The South Western

Some Scenes of Mohammedan Superstition.—S. S. Cox, Esq., writing from Algiers, says:

Mahmoud insists on our going up into the old city to see some Mohammedan rites. The devil himself is an Algerine dervish. These are not the dancing, whirling dervishes of Constantinople. There are several sects of Moslems peculiar to Morocco and Algiers. I think there are seven. I believe Mahmoud belongs to this one. He did not like to confess it, but I saw him, as we entered, quietly salute the chief dervish with a peculiar embrace and kiss.

To this performance the ladies went; but they had to go up-stairs into one of the galleries of the inner quadrangular court of the Moorish house among the Moorish women. Several nationalities were represented in our crowd. Expectation was on tiptoe to see and hear. It was a hot night, and the room was close and full of people. Some two dozen Moors were present. It is dark in the room; only two dim candles and a charcoal fire, which smouldered in a skillet. The object of the latter appeared to be to warm up the drums which the dervishes beat, and which, when the sheep-skins got loose, they heat over the fire to make it tight. Perhaps there were some fumes in the skillet to make the dervishes devilish. While our ladies above were taking coffee, very black and sweet, in nice little China cups, in the galleries, with their Arab hostesses, we sweat down stairs, leaning expectant in the dark against the white-washed walls or against the pillars of the court.

THE DANCE.

Now the chief begins. He chants passages of the Koran, while, standing around him semi-circularly, a half a dozen respond with whining tones. Others, with their drums, sit cross-legged in a row, before a little stand with two long, lighted wax tapers. A monotonous drum chorus begins; then a long haired dervish bounds up like a jack-in-the-box, as if shot in the rear, and, being up, a brother unbinds his garments and spreads out his hair, and then he jumps up gently at first, keeping time to the music. His head bows as his body sways; then faster and faster, till his hair flies around wildly and his hands are swinging insanely.

He is joined by another, who is more staid. The last looks as if he ought to know better. The first one, exhausted, falls down in epilepsy and is carried out. No. 2 is joined by No. 3; then No. 4 appears, and by this time No. 1 reappears, and the quadruped—for they are like a brutal four-legged nondescript—are all at it. No. 1 having worked himself wild again, stops a moment. The others stop.

A brother appears from behind with a red-hot bar of iron.

No. 1 laps it with his tongue. I see it smoke. My blood runs icily. He slaps the incandescent iron with hand and foot. Then the ministering brother offers him to eat some delicate stems or pieces of glass. He crunched them and swallowed them. His digestion is excellent. If it had been candy he could not have relished it more! Then No. 2, the intelligent, stoops and has a long wire run through his tongue and out of each cheek, protruding four inches. He snarls meanwhile like a caged hyena. Then No. 3, who has been rather quiescent, commences to snap and bark like a hungry dog—eyes popping out, and face all savage and imbruted. Barked!—he howled, he growled. Finally, the ministering brother comes out with one of the thick leaves of the prickly pear, a foot long, in form of an ellipse, an inch thick, and full of thorns; all the dervishes drop down on all fours and are biting at it, and into it, and crunching it.

The froth of their mad mouths hang to the green prickles and slavers the green rind.

Ugh! What more? No. 4, in an ecstasy of fanatic diabolism, swallows a scorpion. Whether they have taken out the poison, or whether the afflatus is so enormously exciting that poison is innoxious, or what, God knows? We summon Mahmoud in haste; beckon our ladies from above in the dark, and seek relief and breath in the narrow streets. Upon this infernal orgy we have nothing to comment. It is near making the human a wild animal as anything can be.