Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/101

Rh could not be found here? There were bits of iron which it was hard to imagine any one could possibly need, broken pots, copper basins with holes in them, lanterns, bent and dented, a sewing machine in its late decline, a broken kerosene lamp, half of a knife, rifle triggers, dirty rags from bournouses, a whole pile of greasy, once-red fezes and discarded soldiers' blankets, shoes and coats. But somehow one can also find here a handful of arrowheads shaped by the primitive dwellers in the land, a bit of stone with the remnant of a Roman inscription, an ancient statue, a really fine old sword of the Andalusian Moors or a cameo from Carthage or Blida.

As we were again passing through the Jewish quarter, our guide presented us to a grave, old Hebrew merchant in a brown bournous and a black skull-cap. When I asked him about the life of the Jewish colony in Tlemsen, he declared to us that only an ardent faith and the determination to maintain it in its full vigor had enabled the Jews to endure and live through the persecutions and difficulties of the centuries in Africa, but that the Mosaic laws had undergone gradual changes. Today an African Jew, like his Moslem neighbor, believes in djinns, has his saintly Marabouts and indulges in magic practices and rituals in connection with his fetish-worship. The kubba of the Jewish Marabout, Rabb Ankwa, is the object of many pilgrimages of African Jews to Tlemsen. Near the kubba is a miraculous spring, from which the pilgrims, after having kissed the holy stone on the sacred tomb, drink the healing water with a pinch of soil thrown into it.

When I put to my new acquaintance the further