This is the true Moorish bath. Meantime, the M'zabite or negro, as he dislocates your legs, cracks your spinal column or dances over you on his knees, drones forth a kind of native psalmody, which, melting into the steamy atmosphere of the place, seems to be the litany of happiness and of the pure in heart. Clean in body and soul as you never were before, skinned, depilated, dissected, you emerge for a new life of ideal perfection, feeling as if you were suddenly relieved of your body.
"BALEK!"
There is held every Friday at Constantina a grand assembly of the fire-eating marabouts, the fanatics who have given so much trouble to their French rulers. Every revolution among the Kabyles is a religious movement, set in motion by the wild enthusiasm of the "saints." The religious orders of Kabylia, all of them differing in various degrees from Turkish Mohammedanism, are of some half dozen varieties, adapted to minds of various cultivation. Some, as that of Sidi-Yusef-Hansali, are mild in their rites and of a purely didactic or religious nature. This latter sect originated in Constantina, comprises two thousand brothers or khouans, and was in 1865 under the authority of Hammo-el-Zouaoui, a direct descendant of Yusef-Hansali. An hour passed in the college of this order, where the whole formula of worship consists in saying a hundred times "God forgive!" then, a hundred other times, "Allah ill' Allah: Mohammed ressoul Allah!" may be monotonous, but it is not revolutionary. From this tautological brotherhood, through various degrees of emotional activity, you arrive at the wild doings of the fire-eaters, or followers of Mohammed-ben-Aissa. This Aissa was a native of Meknes in Morocco, where he died full of years and piety three hundred years ago. His legend states that being originally very poor, he attempted to support his family in the truly Oriental manner, not by working for them, but by spending his whole time at the mosque in prayer for their miraculous sustenance. His inertia and his faith were acceptable to Mohammed, who appeared to Aissa's wife with baskets of food, and to Aissa with the order to found a sect. The allegory expressed by the disgusting actions of the order would seem to be that anything is nourishment to the true believer. They therefore exhibit themselves as eating red-hot iron, scorpions and prickly cactus. Various travelers, some of them cool hands and accurate observers, have seen these khouans at their horrible feasts without being able to explain the imposture. A British soldier, an experienced Indian officer, happened to be in Kabylia just before the breaking out of the great Sepoy rebellion in India, and was introduced to one of the fire-eating orgies by Major Deval at Tizi-ouzou, where our journey into Kabylia is to terminate. With his own eyes he saw a khouan, excited by half an hour's chanting and beating the tom-tom, drive a sword four inches deep
A STREET IN CONSTANTINA.
into his chest by hitting it with a tile. The man marched around and exhibited it to the congregation as it quivered in his naked body. Another seared his face and hands with a large red-hot iron, holding it finally with his mouth without other support. Another chewed up an entire leaf of a cactus with its dangerous spikes, which sting one's hands severely and remain rankling in the flesh. Another filled his mouth with live coals from a brazier, and walked around blowing out sparks. Another swallowed a living scorpion, a small snake, broken glass and nails. The spectator was in the midst of these enthusiasts, being touched by them in their antics, yet he could detect no foul play, except that he imagined the sword in the first-named experiment to have been driven into an old wound or between the skin and the flesh. It was to counteract the influence of the fire-eating marabouts that the French government sent over Robert Houdin, the ingenious mechanician, but though he eclipsed their wonders by tricks of electricity and sleight, he has left but a lame explanation of the "juggleries" of the Algerine saints.
