THE CAPKDJI BACHI. 83 



unity ; Judaism and its stigma ; all for the time appeared to have lost 

 in a sense of common danger the fanaticism of their several creeds. 



One person, however, commanded the veneration of the whole, 

 though nothing announced in him that power so dreaded in the east. 

 He was unaccompanied either by servants or slaves, but there was 

 not a member of the caravan who was not eager to do him service. 

 He rode a white horse ; his luteri was of striped damascus stuff; his 

 benich of red cloth; a sky blue pelisse entirely covered him. His 

 head, which wore an expression of the deepest abstraction, was 

 covered with a turban, the regular folds of which announced his 

 profession to be that of the law. He was a scheik. 



If in a Turkish town you see a man without a train, whom the 

 true believers profoundly salute, whom the women dare to look on 

 with admiration and respect, whom the pacha receives as his equal, 

 by making him sit near him, and by giving him his own pipe, you 

 may boldly pronounce that man to be a scheik ; for in a Turkish 

 town a scheik is more even than a Spanish monk ; he acts upon 

 every imagination he is looked upon as an inspired prophet, and his 

 power is thought to approach the miraculous. At his presence 

 Turkish despotism grows pale, and the insurrections of the east are 

 quelled. 



Thus at every halting place it was who and who should spread 

 the carpet of Hadji Joussef Effendi, prepare his repast, light his 

 pipe, in order to obtain from him in return a word, or even a look ; 

 while he, on his side, received all these services with imperturbable 

 dignity, smiling sometime s on the Musselmen, but the Chris- 

 tians and Jews, he looked upon as if they did not exist, notwith- 

 standing the humble and creeping posture with which they ap- 

 proached his presence. His silence, which was only broken by short 

 sententious phrases, opened a wide field of conjecture to the caravan. 

 Some said he was a vizier disgusted with human grandeur, and 

 whose mind was now bent upon God and the prophet. Others, that 

 he was the scherif of Mecca, who had just paid a visit to the grand, 

 signior. Others again, looked upon him as a magician who knew 

 the Koran by heart, and who could reveal the future ; while another 

 party maintained him to be a holy martyr, who had languished 

 twenty years in the prisons Frankistans in the land of the infidels ; 

 and each of these suppositions was accompanied by an ejaculation 

 breathing the most ardent enthusiasm. May God shorten my 

 existence to lengthen his days 1 May his mother be as happy as 

 Mariam ! May the earth of his grave weigh lightly on him after 

 death ! May his guardian angel have cause then to rejoice ! And 

 when the caravan halted in a town, he was surrounded by crowds of 

 the faithful, in the hope of learning some new means of escaping 

 from those infirmities the lot of our nature. 



They reached Aleppo. The scheik repaired to the Zeke of Mew- 

 levi Dervises. At that period, when the isolated individual saw 

 himself without defence against the arms of despotism, corporations 

 were open to him in which he might escape from his isolation. 

 Those of the dervises and the janissaries spread their nets over the 

 whole empire, and there was not a single small town in Turkey that 



