'By the soul of the serdar! by the salt of the chief executioner! the Muscovites are nothing. In comparison to the Persians, they are mere dogs. I, who have seen with my own eyes, can tell you, that one Persian, with a spear in his hand, would kill ten of those miserable, beardless creatures.'
'Ah, you male lion!' exclaimed my master, apparently delighted with what I said, 'I always knew that you would be something. Leave an Ispahani alone: he will always show his good sense.'
'They are but few Muscovites on the frontier. Five, six, seven, or eight hundred,—perhaps a thousand or two thousand—but certainly not more than three. They have some ten, twenty, or thirty guns; and as for the Cossacks, pûtch and, they are nothing. It is very inconvenient that they are to be found everywhere when least wanted, with those thick spears of theirs, which look more like the goad of an ox than a warlike weapon, and they kill, 'tis true; but then, they are mounted upon yabous (jades), which can never come up to our horses, worth thirty, forty, fifty tomauns each, and which are out of sight before they can even get theirs into a gallop.'
'Why do you waste your breath upon the Cossacks and their horses?' said the chief executioner; 'you might as well talk of monkeys mounted upon bears. Who commands the infidels?'
'They call him the deli mayor, or the mad major; and the reason why he is called so, is because he never will run away. Stories without number are related of him. Among others, that he has got the pocket Koran of his excellency the serdar in his possession, which he shows to every one as a great trophy.'
'Aye, that's true,' exclaimed the serdar. 'These bankrupt dogs surprised me last year, when encamped not five parasangs hence, and I had only time to save myself, in my shirt and trousers, on the back of an unsaddled horse. Of course, they pillaged my tent, and among other things stole my Koran. But I'll be even with them. I have shown them what I can do at Gavmishlû, and we still have much more to perform upon their fathers' graves. How many guns, did you say, they had?'
'Four or five, or six,' said I.
'I wrote down twenty or thirty just now,' remarked the Mirza, who was writing at the edge of the carpet,—'which of the two is right?'
'Why do you tell us lies?' exclaimed the serdar, his eyes becoming more animated as he spoke. 'If we find that any part of what you say be false, by the head of Ali! you will soon discover that our beards are not to be laughed at with impunity.'
'In truth, then,' said I, 'this intelligence is not of my own acquiring. The greatness of the serdar's, and my Aga's good fortune, consists in my having fallen upon a means of getting the most perfect information through a young Armenian, who risked his life for us, upon my making him promise of recompense in the name of the serdar.'