No Canopy Is Used On
This Occasion, As In Egypt, Nor Any Music; But Rich Clothes And
Furniture Are Displayed, And The Feasting Is Sumptuous, And Often Lasts
For Three Or Four Days.
On settling a marriage, the money to be paid for
the bride is carried in procession from the house
Of the bridegroom to
that of the girl's father; it is borne through the streets upon two
tabourets, wrapped up in a rich handkerchief, and covered again with an
embroidered satin stuff. Before the two persons who hold these
tabourets, two others walk, with a flask of rose-water in one hand, and
a censer in the other, upon which all sorts of perfumes and odours are
burning. Behind them follow, in a long train, all the kindred and
friends of the bridegroom, dressed in their best clothes. The price paid
for virgins among the respectable classes, varies at Mekka from forty to
three hundred dollars, and from ten to twenty dollars among the poor
classes. Half the sum only is usually paid down; the other half is left
in possession of the husband, who pays it in case he should divorce his
wife.
[p.218] The circumcision feasts are similar to those at Cairo: the
child, after the operation, is dressed in the richest stuffs, set upon a
fine horse highly adorned, and is thus carried in procession through the
town with drums beating before him.
Funerals differ in nothing from those in Egypt and Syria.
The people of Mekka, in general, have very few horses; I believe that
there are not more than sixty kept by private individuals. The Sherif
has about twenty or thirty in his stables; but Sherif Ghaleb had a
larger stud. The military Sherifs keep mares, but the greater part of
these were absent with the army. The Bedouins, who are settled in the
suburb Moabede, and in some other parts of the town, as being concerned
with public affairs, have also their horses; but none of the merchants
or other classes keep any. They are afraid of being deprived by the
Sherif of any fine animal they might possess, and therefore content
themselves with mules or gedishes (geldings of a low breed). Asses are
very common, but no person of quality ever rides upon them. The few
horses kept at Mekka are of noble breed, and purchased from the
Bedouins: in the spring they are usually sent to some Bedouin
encampment, to feed upon the fine nutritious herbage of the Desert.
Sherif Yahya has a gray mare, from the stud of Ghaleb, which was valued
at twenty purses; she was as beautiful a creature as I ever saw, and the
only one perfectly fine that I met with in the Hedjaz. The Bedouins of
that country, and those especially around Mekka, are very poor in
horses; a few Sheikhs only having any, pasture being scarce, and the
expense of a horse's keep being three piastres a day.
In the Eastern plain, behind Tayf, horses are more numerous, although
much less so than in Nedjed and the deserts of Syria, in consequence of
the comparative scarcity of corn, and the uncertainty of the rain; a
deficiency of which often leaves the Bedouin a whole year without
vegetation; a circumstance that rarely happens in the more northern
deserts, where the rains seldom fail in the proper seasons.
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