Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/150

110 the final stage of my treatment, and then I fell asleep, waking some hours later with a clear head and all my faculties about me, though I was then but a living skeleton.

The Khaleefa, hearing of my condition, thought it a favourable opportunity for me to receive a few more lessons in Mahdieh, and my period of convalescence was much prolonged owing to the worry and annoyance which these teachers of Mahdieh were to me. Kadi Hanafi, one of Slatin's old Kadis, then imprisoned with me owing to his open avowal that the justice and the sentences given by the Mehkemmeh (religious courts) were against the teachings of the Quoran, told me that it was a mistake on my part so openly to defy the Khaleefa, and that it would be more "politique" to submit as had Slatin, who had now his house, wives, slaves, horses and donkeys, and cultivated land outside the city. But in my then condition, a little procession, for which my dead body would be the reason, was much more to my liking, and I did not care in what shape death came, provided that it did come.

Hanafi used up all his arguments in trying to persuade me to become a good Muslim. Dilating on the power of the Khaleefa and my impotence, he pointed to my chains, then weighing about forty pounds, and said that the Khaleefa would certainly torture me with them until I submitted to become a good Muslim. To this last argument I replied that if I did say I would be converted, the Khaleefa, as soon as he heard of it, would make me proclaim my conversion publicly,