Page:The Descent of Bolshevism.djvu/56

 always, to be sure, a coming imam. This was the ideal the people continued to cherish,—the ideal that the leaders forever dandled before their eyes. And as a rule of succession, although marked with poison and slaughter,—the most natural thing in the world,—it was an improvement upon all the others.

But the inconsistencies of these Old Men of the Mountain sometimes reach the sublime. We have no reason to doubt that Hasan himself, unlike Mazdak four centuries before him, lived the life of an ascetic in his castle on the hilltop. The miniature paradise, which he could behold from his window, was not for him, but for the young fadais who were willing to die in doing his will. A magnanimity hardly to be surpassed in this world. And he was a Spartan too, this Hasan. He slew both his sons for no apparent reason except that one of them was suspected of conniving at the murder of a dai, the other was seen drinking wine. And he himself—the ruthlessness of Logic, the irony of