A window has been formed in part of the wall for the purpose of giving light to an upper story, which, together with the window itself, appears to have made no part of the original plan; an addition has also been made to the exterior, (marked by shading lines in the ground-plan,) and forming, with what has been already described, a square of something less than fifty feet. There is no appearance of any door in this additional wall, which has been very strongly built, and it completely prevents all access from without to the door of the original building. The object of this has no doubt been security, and the whole structure appears to have been intended as a station for troops and was probably one of the fortresses repaired by Justinian. Its height may be about five-and-twenty feet, (we mean the height of the original building, for the added part does not seem to have been ever raised to half that elevation), and it is still surmounted by a cornice part of which is, however, cut away. There are several other strong towers at no great distance from Gusser el Toweel, nearer to the foot of the mountains, and a communication appears to have been kept up all the way from Bengazi to Ptolemeta. There are also several well-built and spacious arched cisterns, and other structures partly built and partly excavated, in this tract of country; as also many subterranean storehouses for grain; and a month or two might certainly be spent with great advantage in examining the space between the sea and the mountains, from Bengazi to Birsis and Teuchira.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Vide Scylax, Theophrastus, and others.
[2]Signor Della Cella has remarked (p. 185,) that there are a few palm-trees in the neighbourhood of Bengazi, and a tract or two of land sowed with barley (“alcune palme, e qualche tratto seminato col orzo”—) all the rest is (he tells us) neglected and uncultivated. But there are a great many palm-trees in the neighbourhood of Bengazi, on both sides of the harbour, and a great proportion of cultivated land.
[3]The following is the process mentioned by Shaw.—“In the months of March or April, when the sheaths that respectively enclose the young clusters of the male flowers and the female fruit begin to open (at which time the latter are formed and the first are mealy), they take a sprig or two of the male cluster, and insert it into the sheath of the female; or else they take a whole cluster of the male tree, and sprinkle the meal, or farina of it over several clusters of the female.” (Travels in Barbary, vol. i., p. 259-60).
The same author remarks that the palm-tree arrives at its greatest vigour about thirty years after transplantation, and continues so seventy years afterwards; bearing yearly fifteen or twenty clusters of dates, each of them weighing fifteen or twenty pounds[a].
“Si parmi les palmiers (says the author of a treatise on agriculture quoted by Kazwini, in the words of Silvestre de Sacy), “Si parmi les palmiers on rapproche les individus mâles des individus femelles, ces derniers portent des fruits en plus grande abondance, parceque le voisinage favorise leurs amours; et si, au contraire, on éloigne l’arbre femelle des mâles, cette distance empêche qui’il ne rapporte aucun fruit. Quand on plante un palmier mâle au milieu des femelles, et que, le vent venant à souffler, les femelles reçoivent l’odeur des fleurs du mâle, cette odeur suffit pour rendre féconds tous les palmiers femelles qui environnent le mâle.”
[a]Shaw has observed that “the method of raising the Phœnix (φοινιξ) or palm, and, what may be further observed, that when the old trunk dies, there is never wanting one or other of those offsprings to succeed it, may have given occasion to the fable of the bird of that name dying and another arising from it.”
(So Pliny, lib. xiii. c. 4.) Mirumque de ea accepimus cum phœnice ave quæ putatur ex hujus palmæ argumento nomen accepisse, emori ac renasci ex seipsa.
[4]The palm-tree, however, though a beautiful tree, is sometimes, it appears, a very obstinate one; and the means which we are told, on Arab authority, should be used to render it more docile on these occasions would astonish the horticulturists of Europe.