[230] No word has given rise to wilder speculation than Carta, paper. The word here is caret.
[231] At Mequinez, a man having found something in the streets, caused it to be proclaimed, in order that the owner might come and receive his property. Muley Ismael sent for him, and thus addressed him. “You do not deserve death, for you are not a robber; but as I wish all my subjects to know that the proper way to have things returned to their rightful owners is by leaving them where they are, I must make an example of you.”
[232] I refer to the orgies practised among the polished Carthaginians, and better known as belonging to the worship of the Cyprian Venus, and which are reported by credible witnesses as of public occurrence at no remote period in Barbary, on the part alike of male and female saints.
[233] These are the Psylli of the ancients. The same gift was enjoyed by the Marses in Italy, and the Opheogines in Cyprus possessed it; the former pretended to derive it from the enchantress Circe, the latter from a virgin of Phrygia united to a Sacred Dragon.—See A. Gell. Noct. Attic., l. ix. c. 13, et l. xvi. c. 2. Strabo, l. xiii.; Ælian De Nat. Animal, l. i. c. 57, et l. xii. c. 39.
[234] Ælian de Nat. Animal, l. iv. c. 27. It was also called Aglaophotis, and has a flame-coloured flower, supposed at night to emit flashes. It is the Atropa Belladonna.
[235] Josephus, De Bello Jud. l. vii. c. 25.
CHAPTER VII.
CONNEXION BETWEEN MAURITANIA AND AMERICA.
Rabat, Dec. 17th.
The thermometer, in a room where the sun never shines, stands nearly at temperate. During twenty days, we have only had two days of bad weather: it is hot in the sun, and cold at night. The days and nights are of resplendent beauty, with almost always a cloudless sky towards evening. The landscape up the river has a delicacy of colouring as peculiar as beautiful. At night the moon is so brilliant, that stars only of the third magnitude are visible. Walking on the top of the house, for here one leads a cat-like life—always on the roof—it is like a mixture of summer and winter. The houses around seem in their whiteness as if under a load of snow; above, there is a summer sky, and around, verdant hills and fields. I gathered in a garden a branch of a pear-tree in full blossom, though the rest of the tree was quite dead; and flocks of swallows were disporting in the air, making, by our proverb, a summer of December. Yet, during this time, there have been disasters upon the coast: the schooner with which we were in company has been entirely lost at Dar-el-Baída.[236]
A French steam-vessel of war has also been lost, and eighty men have perished: this is the second.