“The breeze spoke of carelessness as it spoke of the time. Warren dwellers no longer maintained the tight water discipline of the old days. Why should they, when rain had been recorded on this planet, when clouds were seen, when eight Fremen had been inundated and killed by a flash flood in a wadi? Until that event, the word drowned had not existed in the language of Dune.”

Stilgar remarks on the irony of Fremen drowning, a death previously inconceivable on the harsh desert planet. The deaths foreshadow the threats and short-sighted consequences that the terraforming project has introduced. Stilgar connects the Fremen’s new vulnerability with the abundance of water. The flash flood is a metaphor for the accelerated speed in which the transformation takes place, washing away tradition and literal lives that lay in its path. Water, which had previously been revered as a life-giving element, is now the purveyor of death.

“Abominations, the holy witches of the Bene Gesserit said. Yet the Sisterhood coveted the genophase of these children. The witches wanted sperm and ovum without the disturbing flesh which carried them.”

Like many of the characters in the novel, Stilgar regards the Bene Gesserit as “witches” for their secretive and seemingly supernatural abilities. The designation reveals a gender bias that demonizes powerful women, as the Bene Gesserit are in fact highly trained individuals who exercise the utmost self-discipline. Stilgar is suspicious that Jessica has a distorted interest in the children and is more concerned with the propagating value of their genes than their welfare as members of her family. His hyperbolic claim that the Sisterhood regards people as just “disturbing flesh” reveals his