“He is a bad man,” they say; “neis koob adam.”

Nothing daunted by the summary ejection of this person, a dervish, with the haggard face and wild, restless eyes of one addicted to bhang, now volunteers to take me under his protection and lead me out of the caravanserai to—­where?  He vouchsafes no explanation where; none, at least, that is at all comprehensible to me.  Where do these interesting specimens of Beerjand’s weird population want to entice me to? why do they want to entice me anywhere?  I conclude to go with the dervish and find out.

The crowd enter their remonstrances again; but the dervish wears the garb of holy mendicancy; violent hands must not be laid on the sacred person of a dervish.  Our path is barred at the outer gate of the caravanserai, however, by two men in semi-military uniforms, armed with swords and huge clubs; they chide the dervish for wanting to take me with him, and have evidently been placed at their post by the authorities.

Soon a uniformed official comes in and tries to question me.  He is a person of very limited intelligence, incapable of understanding and making himself understood through the medium of the small stock of his native tongue at my command.  The linguistic abilities of the strange, semi-civilized audience about us comprise Persian, Turkish, Hindostani, and even a certain amount of Russian; not a soul besides myself knows a single word of English.

After queries have been propounded to me in all these tongues, my intellectual interviewer gives me up in despair, and, addressing the crowd about us, cries out in astonishment:  “Parsee neis!  Turkchi binmus!  Hindostani nay!  Paruski nicht! mashallah, what language does he speak?”

“Ingilis!  Ingilis!  Ingilis!” shout at least a dozen more knowing people than himself.

“Oh, I-n-g-i-l-i-s!” says the officer, condemning his own lack of comprehension by the tone of his voice.  “Aha, I-n-g-i-l-i-s, aha!” and he looks over the crowd apologetically for not having thought of so simple a thing before.  But having ascertained that I speak English, he now proceeds to treat me to a voluble discourse in simon-pure Persian.  Seeing that I fail to comprehend the tenor of the officer’s remarks, some of the garrulous crowd vouchsafe to explain in Turkish, others in Hindostani, and one in Russian!

In the absence of a lunatic asylum to dodge into, I fasten on to the officer and get him to take me out and show me the Ali-abad road, so that I can find the way out early in the morning.

Another caravanserai is found located nearer the road leading from the city eastward, and I determine to change my quarters quietly by the light of the moon, leaving the crowd in ignorance of my whereabouts, so that there will be no difficulty in getting through the streets in the morning.

Late at night, when the now quieted city is bathed in the soft, mellow light of the moon, and the crenellated mud walls and old ruins and archways cast weird shadows across the silent streets, with a few chosen companions, parties to the secret of the removal, the bicycle is trundled through the narrow, crooked streets and under arched alleyways, to the caravanserai on the eastern edge of the city.