The trampling steers beat out th’ unnumbered grain.
When the wind blew freshly, they threw the stuff into the air with wooden pitchforks, and the chaff was winnowed away in clouds.
And the light chaff, before the breezes borne,
Ascends in clouds from off the heapy corn,
The grey dust, rising with collected winds,
Drives o’er the barn, and whitens all the hinds.
The night after the arrival of my Kabyle servant, he came running into the tent while I supped, to tell me that no less than ten assassins were waiting outside. This news did not upset my appetite, nor was it so alarming as it sounds; the word assassin being the Kabyle for guard. It was a curious coincidence to be sitting surrounded by ‘Assassins,’ while the spurs of the mountain facing me were inhabited by the Beni Ismael.
In the Lebanon are tribes known as Assassins. It was the name of a noted fanatical sect of the Ismaelites (one of the great sections into which Mohammedanism split) formed in the eleventh century in Persia and Syria. In the latter country their chief stronghold was in the neighbourhood of Beyrout, and their history is interwoven with the Crusades.[7] Owing to the objectionable methods by which they sought to increase their power, their name was carried by the Crusaders into Europe, and in several modern languages has become a term expressive of cool premeditated murder. The origin of the word has been discussed by the learned, and M. Sylvestre de Sacy narrates a curious story of Marco Polo’s, which has induced him to derive the word from ‘Hashishin.’ This is the Arabic for ‘herbs;’ and he endeavours to prove that the Ismaelites, who committed so many crimes, were great smokers of Hashish, a well-known intoxicating preparation of hemp leaves. I leave the etymology of the word to others, but confess that the theories proposed appear quite fanciful. Moreover the word is far older than the date assigned to it by M. Sylvestre de Sacy; for it occurs in the Bible in reference to a disturbance in the Holy Land. When St. Paul was arrested in Jerusalem, on addressing himself to the Roman tribune, the latter exclaimed, ‘Dost thou know Greek? Art thou not then the Egyptian which before these days stirred up to sedition and led out into the wilderness the four thousand men of the Assassins?’[8] Who then were these people? Were they native troops serving under the Romans, and recruited from hill tribes, answering to our Sepoys, or to the French Turcos?
The assassins came regularly, the different villages having been ordered to supply them in rotation, but usually they were only four or five in number. I supplied them with coffee and tobacco, and as they sat round the flickering camp-fire they amused themselves with singing songs which I liked to hear; a succession of plaintive cadences. My impression is, that they were all love-sick assassins, plaintively lamenting to the jealous moon the enforced absence from their loves. Glorious balmy nights they were; the moon shone with splendour, the fields of ripened barley sloped to a mysterious abyss, beyond rose-dim peaks.