“Allah forgive our ribaldry!” said Hassan. “The sin is ours, not his. Know, O my brothers, that this is a good, virtuous youth, the disciple of a certain holy one revered of all. Allah witness, and do thou take note, O Shibli, that I, for my part, touch not the abomination. Neither I nor my companions; let it be told the sheykh!” He turned then to the soldiers, adding, “It behooves a man to avoid small offenses when he has the uncommon honor to be the friend and companion of the holiest of living men. And that honor is upon all of us here.” The soldiers expressed their polite interest in tones of commiseration. To sip their arac without reproach, they had taken seat close to a pillar of the doorway which screened them, when they leant to drink, from the gaze of the passer-by. “Once, when I was a boy,” said one of them, entertaining Shibli and the rest, while his colleague spoke aside with Hassan, “I had the honor to lie down beneath the horse of a holy sheykh—I and my father and my big brother and a thousand more. It was in El Bica’a, behind Lebanon. The plain was strewn with living bodies. You could not see the ground anywhere between us. Then the sheykh rode his horse over the backs of us, and when it came to my back, lo, it was to me no more than if some girl, mistress of beauty, fondled me for love, there where the hoof pressed. And the spot has been blessed ever since; for when I do evil it pains me, and when I do good it is again as if some hand of love caressed me. By Allah, it pains me now for the sake of this arac—a sin, as the youth rightly declared!... A strange thing—not so, O my masters? “I remember to have seen, in Anadol far from here, a man who went well-nigh naked, his face like the earth itself for dirt and roughness. A one-eyed man might see that he was holy above the rest of us. That man leaned upon a sword—upon the blade of it, by Allah! so that the point came forth at his back. Then he drew it out slowly, showing all men how the blood rained from it. As for him, he laughed to see the red stuff fall. Then, as we looked for him to die, he began to dance, chanting praise to Allah. And that he did not once nor twice, but many times before he died. Strange things are seen in the world, O my masters! By Allah, I count you fortunate! I myself would fain behold that saint of yours. Peradventure he would grant me to witness some marvel worth relating, like the turning of wicked people into dogs....” “The Sheykh Shems-ud-dìn is no wandering derwìsh, whose mind is to cajole the vulgar,” broke in Shibli, from the height of indignation. “He is a learned sheykh of the religion, a man of high lineage and great wealth, to whose wisdom even princes defer with reverence.” “Ma sh’ Allah!” smiled the soldier, but little impressed. “Your talk had led me to suppose him otherwise. Why call him saint, then? Has he wrought no signs in the land?”