As a rule the bizeban also fulfilled the office of eunuch, and walked freely into the seraglio. Prince Mustapha used often, by the hand of his pet bizeban, to send to his sister, the beautiful Saliha, presents of a certain kind of very choice melon which only grew in the Sultan's garden and concerning which fruit a very sad story was told.
One day, noticing that one melon was missing from the beds, the Sultan had all his gardeners tortured that the culprit might confess his theft. Then, when this experiment failed, he had seven of them cut open. To no purpose; but when the eighth was ripped up fragments of the melon were revealed, which was very fortunate, as a few hundred other servants would, but for this, have been treated likewise.
The lovely Saliha was a very kind-hearted creature. She thought her brother's bizeban was a very sweet and gentle little thing, and she did not hesitate to pet him. She tried to make him understand this and that, and he seemed to have a very quick intelligence. Why should he not one day possess a soul? This idea occurred to her as she was walking, on one occasion, in the shrubbery. Could she not give back to him the soul of which he had been deprived, could she not teach him the alphabet? If she showed him a certain letter and then pointed to some object with which he was familiar could he not by degrees be made acquainted with the world?
Saliha made the experiment. She found it a very pleasant recreation, for life in the seraglio is extremely monotonous.
We have heard that prisoners in their dungeons have even taught spiders to dance at the sound of music (and the seraglio as a place of detention is scarcely more exhilarating than a dungeon). Why should not the deaf and dumb boy prove as apt as a spider? At her first essay, Saliha was amazed to see how the soul of the bizeban began to expand. He grasped anything in a moment. Once shown the alphabet he could afterwards trace out each letter on the ground. Once shown the name of a certain article he never forgot it. This success encouraged Saliha to further attempts. Would it not be possible to speak to the bizeban? But how could the speaking be done so that no beholder comprehended it? Ah! with the hands! The human hand has five fingers, and their variety of motion, as they open and shut, is such that the entire alphabet might thereby be distinctly expressed. Saliha determined to teach the boy to converse with her by means of his fingers; and the success of her experiments exceeded her expectations. He quickly learned the secret signs. It was delightful to Saliha; and she determined to get amusement out of it too. She would extract from the bizeban secrets concerning her brother which he thought no one living knew, and then she would tease this relative by pretending that she had discovered them through the mystic words of the Cabala. Who could ever dream of suspecting a bizeban who was deaf and dumb?
After the death of Osman, Prince Mustapha ascended the throne. His youthful gaiety now quickly fled—his shoulders began to bend beneath the weight of the Turkish Empire, which was then already in a tottering condition, with enemies on every side.
At that time the country possessed a great statesman in the person of Raghib Pasha, whose potent hand had preserved the empire from destruction. It was he who crushed the forces of the rebellious Egyptian princes and laid the province at the feet of the Padishah. Raghib was not only a hero in war, he was also a famous poet and the greatest scholar in the land. Historians describe him, in his character of statesman, as a "leader of leaders," szad rul vezir, and in that of writer as the "Prince of Roumelian poets". (Sultani suari Rum). In his gigantic work entitled Zezinet Olulum ("Ship of Knowledge") all the legends are collected which had lain scattered about the Arab plains. It was he who founded the splendid library which bears his name.
At the time of which we now write, Saliha was in the very springtide of her beauty—like the lotus-flower which opens its petals before the dew of dawn. Sultan Mustapha could not have given Raghib Pasha a greater reward than by bestowing upon him the hand of his lovely sister; and as to whether he inspired her with real affection I need only say that he was fifty-nine when he married her and that she loved him so much that when he died her mind became deranged.
Raghib Pasha ruled not only over the Mussulmans but also over the ruler of the Mussulmans, for he had divined the Sultan's thoughts—yes, his innermost thoughts.
It was the Sultan's habit not to retire at night to his bedchamber until he had recorded, in a voluminous diary, all the events of the day and his impressions concerning them. This book he habitually kept in the secrecy of his own room, and the bizeban watched over it until the morning. To whom would it ever have occurred that the deaf and dumb from birth could read, or that he could communicate the written lines to some one else? In the room where this diary was kept there was a little window which opened into the khazoda, the Sultan's place of worship. But it was so shut off from view by various corridors as to be only visible from the seraglio. Every evening, just as the Sultan was leaving his apartments in order to go and say his final prayers in this sanctuary, the murzims were accustomed to strike seven times with a hammer a bell without a tongue. Then the Imam who stood before the altar would say: "Ahamdu lillahi Rabbil alemum" ("Grace descends from Heaven, which rules over all"). Thereupon the congregation would fall on their faces. They remained prostrate until the Sultan reached the door; when the Imam would exclaim: Allehú ekber! ("The Lord is powerful"), and all present rose to their feet. During the period of prostration a secret hand would be stretched out from the little window we have mentioned, and would make all kinds of signs. No one noticed this hand, except Saliha, who carefully watched its mysterious movements whilst she was upon her knees. From these signs she knew everything that the Sultan had that day recorded in his diary; and the very same night she would whisper the information to her husband.