receives the holy sacraments at the sound of nāqūs and marawe. The nāqūs, used by Christians, which was a wooden or metal striking plate, is mentioned in two tales in the Arabian Nights, in which it calls the faithful to prayer from the roof of the Chapel of Mary. A diminutive of nāqūs is nuqaisāt, by which the Berbers of the Maghreb mean finger cymbals. Gebel naqus A geological feature was named for theme nagus based on a similarity of sound. The feature is a rocky mountain on the Red Sea coast in the south-west of the Sinai Peninsula (north-west of the coastal town of el-Tur and south-west of St Catherine's Monastery), called Gebel Naqus ('Bell Mountain'). The naming is based on the legend of a lost Christian monastery in the remote area near el-Tur. The legend says that the monastery disappeared without a trace so that nobody knows its location anymore, but from which the sound of prayer bells can be heard at certain hours. Captain Palmer, leader of an English expedition as part of the Royal Geographical Society to the Sinai Peninsula in 1868, reported Arabs who stated that the sound from the mountain could only be heard on Fridays and Saturdays and that it came from the beaten wooden planks of the sunken monastery. Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811), who in the summer of 1810 (during the date harvest) stayed at el-Tur, discovered the mysterious ringing of bells on the slopes of Gebel Naqus and also found the physical explanation. Seetzen saw that from the hard-packed layer of sand covering the steep slopes of the hill, around midday, when the sun was particularly hot, loose sand began to slide down, making a sound that reminded him of the sound of Aeolian harps. Morocco In Morocco, the Naqus is a bell or metal clapper played by Rwais (professional musicians of the High Atlas mountains of Morocco). It is described as "the nāqūus (a bell originally made of a copper tube, now usually made from a car's brake drum)". Literature Nāḳūs. In: The Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition, Volume 7, 1993, p. 943, Naqus. In: Sibyl Marcuse: Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary. Doubleday, New York 1964, p. 360 References Bells (percussion)