Footnote 181:[ (return) ] A coba is a cubical building, about forty or fifty feet square, having a dome on the top, inhabited by a fakeer; the ground adjacent to this building is consecrated for the dead, but is never inclosed. The living reverence the dead by never, riding over these grounds; but travellers, in passing stop and repeat a fatha. When the ground has been consecrated to the dead, and the coba has an inhabitant, who must be a sanctified person, he immediately assumes the name of fakeer or priest, and the building, and cemetery attached to it, becomes a zowia or sanctuary.
The palaces of this country generally consist of a perfect square wall, containing from two to forty acres of land, or more; for the imperial palace at Mequinas covers about two square miles of ground. At each corner of the square is a cubical building, with an angular top, of green glazed tiles, having four windows, one in each side; in the centre of the square is the palace, surrounded by a colonnade one or two stories high. The pavement is either tessellated or of chequered marble; some of the walls of the rooms are also tessellated with arabesque, borders, the ceilings are painted with gay colours, viz. scarlet, sky-blue, green, yellow, and orange, in arabesque, and some of them are very elegant. The houses of the opulent are diminutive imitations of the palaces. The house of (the Talb Câduse) the minister of the Sultan Seedi Muhamed ben Abd Allah at Marocco, is a building, elegantly neat. Abd Rahamen ben Nassar's house at Mogodor, is well deserving the investigation of an European architect, and his magnificent new house at Saffee, is a model of a particular style of architecture. Some of the houses of the princes and the military at Mequinas are handsome buildings, and many of the houses of the opulent merchants at Fas, who have their commercial establishments at Timbuctoo, and other countries of Sudan, are extremely neat and truly unique, having beautiful gardens in the interior, ornamented with the choicest and most odoriferous flowers and shrubs; with fountains of running water, clear as crystal, delectable to behold in this warm climate, and such as are not to be seen in any part of Europe.
FRAGMENTS, NOTES,
AND
ANECDOTES;
Illustrating the Nature and Character of the Country.
NTRODUCTION.
In recording the following Anecdotes and Fragments the naked truth is stated, without the embellishments of language, or the labour of rhetoric, which the wiser part of mankind have always approved of as the most instructive way of writing; and all such as are acquainted with books will readily agree with me, that many authors stretch, even to the prejudice of truth, from an affectation of elegance of style.