in the employ of the _Sh_ah at
that time, was, it is reliably stated, so horrified at the cruelties he
was compelled to witness that he tendered his resignation. "Follow me, my
friend," is the Captain's own testimony in a letter he wrote two weeks
after the attempt in question, which was published in the
"Soldatenfreund," "you who lay claim to a heart and European ethics,
follow me to the unhappy ones who, with gouged-out eyes, must eat, on the
scene of the deed, without any sauce, their own amputated ears; or whose
teeth are torn out with inhuman violence by the hand of the executioner;
or whose bare skulls are simply crushed by blows from a hammer; or where
the bazaar is illuminated with unhappy victims, because on right and left
the people dig deep holes in their breasts and shoulders, and insert
burning wicks in the wounds. I saw some dragged in chains through the
bazaar, preceded by a military band, in whom these wicks had burned so
deep that now the fat flickered convulsively in the wound like a newly
extinguished lamp. Not seldom it happens that the unwearying ingenuity of
the Oriental leads to fresh tortures. They will skin the soles of the
Babi's feet, soak the wounds in boiling oil, shoe the foot like the hoof
of a horse, and compel the victim to run. No cry escaped from the victim's
breast; the torment is endured in dark silence by the numbed sensation of
the fanatic; now he must run; the body cannot endure what the soul has
endured; he falls. Give him the coup de grace! Put him out of his pain!
No! The executioner swings the whip, and--I myself have had to witness
it--the unhappy victim of hundredfold tortures runs! This is the beginning
of the end. As for the end itself, they hang the scorched and perforated
bodies by their hands and feet to a tree head downwards, and now every
Persian may try his marksmanship to his heart's content from a fixed but
not too proximate distance on the noble quarry placed at his disposal. I
saw corpses torn by nearly one hundred and fifty bullets." "When I read
over again," he continues, "what I have written, I am overcome by the
thought that those who are with you in our dearly beloved Austria may
doubt the full truth of the picture, and accuse me of exaggeration. Would
to God that I had not lived to see it! But by the duties of my profession
I was unhappily often, only too often, a witness of these abominations. At
present I never leave my house, in order not to meet with fres