The soldiers expressed their polite interest in tones of commiseration. To sip their arac without reproach, they had taken seat close to a pillar of the doorway which screened them, when they leant to drink, from the gaze of the passer-by.
“Once, when I was a boy,” said one of them, entertaining Shibli and the rest, while his colleague spoke aside with Hassan, “I had the honor to lie down beneath the horse of a holy sheykh—I and my father and my big brother and a thousand more. It was in El Bica’a, behind Lebanon. The plain was strewn with living bodies. You could not see the ground anywhere between us. Then the sheykh rode his horse over the backs of us, and when it came to my back, lo, it was to me no more than if some girl, mistress of beauty, fondled me for love, there where the hoof pressed. And the spot has been blessed ever since; for when I do evil it pains me, and when I do good it is again as if some hand of love caressed me. By Allah, it pains me now for the sake of this arac—a sin, as the youth rightly declared!... A strange thing—not so, O my masters?
“I remember to have seen, in Anadol far from here, a man who went well-nigh naked, his face like the earth itself for dirt and roughness. A one-eyed man might see that he was holy above the rest of us. That man leaned upon a sword—upon the blade of it, by Allah! so that the point came forth at his back. Then he drew it out slowly, showing all men how the blood rained from it. As for him, he laughed to see the red stuff fall. Then, as we looked for him to die, he began to dance, chanting praise to Allah. And that he did not once nor twice, but many times before he died. Strange things are seen in the world, O my masters! By Allah, I count you fortunate! I myself would fain behold that saint of yours. Peradventure he would grant me to witness some marvel worth relating, like the turning of wicked people into dogs....”
“The Sheykh Shems-ud-dìn is no wandering derwìsh, whose mind is to cajole the vulgar,” broke in Shibli, from the height of indignation. “He is a learned sheykh of the religion, a man of high lineage and great wealth, to whose wisdom even princes defer with reverence.”
“Ma sh’ Allah!” smiled the soldier, but little impressed. “Your talk had led me to suppose him otherwise. Why call him saint, then? Has he wrought no signs in the land?”
“Of a truth, that has he, by Allah,” said Hassan, who had ended his whispered conference. “He brought light to the city where we dwell. He is lord of the jân. They have had no master like him since the death of Suleyman the Wise. When his daughter fell ill, and all help failed, it was by advice of a jinni, his slave, that he brought her hither, to this city, to the house of a Frank physician, where she now lies. Signs, say you? I assure you, by Allah, he is lord of them all! He knows the language of beasts, and on our way hither made use of that knowledge to restore to a certain poor fellâh his camel, which had been long lost. The fellâh, his name Zeyd ebn Abbâs, is still with us. If thou wilt, thou canst speak with him and hear the wondrous story from his own lips.”
“Is it truth thou speakest?” asked one of the soldiers, with a shrug aside to his mate.
“By Allah, it is truth! All these are witnesses with me. Ask one of them. Ask any man acquainted with his holiness!”
They sat a-row in the wide archway, brushed by the raiment of the throng without, hearing snatches of conversation, shouts, laughter, and the ceaseless shuffle of feet along the stones; while at their backs was darkness, save for one red gleam of fire, which the ample form of the taverner kept eclipsing as it revolved in his avocations about the brazier.