“What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing, nothing,” murmured Khalid absent-mindedly.
“That’s not true. Everything belies your words. Why, your actions, your expression, your silence oppresses me. I know what is disturbing you. And I would prevail upon you, if I could, to give up this afternoon’s business. Don’t go; don’t speak. I have a premonition that things are not going to end well. Why, even my dragoman says that the Mohammedan mob is intent upon some evil business. Be advised. And since you are going to break with your associates, why not do so now. The quicker the better. Come, make up your mind. And we’ll not wait for the morning train. We’ll leave for Baalbek in a special carriage this afternoon. What say you?”
Just then the brass band in front of the Hotel struck up the Dastur march in honour of the Sheikhs who come to escort the Unionist Deputies and the speaker to the Mosque.
“I have made up my mind. I have given my word.”
And being called, Mrs. Gotfry, though loath to let him go, presses his hand and wishes him good speed.
And here we are in the carriage on the right of the green-turbaned Sheikh. We look disdainfully on the 315 troops, the brass band, and the crowd of nondescripts that are leading the procession. We cross the bridge, pass the Town-Hall, and, winding a narrow street groaning with an electric tramway, we come to the grand arcade in which the multitudes on both sides are pressed against the walls and into the stalls by the bullying Dragoons. We drive through until we reach the arch, where some Khalif of the Omayiahs used to take the air. And descending from the carriage, we walk a few paces between two rows of book-shops, and here we are in the court of the grand Mosque Omayiah.
We elbow our way through the pressing, distressing multitudes, following Ahmed Bey into the Mosque, while the Army Officer mounts a platform in the court and dispenses to the crowd there of his Turkish blatherskite. We stand in the Mosque near the heavy tapestried square which is said to be the sarcophagus of St. John. Already a Sheikh is in the pulpit preaching on the excellences of liberty, chopping out definitions of equality, and quoting from Al-Hadith to prove that all men are Allah’s children and that the most favoured in Allah’s sight is he who is most loving to his brother man. He then winds up with an encomium on the heroes of the day, curses vehemently the reactionaries and those who curse them not (the Mosque resounds with “Curse the reactionists, curse them all!”), tramples beneath his heel every spy and informer of the New Era, invokes the great Allah and his Apostle to watch over the patriots and friends of the Ottoman nation, to visit 316 with grievous punishment its enemies, and––descends.
The silence of expectation ensues. The Mosque is crowded; and the press of turbans is such that if a pea were dropt from above it would not reach the floor. From the pulpit the great Mohammedan audience, with its red fezes, its green and white turbans, seemed to Khalid like a verdant field overgrown with daisies and poppies. “It is the beginning of Arabia’s Spring, the resuscitation of the glory of Islam,” and so forth; thus opening with a flourish of flattery like the spouting tricksters whom he so harshly judges. And what shall we say of him? It were not fair quickly to condemn, to cry him down at the start. Perhaps he was thus inspired by the august assembly; perhaps he quailed and thought it wise to follow thus far the advice of his friends. “It was neither this nor that,” say our Scribe. “For as he stood in the tribune, the picture of the field of daisies and poppies suggested the picture of Spring. A speaker is not always responsible for the frolics of his fancy. Indeed, an audience of some five thousand souls, all intent upon this opaque, mysterious Entity in the tribune, is bound to reach the very heart of it; for think what five thousand rays focussed on a sensitive plate can do.” Thus our Scribe, apologetically.
But after the first contact and the vibrations of enthusiasm and flattery that followed, Khalid regains his equilibrium and reason, and strikes into his favourite theme. He begins by arraigning the utilitarian spirit of Europe, the rank materialism which is invading 317 our very temples of worship. God, Truth, Virtue, with them, is no longer esteemed for its own worth, but for what it can yield of the necessities and luxuries of life. And with these cynical materialistic abominations they would be supreme even in the East; they would extinguish with their dominating spirit of trade every noble virtue of the soul. And yet, they make presumption of introducing civilisation by benevolent assimilation, rather dissimulation. For even an Englishman in our country, for instance, is unlike himself in his own. The American, too, who is loud-lunged about democracy and shirt-sleeve diplomacy, wheedles and truckles as good as the wiliest of our pashas. And further he exclaims: