or victim to the drug can still procure it if he can pay for its enhanced price. The smell of its fumes was much more familiar formerly in the humbler coffee-shops; but it is not quite absent now. It is often mixed with tumbák, a kind of Persian tobacco, and is smoked in the gózeh, a pipe made of a cocoanut-shell, which has a long cane stem. One who indulges slightly in the habit would not be termed a ḥashshash
any more than a moderate drinker in England would be termed a drunkard. The opprobrium attached to the term is much increased through its association with the Ḥashshashseyn
of the time of the Crusades, whom we know as the Assassins—the subjects of the ‘Sultan of the Castles and Fortresses,’ more commonly called ‘the old man of the mountain.’ They were said to indulge freely in hashsheesh when sent on some murderous errand by their chief. Rowdy or riotous people are often termed ‘Hashshasheen’ whether they be addicted to the drug or not.
Seeing an excitable crowd quite recently, in one of the principal squares of Cairo, I approached to see what was the matter. A brutal-looking man was struggling with a couple of policemen who were taking him off to jail, while others were placing on a stretcher a youth who was terribly hacked about his face and head. On inquiry I heard that the man in charge of the police was employed at the public slaughter-house, that he was given to hashsheesh, and that in a fit of madness he had just assaulted with his butcher’s knife the wounded youth. The term hashshash, which was freely used by the crowd, had a particularly gruesome sound on that occasion.
Loud and furious were the comments of Mahmood, and had he not been carrying my materials he would have joined in the struggle with the butcher.
As this took place just within the limits of the European quarter, it was fully reported in the foreign Cairo papers. The youth succumbed to his wounds, and the hashshash paid the death penalty.
I was on my way to the Khaleeg to look for a subject which had attracted me on a former visit, and before this canal had been filled in by the tramway company. A change for the better, possibly, from a hygienic point of view, and also as a means of communication; but a sad loss to the picturesque. Many historic buildings which backed on to the canal have been pulled down, and commonplace frontages will soon blot out all remembrance of them.