The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

by James Justinian Morier

'But what have I done, O my uncle?' said I to him; 'by my soul, speak!'

'What have you done?' said my wife's cousin. 'Is lying nothing? is stealing nothing? is marrying a wife under false pretences nothing? You must be a rare man without shame to call such acts nothing!'

'Perhaps,' said the eldest brother, 'you think it a great honour which the son of an Ispahan barber confers upon one of the richest families of Constantinople, when he marries their daughter!'

'And perhaps,' said the other, 'you may look upon a beggarly vender of pipe-sticks in the light of a merchant, and think him worthy of any alliance!'

'But Hajji, praise be to Allah! is a great merchant,' said the uncle ironically: 'his silks and velvets are now on their way to bring us lambskins from Bokhara; his shawls are travelling to us from Cashmere, and his ships are blackening the surface of the seas between China and Bassorah!'

'And his parentage,' continued his son in the same strain, 'a barber's son did you say? forbid it, Allah! No, no; he dates from the Koreish. He is not even the descendant, but, by the blessing of God, of the ancestry of the Prophet; and who can come in competition with a Mansouri Arab?'

'What is all this?' again and again did I exclaim, as I saw the storm gathering about my ears. 'If you want to kill me, do so; but do not pull off my skin by inches.'

'I tell you what is it, man without faith,' said the stern man, who hitherto had remained immovable; 'you are a wretch who deserves not to live! and if you do not immediately give up all pretensions to your wife, and leave this house and everything that belongs to it, without a moment's delay, do you see those men' (pointing to the two ruffians before mentioned); 'they will just make your soul take leave of your body as easy as they would knock the tobacco out of their pipes. I have spoken, and you are master to act as you please.'

Then the whole of the assembly, as if excited by this speech, unloosed their tongues at once, and, without reserve of words or action, told me a great number of disagreeable truths.

This storm, which I permitted to rage without opening my lips, gave me time for reflection, and I determined to try what a little resistance would do.