112 AFRICAN WANDERINGS.

tliougli the task may be. Instead of windows these houses have small arrow-slits, and when the inmates have (if necessary) built up their doorway from the inside with stones and stakes, the fortress is in readiness for a siege, as care is ever taken to hold it provided Avith stores of food for man and beast.

Hospitality is ever and at all times a sacred duty with these Arabs, even towards an enemy ; and they have, too, held fast to all their old virtues and good customs, which is far more than can be said of the tribes of the sea coasts and plains ; but this may be easily accounted for, from the latter having been more thrown in the way of holding intercourse with foreign nations, and fi-om their trading much more with such. They are particularly distinguished from the mountain races, who will have nothing to do with them, by their darker skin, but they wear a similar dress, and all acknowledge themselves to be of the sect of the Wachabites (Wahabi), thus distinct from the Mussulmen as also by building no mosques, smoking no tobacco, nor adorning their dress with silk or gold, &e. ; as they plundered the chaaba in Mecca, and robbed the richly endowed groves of Mahomet and his daughter Fatima in Medina, so also did they take from all caravans without exception, their silver, gold, and valuables, and when they no longer dared venture on such robberies, they invented another means of levying toll on all pilgrims, by compelling them to let fall on the ground their money and other valuables, so that they might afterwards take it to themselves as windfalls ; but this procedure is also now forbidden them.

Against these Wachabites, whose warlike qualities were well known, Mehemet Ali declared a religious war, which was highly approved of by the Porte. The latter hoped to see that by this the ever-increasing powers of the Pascha, would be much weakened (a favourite plan of the Porte as regards such powerful vassals) ; but the old wily Pascha gladly used this approval of the sultan to increase his army greatly, and organise it in European style and to European tactics. Nor did he fail to inflame the Moslem with zeal for the holy war, and so win again to his side those bigots who had been much estranged from him by his many innovations and new institutions, and lead tliem to publicly proclaim that it was the duty of every Mussulman to advance to the aid and pro-