was due to the honour and dignity of the
Shadow of the Almighty upon earth.

I now became exceedingly anxious about my future fate; for it was long
since I had heard from Tehran, and I was ignorant of the measure of the
Shah's resentment against me. Looking upon the dark side of things, my
imagination led me to think that nothing short of my head would
satisfy him; but then, cheering myself with a more pleasing prospect, I
endeavoured to believe that I was too insignificant a personage that
my death should be of any consequence, and built all my hopes upon the
intercession of the mushtehed.

The chief tent-pitcher had formerly been my friend, and among his
assistants I recognized many of my acquaintance. I soon made myself
known to them; and they did not, for a wonder, draw back from
recognizing me, although one of our greatest sages hath said, 'that a
man in adversity is shunned like a piece of base money, which nobody
will take; and which, if perchance it has been received, is passed off
to another as soon as possible.'

The newcomers gave me all the intelligence of what had happened at court
since I had left it; and although I professed to have renounced the
world, and to have become a recluse, a sitter in a corner, as it is
called, yet still I found that I had an ear for what was passing in
it. They informed me that the chief executioner had returned from his
campaign against the Russians, and had brought the Shah a present of two
Georgian slaves, a male and a female, besides other rarities, in order
the better to persuade him of his great feats and generalship. The
present had been accepted, and his face was to be whitened by a dress
of honour, provided he made the _tobeh_, oath of penance, restraining
himself from the use of wine for the future. I also learnt,
notwithstanding it was known how deeply I was implicated in Zeenab's
guilt, that my former master, the hakim, had still been obliged to make
a large present to the Shah, besides having had half his beard pulled
out by the roots, for the loss which his majesty had incurred by her
death, and for his disappointment at not finding her ready to dance and
sing before him on his return from Sultanieh. The king's wrath for the
loss of the Curdish slave had in great measure subsided, owing to the
chief executioner's gift of the Georgian one, who was described as being
the finest person of the sort who had been exhibited at the slave-market
since the days of the ce