Seeing death so near, the two wretched men struggle to avoid falling beneath the hand of the executioner; they turn—they shift—each endeavoring to place his companion on the side where the blow is to fall. Djezzar regarded this manœuvering for some time with pleasure; at length, after having pronounced the name of Allah three times, he made his Damascene blade describe a large circle, and both heads fell off at a blow.
Notwithstanding his habitual gravity, the pacha could not avoid laughing at this unexpected result; he laughed immoderately, which he had probably never before done in his life, and his noisy bursts mingled with the hoarse roars and panting of a lion, which, confined in a neighboring apartment, inhaled the odor of the blood.
This lion was his master’s favorite. Custom had for a long time prescribed to the pachas of Shivas, as to other pachas of the East, that they should be accompanied by a lion on all solemn occasions. Galib, the predecessor of Djezzar, and a great partisan of reform, had a monstrous one which he fed particularly with Janizaries; the story ran, that the fanatical Djezzar appeased the appetite of his occasionally with Christian flesh.
And yet this ferocious man, who made a profession of the trade of an executioner, who laughed only when heads were cut off, who, according to public rumor, tossed human flesh to his lion, Haïder, felt the power of love, doubtless not gallant and perfumed love—the love of the boudoir; but, endowed with an energetic and voluptuous temperament, he passed in the midst of his harem the time spared from business; and in the East, whatever may be the complexity of affairs, the administration, especially under such a mastery, is reduced to such simplicity, that leisure is never wanting.
I will give an hour to the cares of my empire, The rest of the day shall be devoted to Zaïre.
Zaïre, that is, Baïla, awaited him on his quitting the Council. Especially in his summer palace of Kizil-Ermak did he spend the greater part of the day, extended on cushions at the feet of his beautiful slave, smoking the roses of Taif or Adrianople, mingled with the tobacco of Malatia or Latakia, sometimes chewing a leaf of haschich, or a grain of opium, or even of arsenic to exalt his imagination.