United States or Honduras ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The style and language in which the Perfumed Garden is written are," says the writer of the Foreword to the Paris edition of 1904, "of the simplest and most unpretentious kind, rising occasionally to a very high degree of eloquence, resembling, to some extent, that of the famous Thousand Nights and a Night; but, while the latter abounds in Egyptian colloquialisms, the former frequently causes the translator to pause owing to the recurrence of North African idioms and the occasional use of Berber or Kabyle words, not generally known."
Baby camels with waggling, tufted humps followed their mothers. Slim grey sloughis and Kabyle dogs quarrelled with each other, among flocks of black and white goats; and at night, the sky pulsed with the fires of desert encampments, rosy as northern lights. Just before the walled city of Ouargla, Victoria saw her first mirage, clear as a dream between waking and sleeping.
The wild Touareg chant was louder now, but she hardly heard it, because her ears strained for some sound which the singing might cover: the sound of rubble crumbling under a foot that climbed and sought a holding-place. From far away came the barking of Kabyle dogs, in distant camps of nomads. In stalls of the bordj, where the animals rested, a horse stamped now and then, or a camel grunted.
The Kabyle continues to call him a Roumi, which will bear to be translated Romanist, being imitated from the word Rome and applied to all Catholics.
'Voila la capitale de Sauveterre! soon cries our driver, pointing to a cluster of bare brown, apparently windowless, houses, and a tiny church, all grouped picturesquely together. A poor-looking place it was enough when we obtained a nearer view, reminding me of a Kabyle village more than anything else; not, however, brightened with olive or fig tree!
Whatever brings out the full power of either without suddenly overtasking is healthy and beneficial. It has been remarked that the most usual size of the Kabyle water-jar is as nearly as possible identical with the amphora kept for a standard measure in the Capitol at Rome.
As for the Kabyle of more vulgar position, take away his haik and his bornouse, trim the points of his beard, and we have a perfect German head. Beside these we set a representative Arab head, sketched in the streets of Algiers.
Lucas-Championniere saw a Kabyle thoubib who told him that it was quite common among his tribe; he was the son of a family of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four times, his father twelve times; he had three brothers also experts; he did not consider it a dangerous operation. He did it most frequently for pain in the head, and occasionally for fracture.
Somewhere not far away the Kabyle dogs were barking shrilly. In the distance rose and fell muffled notes of strange passion and fierceness, an Arab tom-tom beating like the heart of the conquered East, away in the old town. Stephen's short-lived gaiety was struck out of his soul. "For a moment white, then gone forever." He pushed the haunting words out of his mind.
But Seyf el-Mulook got possession of the sparrow and strangled it, and the jinnee fell upon the ground a heap of black ashes. In a Kabyle story an ogre declares that his fate is far away in an egg, which is in a pigeon, which is in a camel, which is in the sea. The hero procures the egg and crushes it between his hands, and the ogre dies.
Word Of The Day