These people in no way differ physically from the European tinkers. They have the same slender, well-knit figures, rather below middle size, tawny skins, rather prominent cheekbones, and straight black hair. The facial angle is rather Hindu and Tatar than Turkoman, and they have the Hindu’s long horse-tail hair. Dark eyes are not invariable; in the mountains of Antioch the colour is sometimes grey or blue, and the same occurs occasionally among the Arabs of Petra and Palmyra, among the Syrians, the Zebeks, and other races of Asia Minor. A great mixture of blood is the cause. The Zebeks of Smyrna have now been deputed to represent the bandit regular troops of Turkey as opposed to the bandit police. The Asiatic Gypsy has also that peculiar indescribable appearance and expression of eye which is so strongly developed in the Romá of Morocco and Moorish Spain, “a feature which, like the brand on the forehead of the first murderer, stamps this marked race over the whole globe, and when once observed is never forgotten. The ‘Evil Eye’ is not the least of the powers with which this people is superstitiously invested; and if there be any truth in the overstrained (?) doctrines of animal magnetism, one could not possibly frame to the imagination an eye so well calculated, so intense a magnetic force.”[163] These Gypsies have never been seen to pray or perform any religious rite; some of their elders, like the Druzes and other Syrian tribes, circumcise their children, and conform to the exterior observances of El Islam. Shaykh Rasscho could repeat with sundry mistakes the Arabic Faith Formula, omitting the second half, “Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah.” He said that he and his tribe acknowledged one supreme, everlasting, omnipotent Being, and believed in an existence after death, a state of reward and punishment connected with metempsychosis. He denied the charges made against the Kurbat by Syrians, Muslims, and Christians that they worshipped the stars or the creative principle under a symbol. He also denied that they abhorred the eel and the celebrated black fish of the Antioch Lake, like the Jews, to whom the Mosaic Law--which, by-the-bye, is equally binding upon Muslims--makes it unclean, because it lacks fins and scales.[164] Newbold, however, was assured that the Kurbat, who, like the India Pariahs, are the flayers of animals dying a natural death, devour the carcases of all animals except the man and the hog.