Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/247

Rh Caucasian lesgine. Near by, a boy made his trained dog and little monkey perform tricks for his restricted audience, as he was encircled only by children, and these so lightly clad that they had not a single place where they might hide their admission fees. Determined to have some reward for his running monologue and for the tricks of his trained animals, the juvenile performer snatched a lump of sugar from the hands of one of his admiring onlookers, bit off a part of it, gave the dog and the monkey a lick each at the remaining moiety and then handed this back to its crying owner, who immediately took the precaution to guard it from further spoliation by putting it in his mouth and was thus appeased.

Down at the further end of Jemaa el-Fna another crowd surrounded an itinerant quack. Those who know the country say that real doctors are to be found among the Berbers and Arabs but that they are fast disappearing; yet pure medical science, as it is known in European countries, does not exist in Moslem lands today. Only traditions remain, and most of these are derived from the realm of magic, inasmuch as all the superstitions of the peoples with whom the Arabs and Berbers have come into contact have injected themselves into the questions of health as well as into the world of sorcery. The Arab medical book known as the "Rhama" is an unordered collection of magical recipes together with expositions of the healing properties of certain plants, salts and mineral springs. This name "Rhama" brought to my mind the "Rama" of Central Asia, whom the Lamaites looked upon as a magus, a doctor and a chief. The resemblance between the name of this book and the word "Brahman"