Middle East -- Description and travel; Stanhope, Hester, Lady, 1776-1839
Hadji Ali showed Lady Hester the pavilion which Djezzar Pacha usually
occupied. He used to have his divan placed near the window and to watch
the street. Did he catch sight of a passer-by whose face, clothing or
figure displeased him, he sent to fetch him. If the unhappy man
attempted resistance, the officer, who did not care to incur his
master's anger, used force. When he was brought, more dead than alive,
before Djezzar, the latter said to him: "Thy face does not please me,"
or, "Thou hast an evil eye," or again, in turning towards the
executioner, who followed him like his shadow: "A fellow so ugly is
unworthy to live; he is surely a child of the devil." And for love of
art he caused ears, noses and heads to be cut off.
Sometimes he showed an amiable caprice. His guards having arrested all
the persons who were passing along the principal street of St. Jean
d'Acre at a certain hour, he had them drawn up on either side of his
divan, indiscriminately, and after having gloated for a time over their
mortal agony, he pronounced sentence in an indifferent voice: "Let the
prisoners on the right be hanged and let an ample breakfast be provided
for those on the left!"
One day, when the barber, who was ordered to pluck out an eye from a
passing stranger, hesitated for a moment, Djezzar said: "Oh! Oh! thou
art squeamish! Perhaps, it is because thou knowest not how to do it.
Come here; I am going to teach thee." And the pacha, plunging the
forefinger of his right hand into the orbit, threw the man's eye on to
his face.
The recital of such atrocities would pass for a tale in the style of
Bluebeard if the slashed faces of hundreds of men did not attest the
frightful reality of it. It is useful for the moment to show how the
varnish of Eastern civilisation cracks to allow us to catch a glimpse of
the abysses of cruelty and barbarism unknown to European mentality.
St. Jean d'Acre was at that time the only town in Syria where the
shopkeepers were not tempted to rob their customers or to use false
weights and false measures. Caught in the act, they were, in fact,
nailed by the tongue to the doors of their shops. The butchers enjoyed
favourable treatment: they were suspended from the crooked iron hooks
intended to suspend the choice morsels.
But the recollection the most horrible, which still caused the narrator
to lower his voice, as though the terrible pacha was concealed in order
to listen to him, was that of the Mameluke mutiny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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