"You will no longer be surprised, my lord," replied the man of faith, "when you learn that, having been taught that all the good things of this world unto the day of judgment shall be suspended from the hairs which are between the eyes of our horses, I buried under the door-way of my house the head of a mare I found lying dead. The rest has come to pass through the blessing of Allah." "The Sultan instantly caused the ground to be dug up at the spot indicated, and when he had thus verified the statement of the Arab, he hastened to recompense one who had not hesitated to give an entire faith to the words of the Prophet. The poor man received the present of a fine horse, superb garments, and riches enough to place him beyond the reach of want for the rest of his days." "You now know," continued the marabout, "what may happen to those who believe," and without waiting for my reply he saluted me with the eyes after the manner of the Arabs, and withdrew. This legend is popular in the Sahara, and the words of the Prophet on which it is founded are there an article of faith. Whether the Prophet uttered them or not, they do not the less surely answer the end proposed to himself by their imputed author. The Arab loves honours, power, riches. To tell him that all that was attached to the long hairs of his horse was to endear it to him, to bind it to him by the bond of a common interest. The genius of the Prophet doubtless went much farther. He fully understood that the mission of conquest which he had bequeathed to his people could only be accomplished by hardy horsemen, and that the love of the horse must be developed in them simultaneously with faith in Islam. These injunctions, which all tend towards the same end, are clothed in various forms. The marabout and the thaleb strung them together as sayings and legends, the noble (_djieud_) as traditions, and the common people as proverbs. Subsequently, proverbs, traditions, and legends, assumed a religious character which has for ever accredited them to the great family of Mussulmans: for it is the will of the Prophet that his own people, to the exclusion of all infidels, should reserve to themselves these powerful instruments of war, which in the hands of the Christians might become so fatal to the Mussulman religion. This inner motive, which the common people of the tent may not have seen, through the symbolical veil behind which it was concealed, has not escaped the perception of the Arab chiefs. The Emir Abd-el-Kader, when at the height of his power, inflicted death without mercy on every Believer convicted of having sold a horse to a Christian. In Morocco the exportation of these animals is hampered with such heavy duties that the permission to take them out of the kingdom is altogether illusory. At Tunis the same reluctance yields only to the imperious necessities of policy, and in like manner at Tripoli, in Egypt, at Constantinople, in short in all Mussulman States.[4]