[FN#267] Arab. "Dimyat," vulg. pronounced "Dumνyat."
[FN#268] Where the door-keepers sit and receive their friends.
[FN#269] This is a traveller's 'Kit' in the East.
[FN#270] Arab. "Takht-rawαn," from Persian meaning "moveable throne."
[FN#271] The use of the expression proved the speaker to be a
Moslem Jinnν.
[FN#272] The "haunted" house proper, known to the vulgar and to spiritualists becomes, I have said, amongst Moslems a place tenanted by Jinns.
[FN#273] Needless to say there never was a Sultan or a King of Baghdad nor a Duke of Athens. This story would seem not to have been written by the author of "the Emir bin Tahir," etc. Night ccccxxiv.
[FN#274] Plur. of Αlim=one learned in the law, a D.D. Mohammed did his best to abolish the priest and his craft by making each Moslem paterfamilias a pontifex in his own household and he severely condemned monkery and celibacy. But human nature was too much for him: even before his death ascetic associations began to crop up. Presently the Olema in Al-Islam formed themselves into a kind of clergy; with the single but highly important difference that they must (or ought to) live by some honest secular calling and not by the "cure of souls"; hence Mahomet IV. of Turkey was solemnly deposed. So far and no farther Mohammed was successful and his success has secured for him the lively and lasting hatred of the ecclesiastical caste which he so honestly and wisely attempted to abate. Even to the present day missionaries have a good word for the Guebre and the Buddhist, the Brahmanist and the Confucian, but none for the Moslem: Dr. Livingstone, for one instance of many, evidently preferred the Fetichist, whom he could convert, to the Unitarian Faithful whom he could not.
[FN#275] i.e. they recited seven times (an unusual number), for greater solemnity, the opening Chapter of the Koran which does general duty on such occasions as making covenants and swearing fealty. This proclaiming a King by acclamation suggests the origin of the old and venerable Portuguese institution.
[FN#276] By affixing his own seal and that of the King. This in later times was supplanted by the "Tughrα," the imperial cypher or counter-mark (much like a writing master's flourish), with which Europe has now been made familiar through the agency of Turkish tobacco.