the windlass: how else should they bring water into their
fields?" Then he fell furiously to digging again, and I
passed on into the city.

There was no sound of murmuring streams in the streets,
and down the main bed of the river I saw only a few shallow
puddles, joined together by a slowly trickling thread. Even
these were fenced and guarded so that no one might come near
to them, and there were men going among to the houses with
water-skins on their shoulders, crying "Water! Water to sell!"

The marble pools in the open square were empty; and at one
of them there was a crowd looking at a man who was being
beaten with rods. A bystander told me that the officers of
the city had ordered him to be punished because he had said
that the pools and the basins and the channels were not all of
pure marble, without a flaw. "For this," said he, "is the
evil doctrine that has come in to take away the glory of our
city, and because of this the water has failed."

"It is a sad change," I answered, "and doubtless they who
have caused it should suffer more than others. But can you
tell me at what hour and in what manner the people now observe
the visitation of the Source?"

He looked curiously at me and replied: "I do not
understand you. There is no visitation save the inspection of
the cisterns and the wells which the syndics of the city ,
whom we call the Princes of Water, carry on daily at every
hour. What source is this of which you speak?"