“Furthermore, let me thank thee once again for thy gracious intervention when Allah willed that I should be accused falsely in El Cûds, whither I went last spring, on an evil prompting, to subject my beloved daughter, then very ill, to the treatment of a Frank physician, in whose house she died very peacefully, the praise to Allah. Though sad for the loss of my daughter, and more for the inordinate affection my soul bore her, which conscience tells was the cause of that loss, I am not unhappy. Thanks to Allah! Here I am surrounded by friends who wish me well. A woman, long a servant in my house and attendant on my little Alia, now tends to the comfort of my age, and lavishes on me the endearments for which her sort were created. Hassan Agha, our old acquaintance, was felled from his horse and wounded recently in a conflict with certain of the Bedû who, harboring a grudge against him for some wrong he did to them in El Cûds, have harried us these three months past—against all precedent, for their time of sojourn here is the winter—but now seem gone from the land, for which we praise Allah. As for Hassan, thy bounteous grant of rifles and powder has done much to reconcile him to my son, with whom he quarreled in El Cûds. All my neighbors, alike Arab and Circassian, honored my son with a great reception on his arrival yesterday in the morning. “And now, O my brother, once more I beseech thee to forgive thy brother and the son of thy brother, who are both very sensible of meriting thy most just displeasure. And May Allah preserve thee always.” This letter, when folded and sealed, was intrusted to the soldier servant of Abd-ur-Rahman, who was obliged to set out that day on his return to El Cûds. In less than a month it was answered. A trooper from the garrison of Esh-Shâm, calling God and his horse to witness that he had ridden day and night without a halt, delivered the missive to Shems-ud-dìn as he sat in the entry of his house toward sunset. With the usual courtesies, it ran: “I have received thy honored letter, and though I grieve much for the loss of a youth whom I had come to regard as my son (a thing I could never procure of my own body, though I have tried many women and begotten at divers times no less than sixteen daughters, if I count aright, so that I have come to hate girl children as a deception, and utterly fail to comprehend thy infatuation for that girl who died), yet I will not disguise from thee that the withdrawal of the young one has done me good in my position. It is but policy in the sovereign to look askance on the posterity of men of note; and that custom of the Turks is wise by which honors descend not from father to son. The eyes of many in high places regarded with disfavor my fondness for Abd-ur-Rahman; but now, an old man without a sequel, I arouse no hatred, only expectations. What am I, thus lonely, but a kind of eunuch, a natural and unenviable appanage of sovereignty.