Although the enemy was merely natives, Samuel still maintained a serious attitude. Know yourself and know your enemy, and you would remain undefeated in a hundred battles. Samuel knew his own troops quite well, but he did not yet have the full picture of the enemy, so it was important to begin by gathering intelligence on his opponent.
However, before preparing to investigate the Abyssinian Empire, Samuel still had two matters to handle.
One was solving the troops' lodging problem. This was not difficult. Although Assab City was small, if they squeezed in, it could still accommodate one division. The First Division of the Kingdom of Italy's first expeditionary force had only three thousand men in total, so its scale was not large.
Using the existing infrastructure of Assab Port and putting up some additional housing could solve the lodging problem. The question was, where would they find building materials?
Samuel looked at the barren desert outside the city. Wood was out of the question—there were not even a few blades of grass in sight. Most of Assab City's buildings were mud houses, and in this tropical desert climate, there was no need to worry about rain.
Setting aside its strategic value beside the Strait of Mandeb, Assab Port had only a little commercial value. It was one of the Arabs' trading outposts, but Arab merchants merely treated it as a place to rest their feet. Once the population grew, even drinking water became a major problem.
Fortunately, it lay close to the Ethiopian Highlands. Though the rainfall of the Ethiopian Highlands could not reach here, it could replenish the groundwater along the terrain. Thus, groundwater resources were fairly abundant; they simply needed to dig more wells.
"Mr. Sapeto, how did you and your company employees usually solve your supply