It has been said that our civilisation is based on the wheel as a means of transport. Yet ten years ago there was no inhabitant of the interior of Morocco who had ever seen a wheeled vehicle. The only wheels known to the Moors were the sleepy creaking water-wheel and the clumsy solid wooden wheels of the antiquated cannon, which stuck inextricably in every swamp through which an attempt was made to draw them. There were no roads, and in the rainy season it was all that a horse or mule could do to get through the sloughs which in time of flood appear in the valley of every stream, Yet the Moors and the Berbers who inhabit Morocco built up for themselves an extremely advanced type of civilization. A thousand years ago Fez was provided by its founder with a drainage system, at least as complete as that of th Romans. Every house in the ci has two water supplies, derived from the Wed Fez, which flows down the steep valley in which the town is built: one supply brings fresh clean water for drinking and domestic purposes, the other keeps the drains flushed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.