When a Siwan girl thinks that it is about time that she was married, and no suitors are forthcoming, she adopts the following custom. On a Friday, when the muezzins on the mosques are calling the Faithful to pray at noon, she leaves the house, carrying some sugar in her right hand and a little salt tightly clutched in her left hand. She covers her face with her long, grey shawl and hurries through the streets, avoiding everybody, to a little hill outside the town—close to the Camel Corps barracks—which is crowned by the tomb of a very venerated Siwan sheikh. When she arrives she runs seven times round the tomb, eating the sugar and the salt and calling on the sheikh to help her. She does this on three Fridays in succession, and after that somebody comes to her parents and asks for her hand. Later, if she has a child, she distributes food to the poor at the tomb of the sheikh as a thank-offering. The actual tomb of Sheikh Abu Arash is inside a little whitewashed mud building. The tomb is covered with white linen, which is renewed by devotees of the saint, and a number of ostrich eggs, brought many years ago from the Sudan, are suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes women bring flowers and palm boughs and lay them on the tomb. Often on a Friday I have noticed a woman hurrying round it, muttering earnestly to herself and hoping for a husband. I wondered at one time whether the proximity of the Camel Corps barracks had anything to do with this recipe for obtaining a husband—but the belief has been held for many years, long before the Camel Corps were thought of. Another way of obtaining a husband is as follows. The girl summons one of the “wise women” to her house and provides her with a basket, which is, by the way, a perquisite. The old woman takes the basket and goes round to each mosque in the town collecting a handful of dust from the ground immediately in front of each door. She then brings the basket full of dust back to the girl and they mix it with olive oil, making a kind of putty. The girl then brings in a round tin or a large round dish and takes a bath, using the putty as soap. The old woman carefully collects the water which has been used in an earthenware pitcher. She goes out at night again to each mosque and sprinkles a little of the water round the doors. The next day, when the men come in and out of the mosques they tread on the place where the water was poured, and probably some of the mud sticks to their feet. One of them is sure to demand the girl in marriage. There are various other methods of attaining the same ends; amulets and charms are manufactured by the witches, which are supposed to attract a certain man, especially if the ingredients of the charm include something that once belonged to him. The whole idea is very much the same as the system of love philtres and charms that were used in Europe in the Middle Ages.