ll about the country begging. They
are nearly all illiterate, and their knowledge of their own religion
does not usually extend beyond certain chapters from the Quran and
stock formulae. But they have a wonderful vocabulary of words of
abuse and curses, and the people are in great fear of being visited
by some calamity if they offend one of them and incur his wrath,
as they believe in their being able to blast the life of a child
or the offspring of a pregnant woman, or to bring other calamities
down from heaven on the heads of those with whom they are wroth. Once
while I was stopping in a village on the border one of these gentlemen
came to say his prayers in the mosque, and had left his shoes at the
entrance, as is the custom. After he had said his prayers with great
sanctimoniousness he went to resume his foot-gear, but found, to his
dismay, that some thief had gone off with them. Then followed a torrent
of curses on whoever the thief might be, in which all imaginable
calamities and diseases were invoked on him and his relations,
accompanied by every epithet of abuse in the Pashtu vocabulary, and
that is pretty rich in them! The very volubility and eloquence of his
anathemas would have dismayed any ordinary thief had he been within
earshot, but whether he ever got back his shoes or not I cannot say.

Women who are childless will visit various faqirs, whose prayers have
a reputation for being efficacious for the removal of sterility. They
write charms, and dictate elaborate instructions for the behaviour
of the woman till her wish be fulfilled, and they take the gifts
which the suppliant has brought with her. Were this nothing more
than a fraud dictated by avarice, it would be reprehensible, but
worse things happen; and when a child is born after due time, the
husband of the woman cannot always claim paternity. It is a strange
thing that in a country where husbands so jealously guard their women
from strangers they allow them so much freedom in their dealings with
faqirs, whom they know to be morally corrupt. It recalls the Hindu
Sadhu and divinity, who is popularly supposed to have attained an
elevation where ethics are no longer taken account of.

In a religion such as Islam it is scarcely possible for an order
of dervishes to be orthodox, and, as a matter of fact, most of them
are extremely unorthodox, and there is often considerable disputing
between them and the priesthood on this account. But the faqirs have
s