Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/271

Rh wise men still wander here, figures in that history which has not yet been finished, but rather interrupted in the midst of the record, and is waiting for a chronicler who shall remove the dust from the ancient book and begin a new page.

Once my learnèd cicerone had led me within the walls of the neglected and depressing kasba of the Saadite dynasty, he showed further depth of feeling in his words:

"Sir, we are on the hallowed ground that has received the ashes of the great Saadite emirs, among them those of Ahmed the Golden, the conqueror of Timbuktu, the Sudan and Senegal. A curse followed this noble family, so that one of them rarely died a natural death. In blood and revenge they wandered this earth, ever the prey of disasters and crime. The anathema which had been pronounced by a vengeful kahina upon one of their distant ancestors followed them to their graves and only died with the last of the rulers. With the passing of power over Maghreb from their hands to those of the Alawites this place was walled in, and nobody ever dared to disturb the rest of the spirits—no one, as the new king feared the curse and strove to blot out even the memory of these earlier rulers, which ever lived in the grateful hearts of the men from the Atlas.

"But they did not succeed in that; for among the Draa tribe of mountaineers there were still families descended from the oldest Berbers, or Mesmudas, who knew that the mausoleum had already existed for three centuries. Some among them dug a branch from a nearby-by subterranean channel through which they passed under and into the kasba, thus enabling their most respected Marabouts