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332 has a low coefficient of lateral supporting strength, the length of the beams is restricted to ten feet, owing to which practically all rooms are of uniform dimensions. It also interested me immensely to find that the natives seek to preserve the wood from rotting by wrapping it in layers of dried palm-leaves, just as the Mongols and Tibetans preserve their beams and rafters with the twigs of some local shrub.

In a school that we visited we found the Arab master was instructing the children in geography, history and French, in addition to the rudimentary subjects. The shaved heads of the boys made strenuous efforts to spell acceptably before the consul and the colonel and succeeded fairly well. In another school small children and youths were learning to make artistic embroidery and to decorate leather in gold and colors according to the accepted fashions of Fez and Marrakesh.

Meanwhile, as we wandered about. Colonel Pariel began telling us something of the history of the oasis.

"These seven villages, before their incorporation into the empire of the Moroccan Sultan, were seven separate and independent republics, constantly at war with one another. There existed two very definite reasons for this unceasing hostility: the first, a moral one, that of the vendetta, or blood-revenge; the second, a material one, the struggle for water.

"Do you see those ruins? They were once a village, whose inhabitants skilfully gained possession of the foggar a made by their neighbors for the purpose of leading water to the reserve reservoir on their lands. After a long-continued armed strife the original owners of the