The Scene Was Altogether Highly Interesting.

Mourzouk is a walled town, containing about 2,500 inhabitants, who are blacks, and who do not, like the

Arabs, change their residence. The walls are of mud, having round buttresses, with loopholes for musketry, rudely built, but sufficiently strong to guard against attack; they are about fifteen feet in height, and at the bottom eight feet in thickness, tapering, as all the walls in this country do, towards the top. The town has seven gates, four of which are built up, in order to prevent the people escaping when they are required to pay their duties. A man is appointed by the sultan to attend each of these gates, day and night, lest any slaves or merchandise should be smuggled into the town. The people, in building the walls and houses, fabricate a good substitute for stones, which are not to be found in those parts, by forming clay into balls, which they dry in the sun, and use with mud as mortar; the walls are thus made very strong, and as rain is unknown, durable also. The houses, with very few exceptions, are of one story, and those of the poorer sort, receive all their light from the doors. They are so low as to require stooping nearly double to enter them; but the large houses have a capacious outer door, which is sufficiently well contrived, considering the bad quality of the wood, that composes them. Thick palm planks, of four or five inches in breadth, for the size and manner of cutting a tree will not afford more, have a square hole punched through them at the top and bottom, by which they are firmly wedged together with thick palm sticks; wet thongs of camels' hide are then tied tightly over them, which, on drying, draw the planks more strongly and securely together. There are not any hinges to the doors, but they turn on a pivot, formed on the last plank near the wall, which is always the largest on that account. The locks and keys are very large and heavy, and of curious construction. The houses are generally built in little narrow streets, but there are many open places, entirely void of buildings, and covered with sand, on which the camels of the traders rest. Many palms grow in the town, and some houses have small square enclosures, in which are cultivated a few red peppers and onions. The street of entrance is a broad space, of at least a hundred yards, leading to the wall that surrounds the castle, and is extremely pretty. Here the horsemen have full scope to display their abilities, when they skirmish before the sultan. The castle itself is an immense mud building, rising to the height of eighty or ninety feet, with little battlements on the walls, and at a distance really looks warlike. Like all the other buildings, it has no pretensions to regularity. The lower walls are fifty or sixty feet in thickness, the upper taper off to about four or five feet.

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