In This Form He Is Transported,
Perhaps, Some Hundred Miles, Slung Upon A Camel, With The
Thermometer Above 130 Degrees Fahr.
In the sun, and he is
conveyed to the village that is so fortunate as to be honoured
with his remains.
It may be readily imagined that with a
favourable wind, the inhabitants are warned of his approach some
time before his arrival. Happily, long before we arrived at Sofi,
the village had been blessed by the death of a celebrated Faky,
a holy man who would have been described as a second Isaiah were
the annals of the country duly chronicled. This great "man of
God," as he was termed, had departed this life at a village on
the borders of the Nile, about eight days' hard camel-journey
from Sofi; but from some assumed right, mingled no doubt with
jobbery, the inhabitants of Sofi had laid claim to his body, and
he had arrived upon a camel horizontally, and had been buried
about fifty yards from our present camp. His grave was beneath a
clump of mimosas that shaded the spot, and formed the most
prominent object in the foreground of our landscape. Thither
every Friday the women of the village congregated, with offerings
of a few handfuls of dhurra in small gourd-shells, which they
laid upon the grave, while they ATE THE HOLY EARTH in small
pinches, which they scraped like rabbits, from a hole they had
burrowed towards the venerated corpse; this hole was about two
feet deep from continual scratching, and must have been very near
the Faky.
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