When one buys a garden the water rights are included, but men often sell part of their water right to a neighbour, this, of course, being recorded in the Book of the Spring, which is kept by one of the sheikhs. The “Ghaffir el Ain,” or Guardian of the Spring, takes his time from the call of the muezzin, or in distant gardens by the sun and the stars. At night a special muezzin calls from one of the mosques for the benefit of the watchmen on the springs out in the gardens. The system has been in force for so many centuries that there are very rarely any disputes on the subject. All questions are referred to the books, which serve also as records of ownership of the gardens. Each Siwan, however poor, keeps a book of his own in which he enters, or rather pays a scribe to record, an account of his property. It states the boundaries, number of trees and water rights of his garden. When a man buys a garden he writes down the particulars in his “daftar,” and this is signed by the person who sold the garden, and witnessed by several responsible sheikhs or “nas tayebin”—respectable people. This entry serves as a title-deed for the purchase. When I was at Siwa there was a lengthy and involved law case about the ownership of some property, in which one party, in order to prove inheritance, forged an entry in his “daftar.” But cases of forgery were not frequent—fortunately, as they added considerable complications to an already difficult case. There is more water in Siwa than is required for irrigating the gardens, and in many cases sweet water flows to waste among the salt marshes. The Siwans are unenterprising. They only cultivate just sufficient for their own needs, and not always that: they only work in the gardens where the soil, after centuries of watering and manuring, has become very rich. They grow a very little wheat and barley, but not enough to supply the population, who depend on imported barley from the coast, yet there are many fertile plots of land which would raise corn, and which could easily be irrigated. Lack of labour and implements is their excuse when one questions them, but in the spring numbers of Siwans go up to the coast and hire themselves out to the bedouins as labourers, preferring to work on the coast instead of increasing the cultivation in their oasis. The palm groves of Siwa are very beautiful. It seems a veritable Garden of Hesperides when one arrives there after a long trek on the waterless desert which surrounds the oasis. One appreciates the slumberous shade of the luxuriant gardens, long, lazy bathes in the deep cool springs, and feasts of fruit on the banks of little rushing streams. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Siwans are lazy and indolent, for their country is in many ways a land of Lotus Eaters. The natives have a happy-go-lucky Omar Khayyámish outlook on life which is accentuated by the place they inhabit.