ENTERTAINING VARIETIES. 113 



their daily habits. The starved-looking children were playing in the 

 street ; some, too weak to play, were sitting on the ground, diverting 

 themselves as well as they could ; the men were busy at work, as if 

 disease had become their accustomed state, an evil too hopeless to 

 attempt its cure. Unlike the beggars of Soodan, their poor prefer 

 tatters to nudity. Even their little ones were encumbered with un- 

 sightly rags, and, strange to say, the poorest people seemed to have 

 the largest number of children. Habit has inured them to the im- 

 purities of the atmosphere ; they breathe the thickest dust with in- 

 difference ; yet these same people are afraid of the night-air. After 

 dark the fire of the furnace burns low and the smoke clears away, at 

 the very time when the inhabitants close every aperture of their 

 hovels. Where whole families sleep together (as in the den of Er- 

 Masood) this insane habit can not fail to increase their infirmities. 

 Poverty is by no means the only cause of their sickliness. The only 

 manly -looking men I saw in that town were the hard-working laborers 

 of a smithy, and in the wealthier quarters, where the children are as 

 pretty as our own, their fathers look unsound and peevish, in spite of 

 their great paunches. 



The cave-street led steadily up-hill till we reached the top of an 

 eminence, where we stopped and breathed more freely. On the north 

 slope of the hill the wealthier burghers had some well-built log-houses, 

 and right before us was a large stone building with a spacious court, 

 where I saw a number of fat old fellows, all wearing the same kind of 

 cloaks, and all shaved like the sick of a lazar-house. At first I thought 

 that the place was a sort of hospital for the cure of obesity, but I 

 afterward ascertained that it was a guttle-house,* a building where 

 numerous dervishes are fattened at the public expense. These holy 

 men consume great quantities of manioc-roots, f which they digest in 

 the interior of the building, where every one of them has a little stall 

 of his own. At daybreak, at sunset, and again at the rise of the moon, 

 they set up a plaintive howl, in order to save their souls from the 

 Great Pitch-Hole, as the Monakees call the vale of Jehannum.J They 

 do not perform any kind of useful labor, but, as their howl is supposed 

 to propitiate the wrath of the gods, they are revered as saints, and the 

 people feed them very liberally. They wear a sort of sack-gowns, as 

 tighter garments would be inconvenient ; and among those I met 

 at Beth-Raka some were so fat that I could see their cheeks from 

 behind. 



In the mean time the sun had gone down, and, as the twilight in 



* Fress-Haus (W.). 



f The Jatropha manUiot, a species of esculent tubers, as nutritious as our yams or 

 "sweet-potatoes." 



\ The mythology of the Mohammedans represents the bottomless pit as a desolate 

 valley, swept by harmattan-winds, and infested with uncouth goblins and swarms of gad- 

 flies a sort of tropical Tartarus. 

 vol. xxi. 8 



