Hadji Bilal, my most intimate friend in the pilgrims' caravan with which we travelled, who visited Mecca and Medina in the seventies, remained firm in his belief in my Moslemism; he even asserted that if I had adopted an incognito at all, it was decidedly rather in Europe than in Asia, and that my _Christianity_ was apocryphal. How far he was right in his supposition the reader of these memoirs can judge for himself. In the matter of prejudice, superstition, and fanaticism, there is only this difference between the West, which is so proud of its civilisation, and uncultivated Asia, that in the West human passions are restrained by the laws of more advanced civilisation, and the adherents of foreign religious or political opinions, are exposed to less dangers in public life than in Asia where lawlessness and anarchy afford no protection. Unfortunately I made bitter experiences in this respect. Where my origin was unknown, my career so full of struggles found much more acknowledgment than in those circles in which I, as a Jew, was defamed, and from the very beginning marked as a liar and deceiver. It was the same with my political opinions. Until the Franco-Russian alliance was strengthened I had many friends in France, but I lost them all the moment I took up my position as anti-Russian writer, in England's interest in Asia. Even in England I was made to feel the effect of political quarrels amongst the various parties. Mr. Ashton Dilke, a furious Liberal and a pro-Russian, in conjunction with Herr Eugen Schuyler, secretary to the American Embassy at St. Petersburg (whose ancestor took a prominent part against England in the American War of Independence), took it into his head to represent my journey through Central Asia as fiction, and attacked me in the _Athenæum_ No. 2,397. He asserted that I, a connoisseur of Oriental languages, had never been in Bokhara nor Samarkand, and had written my book with no other foundation than the facts I had collected in the Bosphorus, and as a proof of this assertion it was said that I had described the famous nephrit stone on the tomb of Timour as green, whereas in reality it was blue. Little or no notice was taken of this attack by my friends in England, and I was not a little surprised when the noted Russian orientalist, Mr. W. Grigorieff, declared in _Russki Mir_ that this attack on the authenticity of my journey was ridiculous and inadmissible, and designated me as an audacious and remarkable traveller of recent date, though he had sharply criticised my _History of Bokhara_ some time before. Considering my strongly marked opposition to Russia, this trick of holding out a saving hand seems rather strange; but the kindness evinced missed its aim, for my political works continued to be anti-Russian. Also Mr. Schuyler, the American diplomatist, in spite of the hatred he bore to England, changed his tone in time; for when he visited Budapest in 1886, I received the following letter from him:--