Alas! alas!" burst involuntarily from their lips, despite
the danger of such exclamations; tears trickled down their hairy
cheeks, and their brawny bosoms heaved with sobs. A strange sight it
was to see rugged fellows, mountaineers perhaps, or the fierce Iliyat
of the plains, sometimes weeping silently like children, sometimes
shrieking like hysteric girls, and utterly careless to conceal a grief
so coarse and grisly, at the same time so true and real, that I knew
not how to behold it. Then the Satanic scowls with which they passed
by, or pretended to pray at, the hated Omar's tomb! With what curses
their hearts are belying those mouths full of blessings! How they are
internally canonising Fayruz-the Persian slave who stabbed Omar in the
Mosque-and praying for his eternal happiness in the presence of the
murdered man! Sticks and stones, however, and not unfrequently the
knife and the sabre, have taught them the hard lesson of disciplining
their feelings; and nothing but a furious contraction of the brow, a
roll of the eye, intensely vicious, and a twitching of the muscles
about the region of the mouth, denote the wild storm of wrath within.
They generally, too, manage to discharge some part of their passion in
words. "Hail Omar, thou hog!" exclaims some fanatic Madani as he passes
by the heretic-a demand more outraging than requiring a red-hot,
black-north Protestant to bless the Pope. "O Allah! hell him!" meekly
responds the Persian, changing the benediction to a curse most
intelligible to, and most delicious in, his fellows' ears.[FN#30]
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