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Updated: May 7, 2025
I make the tour of the Oasis. Visit to the Souk. Prejudices against me diminish. First sight of Birds. A young Taleb's specimen of Writing. My Turjeman's House. The Negro Dervish. Touarick Camel Races. A few Drops of Rain. Various Visits, Conversations, &c., about Timbuctoo. Prevalent Diseases, and my Medicine Chest. Evening previous to the Ramadan. Houses, Public Buildings, and Streets.
Went to see this evening a sick Touarick, out of town in his tent, and gave him some medicine; but shall be obliged to leave off distributing soon, for the most useful medicines are nearly all finished. 13th. Weather becomes daily cooler. Get tired of writing, and wish to be off in The Desert.
Gradual method of obtaining Information. Visit from a Touarick. Tripoline Merchants have the Money of those in Ghadames. Indifference of Mussulmans in reading The Bible. 4th. WALKED out this morning and found no one in the streets; every body was still in bed, or shut up in their houses, being the first day of the Ramadan. A paralysis of death seemed to have stricken the city.
If this report be correct, it evidently refers to the harmless lefâah mentioned by the Touarick. At the ruins of Lebida, on the coast of Tripoli, an unusual number of large snakes were seen this year , mounting upon and twining round the broken shafts of pillars still standing, as if at the command of some invisible jinn; but they were all perfectly harmless.
Yet whilst the sun scorched my face on one side, the cold wind from the east blanched my cheek on the other. No living creature seen but a few insects. Our people fell in with the skeleton of a Touarick ass, and amused themselves with setting it up upon its legs, as if in the pillory. I rallied them afterwards as they were in a good humour, on their terror of banditti yesterday.
The young beaux prefer the great red sash wound round the head in shape of the turban. The Touarick, from his habit of wearing the litham, does not like a beard, which, indeed, could rarely be seen. As it grows, they pull it out, and so in time it often disappears altogether.
Their method of political organization is democratic and similar in construction and administration to the old Cushite municipalities. Baldwin, quoting from Richardson, says: "Ghat, like all the Touarick countries, is a republic; all the people govern. The woman of the Touaricks is not the woman of the Moors and Mussulmans generally.
A courier is also come from Touat, with the intelligence that the Shânbah, instead of fleeing away from the threatened attack of the Touaricks, had boldly appeared on the Touarick territory, in the route of Touat and Ghadames, having a force of 1200 mounted men.
In the matter of beard, the almost sacred ornament of the Moor and the Arab, the Touarick is placed again in strong contrast with his Mahometan neighbour. All wear a profusion of talismans suspended round the neck, or sewn or stuck about the head, like so many liberty or election cockades.
I tasted of this which I bought, and liked it. There is no lizard of this species in Soudan. A Touarick told me that, having found one in The Desert, he carried it to Soudan, where a Negro prince fell in love with it, and gave him for it the present of a young female slave. The Arabs tame the Thob, and he grows very fond. Some of them are very large.
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