No wonder they despise what they call the world. For the real world, the
cosmos of rational thought and action, has never existed for them. At
Tangier, Mecca, Jerusalem or Timbuctu, they have sat eternally in the same
coffee-houses or mosques, and listened eternally to the same theological
chatterings; which accounts for a certain "family likeness" between all of
these mentally starved creatures, who are nevertheless favoured of Allah
so far as bodily comforts are concerned, inasmuch, as (if they play their
cards correctly) money, wives, and lands pour down upon them till, in old
age, they become so fuddled with homage and holy mumblings that they
themselves cannot exactly remember whether they are humbugs or not: this,
I take it, must be the culminating point, the _dernier mot_, of maraboutic
enlightenment.
And beside these ten thousand impromptu saints that spring up daily out of
the fertile soil of Arab imagination and poverty, every one of the
descendants of Mahomet's daughter is a marabout, and all their children,
male and female, in _saecula saeculorum_.
God alone, who numbers the stars, can keep count of their legions.
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