Tales From Jókai

by Mór Jókai

The young woman who lay there really resembled his Eminha. Death is a great artist. With one cold breath she knows how to make all human faces singularly alike.

"She is not dead!" cried Muhzin to the dumfoundered crowd. "I can make her arise, and then you will see that she will call me her husband. I have been waiting for her here a whole year. Hence, all of you! for I would kill and slay and scatter curses around me! Ye shall not bury the living!"

The people were alarmed at the sight of mad Muhzin, and still more by his savage words. Moreover, the mourning Kadilesker dearly loved his dead wife, and when Muhzin said that he would raise her up again, he also was glad, and made place for him by the coffin that he might perform this miracle.

With the fervour of devotion, Muhzin drew from his girdle the little box and opened it; a yellow-coloured ointment was inside it, speckled with little green-gold points, of whose magical efficacy Muhzin himself was quickly convinced when he dipped into it the index finger of his right hand, for it burnt him as severely as if he had plunged it into boiling oil. But this extraordinary quality of the ointment was only a greater testimony to its marvellous origin, so that Muhzin did not hesitate to thoroughly rub the eyebrows and the lips of the corpse with his anointed finger-tip.

Everybody was intently watching to see whether the breath of life would return beneath the influence of the wondrous unguent, but nobody was so devout a believer in it as Muhzin himself.

But lo! instead of the eyes and lips of the dead woman opening, as was expected of them, the places which Muhzin had anointed turned black, the skin began to crackle and blister, and the face of the dead woman became quite hideous.

Horror seized upon Muhzin. This was not the effect he had anticipated. The people around him murmured aloud, the Kadilesker rushed furiously upon him, and, seizing him by the throat, cast him to the ground.

"Accursed magician!" he cried, "so shamelessly to distort the face of my dead wife, and make her, now that she is dead, just such an one as thou thyself art while still alive!"

"To the stake with him!" thundered the mob all around; they were furious with Muhzin. "To the fiery pit with him—reserved for the idol-worshippers and sorcerers—the wretch who would desecrate the bodies of the dead!"

And worthy Muhzin would have been burnt on the spot had not the Governor of Damascus happened to be there, who, perceiving that they had to do with a lunatic rather than an idolater, ordered his chiauses to seize Muhzin, tie him to a pillar, give him two hundred strokes with a camel-driver's whip, and then bring the man before him, that he might confess what mad idea it was that had induced him to deform the features of the dead wife of the Kadilesker.