Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/298

290 on the lighted embers in each pot, and it immediately gives out a good deal of smoke. The men who are about to perform bend over them, and inhale the smoke, taking long and deep inspirations. In a very few minutes they appear to become almost intoxicated with the fumes; they dance about in a wild manner for some time, and as soon as they are wound up to the proper pitch of excitement they do the feats already described—they eat scorpions, broken glass, &c., and other equally extraordinary things.

It is said, that whenever there is any sickness in a Moorish house, some members of the Aïssaoua sect are sent for by its inmates, who believe that by this process the evil spirit which causes the disease is driven out of their dwelling.

The dances above-described as being common to Algeria are those of a people who possess a certain amount of civilisation—of a barbarous kind, it is true—(in the case of the Aïssaoua sect it does not go beyond learning to converse in a foreign language). In one part of the Sahara, dances are executed which we associate with very remote times, viz. funeral dances.

We are in the habit of picturing to ourselves the Sahara as being a vast and almost illimitable sandy plain; but such is not the aspect of that portion of it which we visited: it was rather that of a newly-harrowed field, out of which rise, here and there, hillocks of pure sand. Small tussocks of vegetation are scattered all over its flat surface: any plants there may be are of a fleshy or juicy nature; they form the only sustenance of the flocks of camels and sheep which migrate northwards every spring from the far interior of the desert to the Tell (as the land is called which lies between the Atlas mountains and the sea), whither the Bedouins bring them for pasture during the hot months of the year. There are also small encampments of these nomads, consisting of a certain number of families, who live together under the rule of their sheikh. Their food is for the most part, if not entirely, dried dates and the milk of their flocks. Water is generally such a scarce commodity with them that should any rain fall (a most unusual event) the women set to work to collect the precious fluid in skins from all the little hollows or depressions in the ground. Such communities remain for several years within a mile or