Page:Among the Women of the Sahara.djvu/141

Rh up to Heaven in a manner which seems very incongruous here, and recalls the religious customs of Nineveh and Tyre.

On the graves of those who have not achieved the dignity of sainthood, rags and broken pottery are thrown as well as stones. This custom is a relic of the worship of spirits to which I shall refer again later, and the accumulated debris serves also for identification of the tomb. Blind old women indeed sometimes recognize the last resting place of some loved one by feeling the pieces of broken pottery strewn on it.

And we Rûmis, aliens in a foreign town amongst a people sullenly hostile to us, as we look down from our minaret upon these tombs and platforms, seem to see in the broken pottery strewing the former, an emblem of the cup of life, drained and emptied by those cut off by death. And as the nasal droning of the Mozabite devotions is wafted up to us our melancholy becomes tinged with a kind of fatalist resignation.

But it is time we left this lofty position with its depressing associations. Shall I talk to you instead of the school connected with every mosque, where the Mozabite children are taught to recite the Koran? Well, these schools are supported by a commercial tax on dates, a tribute paid in kind. Teachers, scholars, muftis, or doctors of the law, and imans or priests, are all supported