“Dìn! Dìn! Dìn Muhammed!” … The mountaineers, though unbelievers, joined lustily in the cry of El Islâm. They had come fifty miles in pursuit of their quarry and now they had run him to earth. “Dìn ’hammed!” a child’s voice piped manfully; and Saïd beheld a little boy in a man’s arms, brandishing a toy knife as he was borne along, crowing for joy of the merry race and the shouting. There was a stoppage in front; but those behind still continued to push on, regardless of the protests of such as were tall enough to see the nature of the obstacle.
The giant on Saïd’s right proclaimed that certain persons of authority were sorting the crowd, sending some this way, others that, to join bands already at work. He licked his lips as he added that he himself had slain fifty Maronites between the first hour and the fourth, at the taking of Zahleh. By Allah, it was the business to whet a man’s appetite. He remembered to have eaten a whole sheep that day—to have rent it limb from limb and devoured it yet warm and uncooked, he was so hungry. But his remarks were lost for the most part in the general uproar.
“Dìn! Dìn! Dìn Muhammed! …” Saïd was past the obstacle, speeding over the rough pavement of a lane in shadow. The sky, a narrow streamer of living blue, seemed to flutter and wave overhead as he ran with throbbing brow and panting chest. With the two Drûz and a hundred others he was told off to join a part of the mob who were gone to raze the house of the Muscovite Consul, whose ill-timed meddling had fired the people. The two Drûz lost their eagerness.
“What have we to do with this Frank?” Saïd heard one say to the other. “Let us turn—what sayest thou? Our enemies are yonder!”
“True,” breathed the other; and they slackened so as to drop behind.
The house of the Consul was already in flames when Saïd’s reinforcement came up. Little pillars and wreaths of brown smoke curled upward from it, to condense in a low cloud like a frown upon the tranquil sky. A seething, roaring throng, close-packed from wall to wall, choked every approach. By mounting on a high stone beside a doorway Saïd contrived to see what was doing.
Furniture and other goods, which the greed of the insurgents had dragged from the burning house, were being tossed back into the blaze by order of an aged man invested with some sort of authority. This person seemed some prophet or dervìsh—a holy man in any case, for he was naked save for a loose shirt of sackcloth, and his legs and arms were almost black through long exposure. He capered about in a solemn measure, screaming, praising Allah, and exhorting the faithful to fresh exertions.
There was a movement on the outskirts of the crowd. Where was the good in standing idle, looking on at the prowess of others, when there was work enough for every man that day?
“Dìn! Dìn! Dìn Muhammed!” … Even to Saïd’s maddened brain it occurred that there was some rough order in the mob. A band of butchers were there in their slaughterhouse garb, with long knives dripping blood not of beasts. Men forced their way into homes, he among them, upsetting costly furniture, trampling rich carpets in their zeal to seize on the inmates. These they spat upon, spurned, insulted and dragged out into the street, where the aforesaid butchers waited to despatch them.
Girls were embraced brutally and borne shrieking away in the arms of men whose clothing was bespattered with the blood of a father or mother. Crones strained and knotted their wizened throats in supplication for the spark of life that yet warmed them. Dwellings were looted, then set on fire. Saïd, in his search of the house of a rich merchant, saw a foot peeping out from a heap of bedding. He laid hold of it and, pulling with a will, elicited an old, white-bearded man whose face was grey with terror. He shrieked to Miriam, Mother of God, to help him; but Saïd had him fast by the throat, thin and grisly as a hen’s, and soon pitched him headlong down a short flight of stone steps. He toppled senseless at the feet of one of the butchers, who, being idle for the moment, knifed him at once.
The thought of Ferideh, awaiting his further pleasure in the safe keeping of old Nûr, filled the fisherman with a kind of drunken joy. She had bitten his arm last night and the wound pained him yet. What matter! There would be plenty of leisure to punish and tame her by-and-by. She would learn to worship him in the beautiful house he would build for her out of her father’s hoard. His brain whirled. He had the strength of two men. He saw all things in the redness of eyelids closed against the sun; felt and cared for nothing save the lust of blood and the joy of killing. … “Dìn! Dìn! Dìn Muhammed!”
A sound of firing came out of the distance—a single volley followed by faint cries. One or two strained ears to listen; but the hoarse shouts of the slayers and piercing shrieks of their victims made it hard to ascertain noises more remote. Zeal continued unabated. Men, women and children were dragged out of the shadowy doorways to be hacked to death on the causeway beneath the ribbon of peaceful blue sky which the smoke of burning houses began to veil in part. The mob jeered and reviled their last agonies. Some were found to spit in the faces of the newly slain. And the name of Allah
