"O physician of souls!" "O thou who wert
chosen!" "O advocate in the Day of Judgment,
when men will exclaim, 'my soul! O my
soul!' and when thou wilt say, 'O my people!
O my people!'" Then, as the sheikh prostrated
himself on his white lambskin prayer-rug, the
readers began chanting their ejaculations:

"Blessings on our prophet, the lord of
messengers, and on his family and companions!"
"Blessings on Abraham and his companions," &c.

It is not my disposition to see the ludicrous
if the ludicrous is not in a thing, but I must
confess I had to bite my tongue hard when three
old men, too feeble for howling, squatted on the
floor—a blind feeble man, a yellow phlegmatic
man, and a toothless old man, who, in England,
would have been admirals at least—to whine
verses of the Koran at the very top of their
quavering voices. All this time the incense stifled,
curdling blue and thick, while the sheikh in the
green and black turban bowed to the niche, or
raised his hands in prayer, as the dervishes put on
their light-brown thick felt caps, and, taking off
their girdles, hung them round their necks.

It was when the flutes began in a whirling,
shuttling movement, singularly adapted to fill
madhouses with lively tenants, that the real
business of the afternoon (half-past three)
commenced. The progress of the howling dervishes'
chorus chant, and of the motions and gestures
accompanying it, are always the same; beginning
sanely and rationally enough, and gradually
crescendoing to the wildest frenzy and the raving
howl of mad wild beasts.

Ranged in a line like a row of soldiers on drill,
the brothers' first repeat slowly and sanely, in good
cadence, keeping time with the flutes, the
Mohammedan confession of faith: "La illah—illah
la" (six syllables). As they say "la," all the dozen
brothers bow forward; at "il," they raise
themselves up again; at "lah," they bend
backward; at "il," they again bend forward; at
"lah," they raise themselves; at "la," they
bend again backward.

The second time the syllables are repeated
with a change of action; for now the men bend to
the right at the first, raise themselves up at
the second syllable, and bend to the left at the
third. Soon the measure gets quicker, the music
more whirling and frenzied, the gestures become
abbreviated, or are performed and shouted so
quickly that they seem like one and the same
movement and one and the same sound, and all this
time that nodding, toothless, blear-eyed old
chorus go quavering out the passages from the
Borda, or praises of the Prophet, and the great
dervish sheikhs, Abdul-Kadir, Gilan, and the
founder, Seid Ahmed Rufai, and then they all
clap their horny hands and shout in gasps,
"Ya-hu!" (Jehovah), or "Ja meded!" (O help).
Faster and louder goes the "la illah, illah la,"
faster the swaying backward, forward, and
right and left, till you hear at last nothing but
the first syllabic "il," and the last "la," or a
paviour's grunt of "Hoo!" roared out as if the
madmen were turning into wolves rapidly;
the motion growing quite mechanical and
insanely epileptic. There is a negro there with
puffy ashy lips; a soldier, whose eyes stare very
wildly; a greasy boy, who seems to think the
whole affair a trick; a gross sailor-like man,
well dressed, who came late, and who performs
a sort of chassé step, and is undoubtedly a
cheat and impostor; and a rickety idiot beggar,
who is more demoniacal and frantic than any of
the rest, and seems never to tire, though I see a
cold marbly sweat beading upon his rough blue
chin. Lastly, they keep three-quarter time, till
faster or slower grows the orgie. I begin soon
to observe that when the motion is backward
and forward the scanning of their verse is
thus:

                   L?-?l-l?h—il-l?h-l?h;

but when to right and left it runs:
                   L?-?l-l?—?l-l?h-l?h;

upon which the toothless old chorister, hearing
the sheikh stamp as a sign for "taking" the
thing quicker, nearly splits my ears with his
excruciating sacred song, which makes him
writhe and roll his eyes with sheer anxiety and
exertion; for, being deaf, our old friend is utterly
incapable of knowing how exceedingly high he is
pitching his thready old voice.

Every now and then, as I felt my brain
slightly going with the monotonous paviour's
howl, from some fourteen men nearly frenzied
with religious and sympathetic excitement, I
rolled myself back on my rug and took a draught
of pure unincensed air from the open window that
looked out on some cypress-trees, on a Turkish
cottage, and on a little garden where a
woolly-leafed mulberry grew to feed somebody's
silkworms, and where a huge box-tree watched
over the grave of some dervish long ceased from
howling—quite tired out, I should think.

What a change to look back on that chain of
men, tossing their heads in cadence to and
fro, jerking forward and backward their mad
bodies, and then coming down all together
with the roaring "Hoo!" intermingled with
shouts of "Allah!" "Alhamdoo lillah!" It
would have been something at once ludicrous and
dreadful to see the possessed man—the little
idiotic beggar, waggling about like a machine—
had not a smile of semi-formalist satisfaction
sat on his face, such as no automaton could
assume. Right, left, backward, forward, regular
as a pendulum, his little legs bandied as if by
perpetual oscillation. Thrust a bit of opium
in that man's mouth, thought I, tie a sabre
in his idiotic hand, craze him with half
an hour of this howling, turn a little
stupifying incense under his nose, and he would
rush out and slay a dozen Christians, or brain
the Sultan himself, if the sheikh bade him.
His madness, I noticed, made the others
madder; for, when any backslider slackened at
all, a howl or roar of this idiot set him on again
wilder than ever. In fact, a sort of juryman
consultation, nodding right and left, was much
in vogue among these candidates for Bedlam.

Mad and frenzying as this howling chorus of
maniacs was, not one swooned or fell foaming at