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A Discarded Favorite
(Vitagraph)
By SI KADDOUR BEN GHABRIT
The ancient muezzin had joined our caravan on the highroad from Mogador to Saffi. He was sickened for his last rest, and the dim light of a searcher for the East shone in his sunken eyes.
As we laid him down under the somber verdure of an iron wood tree, he composed himself, facing Mecca. We would have left him, in decency, to his mutt e r e d prayers, but, by words spoken to his assdriver, he bade us gather round him. Then, with a last clutch at things earthly, he told us the following strange story. A soldier of the Makhzen had told it to a Jew from the Mellah, who had whispered it, with pledges of secrecy, to a fair customer in the walled * K a s bah. She,* before her charms were waning, had recounted it to elHad j, her lover, who, swollen with i t s strangeness, had confided in the muezzin. There, for many years, it had lain, locked tightly in his bosom.
There is a sacred tomb, or Koubba,
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in the gardens of Tameslouhet, which the tribesmen have worshiped ever with the zeal of the faithful. In it lay the bones of Abdallah ben elH o s s e i n, that much venerated and all-powerful Shereef , whose body had joined Allah, but whose soul still radiated thru his successors. In his earthly tenancy, the Shereef had lived in a high dwelling, and the Kasbah and town had grown around it, sheltering him alike from the horsemen of the plains and the unruly goatherds of the m o u ntains.
Here, before the coming of traders, he had exacted toll from entering caravans, and had grown sleek from the tithes of husbandmen and the workers in leather. When he came, in state, outside of the walls of the Kasha h, he was seen to be young, of a good color, and with a hawklike face under his dazzling burnous. He was a Marabout, the chosen of Allah and of the Sultan ; the beggars by the gates bowed their heads and prayed