d solemnity. I was seated lonely in the guard-room of
the palace, when I heard the cries of the sentinels on the watch-towers,
announcing midnight, and the voices of the muezzins from the mosques,
the wild notes of whose chant floating on the wind ran through my veins
with the chilling creep of death, and announced to me that the hour of
murder was at hand! They were the harbingers of death to the helpless
woman. I started up,--I could not bear to hear them more,--I rushed on
in desperate haste, and as I came to the appointed spot, I found my five
companions already arrived, sitting unconcerned on and about the coffin
that was to carry my Zeenab to her eternal mansion. The only word which
I had power to say to them was, '_Shoud?_ Is it done?' to which they
answered, '_Ne shoud._ It is not done.' To which ensued an awful
silence. I had hoped that all was over, and that I should have been
spared every other horror, excepting that of conducting the melancholy
procession to the place of burial; but no, the deed was still to be
done, and I could not retreat.

On the confines of the apartments allotted to the women in the Shah's
palace stands a high octagonal tower, some thirty gez in height, seen
conspicuous from all parts of the city, at the summit of which is
a chamber, in which he frequently reposes and takes the air. It is
surrounded by unappropriated ground, and the principal gate of the harem
is close to its base. On the top of all is a terrace (a spot, ah! never
by me to be forgotten!) and it was to this that our whole attention
was now riveted. I had scarcely arrived, when, looking up, we saw
three figures, two men and a female, whose forms were lighted up by an
occasional gleam of moonshine, that shone in a wild and uncertain manner
upon them. They seemed to drag their victim between them with much
violence, whilst she was seen in attitudes of supplication, on her
knees, with her hands extended, and in all the agony of the deepest
desperation. When they were at the brink of the tower her shrieks were
audible, but so wild, so varied by the blasts of wind that blew round
the building, that they appeared to me like the sounds of laughing
madness.

We all kept a dead and breathless silence: even my five ruffians seemed
moved--I was transfixed like a lump of lifeless clay, and if I am asked
what my sensations were at the time, I should be at a loss to describe
them,--I was totally inanimate, and still I knew what was go