Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/493

 Folklore of the Algerian Hills and Desert. 185

the little one grows big ! " — the women who were watching them meantime uttering their long-drawn quivering cry of rejoicing to be heard at all Algerian festivals. These women danced for a considerable time and were at length relieved by two others, an elderly woman and a young one, who turned slowly round and round as they danced, holding their flowing garments outstretched with both hands. While the dancing was in progress the mother of one of the boys to be circumcised went behind the house with a basket and filled it with earth, which she sifted with her hands to remove stones and to break up hard lumps. At the conclusion of the dancing, the house in which it had taken place, containing but a single apartment, was divided into two by means of a carpet suspended as a curtain across it.

After the arrival of the operator, on one side of the curtain the grown-up men of the party — not the lads, of whom some were present — sat upon the ground and were offered a large dish containing some thin unleavened bread made with oil broken up into small pieces and garnished with numerous hard-boiled eggs, also broken up, and frag- ments of meat. This meal was merely tasted and removed immediately. A mat of halfa-grass having been laid upon the ground in the men's part of the room, a large wooden dish was placed bottom upwards upon it. This dish was thickly covered with the dry earth dug up by the mother of one of the patients, and a fragment of pottery placed beside it containing two fresh eggs and some lumps of coarse salt. A large quantity of powdered leaves of Juni- perns phoenicea and of powdered goat's dung, wrapped in cloths, were also placed at hand. The operator, who was not one of the professional practitioners of medicine and surgery whose work I have described elsewhere,^ squatted beside the dish on the left of the patient, a boy of eleven months, who was laid upon his back on the earth covering ^ Hilton-Simpson, Arab Medicine and Surgery, 1922.