The Bazar At Al-Madinah Is Poor, And As Almost All The Slaves
Are Brought From Meccah By The Jallabs, Or Drivers, After Exporting The
Best To Egypt, The Town Receives Only The Refuse.[FN#24]
The personal appearance of the Madani makes the stranger wonder how
this mongrel population of settlers has acquired a peculiar and almost
an Arab physiognomy.
They are remarkably fair, the effect of a cold
climate; sometimes the cheeks are lighted up with red, and the hair is
a dark chestnut—at Al-Madinah I was not stared at as a white man. The
cheeks and different parts of the children’s bodies are sometimes marked
with Mashali or Tashrih, not the three long stripes of the
Meccans,[FN#25] but little scars generally in threes. In some points
they approach very near the true Arab type, that is to say, the Badawi
of ancient and noble family. The cheek-bones are high and saillant, the
eye small, more round than long,
[p.14] piercing, fiery, deep-set, and brown rather than black. The head
is small, the ears well-cut, the face long and oval, though not
unfrequently disfigured by what is popularly called the “lantern-jaw”; the
forehead high, bony, broad, and slightly retreating, and the beard and
mustachios scanty, consisting of two tufts upon the chin, with,
generally speaking, little or no whisker. These are the points of
resemblance between the city and the country Arab. The difference is
equally remarkable. The temperament of the Madani is not purely
nervous, like that of the Badawi, but admits a large admixture of the
bilious, and, though rarely, the lymphatic.
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