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270 are shafts leading down to a network of subterranean canals, which in long-forgotten times the sultans had caused to be dug to carry out the plans they had elaborated for furnishing the capital with water. The industrious and skilled natives of the Draa tribe were called upon to excavate numerous trunk-lines of these subterranean canals at a depth where the earth would carry without great wastage the water from the Atlas streams, that were being greedily absorbed by the chalky surface strata of the desert Besides the principal canals, dug by and belonging to the government, there exists also a whole network of private foggaras, which irrigate the plantations and provide some of the branch lines of the town. Somewhere around three hundred sixty of these lesser and greater branches are in use, and for their maintenance and cleaning the officials and planters still employ the Draa natives, who enter the tunnels through these round holes which I had observed. On the plain between Marrakesh and the Atlas the water of the subterranean channels in some places is carried for a short distance along the surface. Here the Moroccans have occasionally impounded the water by dams and have cleverly erected small mills.

I know similar systems of subterranean canalization in China and Persia, but in those countries I never ran across works of such grand dimensions. I have seen but one place in which this skill and spirit of enterprise in the native handling of water has reached a higher point of development, and that is in the oasis of Figig, just on the Moroccan-Algerian border, where the natives work in the earth with the skill of moles and search out