Mountain life in Algeria . ered oer,And thick bestrown, hes Ceres sacred floor,When round and round, with never-wearied pain,The trampling steers beat out th unnumbered grain. When the wind blew freshly, they threw the stuff into the airwith wooden pitchforks, and the chaff was winnowed away inclouds. And the light chaff, before the breezes borne,Ascends in clouds from off the heapy grey dust, rising with collected winds,Drives oer the barn, and whitens all the hinds. The night after the arrival of my Kabyle servant, he camerunning into the tent while I supped, to tell me that no less
Mountain life in Algeria . ered oer,And thick bestrown, hes Ceres sacred floor,When round and round, with never-wearied pain,The trampling steers beat out th unnumbered grain. When the wind blew freshly, they threw the stuff into the airwith wooden pitchforks, and the chaff was winnowed away inclouds. And the light chaff, before the breezes borne,Ascends in clouds from off the heapy grey dust, rising with collected winds,Drives oer the barn, and whitens all the hinds. The night after the arrival of my Kabyle servant, he camerunning into the tent while I supped, to tell me that no less thanten were waiting outside. This news did not upset myappetite, nor was it so alarming as it sounds ; the word assassinbeing the Kabyle for guard. It was a curious coincidence to besitting surrounded by Assassins, while the spurs of the mountainfacing me were inhabited by the Beni Ismael. In the Lebanon are tribes known as Assassins. It was thename of a noted fanatical sect of the Ismaelites (one of the great. HARVEST MOON. 105 sections into which Mohammedanism split) formed in the eleventhcentury in Persia and Syria. In the latter country their chiefstronghold was in the neighbourhood of Beyrout, and their historyis interwoven with the Crusades.^ Owing to the objectionablemethods by which they sought to increase their power, their namewas carried by the Crusaders into Europe, and in several modernlanguages has become a term expressive of cool premeditatedmurder. The origin of the word has been discussed by thelearned, and M. Sylvestre de Sacy narrates a curious story ofMarco Polos, which has induced him to derive the word from Hashishin. This is the Arabic for herbs ; and he endeavours toprove that the Ismaelites, who committed so many crimes, weregreat smokers of Hashish, a well-known intoxicating preparationof hemp leaves. I leave the etymology of the word to others, butconfess that the theories proposed appear quite fanciful. More-over the word is far older th
Size: 1336px × 1871px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdec, booksubjectalgeriadescriptionandtravel
