Page:Folklore1919.djvu/564

198 When the new moon is first seen they say: Children call mushrooms “crows’ bread.”

The marching order of troops was imitated from that of the wild geese of ‘Iraq (Babylonia) who also always appoint a sentinel to keep watch at night.

“When Adam was created he did not know what the time was and therefore when he ought to say his prayers. Accordingly he asked God to let him know the time. So God made the cock in order that it might crow” (yiddan; from the same verb come mueddin, “the summoner to prayer,” and mâdna, “minaret,” from whence the call to prayer is made).

“When Adam was on the mountain God showed him bread in the plain below. Instead of waiting till the bread should come to him Adam ran after it; hence it has been necessary ever since to run after bread, grinding the corn and kneading the flour until it is made.”

“Joseph saw himself in a glass looking young and beautiful, and said: ‘If I were a Mamlûk my price would be so high that no one could buy me.’ Hence it was that God allowed him to be sold as a slave.”

On the eve of the Lesser Feast (Bairam) after Ramadan and on that of the Greater Feast meat is bought for “the supper of the dead” (“‘asha el mayyitîm”), though eaten by the purchasers, and on the eve of the Greater Feast bread and dates are also taken to the tombs and left there, after which the offerers return home and kill a sheep, the rich giving food to the poor. I gather that though this custom has been observed until recently in the villages round about Cairo it was unknown in Cairo itself.

On Shemm en-Nesîm, the great national festival of Egypt which has come down from Pharaonic days, the boys club