We spoke of European politics, of which the obtuse brain of the Yuze Bashi, Hadjee Hussein Ebn al Ojuz, knew as much as he did about electricity, the longitude, the 'philosoplry of the infinite,' a good pun, or anything else, which is incomprehensible to an Oriental mind.
Belton spoke of the Greek girls, and then the old fellow became lively, and looked roguishly out at the corners of his sly black eyes.
'Inshallah!' said he; 'I do love pretty girls with all the zeal of a true Believer. Mohammed! yes—I have played some strange pranks in my time among the fair-haired Tcherkesses, and the black-eyed Cockonas of Bucharest—the City of Delights—as its name imports. Yes, and there are some pretty ones in Egypt too, who have good reason to remember the Hadjee Hussein. But my heart has long been fixed upon obtaining a Russian. They are large, those Muscovites, and plump and fair-skinned, round and white as eggs; and, please God, I shall perhaps have a couple of them yet.'
'Scarcely,' said Belton, 'for we are on the eve of a peace; so, Captain, your chances are small.'
His eyes flashed fire at the idea of a peace.
'Good can never come of it!' said he; 'we shall have all these battles to fight over again; all these fortresses to take and to defend; and the Muscovite swine may yet wallow upon the shores of the Golden Horn, if Britain and France are false to us, and we are false to ourselves! Yet Heaven, they say, was with us in this war.'
'They—who?'
'Mashallah! by "they," one means that mysterious personage on whom one fathers everything that lacks a better authority.'
'Bono!' said the major; 'well, captain—they say—'
'That at Silistria ten thousand angels, in green dresses, were visible to all the Faithful, fighting against the God-abandoned Russians. The Hafiz Moustapha counted their ten green banners with a thousand under each. Even the English newspapers repeated that.'