantic square-cut pit, with the bottom packed, almost to overflowing, with giant earthen jars. It is those jars that make the most amazing sight of all. Gleaming whitely, they fill the entire fort, except where the roofed-in, low, gloomy corridors jut out from the base of the main wall, giving access to the pit and to the four corner towers.
SHADOWS, ALWAYS SHADOWS, MEET ONE AT EVERY TURN
The fort might be compared to a vast, unused cupboard full of gigantic empty jam-pots—but jam-pots far above the most exaggerated dreams of the hungriest schoolboy. I started to count them, but gave it up. They looked, in their unevenly lined hundreds, as numerous and as disorderly as a flock of sheep.