Occasionally a dervish holds aloft the fantastic paraphernalia of his profession, battles his way through the surging human surf, and with his black, ferret-like eyes gleaming with unconscious ferocity through a vision of unkempt hair, thrusts his cocoa-nut alms-receiver under my nose and says, “Huk yah huk!” or “backsheesh!” Shouted at, gesticulated at, intrigued against and solicited for alms all at the same time, and with brain-turning persistency, the classic halls of Bedlam would, in contrast, be a reposeful and calm retreat.  Driven by my tormentors almost to the desperate resolve of emptying my six-shooter among them, let the result to myself be what it may, the sun of my persecutions has not reached the meridian even yet.  The officer who an hour ago inconsiderately left me to my own resources, now returns with a large party of friends, bent on seeing the same wonderful sight that has seemingly set the whole city in an uproar.  He has been about the place collecting friends and acquaintances for the purpose of treating them to an exhibition of my skill on the wheel.  The purpose of the officer’s return, with his friends, is readily understood by the crowd, and his arrival is announced by a universal roar of “Sowar shuk! tomasha!” as though not one of this insatiable mob had yet seen me ride.

Appearing before the elevated porch of the menzil, he beckons me to “come ahead” in quite an authoritative manner.  The peculiar beckoning twist of this presumptuous individual’s chin and henna-stained beard summoning me to come out and “perform” reminds me of nothing so much as some tamer of wild animals ordering a trained baboon to spruce himself up and dance for the edification of the circus-going public.  Signifying my unwillingness to be thus made a circus of over and over again, the officer beckons even more peremptorily than before, and even makes a feint of coming and fetching me out by force.

As may well be believed, the sum of my patience is no longer equal to the strain, and jerking my revolver around from the obscurity of its hiding-place at my hip to where it can plainly be seen, and laying a hand menacingly on the butt, I warn him to clear off, in a manner that causes him to wilt and turn pale.  He leaves the caravanserai at once in high dudgeon.  It has been a most humiliating occasion for him, to fall so ignobly from the very high horse on which he just entered with his bosom friends; but it is no more than he rightly deserves.

Shortly after this little incident the part-proprietor of a tchai-khan not far from the caravanserai, proposes that I leave my menzil and come with him to his place.  Happy in the prospect of any kind of a change that will secure me a little peace, I readily agree to the proposal and at once take my departure.  A few stones are thrown, fortunately without doing any damage, ere the tchai-khan is reached; but once inside, the situation is materially improved.