The witches are supposed to be able to summon jinns whenever they want to, but any ordinary person has to follow out a complicated proceeding before being able to do so. The system used for invoking jinns is only practised secretly, and by women, but it is implicitly believed in by everybody. For forty-five days the woman eats no meat, feeding entirely on bread, rice, lentils and fruits. Every evening she bakes a loaf of wheaten bread, unsalted and flavoured with red pepper, which is the favourite flavouring among jinns. She takes the loaf, naked, with her hair hanging loose, to the rubbish heap outside her house, where she leaves it. On the forty-fourth night a jinn appears in the form of some familiar animal: a camel, donkey, or cow. If the woman is afraid it kills her at once, but if she is brave, and speaks to it, it does her bidding. The jinn tells her to prepare a dinner on the following night for six of his brothers. Next day she makes six loaves and flavours them with spiders’ webs besides pepper, and takes them out to the dust heap as before. She leaves them and returns an hour later. Then she finds the chief of the jinns, Iblis himself, waiting for her, a monstrous creature with flaming eyes, horns and great hooked teeth, breathing out fire from his mouth. This individual asks her what she desires and promises to carry out her wishes on the condition that from henceforth she never utters the name of Allah. There is another even more fantastic story that sometimes at midnight one of the witches swings a cord from her house on the battlements to the top of the tall minaret of a mosque just below. She then steps off the wall and walks along the rope, which is suspended in mid-air, like a tight-rope dancer. People also assert that it is a practice of the witches to creep out into the graveyards at night, to dig up a body, tear off the head, and carry it back in their mouths like animals. This gruesome habit was ascribed to werewolves in the olden days.