The
Weird Orient
By Henry Iliowizi
CONTENTS.
The Doom of Al Zameri
Sheddad’s Palace of Irem
The Mystery of the Damavant
The Gods in Exile
King Solomon and Ashmodai,
The Croesus of Yemen,
The Fate of Arzemia
The Student of Timbuctu
A Night By the Dead Sea
PUBLISHERS’
PREFACE
In
introducing to the general public a writer who has heretofore been known
chiefly among the people of his own race, his publishers may perhaps
be permitted to say a word. Rabbi Iliowizi is a Hebrew of pure lineage,
the son of a zealous member of the Chassidim, a Kabbalistic sect
numbering over half a million members in Russia, Roumania and Gallicia,
but rarely met with in this country. He passed his infancy and boyhood
in the Russian provinces of Minsk and Moghileff, and in Roumania,
growing to manhood and receiving his education at Frankfort-on-the-Main,
Berlin and Breslau, where he qualified himself for a theological career.
After six years of study in Germany, he spent some four years more
perfecting his training in modern languages and in Arabic and Hebrew in
London and Paris, under the auspices of the Anglo-Jewish Association and
the Alliance Israelite Universelle, as a preparation to take charge of
one of the outlying mission stations maintained by these affiliated
societies in the Orient, where they support some fifty schools for the
benefit of their oppressed co-religionists. After a prolonged service in
Morocco, engaged in the educational work of the two societies, Mr.
Iliowizi lived for a year at Gibraltar, and then came to America to
devote himself to the ministry of the Jewish Church, and is now the
spiritual head of a large congregation of his own people.
Mr. Iliowizi has hitherto contributed principally to the
literature of his race, being known among Jews by several works; most
widely, perhaps, by a volume of stories of Russian life, under the title
of “In the Pale,” recently published by the Jewish Publication
Society of America for its subscribers. In the series of Eastern tales,
comprising the present book, which appeals to a larger audience, he has
the special advantage, not only of a lengthened residence among Eastern
peoples, but that he is himself of an Oriental race, of a heredity
highly tinctured by the tenets of one of its most mystical sects, and
personally is of a strongly Semitic type of mind, tempered by the maturing
of his powers in the clear atmosphere of the New World intellectual
life. He has, therefore,—or ought to have,—exceptional facilities
for interpreting to the West the mind and heart of the East.
Whoever has lived long in the Orient,—and Morocco is
essentially Eastern in its atmosphere, even if geographically it might
possibly be otherwise classed,—cannot but realize the subtle and
inexpressible influence that so strongly pervades its life, and which,
often as it has been spoken of, is so hard for the Occidental mind fully
to understand or appreciate. It is the “call of the East,” as Mr.
Kipling happily puts it, and of which his British soldier sings in such
realistic fashion
“An’
I’m learnin’ ’ere in London what the ten-year sodger tells;
‘If
you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, why you won’t ’eed nothin’
else.’
No! you won’t ’eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells
An’
the sunshine an’ the palm trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells!”
The
mystery of the great desolate desert stretches, with their overpowering
solemnity of deadly silence, has from time immemorial exercised a most
powerful influence upon the imagination of those who frequent them; and
their optical illusions are often so curious and so startling as to
afford easy explanation of the legends of hidden and phantom cities,
such as are told here and elsewhere, and indeed of much else beside.
Stories similar to “Sheddad’s Palace of Irem,” and that of the
vanishing city of the Pen in “The Crœsus of Yemen,” are
frequently met with.
The gloominess of the mountain regions, especially that of the
Sinaitic Peninsula, has also had a profound influence in giving color to
the legendary lore of the middle Orient; and this combination of desert
and mountain influences perhaps largely accounts for what is distinctively
peculiar in the mysticism of the East, and for much that will be found
in this book.
The Weird Orient
The
nine tales which follow have a history which is itself not without
interest. The materials have been accumulated during a residence of many
years at Tetuan, Morocco, varied by excursions to places in the interior
where semi-barbarous life may be seen in its pristine crudeness. In
Tetuan I had somewhat exceptional opportunities of getting into the
heart of native life and thought, and I am under obligations also for
contributions received from a venerable storyteller at Tangier, who
had been assistant librarian at the Kairouin of Fez, the only university of the Moorish Empire. The
tales themselves have been for centuries floating through the legendary
lore which plays so large a part in the intellectual cloudland of the
gorgeous East; my part has been to put them into English dress, with
scrupulous adherence to their substance and, as far as may be, to
their native costume.
Tetuan is a typical Oriental town, beautiful from a distance,
disappointing at a closer inspection, but not devoid of that classic
atmosphere which invests ancient cities in the East with a spiritual
something unfelt in modern centres of culture. Situated at the foot of
the Beni Hosmar, a bold peak of the northern branch of the Atlas range,
it has a population of about twenty thousand souls, is enclosed by a
dilapidated wall, boasts of some fine homes built by wealthy Tetuani,
has a separate mellah for its
unfavored Jews, some European dwellings and cultivated gardens for
foreign consuls, a large unclean square as a marketplace, chronically
infested by packs of mongrel dogs fed by Moslem women, and something of
an official residence within the moss-capped walls of a stronghold
spoken of as the Casbah. The
rest is covered by the Moorish quarter, a bewildering labyrinth of
unpaved, unswept alleys, crooked lanes, the white, flat-roofed,
unwindowed houses often meeting each other overhead, thus creating dingy
tunnels which are utilized as bazaars, with wretched holes to right and
left reserved for sundry wares and offices—the usual conditions of
Moslem towns.
Unattractive as such a conglomeration of semi-barbarous retreats
must appear, neither Pegasus nor the muses would pass them with
indifference. As the descendants of the Moors expelled from Hispania by
their Catholic Majesties, the Tetuani show a degree of refinement
unknown elsewhere in Barbary, and with it survives a taste for higher
things of which poetry is not the least. Tetuan’s intellectual
atmosphere is so generally recognized that the present Emir-al-Mumemin
(sole ruler of the true faithful) sent his heir apparent, Hassan, to be
educated at the Casbah by a taleb chosen
from the local aristocracy, in preference to the unfathomed wisdom
stored in the wise heads of the Kairouin
at Fez. The minstrel, the fluent story-teller, the poetic historian,
and the fine performer on the double-stringed gimreh,
are not unfamiliar figures in Tetuan, provided one knows how to
approach them, which is not so hard as it is to overcome their
reluctance to unbosom themselves before the infidel. Great as is the
Moor’s cupidity, it pales before his abhorrence of the foreign intruder
who presumes to pry into his jealously guarded sanctuaries. Touch him
on a point concerning his nebulous legends and traditions and, like the
turtle, he draws in his head, and that is the Last you will see of him,
unless you strike the sensitive chord of national pride by speaking
grandiloquently of non-Mussulman heroes and literary triumphs. Even then
Moslem passiveness proves often an immovable inertia. It has been found
possible to provoke the garrulity of the taleb,
adool and fukie, respectively
representing our lawyer, notary, and man of letters; but there are two
characters in Morocco whom no whirlwind will move to dispute the
infidel’s claim to a superior culture, and they are the all-knowing kadi and the emin, the
judge and the priest, both deriving their unquestioned authority from al
Koran, and thus cherishing a supreme contempt for the wisdom of the
faithless inspired by the cunning devil. The idea is as old as Islam
that what the Koran reveals not, Allah alone knows.
After many rueful failures to get at the sources of Barbary’s
folklore, the author of this book conceived the idea, which happily met
with some success, of creating a social focus sufficiently attractive to
ensnare unwary stragglers of infallible Islamism, such as itinerant
students, beggars, story-tellers and pilgrims, who, being strangers in
the place, might be induced by liberal treatment and a little policy to
impart some glimpses of the precious lore so dear to one who had set his
heart on the acquisition of so promising a treasure. Did the Arabian Nights and the other works we know exhaust the vast resources
of the Orient’s mysteries? Without betraying his ultimate purpose, the
author called a meeting of the foreign residents, all good friends or
acquaintances, and submitted the scheme of opening a Casino for mutual
sociability and the reception of worthy strangers, sometimes of high
rank, who not infrequently cross the Strait of Gibraltar to see life as
it must have been in the patriarchal age. The suggestion was received
with acclamation; the meeting, nineteen souls in all, organized itself
into a body of subscribing members; officers were elected, rules
formulated, and a liberal subscription list enabled the chairman to
proceed at once to carry out the project, everyone wondering why the
thing had never been thought of before. It took some weeks to perfect
matters, when the pleasure-house was opened with proper ceremony. The
windows of the commodious building looked on the market-place, the
Casino being about a hundred paces from the gate of the Casbah,
and the institution soon became an object of talk and wonder, it
being the first of its kind in the tedious annals of Tetuan.
Only a few days after the opening the members experienced the
undelightful surprise of finding one of their distinguished friends,
the Spanish Vice-consul, a stately hidalgo of high lineage, afflicted by
the thirst of Tantalus, with a hydrophobic aversion to water as the
proper means of appeasing it. The cavalier could neither be asked to
resign nor could he be expelled, without creating an unpleasant
sensation, but his drunkenness threatened the very life of the resort.
What was to be done? A secret meeting called for the purpose of dealing
with the problem ended in a unanimous sigh of despondency. But help was
near at hand. Diepo, the caterer, who realized that his prospects were
on the brink of ruin, devised a way out of the dilemma. Under the
pretext that the annoying pest of insects, flying and creeping, required
some remedy, the shrewd caterer prepared a substance that stuck to one
like the Evil One, spread it freely on large sheets of brown paper, and
distributed them judiciously where they would best serve his purpose.
Once in his hazy condition, the chivalrous Vice-consul was quick in
satisfying Diepo’s most sanguine anticipations, picking up by a
variety of zigzag evolutions almost every sticker, and covering himself
with the viscous stuff from head to foot, until the stifled giggle of
those present gave way to roars of laughter.
A coarse jellab had to
be thrown around the frame of the inebriate, to take him home without
exposure to the ridicule of outsiders. If the incident did not cure the
disgraced representative of Spanish chivalry of his thirst, it at least
rendered it impossible for him to return to the circle he had
scandalized; and as to Diepo’s stratagem, it was commended as a
measure devised for self-preservation.
An unexpected triumph for the Casino was the application of three
prominent Moslems for membership, each one, in days bygone, having been
attached to some embassy the Caliph of the Lord now and then sends to
one or another of the European courts. To the manifold diversions
afforded by the institution belonged a sagacious parrot who astonished
the noble Moors by receiving them with the Muezzin’s
cry: “La illaha, il Allah,
Mohammed Ressul Allah!” This confession of Islam, that there is no
God but God, and that Mohammed is His Prophet, would have edified the
Mussulmans, had not the frivolous bird accompanied his exclamation with
screams of profane laughter. At first puzzled by the unaccountable
frivolity of the bird, the most ingenuous of the Moslems finally solved
the riddle by recognizing therein an expression of felicity the creature
derived from uttering the sacred formula.
Gratuitous music was furnished by an Italian who blew the
trombone; by a French teacher who played the violin; by a Hebrew who
gave wind to a pipe of reeds; and by a Spaniard who harped on the
strings of a colossal bass-viol. In course of a few months the members
of the Casino entertained visitors not alone from Europe and many
quarters of Barbary, but from the more distant Orient, the most of
them coming by the way of Tangier, sometimes called the “white city of
the dark continent.” But nothing advertised and dignified that
institution more than the standing offer of twenty-five pesetas to him
who should, upon a fixed evening, regale its members with the most
interesting tale, subject to the critical verdict of three judges, the
decision to be sustained or rejected by a majority of votes. The tale
was not to be wholly fictitious, but should either turn around some
historic event, or be based on some popular tradition or legend current
in the lands of the rising sun. In a country where, thanks to nature’s
bounty, a peseta is sufficient to supply a numerous family with food for
days, the prize held out as an inducement proved an object of keen
competition. Once a month the competitors were given the opportunity
of displaying their storytelling talents, and on one occasion a
fukie of Fez, a Jew of Yemen, another one of Jerusalem, and a
Parsee of Bombay, claimed the attention of the interested auditors, in
their endeavors to secure the coveted prize.
Such were the beginnings of this work; it contains in substance
all the tales for which prizes were awarded, but it is only fair to
state that the Parsee was the one to whom the author is mostly indebted
for the mass of his material. Yakoub Malek was a very original
eccentric, of a nature deep, generous, ardent and visionary. A Parsee by
birth, Malek exchanged his Zoroastrian creed for Buddha’s ideals,
only to show a later preference for Islam. Driven by a restless
temperament, he traversed Asia throughout its length and breadth, and
crossed the whole north of Africa for
the avowed purpose of seeking an audience with the Pope in Rome, his
object being to be initiated into the mystery of the Catholic Church.
Like Marco Polo, Malek was the most observing of travellers, and his
adventures embraced encounters with monstrous brutes, communion with
spirits in the desert of Gobi, hairbreadth escapes from cyclonic storms,
shipwrecks, venomous reptiles, cannibals and banditti. In the Western
hemisphere Malek would pass for a transcendental spiritualist,
claiming, as he did, to hold intercourse with the spirits of his
parents, especially with that of his father. One dark evening he
startled his auditors by producing a human finger, all dried and
shrivelled. He had taken it off stealthily from the right hand of his
father’s dead body, after the vultures had denuded it of flesh, it
being the religious custom of the Parsees to expose their dead to the
voracity of that carrion bird, for which purpose, as is well known,
their “towers of silence” are constructed. That singular rite has
its origin in the Zoroastrian idea that earth is holy and must not be
polluted by the decay of human flesh.—“As often as I long to see my
father, I hold this bone closed in my right hand and shut my eyes, when
lo! I see him rise from the realms of the invisible, ready to commune
with me in whispers audible to my soul,” asserted the Oriental with a
mystic glow in his eye.
His æsthetic quality betrayed itself in his glowing descriptions
of Balbec and Tadmor, of the prodigious monuments of Egypt, and the
temples and palaces of India. Of his vivid power to portray what his
memory retained, or his imagination conceived, the subjoined rhapsody,
taken as he gave it, may convey an idea. “I see him there, Shah Jahán,
in Jáhnáhád, the Delhi of his fiat, exalted on his throne of thrones,
a blaze of jewelled splendors, set in mockery of the peacock’s
feathers, but fairer than that fairest bird, the Moghul’s emblem of
star-dotted majesty. Great Akbar’s Empire is his, and India’s
wealth.—Poor Moghul! From Agra’s lovelier court, thy favored home,
the courier speeds to drown thy happiness in gloom. She is no more who
owned thy heart. Thy sweetest Empress, Mumtaza Mahal, the Orient’s
loveliness and grace, succumbed to throes which mothers know. The babe
survived her. Delhi mourns. Shah Jahán hurries to his seat of woe. How
dismal looks the city of imperial gardens! How sepulchral its palace of
grandeurs nowhere seen, never heard of, vast and noble, too grand for
man, not unfit for gods!—Death darkens the world, darkens Shah Jahán’s
glorious throne-hall. Here his incomparable mate lies cold in death,
crowned and sceptred, as though called to rule in the nether world, a
queen among the dead. All mourn and weep, but the true sorrow is thine,
poor Jahán, with melancholy as thy only friend, thy hope the grave.
That wondrous sepulchre of thine, reared to crown thy love; there it
stands, thy resting-place and hers, the Taj, the monumental blossom of the world, beyond expression
beautiful.”
Yakoub Malek was a mystic adventurer, and his narrative mystified
his audience. But for that delightful dreamer this book would never have
seen light. His passing out of sight, with an echo that rings in the ear
forever, charmed by a voice that enchanted the soul, suggests the career
of those prophetic wizards who, having stirred the world with the fire
of their breath, departed this life, leaving song and prophecy to
vibrate in the air to the end of time. Should that picturesque wanderer
ever come across these pages, he will have to forgive the liberties the
author has taken with his rhapsodic style not less than with the version
in certain parts of his narrative. Not everything the dreamy Orient is
ready to accept will meet with equal credence, or even with tolerance,
in the sobered Occident. Yet enough has been retained in these tales to
draw the reader from his realistic surroundings into those weird realms
where, unrestrained by the laws of sublunar existence and the limitations
of mortality, the spirit is allowed to roam in the vast, unencumbered by
matter, unhindered by time and space.
And don't forget to check out our
Horror Story of the Day
<<---
From Your Dark Side
