deity but God: Mohammad is God’s Apostle.” The private watchmen are employed to guard, by night, the sooks (or market-streets) and other districts of the town. They carry a nebboot (or long staff), but no lantern. The Zábit, or A′gha of the police, used frequently to go about the metropolis by night, often accompanied only by the executioner and the “shealeg′ee,” or bearer of a kind of torch called “shealeh,” which is still in use.[221] This torch burns, soon after it is lighted, without a flame, excepting when it is waved through the air, when it suddenly blazes forth: it therefore answers the same purpose as our dark lantern. The burning end is sometimes concealed in a small pot or jar, or covered with something else, when not required to give light; but it is said that thieves often smell it in time to escape meeting the bearer. When a person without a light is met by the police at night, he seldom attempts resistance or flight; the punishment to which he is liable is beating. The chief of the police had an arbitrary power to put any criminal or offender to death without trial, and when not obnoxious, by law, to capital punishment; and so also had many inferior officers, as will be seen in subsequent pages of this work: but within the last two or three years, instances of the exercise of such power have been very rare, and I believe they would not now be permitted. The officers of the Zábit perform their nightly rounds with the military guards merely as being better acquainted than the latter with the haunts and practices of thieves and other bad characters; and the Zábit himself scarcely ever exercises any penal authority beyond that of beating or flogging.