This Severe Order, However, Lies In General Abeyance.

[21] "Tuarick grandiloquence," says Richardson (vol.

I. p. 207.), "savours of blasphemy, e.g. the lands, rocks, and mountains of Ghat do not belong to God but to the Azghar." Equally irreverent are the Kafirs of the Cape. They have proved themselves good men in wit as well as war; yet, like the old Greenlanders and some of the Burmese tribes, they are apparently unable to believe in the existence of the Supreme. A favourite question to the missionaries was this, "Is your God white or black?" If the European, startled by the question, hesitated for a moment, they would leave him with open signs of disgust at having been made the victims of a hoax.

The assertion generally passes current that the idea of an Omnipotent Being is familiar to all people, even the most barbarous. My limited experience argues the contrary. Savages begin with fetisism and demon- worship, they proceed to physiolatry (the religion of the Vedas) and Sabaeism: the deity is the last and highest pinnacle of the spiritual temple, not placed there except by a comparatively civilised race of high development, which leads them to study and speculate upon cosmical and psychical themes. This progression is admirably wrought out in Professor Max Muller's "Rig Veda Sanhita."

[22] The Moslem corpse is partly sentient in the tomb, reminding the reader of Tennyson:

"I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so; To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?"

[23] The prayers for the dead have no Rukaat or bow as in other orisons.

[24] The general Moslem name for the African coast from the Somali seaboard southwards to the Mozambique, inhabited by negrotic races.

[25] The Moslem rosary consists of ninety-nine beads divided into sets of thirty-three each by some peculiar sign, as a bit of red coral. [Illustration] The consulter, beginning at a chance place, counts up to the mark: if the number of beads be odd, he sets down a single dot, if even, two. This is done four times, when a figure is produced as in the margin. Of these there are sixteen, each having its peculiar name and properties. The art is merely Geomancy in its rudest shape; a mode of vaticination which, from its wide diffusion, must be of high antiquity. The Arabs call it El Baml, and ascribe its present form to the Imam Jaafar el Sadik; amongst them it is a ponderous study, connected as usual with astrology. Napoleon's "Book of Fate" is a specimen of the old Eastern superstition presented to Europe in a modern and simple form.

[26] In this country, as in Western and Southern Africa, the leopard, not the wolf, is the shepherd's scourge.

[27] Popular superstition in Abyssinia attributes the same power to the Felashas or Jews.

[28] Our Elixir, a corruption of the Arabic El Iksir.

[29] In the Somali tongue its name is Barki: they make a stool of similar shape, and call it Barjimo.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 41 of 249
Words from 20646 to 21153 of 128411