•284 
BENGAZI. 
carried off by spouts into some general reservoir, or is collected in 
large ear them jars for the daily consumption of the house. By far 
the greater number of houses g,re, however, unprovided with any 
defence of this nature ; and if the precaution of beating down the 
mud which forms the terrace, sufficiently hard to make the water 
run off, be not adopted at the commencement of the rains, it is more 
than probable, that the whole of the building so neglected will dis- 
appear before the season is over. As the rehgion and the laziness of an 
Arab equally prompt him to depend more upon the interference of 
Providence, than upon any exertions of his own, this precaution is 
often neglected ; and after having borne, with exemplary patience, 
all the dirt and inconvenience occasioned by the passage of the rain 
through the mud over his head, he is roused from his lethargy by 
the screams of his wife and children, alarmed, or badly wounded by 
the fall of the roof, or by some serious accident from a similar cause, 
by which he is a sufferer himself. Many persons were severely 
wounded at Bengazi in the winter during which we were confined 
there ; and it is probable, that there are accidents in the town every 
year, occasioned by similar neglect. 
4Vhen a house falls, it is generally left in a state of rubbish and 
ruin, and the survivors of the family remove to another spot without 
troubling themselves further about it : the consequence is, that the 
streets are often nearly blocked up by mounds of this nature disposed 
in various parts of them ; which form in the winter-time heaps of 
mud and mire, and, in the dry weather, scatter thick clouds of light 
dust in the faces and eyes of the passengers. 
