“But I shan’t set on the floor as they do here,” sez he, “I am sorry for some of them poor old men that can’t afford chairs, and I would be perfectly willin’ to make ’em some stools if they’d furnish the lumber.”
Sez I, “It’s their way, Josiah, they like it.”
“I don’t believe it,” sez he; “nobody loves to scrooch down flat with their legs under ’em numb as sticks.” But right whilst we were talkin’ we met a funeral procession. The head one had hard work to git through the crowd crying out:
“There is no deity but God! Mohammed is his apostle!” Then come some boys singin’ a funeral him; and then the bier, borne by friends of the corpse and covered by a handsome shawl. Then come the hired mourners––wimmen––for I spoze they think they’re used to mournin’ and can earn their money better. ’Tennyrate, these screeched and wailed and tore their hair and beat their breast-bone as if they meant to earn their money. Then come the relatives and friends. Of course, they no need to have wep’ a tear, havin’ hired it done. But they did seem to feel real bad, they couldn’t have wept and wailed any more if they had been hired to. Josiah sez:
“Samantha, when I’m took, if you hire anybody to mourn get some better lookin’ females than these. I had almost ruther die onlamented than to have such lookin’ creeters weepin’ over my remains; now some fair lookin’ females such 268 as sister Celestine Bobbett and she that wuz Submit Tewksbury–––”
But I interrupted him by telling him truly that no hired tears would fall on his beloved face if I outlived him, and no boughten groans would be hearn. Sez I, “The tears of true love and grief would bedew your forward.”
“Well,” sez he, “it would be my wishes.”
As we wended our way along we met several water-carriers with leather bottles, jest such a one as Hagar took with her and Ishmael out in the desert, and it wuz on this same desert whose sands wuz siftin’ in about us every chance it had that she lay the child down to die and angels come and fed him. And, also, it bein’ along towards night we met several shepherds; one wuz carryin’ a tired lamb in his arms. They wuz patriarkal in appearance and dressed jest like the Bible pictures. I felt as though I had met Abraham or Isaac onbeknown to them.
Another sight that impressed my pardner fearfully wuz the howlin’ dervishes––we’d hearn about ’em a sight, and so we thought we would go and hear ’em howl. By payin’ a little backsheesh (which is money) we got permission to attend one of their religious meetin’s. There wuz a chief or Sheik, which Josiah always called a “shack”––and I d’no but he wuz well named––and about twenty or thirty howlers in long white robes. They made a low bow to the Shack and then knelt round him in a circle; then they bowed agin a number of times clear to the floor and begun to sing or pray. I d’no what you would call it, but the axents wuz dretful and the music that accompanied it harrowin’ in the extreme. Then they got up and bowed agin to the Shack and begun to shake their heads and their arms and their feet rapid and voylent, all keepin’ time to the music, or what I spoze they called music, their hair hangin’ loose, their yellin’ fearful, and then they begun to whirl like a top spinnin’ round, faster and faster, whirlin’ and howlin’ and shriekin’ till they couldn’t howl or whirl any longer. Then the meetin’ 269 broke up as you may say, they formed a half circle agin round the Shack, bowed to the ground before him and fell down perfectly wore out on the floor. I should have thought they’d died. Why, I couldn’t have stood it and lived nor Josiah couldn’t; it wuz all we could stand to see it go on.
One day Miss Meechim and I visited an American Mission School for Arab and Egyptian children, and it wuz from one of these very schools that one of the Rajahs or native princes took his wife. She wuz a little donkey driver, and the teacher of the Mission, liking her and pitying her, got permission of her mother (a poor donkey driver of Cairo living in a mud hut) to take the child into her school. When she wuz about fourteen years old the Rajah, who had accepted the Christian religion, visited this school, and the little girl wuz teaching a class of barefooted Egyptian girls, sittin’ on the floor about her.