Eurasian Frontier final exam

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6 SKETCHES OF CE'YTRAL ASIA.

neath the pompous dress of the prince a mere mortal man, aud mindful of the vanity of sublunary things, laughs at the farce of life.

Though perfectly conscious of their relative position, these two extremes exhibit, when they meet, an ad­ mirable degree of toleration and indulgence. The dervish, who, when received in private, behaves with the freedom and unconstraint of an intimate friend, never forgets on public occasions that he is the poorest of the poor. The man of rank suffers from him what to any other person would appear insupportable. At Kerki, the governor of the province had a dervish in his palace, who, in conformity with a precept of his order, had the agreeable office of brying aloud uninter­ ruptedly, from sunset till break of day: Ya Im! ya hakk ! La ilia hu l * and that with the voice of a Stentor. AB soon as darkness prevailed, and the busy hum of public life had become silent, the melancholy and monotonous exclamations became more and more audible, not only in the palace itself, bnt to a consider­ able extent around it. That his devotions disturbed many in their sleep, may be easily imagined. Never­ theless, tl1e governor, notwithstanding the entreaties of his owu family, did not venture to make any objec­ tion to this proceeding, and the dervish continued his vooiforatious every night as long as he sojourned in Kerki. .As I lodged in the vicinity of the palace, I

'* Yes, it is he! it ia the righteo-u,, one! there is no God but he; are, the usual forma of praye;i; which oce.ur in the Zikr.

DERVISHES AND HADJIS. 7

enjoyed my share of thIB nightly concert; and as the voice of the enthusiastic bawler became towards the

· .approach of dawn weaker and weaker, I was enabled to calculate from it the distance of da,ybreak without stepping out of the dark cell in which I lay.

We may say, however, that we nowadays very seldom meet with a dervish in the strict sense of the word; that a man who, renouncing from inward conviction earthly goods and worldly comforts, is desirous auly of obtaining experience of life and devoting himself to the practice of religious duties: such a man, in a word,· as the poet Saadi is represented to have been. Those who embrace this vocation are either unprincipled and lazy fellows, or professed beggars, who, under the cloak of poverty, collect treasures, and when they are sufficiently enriched often adopt some lucrative trade. This IB particularly the case in Persia. So long as Fortune is :favourable to them they foad a life of osten• tatious magnificence, and forget how transitory all is in this world. But should he.be overtaken by adver­ isity, then he retires to some modest corner, rails at the vain pursuits of men, and, inflated with pride, cries out: Men dervish em; I am a dervish.

The dervishes of India, and particularly those of Cashmere, are throughout the East pre-eminent among their Mahometan brethren for cuuning, secret arts, forms of exorcism, &c. These fellows impose most impudently on the credulity of the people m Persia and Central Asia, and even men of wit and undei:-