Lady Hester, in strolling through the town, was astonished to meet a number of people with faces atrociously mutilated. Some had no nose; to others a ear was wanting, sometimes two; several were one-eyed. Puzzled, she made inquiries of Hadji Ali, a janissary of St. Jean d'Acre, whom she had promoted to the high rank of inspector of the luggage. Former soldier of Djezzar Pacha, he had his memory haunted by nightmare visions, and related concerning his master ghastly stories. Although he had been dead for four years, the inhabitants were hardly beginning to emerge from the Red Terror under which they had lived and to breathe more freely. Ahmed Djezzar was born in Bosnia. At the age of sixteen he left Bosnia and went to Constantinople, and afterwards to Cairo. There, bought by Ali Bey for his Mamelukes, he specialised with so much enthusiasm in missions of assassination that he acquired his redoubtable surname of Djezzar (slaughterer). Having, by chance, refused to put to death a friend of Ali, he took to flight to escape his vengeance.
He made his way to the Druses, where he received hospitality from the Emir Yusef, who appointed him Aga, then governor of Bairout. Djezzar betrayed him. Yusef, furious, made an alliance with Dahers, sheik of one of the Arab tribes of the coast. Besieged in the town, Djezzar defended himself like a devil, walled up twenty Christians alive in his walls to render them more solid, and surrendered finally to Dahers, who, fascinated by his courage, gave him his friendship and the command of an expedition to Palestine. Unhappy idea! Djezzar went over to the Turks again. And, a little later, a war having broken out between the pachas of Syria and the Porte, he was ordered to reduce St. Jean d'Acre. His knowledge of the country having assured success, he surprised Dahers and killed him with his own hand.
Appointed afterwards pacha of Acre and Sidon, then of Damascus, he was able to abandon himself without restraint to his sanguinary tastes and to his love of butchery. Traitor to his country, to his benefactors, sold to the highest bidders, vile and dishonourable, he lived peacefully until the age of eighty-eight, when the dagger of a relative of one of his numerous victims came to put an end to his exploits.
Amidst the annals of Turkish history, so heavy with murders and cruel massacres, so stained with blood, so filled with the lamentations of thousands of unhappy people put to torture, Djezzar's reign shone with a singular brightness.
Hadji Ali showed Lady Hester the pavilion which Djezzar Pacha usually occupied. He used to have his divan placed near the window and to watch the street. Did he catch sight of a passer-by whose face, clothing or figure displeased him, he sent to fetch him. If the unhappy man attempted resistance, the officer, who did not care to incur his master's anger, used force. When he was brought, more dead than alive, before Djezzar, the latter said to him: "Thy face does not please me," or, "Thou hast an evil eye," or again, in turning towards the executioner, who followed him like his shadow: "A fellow so ugly is unworthy to live; he is surely a child of the devil." And for love of art he caused ears, noses and heads to be cut off.
Sometimes he showed an amiable caprice. His guards having arrested all the persons who were passing along the principal street of St. Jean d'Acre at a certain hour, he had them drawn up on either side of his divan, indiscriminately, and after having gloated for a time over their mortal agony, he pronounced sentence in an indifferent voice: "Let the prisoners on the right be hanged and let an ample breakfast be provided for those on the left!"
One day, when the barber, who was ordered to pluck out an eye from a passing stranger, hesitated for a moment, Djezzar said: "Oh! Oh! thou art squeamish! Perhaps, it is because thou knowest not how to do it. Come here; I am going to teach thee." And the pacha, plunging the forefinger of his right hand into the orbit, threw the man's eye on to his face.
The recital of such atrocities would pass for a tale in the style of Bluebeard if the slashed faces of hundreds of men did not attest the frightful reality of it. It is useful for the moment to show how the varnish of Eastern civilisation cracks to allow us to catch a glimpse of the abysses of cruelty and barbarism unknown to European mentality.
St. Jean d'Acre was at that time the only town in Syria where the shopkeepers were not tempted to rob their customers or to use false weights and false measures. Caught in the act, they were, in fact, nailed by the tongue to the doors of their shops. The butchers enjoyed favourable treatment: they were suspended from the crooked iron hooks intended to suspend the choice morsels.
But the recollection the most horrible, which still caused the narrator to lower his voice, as though the terrible pacha was concealed in order to listen to him, was that of the Mameluke mutiny.