The Strand Magazine 1909. (nem teljes évfolyam) [antikvár]

THE STRAND MAGAZINE. Vol. xxxvii. JANUARY, 1909- No. 217 By HALL CAINE. [The Arabs have a tradition that in "the time of the end" a Redeemer will come to unite the faiths of the world into one faith, and the peoples of the world into one people. This Redeemer is sometimes known as the Mahdi, sometimes as Mohammed, sometimes as Jesus, but generally as the White Prophet of Peace, meaning the Christ.] FIRST BOOK :—The Crescent and the Cross. CHAPTER XIII. SHMAEL AMEER was the son of a Libyan carpenter and boat-builder, who, shortly before the days of the Mahdi, had removed with his family to Khartoum. His earliest memory was of the solitary figure of the great white pasha on the roof of the palace, looking up the Nile for the relief array that never arrived, and of the same white-headed Englishman, with the pale face, who, walking to and fro on the sands outside the palace garden, patted his head and smiled. His next memory was of the morning after the fall of the desert city, when, awakened by the melancholy moan of the great onheya, the elephant's horn that was the trumpet of death, he heard the hellish shrieks of the massacre that was going on in the streets, and saw his mother lying dead in front of the door of the inner closet in which she had hidden her child, and found his father's body on the outer threshold. He was seven years of age at this time, and being adopted by an uncle, a merchant in the town, who had been rich enough to buy his own life, he was sent in due course first to the little school of the mosque in Khartoum, and afterwards, at eighteen, to El Azhar, in Cairo, where, with other poor students, he slept in the stifling rooms under the flat roof, and lived on the hard bread and the jars of cheese and butter which were sent to him from home. Within four years he had passed the highest examination at the Arabic University, taking the rank of alim (doctor of Koranic divinity), which entitled him to teach and preach in any quarter of the Mohammedan world, and then, equally by reason of his rich voice and VqI. :txxvu.—1. Copyright, 1908, by Hall Caine, his devout mind, he was made reader in the mosque of El Azhar. Morality was low among the governing classes at that period, and when it occurred that the Grand Kadi, who was a compound of the Eastern voluptuary and the libertine of the Parisian boulevards, marrying for the fourth time, made a feast that went on for a week, in which the days were spent in eating and drinking and the nights in carousing of an unsaintly character, the orgy so shocked the young alim from the desert that he went down to the great man's house to protest. "How is this, your Eminence?" he said, stoutly. "The Koran teaches temperance, chastity, and contempt of the things of the world—yet you, who are a tower and a light in Islam, have darkened our faces before the infidel." So daring an outrage on the authority of the Kadi had never been committed before, and Ishmael was promptly flung into the streets; but the matter made some noise and led, in the end, to the expulsion of all the governors (the Ulema) of the University except the one man who, being the first cause of the sq^ndal, was also the representative of the Sultan, and therefore could not be changed. Meantime Ishmael, returning no more to El Azhar, had settled himself on an island far up the river, and there, practising extreme austerities, he gathered a great reputation for holiness, and attracted attention throughout the valley of the Nile by breathing out threatenings and slaughter—not so much against the leaders of his own people, who were degrading Islam, as against the Christians under whose hated bondage, as he believed, the whole Mohammedan world was going mad. in the United States of America. J ¦ , ¦ ¦ i it W