United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But we were to find no rest in the shade of Sidi el Muktar's stately zowia. The "Sons of Lions" had raided the place on the previous day, hoping to terminate alike the rule and the existence of a kaid whose hand had rested too heavily upon them.
Doubtless this zowia gives the Sok el Abeed a sanctity that no procedure within its walls can besmirch; and, to be sure, the laws of the saint's religion are not so much outraged here as in the daily life of many places more sanctified by popular opinion.
The harvest was newly gathered, it had survived rain and blight and locusts, and now they had to wait the arrival of their kaid or his khalifa, who would seize all they could not conceal, hawk, locust, and blight in one. At the village called after its patron saint, Sidi B'noor, a little deputation of tribesmen brought grievances for an airing. We sat in the scanty shade of the zowia wall.
I motioned one lad to go forward, and, to my amazement, he made the sign that is intended to avert the evil eye, and declared that he took refuge from me with Allah. I sent for Salam, and, as he approached, a chorus of explanations came to him from all sides. The pigeon came from the zowia of El Hanchen. It was sacred that is why it was so fat.
Beyond and above the wall glistened the white dome of a zowia, flanked by a spear-like minaret and the tall heads of a few date palms whose long leaves hung motionless in the hot air. Suddenly in the crowd beyond the gates there was a commotion. From one of the streets six colossal Nubians advanced with shouts of "Oak! Oak! Warda! Way! Make way!"
A dazzling, white-domed saint's shrine within four square walls lights the landscape here and there, and gives to some douar such glory as a holy man can yield when he has been dead so long that none can tell the special direction his holiness took. The zowia serves several useful purposes.
For miles and miles, often as far as the eye can see, the land lies fallow, never a farmhouse or village to be seen, nothing save some zowia or saint's tomb, with white dome rising within four white walls to stare undaunted at the fierce African sun, while the saint's descendants in the shelter of the house live by begging from pious visitors.
Salam and M'Barak praised Sidi M'godol, whose zowia lay plainly to be seen below the Marrakesh gate; the Susi muleteers, the boy, and the slave renewed their Shilha songs, thinking doubtless of the store of dollars awaiting them; but I could not conquer my regrets, though I was properly obliged to Sidi M'godol for bringing me in safety to his long home.
Before us on a hill two meadows away stood the douar, its conical huts thatched with black straw and striped palmetto, its zowia with minaret points at each corner of the protecting walls, and a stork on one leg in the foreground. It cost me some effort to tear myself away from the place, and as I remounted and prepared to ride off the veteran cried once more, "I have seen many Sultans."
Then, again, the zowia shelters the descendants of the holy man, who prey upon passers in the name of Allah and of the departed. Beyond one of the villages graced with the shrine of a forgotten saint, I chanced upon a poor Moorish woman washing clothes at the edge of a pool. She used a native grass-seed in place of soap, and made the linen very white with it.
Word Of The Day