The most prominent and disgusting feature of this scene is, however, that unrestrained passion has nothing to do with it, and that everything is done slowly, pathetically, and with evidently practised motions; children down to the ages of four or five years are put into the procession, and if they make the difficult and unnatural movements well, the mothers, cowering behind, call out _taib, taib_, to them. “Bravo, well done!” The second act of this deafening ceremony, by the continual clapping, cries, and screams, is that the whole company of dancers throw themselves upon the ground and roll down the hill; but even this is done slowly and premeditatedly, while they draw their knees up to keep hold of their dress, poke their arms in also, and then roll away on their backs and knees. This ceremony begins an hour before sunset and continues into the middle of the night. The whole of it causes, by its unnaturality surpassing everything else, an indescribable impression, which is rendered the more disagreeable, as one perceives throughout the empty play, the inherited and spoilt custom, and can recognize no trace of individual truth and natural feeling in the persons taking part in it. And yet the comparison with certain descriptions and representations of similar ceremonies among the ancients, teaches us to understand many things, of which, in our own life, we shall never form a proper estimate, until we have seen with our own eyes such caricatures of uncivilisation, occasionally shown to us by the Orient. Next day we visited the hospital, which we found very clean, and in good order; it contains one hundred patients, but there are only twenty-eight at the present time. Then we proceeded to the barracks, in the large court of which the exercises are gone through. The commanding officer assembled the band, and had several pieces of music played. The first was the _Parisienne_, which made a strange impression upon me amidst these scenes, as also the following pieces, which were mostly French, and known to me; they are tolerably performed. The musicians had scarcely any but European instruments, and have incorporated in their Arabic musical vocabulary our word trumpet, applying it, however, to the drum which they call _trumbêta_, while they have for the trumpet a native name, _nafir_; the great flute they call _sumára_, the little one _sufára_, and the great drum _tabli_. There were only 1,200 men of the regiment (which consists of 4,000) present, almost all negroes, who poked out their black faces, hands, and feet, from their white linen clothes, and red caps like dressed-up monkeys, only looking much more miserable and oppressed than those animals. Yet we did not suspect that in two days, these people would rebel, and go off to their mountains.