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It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara, after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached the top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr.
The inhabitants of Kalaa pass for rich, the women promenade without veils and covered with jewels, and the city is clean, which is rare in Kabylia. The anaya never fails, and we are received with cordiality, mixed with stateliness, by an imposing old man in a white bornouse. "Enta amin?" asks the Roumi. He answers by a sign of the head, and reads our missive with care.
The marabout did not answer. He looked at me calmly, as at a child who asks questions about the mysteries of life which only the old can understand. "These things," he said at length, "are hidden from the unbeliever. You are a Roumi. How, then, should you learn such matters?" "But even the Roumi "
The Kabyle, of sturdier stuff, hands his ragged garment to his son like a tattered flag, bidding him cherish and be proud of the rents made by Roumi bayonets. It must be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears.
The women were charming, although they took part in it. These people did not like the roumi, the shivering Christian. Besides, women do not like men who have fallen. They do not like feeble creatures. "Bah! and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?" "Are you quite sure that the Sisters of Charity are women, my dear Marianne?
Roumi!" warned us that we had been discovered. The sailor, Mehemet, he who figured in the scene of the oath at Palamos, entered in a melancholy mood the enclosure where we were together, and made us understand that the cries of "Roumi!" vociferated under these circumstances, were equivalent to a sentence of death. "Wait," said he; "a means of saving you has occurred to me."
And there between the café and the souk gate was the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their feet tucked under their little kashabias, their chechias awry on their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather legs of the infidel conquerors passing by. The Roumi, the French blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!
These same tribes doubtless called Saint Augustine a Roumi, and he returned the epithet Barbari or Berbers a name which the emperors applied with vast contempt to the hordes and mongrel population of exiles and convicts that peopled Mauritania, and which the natives retained until the Arab invasion, when they changed Berber for Kebaïle. The Romans conquered the shores and the plains.
The valley of the river Sahel is full of boars, and panthers and monkeys abound in the neighboring spurs of the Zouaouas. While the Roumi are examining his orchards of oranges and pomegranates the agha's courtyard fills with guests, magnificent sheikhs on Barbary horses, armed with inlaid guns.
She would have been utterly confused if an Arab had seen her face. She sat there before me, almost within reach of my hand, in a thin, short, very short, tunic, which was wet, and she never turned a hair. I was a "Roumi," not a man, a dog. That was all there was to it. I felt that unless I could shake her composure I would explode. I tried to convince her I was a man by staring at her.
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