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Here, too, lie the cemeteries: the Jewish, fronting the main road, with a decent enclosure; that of the Christians, framed in a wire fence and containing a few wooden crosses, imitation broken columns and tinsel wreaths; Arab tombs, scattered over a large undefined tract of brown earth, and clustering thickly about some white-domed maraboutic monument, whose saintly relics are desirable companionship for the humbler dead.
Walking from Nefta to the Chott, you will reach, on the burning plain, a maraboutic shrine that might serve as an asylum for some conscience-stricken, malaria-proof penitent. They go well together, maraboutism and the Chott two factors that make for barrenness in man and nature. And Nefta is full of such shrines.
All faces were turned towards the sacred city, as Mussulmans turn when they kneel to pray, in mosque or in desert; and the white slabs, narrow or broad, long or short, ornamental or plain, flat or roofed with fantastic maraboutic domes, were placed very close together.
The modern settlement has wandered away from this ancient one which now slumbers together, maybe, with its hoary Egyptian prototype under high-piled mounds whereon have arisen, since those days, a few mediaeval monuments and crumbling maraboutic shrines and houses of more modern date, patched together with antique building blocks and fragments of marble cornices: an island of sand and oblivion, lapped by soft-surging palms.
It is hard to say why the French foster these Arab maraboutic tendencies as opposed to the saner ideals of the Berber stock; perhaps they think it politic to arabize the older race in this and a few other particulars, though it signifies, almost invariably, a retrograde movement of civilization.
Those charms and amulets, those dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the bean-humbug . . . He had the true maraboutic note.
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