TWO GREAT MOORISH RELIGIOUS DANCES 
or dance on. one foot, but the rhythm, 
the one, two, three—one, two, three 1s 
always there. 
And after a person has listened to 
them awhile he catches himself keeping 
time to the music, maybe at first only 
with a fan or walking stick; then per- 
haps one finds the muscles of one’s knees 
stiffening in time to the music, and one 
may even go so far as to rise on one’s 
toes and fall back again as the beat, beat, 
beat of the drums and the wail of. the 
pipes sink deeper into one’s blood. 
The road through the great market- 
place of Tangier is not over one thou- 
sand feet long, and yet so slowly do the 
dancers move that the time occupied in 
passing from one gate to the other is 
sometimes five hours, during all of which 
time no foreigner, unless he be overcame 
by the noise or the heat or the barbaric 
splendor, can take himself away, and as 
he watches all the peculiar tales of the 
Aisawa dancers recur to him. Servants, 
who for three hundred and sixty-four 
days a year are model servants, not over 
religious, and apparently more than half 
European, on the day of the dance feel 
the resistless call of the faith and sur- 
prise their masters by casting aside much 
of their clothing and throwing them- 
selves into one of the rows of the Aisawa 
and participating with equal fervor in 
the religious dance. 
One cannot understand how the dan- 
cers can live through such a long ecstasy 
of effort; and yet they do, and when 
after passing through the upper gates of 
the market-place they gather in the 
walled inclosure which they maintain, 
they eat vast quantities of food and show 
no effects whatever of their terrible 
. dance of endurance. 
The Hamadsha, which is a less numer- 
ous and influential religious order, con- 
fined more to Morocco, are the followers 
of Sidi Ali Bel Hamdush, who made his 
appearance as a saint on the pages of 
Mohammedan history at a later date 
than M’Hammed Ben Aisa. Sidi Ali Bel 
Hamdush founded his brotherhood upon 
the tenet “Who pardons our past sins 
185 
will pardon those of the future.” This 
seems to be a somewhat inadequate ex- 
cuse for the rites of the Hamadsha, who 
also make a pilgrimage each year to the 
tomb of their founder and patron saint. 
This tomb is at Zarhom, a sacred city on 
the hill near Maknez, a city whose streets 
have never yet been polluted by the foot 
of a Christian. Many Christians have 
trie to go there, but they have never 
succeeded. It is not the policy of Zar- 
hom to let a Christian enter and then kill 
him, but to kill him before he enters. 
The Hamadsha who dance each year 
in the sok at Tangier are not numerous. 
There are perhaps a dozen adult dancers, 
which number is increased during the 
different dances by the addition of cer- 
tain spectators, who are overcome by re- 
ligious fervor, among which, unfortu- 
nately, are usually a number of boys 
varying in age from ten to fifteen. And 
when one considers that the thing which 
differentiates the Hamadsha dance from 
the dance of the Aisawa is that the 
Hamadsha have a pleasant way of chop- 
ping their own heads with a small axe 
shaped like an old-time battle-axe, the 
introduction of small but impulsive boys 
into the equation causes the average for- 
eign spectator to have a peculiar feeling 
in the pit of his stomach. 
Some way one feels that if a man from 
thirty to fifty years old wants to whirl 
around and chop his head with an axe 
he is old enough to know what he wants 
to do, but when after the spectacle has 
reached a point where the blood and the 
beat of the sun are beginning to have 
rather a depressing effect, one sees a 
small boy rush into the circle of dancers, 
seize an axe from the hand of a man 
who should have been dead some time, 
and with a shout of religious joy bring 
the sharp edge of that axe down upon 
his little shaven head—well, one wishes 
that one could have about a five-minute 
session with the old gentleman and a 
good-sized base-ball bat to argue with. 
The old dancers either have such thick 
heads or else have learned so well how to 
handle the axe that they can draw the 
