This pariah was a tall lean man, with a pale
skull-like face, bare shaven head, and poverty-
stricken dress, of which the oddest feature was
a white shirt, worn over ragged European
trousers. He knelt with downcast head and
clenched hands, hardly daring to look round him.
He was a Tartar sent from the great prison at
Moscow, under guard of a soldier, to attend his
devotions at the mosque of his nation. There
was the grim stupidly-contemptuous soldier in
his brown-grey great-coat and yellow facings,
watching him luridly from the doorway, a straw
between his great horse teeth, and a spiked
helmet on his ugly bullet of a half-reclaimed
Tartar head. Eventually this warrior lay down
in the sun, tried to look watchful and intelligent,
and, exhausted by that intense mental effort,
fell fast asleep, and snored like an afreet or a
ghoul after a heavy churchyard meal.

By this time some thirty Tartars had assembled,
and were kneeling in a row before the niche,
which, in the mosques of these image-worshippers,
is always perfectly bare and unadorned, being
merely intended to serve as a compass to mark
the direction to Mecca. Most of the men were
kneeling back and resting their hands upon their
knees in the prescribed way. Others occasionally
bent gravely forward till their foreheads
touched the ground, and then arose equally
gravely and slowly. All this is part of a religious
drill, in which every movement of the foot,
hand, or head, is studied and prescribed. Had
I not known the Moslem ritual, I should
have thought the movements unmeaning; but
I knew the silent prayer with which it was
accompanied, and will describe it.

Let me take as my instance that fat full-
fleshed evidently rich merchant who has just
slipped off his shining patent leather overalls, and
now waddles forward to the place where he means
to kneel. He leaves an oppressive odour of
musk as he moves along, showing that he has
just emerged from the bath. His pelisse is of
rich walnut-coloured silk, his turban of the finest
cambric muslin, opaque only from the thickness
of its folds. How soft and plump and white his
hands are, how sharp and sleepy by turns are his
little black eyes, how full of importance he is; he
surely must be the great Pan Nam Jam himself,
with the little round button on the top of his
head, who ate apple-pie till the gunpowder ran
out of the heels of his boots—that great potentate
immortalised by Foote. How he spurns with
his eye the poor cringing prisoner, how he
ruffles along, as if every other Moslem owed him
piles of sequins and handfuls of piastres.

See now! He stands erect facing the niche, and
raising his open hands to the lobes of his ears, says
to himself, "God is great—Allahoo Akbar!"
Now, placing his hands together, like a soldier
standing at ease, with bended head, he repeats,
silently, the Fathah, or opening chapter of the
Koran, or the short one hundred and twelfth
chapter. He then again says, " God is great!"
and as he says it, he places his hands with his
fingers spread upon his knees, and bends down till
his head is level with his waist; and as he remains
thus, he says three times, still to himself, " I
extol the perfection of my Lord the great. May
God hear him who praiseth Him; our Lord,
praise be unto thee!" Then, raising his head,
he exclaims, " God is great!" and drops softly on
his knees, and, repeating the exclamation of
praise, places his hands on the ground a little
before his knees, and touches the ground with
his forehead, between his two hands. While he
performs this prostration, he repeats the " Allah
Akbar" three times. He then raises his head
and rests on his knees before he repeats the
prostrations and the exclamations of praise. He
then rises and repeats the whole ceremony, or
Rekah, as it is called. After the second rekah, he
rests on his knees, bending his left foot under him,
and placing his hands upon his thighs, says to
himself: " Praises are to God, and prayers, and good
works. Peace be on thee, O prophet, and the
mercy of God and his blessings. Peace be on
us, and on all the righteous worshippers of God."
Then raising the first finger of the right hand,
he says: "I testify that there is no deity but
God, and I testify that Mahomed is his servant
and his apostle."

After this, which is the work of only two or
three minutes, the Tartar merchant, looking first
on his right shoulder and then on his left, repeats
the words, "Peace be on you and the mercy of
God." The benediction is addressed to the one
hundred and sixty guardian angels, who, some
say, attend and guard every true believer, and
to all good Moslems present. This finished,
the merchant repeats some petition of the
Koran, holding his two hands before his face as
if they formed a book, and then drawing them
over his face, from the forehead downwards.
Then he remains sitting, and as his big lips
keep moving I know that the fat Pharisee
is repeating verses of supererogation—the
Throne verse, or the two hundred and fifty-sixth
verse of the second chapter of the Koran—or
repeating "God is most great" thirty-three times
running; every time he says it a bead of his
aloes-wood rosary slipping between his plump
white fingers.

And now a strange dream comes into my head,
and that is, that every one of those two rows of
Moslems is one of the characters of the Arabian
Nights. That fat merchant was the insolent
oppressor of Sinbad; those three men next him
are clearly the three Calenders; that boy is
Aladdin, the smart and mischievous; before him
stands the merchant who killed the Afrit's son
with the date-stone. And the poor down- trodden
prisoner is, I am sure, the unlucky confectioner
who was condemned to death for that matter of
the pepper in the cream tarts of the princess.

The constitution of the Mahomedan Church
is very simple. In Constantinople, there is a
Sheikh el Islam, a sort of national archbishop,
who has great power, or rather used to have,
and, in past times, helped to remove many a