A loud whistle, as a signal, had been given by someone in this boat, and thereafter two men, one of whom he suspected to be the Moolah Moustapha, had left the postern gate, half leading and half dragging a veiled woman, 'who sobbed heavily,' concluded. Callum, 'but who made not the least resistance, as if all hope in her heart was dead, poor thing!'
I cannot express the horror with which I heard this information. Innumerable stories of Turkish cruelty, of the burial of living women, sacked and drowned in the Bosphorus; of the gashed and mangled bodies of others that have been found across the cables of our own ships, or were raked up by them, as they swung at their anchors by the Golden Horn; of bodies stranded and torn by jackals on the shore at Pera, with a thousand real and imaginary instances of the terrible result of oriental jealousy and domestic cruelty, flashed upon my memory, and I determined to save Iola from the dreadful fate impending over her, or to die in the attempt.
In the beginning of Islamism—women who were supposed to have broken their vows were stoned to death, or immured in a stone wall; for the fourth chapter of the Koran commands that they shall be "imprisoned in separate apartments until death release them."
'You are my foster brother, and will stand by me, Callum?' said I, grasping his hand.
'To the death will I stand by you; but on what errand go you now?'
'To save this woman.'
'The wife of the Yuze Bashi.'
'Yes—the Greek girl, Iola.'
'From what?'
'Death!'