Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/205

 The Great Feast m Morocco. 175

toy-instruments, museka del-bsat ; a fat kadi, or judge, wearing a ridiculous headgear ; two shereefs from Mecca {Jidl Mekkd) ; several Darkawa (members of the Darkawi brotherhood), with rosaries of shells, tall caps made of reeds, and long staffs in their hands, singing the grossest obscenities ; a suwdfa, or fortune-telling woman, equally indecent in her talk ; prostitutes addressing themselves especially to shereefs and other highly respected men ; Drawa, Gnawa, Jews, Jewesses, and Christians, among whom are a basador (ambassador) and his thlrjmdn (drago- man). There are, moreover, some jnUn represented by boys dressed up in red jackets and trousers, with white masks over their faces, carrying in their hands needles with which they prick the people as they pass along. There are two other spirit-beings, l-gol and l-gota, whose behaviour is as shocking as their dress. And there are a camel with its driver and a leopard and a leopardess copulating in public.

This show is collectively named bsdt after the toy-house, and the same name-^ is given to the 'Asura play even in towns like Mazagan, where there is no representation of a house, but persons dressed up as Christians and Jews only carry round lighted paper lanterns. In country districts no such ceremony is connected with the masquerade which sometimes takes place on this occasion. In Aglu, in Sus, a party dress themselves up to represent a variety of persons and animals, — an old man and an old woman, Jews and Jewesses, Christians, a female donkey, a hyena, a leopard, a lion, and a wild sheep {uddd). They are called hngarn iyiid (" the chiefs of the night"), because they walk about at night, commencing in the evening of the 12th of Moharram, that is, two days after the day of 'Asura, and not finishing the tour till they have visited all the villages of the tribe. They imitate the idioms of the persons or the sounds of the animals they represent, they sing and play,

^^ Or le-bsdt, as I have also heard it pronounced.