SECTION IV. ON CERTAIN CUSTOMS, FORMS OF SPEECH, AND TRADITIONS OF THIS SECT.――Mahmúd has treatises and rules conformable to the law of the prophet; but he interpreted the Koran according to his own creed. Of his established customs are the following: One living in solitude is called _váhed_, “recluse.”[15] Praises are due to the man devoted to this state, whose whole life is spent in holiness, poverty, and retirement; who feels no inclination for connexion; takes little, and no more than necessary, food; such a man will rise to perfection, and become a “váhed,” attaining the divine dignity which leads to that of a “teacher.” If the pious person feels himself inclined to connexion with a woman, let him enjoy her once in his whole life; if he cannot otherwise, once in one year; if he requires more, once in forty days; if this be not enough, once in a month; if still more, once in a week. A váhed is reported to have given the following information: When one descends from the state of a man to the state of an irrational animal, or from that to a vegetable, or from a vegetable becomes a mineral; in this manner, by reaction of impressions and dispositions, he receives in each state a mark (_mahs_), which he bears from formation to formation: “Fear the intelligence of the believer, because he sees by the light of God.” _Mahs_[16] in the dictionary is interpreted “a computer,” but in the idiom of this tribe it signifies (as just said) that every individual, in his disposition and action, bears a vestige of the disposition of a former state. It is a part of their persuasion, that, when an individual enters for the first time in a society, the name of whatever in the three kingdoms of nature he first brings upon his tongue, is supposed to be the _ihśa_, or “mark,” that in a former state he had been the very thing the name of which had fallen from his tongue.