But my thoughts have been so engaged by the memory of this visit to Mollah Zeman, that I was about to forget to describe the spot where I found him. It was in a karavanserai appropriated to the trade in slaves. Of this I cannot forbear to give the reader a slight sketch. The building, which formed a square, contained, it may be, from thirty to thirty-five cells. Three wholesale dealers in this abominable traffic had hired these buildings as a depôt for the poor wretches, who were partly their own goods and {192} chattels, and partly entrusted to them as commission brokers for the Turkomans. As is well known, the Karaktchi, unable to wait long, are accustomed to sell their slaves to some Turkoman who has more means at his disposal. The latter brings them to Bokhara, and is the chief gainer by these transactions, as he buys immediately from the producer. In the very first days of his arrival in the capital, he sells all those for whom he can find customers; the remainder he leaves behind him in the hands of the Dellal (broker), who is more especially the wholesale dealer. Human beings are sold in Bokhara and Khiva from the age of three to that of sixty, unless they possess such defects as cause them to be regarded as cripples. According to the precepts of their religion, unbelievers alone can be sold as slaves; but Bokhara, that has nothing more than the semblance of sanctity, evades without scruple such provisions, and makes slaves not only of the Shiite Persians, who were declared 'unbelievers' so long ago as 1500 by the Mollah Schemseddin, but also many professors of the Sunnite tenets themselves, after they have, by blows and maltreatment, been compelled to style themselves Shiites. It is only the Jew, whom they pronounce to be incapable, that is unworthy of becoming a slave, a mode of showing their aversion, of course, anything but disagreeable to the children of Israel, for although the Turkoman will make booty of his property, and strip him of everything, he will not touch his body. At an earlier period, the Hindoos also formed an exception. More recently, as they flocked by Herat into Bokhara, the Tekke or Sarik began to lay down new rules for their procedure. The unfortunate worshipper of Vishnoo is now first metamorphosed {193} into a Musselman, then made a Shiite; and not until this double conversion has taken place is the honour conferred upon him of being plundered of all his property, and being reduced to the condition of a slave. The slave exposed to sale is, when a male, made the subject of public examination: the seller is obliged to guarantee that he has none of those moral or bodily defects, which constitute to his knowledge latent unsoundness: that is to say, where, though they are not discernible to the eye, they exist in a rudimentary state.