"And you love her?"
"Alas, yes--God and the Prophet alone know how well!" said the Pasha, whose head drooped as he mentally compared the sweet gentleness of his Circassian girl with the fiery fury of the royal bride he had been compelled to espouse, as a cheap reward for his military services.
"Chabauk!" exclaimed Djemila. "Serve the next dish. Eat, eat, I say, and no more of this!"
The cover was removed by a trembling servant, and there lay before the Pasha Mahmoud the head of the poor Circassian girl--the masses of golden hair he had so frequently caressed, the eyes, now glazed, he had loved to look on, and the now pale lips he had kissed a thousand times in that lonely kiosk beside the sea.
"There is your dessert--alfiert olsun!" (May it do you good!) exclaimed Djemila, with flashing eyes and set teeth.
Mahmoud, horror-struck, had only power to exclaim, as he threw his hands and turned his eyes upward, "My love--my murdered love--Allah bereket versin!" (May God receive your soul!) and then fell back on his divan, and expired.
As he had prior to this drunk some sherbet, it was whispered abroad, ere long, that the poor Pasha had been poisoned; but as no examination after death took place, the high rank of his wife precluding it, it was given out that he had died of apoplexy. So he was laid in the Place of Sleep, with his turban on, his toes tied together, and his face turned towards Mecca, and there was an end of it with him; but not so with the Capi Aga, whom the Sultan, for being guilty of obeying Djemila's order to execute the odalisque, subjected to an old Turkish punishment now, and long before that day, deemed as obsolete. He was taken to the Sirdan Kapussi, or Dungeon Gate of Stamboul, close by the Fruit Market, and placed in a vaulted room, where he was stripped of all his clothes by the Capidgi Bashi, who then brought in a large copper plate or table, supported by four pedestals of iron, and underneath which was a grate of the same metal, containing a fire of burning coals, at the sight of which a shriek of despair escaped the miserable Greek. When the plate of copper had become quite hot, the executioner took the turban-cloth of the doomed man, unwound it, and placing it round his waist, by the aid of two powerful hamals had it drawn tight, until his body was compressed into the smallest possible place. Then by one blow of his sabre he slashed the hapless wretch in two, and placing his upper half instantly upon the burning copper, the hissing blood was staunched thereby, and he was kept alive, but in exquisite torture, till the time for which he was ordained to endure it was fulfilled. He was then lifted off, and instantly expired.
Eagerly, with fixed eyes, half-open mouths, and in hushed silence, forgetting even to smoke, and permitting their chibouks to die out, his audience listened to this most improbable story, which the cunning Hadji related with wonderful spirit and gesticulation; and so "having supped full with horrors," at its close they showered coins--kopecs, paras, and even English pennies--upon the narrator. The whole story was a hoax, the Sultan having no such daughter as Djemila, the names of the three sultanas being quite unlike it; but that made as little difference then in Crim Tartary as it did afterwards nearer Cornhill; and Charley Gwynne and others of ours to whom I mentioned it were wont to call it "the bounce of the cold chop and the hot plate."
[CHAPTER XLII.--THE TCHERNIMORSKI COSSACKS.]
The night passed slowly with me in the khan. After the conclusion of the Hadji's story, the travellers who were halting there coiled themselves up to sleep, on the divan or on their carpets or felt mats; but I was too much excited, too wakeful and suspicious of the honest intentions of all about me, too anxious for dawn and the successful completion of the important duty confided to me, to attempt following their example, or even to allow that my horse should be unsaddled. I simply relaxed his girths, and remained in the travellers' common apartment, listening to every passing sound, and watching the sharp oriental features of the black-bearded and picturesque-looking sleepers by the smoky light of a solitary oil-lamp, which swung from a dormant beam that traversed the apartment. The arched rafters of the ceiling were painted in alternate stripes of white and black. There was a fireplace or open chimney, where smouldered on the hearthstone a heap of branches and dry fir-cones, the embers of which reddened and whitened in the downward puffs of wind that eddied in the vent; and round the walls were rows of shining tin plates, and under these were other rows of white cloths, like towels in shape and size, but worked and embroidered with gold thread, all made and prepared before marriage by the Tartar hostess in her bridal days. All these quaint objects appeared to recede or fade from my sight, and sleep was just beginning to overpower me, when my sleeve was twitched by the Hadji, who pointed to the snow-covered summits of the mountains then visible from the windows, and becoming tipped with red light; and stiff and weary I started up, to have my horse corned and watered for the task of that day, the close of which I could little foresee.