the town whose condition is that of Suez and Bayrut half a century ago.  It is a foul slope; now slippery with viscous mud, then powdery with fetid dust, dotted with graves and decaying tombs, unclean booths, gargottes and tattered tents, and frequented by women, mere bundles of unclean rags, and by men wearing the haik or burnus, a Franciscan frock, tending their squatting camels and chaffering over cattle for Gibraltar beef-eaters.  Here the market-people form a ring about the reciter, a stalwart man affecting little raiment besides a broad waist-belt into which his lower chiffons are tucked, and noticeable only for his shock hair, wild eyes, broad grin and generally disreputable aspect.  He usually handles a short stick; and, when drummer and piper are absent, he carries a tiny tom-tom shaped like an hour-glass, upon which he taps the periods.  This Scealuidhe, as the Irish call him, opens the drama with extempore prayer, proving that he and the audience are good Moslems:  he speaks slowly and with emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action and the most comical grimace:  he advances, retires and wheels about, illustrating every point with pantomime; and his features, voice and gestures are so expressive that even Europeans who cannot understand a word of Arabic divine the meaning of his tale.  The audience stands breathless and motionless surprising strangers[FN#303] by the ingenuousness and freshness of feeling hidden under their hard and savage exterior.  The performance usually ends with the embryo actor going round for alms and flourishing in air every silver bit, the usual honorarium being a few “f’lus,” that marvellous money of Barbary, big coppers worth one-twelfth of a penny.  All the tales I heard were purely local, but Fakhri Bey, a young Osmanli domiciled for some time in Fez and Mequinez, assured me that The Nights are still recited there.

Many travellers, including Dr. Russell, have complained that they failed to find a complete Ms. copy of The Nights.  Evidently they never heard of the popular superstition which declares that no one can read through them without dying—­it is only fair that my patrons should know this.  Yacoub Artin Pasha declares that the superstition dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and he explains it in two ways.  Firstly, it is a facetious exaggeration, meaning that no one has leisure or patience to wade through the long repertory.  Secondly, the work is condemned as futile.  When Egypt produced savants and legists like Ibn al-Hajar, Al-’Ayni, and Al-Kastallani, to mention no others, the taste of the country inclined to dry factual studies and positive science; nor, indeed, has this taste wholly died out:  there are not a few who, like Khayri Pasha, contend that the mathematic is more useful even for legal studies than history and geography, and at Cairo the chief of the Educational Department has always been an engineer, i. e., a mathematician.  The Olema declared war against all “futilities,” in which they included not only stories but also what is politely entitled Authentic History.  From this to the fatal effect of such lecture is only a step.  Society, however, cannot rest without light literature; so the novel-reading class was thrown back upon writings which had all the indelicacy and few of the merits of The Nights.