Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/131

 The bridegroom is conducted to the house of his fiancée there to sit in state, by a band of his male relations and friends, some of whom sing shrill verses from the Kurân, while others rush madly ahead, charging, retreating, capering, dancing, yelling, and hooting, brandishing naked weapons, and engaging in a highly realistic sham-fight with the bride's relatives and their friends, who rush out of her compound to meet them, fling themselves into the heart of the excited mob, and do not suffer themselves to be routed until they have made a fine show of resistance.

Traditional customs, such as this, are among the most illuminating of archeological relics. They are perpetuated to-day for old sake's sake, laughingly, as a concession to the conventions, by people who never stay to question their origin, or to spare a thought to the forgotten social conditions or religious observances to the nature of which they testify. Yet each one of them is a fragmentary survival that whispers, to those who care to listen, of strange and ancient things. Thus the right claimed in England to kiss any girl who at Christmas is caught beneath the mistletoe, is the innocent shadow thrown across the present by the wild, indiscriminate orgies which were wont to be held under the oak trees in Druidical Britain, in celebration of the winter solstice. The practice of "blooding" a boy who, for the first time, is in at the death of a fox, points to the fact that of old, in merry England, the anointing of the young and untried warriors with the blood of the slain was a