'The worst of traitors: 'grumbled Hussein. 'Every one who comes into this world is touched by the devil, who attends at his birth unseen; but Inshallah! Shaitaun must have taken a rough hold of our Greek! He was an officer—a mulazim in the regiment of Albanians who garrisoned this place before we came here.'
'An officer!' I reiterated, in astonishment.
'And chained thus!' added Belton, in the same tone.
'Now, by the seventh paradise, but you astonish me!' said the Captain Hussein, opening his great oriental eyes. 'Do you forget that the man is only a Greek, and that the Greeks, like the Russian, are all beasts—as Zerdusht the Prophet was, who married his grandmother, and who will have a bridle of fire in his jaws at the last day.'
'His crime—'
'Was desertion. He was stationed at the battery near the mouth of the harbour, and fled one night in an open boat, taking with him four Albanian soldiers. They rowed across the Sea of Marmora to the isle of that name; and after lurking for a time among its marble quarries, feeding on nuts like so many squirrels, they sailed over to Natolia, where they were taken in the Sangiac of Bigah, and made prisoners. The four Albanian soldiers were shot on the instant; but he has been sent here, on board the Mahmoudieh—yonder war-steamer now at anchor in the bay—and to-morrow, before the sun is at its height, he shall be shot to death in the Valley of the Little Mosque.'
'After all he has endured?'
'Poor fellow!'
'Mashallah! Human life is only a deceitful enjoyment,' replied Hussein, who was an inveterate quoter of the Koran; 'but may I never see Paradise if his story is not a strange one; I shall tell it to you—'tis a tale, like any other, and I heard it all, being one of the court-martial at Bigah which sentenced him to die.'
After draining his little coffee-cup, refilling the capacious bowl of his pipe, and taking a few prodigious whiffs, the Yuze Bashi related the following story, which—with the reader's permission—I will rehearse in my own words; and while he spoke, the noble figure, stately presence, pale beauty, and splendid eyes of the manly Albanian Greek, seemed ever and painfully to be before me.