The country hereabouts is regarded as tolerably healthy, but ʿAbd e’ Saʿade, a village a little further eastward, has suffered greatly from malignant fevers, which are attributed to the unwholesomeness of the waters of the Wadi Kʿaám, as I noticed on my former journey[27]; hence the population has become rather thin, and industry has declined. At some distance from the wadi, cultivation ceases entirely, and, instead of groves and gardens, a wide and wild field of disorder and destruction meets the eye. This rivulet, which is identical with the Cinyps, was in great vogue with the ancients, who knew how to control and regulate its occasional impetuosity. Immense walls, which they constructed as barriers against destructive inundations, remain to testify to their activity and energy. Of these one group, forming a whole system of dikes, some transverse, some built in the form of a semicircle, is seen near the spot, where a beautiful subterranean aqueduct which supplied Leptis issues from the wadi; another enormous wall, 650 yards long, and from 4 to 4½ yards thick, stands about three quarters of a mile higher up the valley. But with the details of all these works, though to me they appeared so interesting that I measured them with tolerable exactness, I will not detain the reader, but shall hasten to carry him back to Tripoli. Having started in the afternoon from the mouth of the wadi, I re-entered Zawíya ʿAbd el Ferjáni from the rear, but finding that my people had gone on to Leptis, I followed them, after a little delay, by the way of Wadi Súk, where every Thursday a market is held (“Súk el khamís,” a name applied by Captain, now Rear-Admiral, Smyth to the neighbouring village), and then over the open meadow-plain, having the blue sea on my right, and came up with my people just as they were about to pitch my tent at the foot of an enormous staircase leading to some undefined monument in the eastern part of the ancient city of Leptis. [Sidenote: February 23rd.] During the forenoon I was busily employed in a second investigation of some of the ruins of Leptis, which have been so well described and illustrated by Admiral Smyth. Near the small creek called Mirsá Legátah, and a little east of the chapel of the Merábet ben Shehá, a small castle has been lately built by the Turks, about a hundred paces square. It has quite a handsome look with its pinnacles and small bastions.