What a fearful, barbarous worship, which the astounded multitude, great and small, gentle and simple, gaze upon seriously and with stupid respect, and in which it not unfrequently takes a part! The invoked deity is manifestly much less an object of reverence than the fanatic saints who invoke him; for mad, idiotic, or other psychologically-diseased persons, are very generally looked upon as holy by the Mohammedans, and treated with great respect. It is the demoniacal, incomprehensibly-acting, and therefore fearfully-observed power of nature, that the natural man always reveres when he perceives it, because he is sensible of some connection between it and his intellectual power, without being able to command it; first in the mighty elements, then in the wondrous but obscure law-governed instincts of animals, and, at last, in the yet more overpowering exstatical, or generally abnormal mental condition of his own race. We must decidedly look upon the Egyptian animal-worship, as far as it was not the covering for deeper and more refined doctrines, as resting upon the same idea of a worship of nature;[22] and the reverence occasionally manifesting itself among some nations of mentally-diseased men may be regarded as a curious branch of the same feeling. Whether such conditions really exist, or whether, as with the _derwishes_, they are artificially produced and purposely fostered, is not criticised by the masses, and it is much the same in individual cases. In such a presence one would feel oneself overcome by a mysterious feeling of dread, and would not care to express repugnance, or even to manifest it by signs, or by a token of having even observed anything, for fear of diverting to oneself the storm of brute passion. The nine days’ festival closes with a peculiar ceremony called _doseh_, the treading, but which I was myself prevented from witnessing. The sheîkh of the Saadîeh-_derwishes_ rides to the chief sheîkh of all the _derwishes_ of Egypt, El Bekri. On the way thither, a great number of these holy folk, and others too, who fancy themselves not a whit behindhand in piety, throw themselves flat on the ground, with their faces downward, and so that the feet of one lie close to the head of the next; over this living carpet, the sheikh rides on his horse, which is led on each side by an attendant, in order to compel the animal to the unnatural march. Each man’s body receives two treads of the horse; most of them jump up again without hurt, but whoever suffers serious, or, as it occasionally happens, mortal injury, has the additional ignominy to bear, for not having pronounced, or for not being able to pronounce, the proper prayers and magical charms that alone could save him.[23]