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. [Illustration: PART OF FACHI, WHICH IS BUILT ENTIRELY OF SALT] 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.