"Nay, more than conquerors," said Mustapha. "If one falls in battle paradise flings wide its gates, and troops of angels and houris come to lead his soul in a triumphal procession into that beautiful land where the earth is like purest musk, and where the great Tuba tree grows—a branch of which shades the kiosk of every believer, and bends down to place its luscious fruit into his hand, if he so much as desires it; where are grapes and pomegranates, and such as for spicy sweetness have never been tasted on earth; where are streams of water and milk and wine and honey, whose bottoms are pebbled with pearls and emeralds and rubies; where the houris, the fairest of maidens, dwell close beside the believer in pavilions of hollow pearls, and serve every wish of the faithful even before he can utter it."[38]
But Michael's eyes were heavy; and as the old veterans diverted the conversation to some matter of business between them, his excited imagination reproduced the description of paradise in his dreams. Only, the pavilion of pearl was shaped like good Uncle Kabilovitsch's cot on the mountains, and the houris were all fair-haired Morsinias.
CHAPTER XIII.
Weeks and months passed away, during which the physical exercises of the lads in the Janizary school were varied with lessons in the Turkish language; and, in the case of a select number, in the Arabic, mastering it at least sufficiently to read the Koran, large sections of which they were compelled to commit to memory.
The teachers in the Janizary schools were far from ordinary men. They were highly learned, and, like most Orientals of education, gifted with great eloquence. After the daily tasks had been accomplished the boys were gathered in a semicircle upon the floor about the instructor, who sat cross-legged among them, and narrated in glowing language the history of the Prophet and his successors in the khalifate; inflaming their young minds with the most heroic and romantic legends of Arabia and Egypt, Algiers and Granada, where the Koran had conquered the faith of the people whom the swords of the true Moslems had subdued. Wild stories of the early days of the Turks, before Ertoghral,[39] "The Right-hearted Man," led the tribes from the banks of the Euphrates; and earlier still when Seljuk[40] led his people from north of the Caspian; of the settlement of their remote ancestors in Afghanistan, where the great chief was first called Sultan;[41] of how they had once held the religious faith of Zoroaster. Indeed, myths from the very dawn of known history, when the Turkius did all sorts of valiant deeds in far-off China.[42]
The Christian books were made to appear to the young proselyte as but imperfect suggestions of the completed teaching of the book of Mahomet; while the peculiar dogmas of the Christians were restated with such shrewd perversion that to the child's judgment they seemed puerile or untrue.
"Behold the sky!" one would exclaim. "Is it not one dome, like the canopy of one mighty throne? Behold the light! Does it not pour from one sun and fill all space with one flood? Breathe the air! Is it not the same over all lands and in all lungs? Do not all birds fly with one mechanism of wings? and all men live by the same beating of the heart? How then can there be three Gods, Allah, and Jesu and Mary, as the Christians teach?[43] What does reason say? What does the universe testify? What says the true and wise believer?"
"There is one God and Mahomet is His Prophet," would be the response of the pupils, bowing their heads to the floor.