22 
A METEOR — FAMILY BROIL. 
lute indifference. Even the beautiful manner in 
which the Arabic letters are printed scarcely excites 
their surprise. En-Noor paid me his usual morn- 
ing visit, drank tea, and ate pickles and marmalade. 
We asked him about meteors. He recollects the 
fall of many. One, he says, fell upon a house, and 
terrified the inhabitants, who came running to him. 
Afterwards they dug to the depth of a man, and 
found nothing, for it had buried itself deep in the 
earth. According to him, a great profusion of 
meteors denotes abundance of rain and herbage : 
but these phenomena exert also a sinister in- 
fluence like comets, signifying the death of some 
great personage. I have no doubt that extraor- 
dinary meteors are very frequent in this part of the 
Sahara. En-Noor was very condescending, as 
usual : no change is observable in his manners. 
It turned out that he had come with the inten- 
tion of speaking on a very delicate subject, but had 
refrained. We learned what it was afterwards. 
Dr. Overweg was sent for in the course of the day to 
attend upon one of En-Noor's wives, who had been 
frightfully beaten by his highness the previous even- 
ing. This domestic broil formed the common topic 
of conversation in Tintalous. Every scandal-monger 
has got hold of one version of the story. From what 
we could gather, the great man was lying down 
quietly, when suddenly, without any apparent pro- 
vocation, he started up, took a large stick from the 
fire, one of its ends still burning, and with this ter- 
