Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/478

 SOME NOTES ON THE FOLKLORE OF THE ALGERIAN HILLS AND DESERT.

M. W. HILTON-SIMPSON.

In the summer of 1914 I submitted to the Folk-Lore Scoiety a paper on " Some Algerian Superstitions," which was read during my absence in France and subsequently appeared in Folk-Lore (vol. xxvi. p. 225 et seqq. September 191 5). In it I attempted to lay before the Society some of the material collected by my wife and myself during two winters spent in wandering among the Shawiya Berbers, whose eerie-like villages are perched high amid the rocky hills of the Aures massif to the N.E. of Biskra, and among the nomad, so-called Arab, tribes who spend the winter with their flocks and herds in the desert at the southern foot of these hills, migrating northward to the central Algerian plateau in the summer, when lack of pasture drives them from the fringe of the Sahara. Since the War we have passed two more winters among these people, of whom we are endeavouring to prepare an ethnographical survey, and besides further notes upon their arts and crafts, medicine and surgery, etc., we have obtained a certain amount of additional information with regard to their customs and folk-lore. In order to present a carefully considered digest of this information, viewed in comparison with the folk-lore of other regions, a considerable time would obviously have to be spent in research work at home. Up to the present I have been unable to find the leisure to devote to this task, though I hope at some future date.