Middle East -- Description and travel; Stanhope, Hester, Lady, 1776-1839
But no time was lost in sending this troublesome person to Bedlam.
Before going, he bestirred himself so much and to such good purpose to
obtain a visit from Lady Hester that this singular request reached the
ears of Pitt's niece. Curious to make the acquaintance of the prophet,
she hastened to accede to his wish. Brothers solemnly predicted to her
that "she would go one day to Jerusalem, and would lead the Chosen
People; that on her arrival in the Holy Land there would be upheavals in
the world and that she would pass seven years in the desert." While she
was rusticating at Brousse, two Englishmen, who were passing through it
and who knew the prophecy, amused themselves about her great future.
"You will go to Jerusalem, Lady Hester," said they; "you will go.
Esther, Queen of the Jews! Hester, Queen of the Jews!"
Did the coincidence of the names strike her, or did this programme
fascinate her by its novelty? Did she consider Brothers as an
inoffensive lunatic or as a visionary of genius? She was not yet the
sorceress of Djoun, believing firmly in magicians and enchanted
serpents. But many sensible men, such as William Sharp, who had even
given to the world a fine engraving of the prophet, with these words:
"Believing firmly that this is the man chosen of God, I have engraved
his portrait," and as Mr. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, an Indian official
and translator of the code of Geptoo laws, if it please you, had
publicly proclaimed themselves his disciples.
However that may be, Lady Hester took, with the handsome Colonel Bruce,
the road to Jerusalem, wearing the costume of the Egyptian Mamelukes:
short bolero of red satin, purple tunic without sleeves, gallooned with
gold, wide trousers of which the multiple folds had the thickness of
drapery, cashmere shawl twisting like a turban around her head. All that
formed a symphony of red, which blazed forth when she partially opened
the great white burnous which hid her entirely during her ramblings on
horseback. They only proceeded so far as Jaffa; Jaffa which bathes the
foot of its dirty houses in the sea, and which the pilgrims returning
from Jerusalem, after the Easter festival, fill with confusion and
noise, transforming the little dead town of fishermen into a comical
fair in which all the idioms of creation are entangled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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