Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/34

18 turning out this sort of jewelry and bizarre ornaments aie to be found. The women wore no veils and had their eyes heavily underlined with black and their eyebrows brought together in one continuous dark line.

Their painted cheeks and lips and the circles, zigzags, arrows and squares tattooed all over their faces, made such a vivid picture that I started to photograph them, but was rewarded only by the precipitate flight of all save a single young and supple woman with a sharp, rapacious expression. When I sought the reason for this miniature hegira, one of the men explained that the ordinary Moslem believes that to have one's picture taken brings misfortune and sickness and that consequently only the young dancer and they, the men, could be snapped,

"Are you, then, not followers of the Prophet?" He shrugged his shoulders and answered:

"Yes, though not of Mahomet but of Ben Sliman. We belong to the Mlaina tribe."

I did not then understand the full significance of his explanation and only later learned the interesting and curious facts needed to elucidate it. In the south of Oran province and in other parts of the French possessions in North Africa there exist several tribes who are despised by the real Moslems but who, at the same time, inspire in their more orthodox brothers a mystic awe. It seems not yet to have been thoroughly established just what the extraction of these tribes really is, whether they migrated from Asia or are indigenous to Africa. They were formally followers of Islam, but their prophet is Omar ben Sliman, who is said to have been a renegade