This fanaticism is linked with an unreasoning ferocity of punishment. I have seen a coachman suddenly seize on a street-boy, and, for some word or gesture, lash him on the bare legs with the whip again and again with all his might. Even a particularly good-natured and pleasant native remarked with gusto how good it would be to take a certain family who were of thievish habits, and pour petroleum over them--from the old woman to the baby--and so burn them all up alive: he gloated over the thoroughness of the undertaking, while all the time he was cheating his own employer. It is a pity for their sakes that they do not believe in witchcraft, the whole village would so much enjoy the festivity of doing a ducking, in the fashion of our ancestors. Akin to this fanaticism is the ruling view of everything as _kismet_, the allotted fate. Perhaps no abstraction is so deleterious to a character as this; as a man always can thus shut his eyes to the consequences of his own actions, and refuse to learn by experience. I never yet found a fellah who confessed to doing wrong, or to being sorry for what he had done. He may sometimes stand and look aghast at the consequences of his own carelessness; but he will do no more, and no less, if the damage is the fault of someone else. He scarcely can, in fact, express what one of ourselves would feel, as there is no word for repentance in his vocabulary, except ‘good’; nor is there any word for sorrow, except ‘angry’ or ‘annoyed.’ The very sentiment of remorse is so unknown that there are no means of expressing it in any form. The constant way of appeasing an injured party is for the offender to assure him emphatically that it is of no consequence (_ma’alesh_); and the more often he thus asserts that he has not done the other a wrong, the more he considers he clears himself of it, until after sufficient of this lying he goes away with a sense of virtue. If in consequence of some very plain fault a man is punished by dismissal or otherwise, expressly pointing out to him the causes of his punishment, he will sullenly shrug his shoulders and say to his companions, _Kismet_; it is fated he is not to work. That any blame attaches to him for his trouble seems not to be _dangable_ into him by any means. This lack of belief in consequences is also seen in the extreme carelessness often shown. After a harvest, a large quantity of grain had been stored in a room beside a village, covered with the most inflammable of roofing--durra straw: then, in order to toast some bread, a blazing fire was lighted in the low room, and allowed to flame up to the straw overhead. Of course it was soon all in flames, and the whole of a large proprietor’s harvest was destroyed. Even when it was blazing, within a hundred feet of the canal, the only attempt to fetch water was by two or three women slowly filling their great pitchers and carrying them up on their heads as usual; no notion of a chain-gang ever seemed to occur to them.