Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/53

Rh the sultan's call the aged seer set out at once from a neighboring city but died on his way, by the bank of the river Isser. The grieving ruler gave the holy Marabout a magnificent burial close to the mosque in El-Eubbad near Tlemsen.

My wife and I are just before the beautifully carved cypress door of this kubba where the remains of Sidi Choaib ibn Husein el-Andalosi are resting. We pass inside the small court paved with marble and mount the short flight of steps to an onyx colonnade. The kubba itself, which we now enter, is surmounted by a dome and lighted through small leaded windows of colored glass, that flood the silence with a soft, mysterious light. In the farther corner rests the tabout, or sarcophagus, of cypress black with age, as it has stood here through eight centuries. Beautiful gold and silver embroideries all but cover the Marabout's tomb, near which we are shown a smaller sarcophagus, containing the ashes of Sidi Abd es-Selam. Richly decorated banners, the handiwork of women in harems from Bagdad to Sali, hang upon the walls; offerings rest everywhere, silver lamps, candlesticks, boxes, cups, polished ostrich eggs, even animal bones, which I recognized as coming from crocodile skeletons. To the left of the entrance is a well, with a coaming built up about twenty inches above the ground with blocks of onyx as yellow as wax, some of which are deeply cut by the chains which have raised the buckets ever since the twelfth century. The water is clear and cold as it probably comes down from the heights of the Tlemsen range, and is reputed to have healing properties. Though we could not experiment with its therapeutic