[p.21]the brotherhood of Al-Islam and the mutual duties obligatory on true believers.  I then turned away slowly and fiercely, for the next thing might have been a cut with the Kurbaj,[FN#7] and, by the hammer of Thor!  British flesh and blood could never have stood that.

After which satisfactory scene,-for satisfactory it was in one sense, proving the complete fitness of the Darwaysh’s costume,-I tried a dozen other promiscuous sources of information,-policemen, grooms, scribes, donkey-boys, and idlers in general.  At length, wearied of patience, I offered a soldier some pinches of tobacco, and promised him an Oriental sixpence if he would manage the business for me.  The man was interested by the tobacco and the pence; he took my hand, and inquiring the while he went along, led me from place to place, till, mounting a grand staircase, I stood in the presence of Abbas Effendi, Naib or deputy to the Governor.

It was a little, whey-faced, black-bearded Turk, coiled up in the usual conglomerate posture upon a calico-covered diwan, at the end of a long, bare, large- windowed room.  Without deigning even to nod the head, which hung over his shoulder with transcendent listlessness and affectation of pride, in answer to my salams and benedictions, he eyed me with wicked eyes, and faintly ejaculated “Min ent[FN#8]?” Then hearing that I was a Darwaysh and doctor-he must be an Osmanli Voltairean, that little Turk-the official snorted a contemptuous snort.  He condescendingly added, however, that the proper source to seek was “Taht,” which, meaning simply “below,” conveyed to an utter stranger rather imperfect information from a topographical point of view.

At length, however, my soldier guide found out that

[p.22]a room in the custom-house bore the honourable appellation of “Foreign Office.”  Accordingly I went there, and, after sitting at least a couple of hours at the bolted door in the noon-day sun, was told, with a fury which made me think I had sinned, that the officer in whose charge the department was, had been presented with an olive branch in the morning, and consequently that business was not to be done that day.  The angry-faced official communicated the intelligence to a large group of Anadolian, Caramanian, Bosniac, and Roumelian Turks,-sturdy, undersized, broad-shouldered, bare-legged, splay-footed, horny-fisted, dark-browed, honest-looking mountaineers, who were lounging about with long pistols and yataghans stuck in their broad sashes, head-gear composed of immense tarbushes with proportionate turbands coiled round them, and bearing two or three suits of substantial clothes, even at this season of the year, upon their shoulders.

Like myself they had waited some hours, but they were not so patient under disappointment:  they bluntly told the angry official that he and his master were a pair of idlers, and the curses that rumbled and gurgled in their hairy throats as they strode towards the door sounded like the growling of wild beasts.