I laid a hand on my breast, and expressed a hope that he would not think so meanly of me.
'No, no, I shall answer for him,' said the Yuze Bashi; 'it ill becometh a young soldier to mock the white beard of an old one. Moreover, what sayeth the Koran? "O Unbelievers, I will not worship that which ye worship, nor will ye worship that which I worship. Ye have your religion, and I have my religion," and there is an end of it, say I, Hadjee Hussein. 'Tis a story as well as another, and I delight in stories—they always set me to sleep.'
'I will tell you in a few words,' replied the old Moolah, adjusting his high conical cap of grey felt, and disposing his mighty beard over the breast of his robe; 'but I presume that you, O valiant Yuze Bashi, have heard it before?'
'By the spout of the holy Kaaba, most reverend Hafiz; and by the holy camel's blessed hump I never did!' said the irritable Yuze Bashi, giving the coils of his arguillah a kick, and smoking away at the amber mouth-piece.
'It made noise enough in the camp of the Sultan's troops.'
'Then I hope it may make a noise here too, for the place is quiet enough,' retorted Hussein, who was in a furious pet at all this unnecessary delay.
'You must know, O Frank!' began the Moolah, 'that I was a corporal in the third Orta or battalion of Scherif Bey's regiment, in the army of the Grand Vizier, Reschid Pasha, and warred against the revolted Egyptians of Mehemet Ali; and was wounded by a bayonet at Homs in the Pashalick of Damascus, where we fought a desperate battle on the right bank of the Orontes; I lost the tip of my right ear at the battle of Athens when fighting against the Greeks, and had a mouthful of teeth driven down my throat by a half-spent Russian bullet at Navarino; but all these wounds were as nothing when compared to one I received at the fatal defeat of Koniah in Asia Minor, where in the winter of 1247, by the reckoning of the Hejira, Ibrahim Pasha, defeated Reschid and cast everlasting disgrace on the banners of the Sultan.
'All his reverses in the Russian wars had failed to teach generalship to Reschid Pasha, who, with the fugitives of Homs, had halted at the thrice-blessed city of Koniah, where a snow-covered plain of sixty miles in extent gave ample room for the Osmanlies, forty-five thousand in number, to fight the fifteen thousand Egyptian curs at Ibrahim. Brave to a fault—for he was the son of a Koordish chief and a Georgian slave—old Reschid led the charge of Horse, which, by its failure, lost the battle. Vain was the fury of the Koordish Cavalry, and vain the fiery valour of the bare-kneed Albanian Guard! The battle was lost by us, and the banner of the Sultan was trod to the dust by the steeds of the desert. All our cannon were taken. O day of calamities!—and all our standards!'
'Except one,' urged Hussein, parenthetically.
'Yes, most valiant Yuze Bashi—except one, after assisting you to save which, a musket-shot pierced my breast, and, half-choked in my blood, I sank powerless on the field; and on becoming faint, remember no more of that unfortunate battle, though its roar was so great that one might have supposed all hell was being dragged by chains to judgment, as the Prophet says, it shall be, on the great and inevitable day.