Let us begin at the beginning. Fessul bin Turkee, the present ruler of Oman, lives in a large, tumble-down old castle in Muscat, and his big red flag waves over the town every Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath. He is not much better nor worse than his father, Turkee, or than other rulers in Arabia, but he certainly is far more enterprising, and is generally liked by the Arabs of Muscat. He is not however in all respects a merciful ruler. When I visited Muscat a few years ago this petty king had a real lion's den, like Nebuchadnezzar, and the story goes that he sometimes used it in the same way to get rid of his enemies. He once had a steam-launch, and even put up an electric light on the top of his castle, but both of these modern improvements came to grief. He also started a small ice factory to supply his household with cold water when the thermometer rises to over one hundred degrees; but the expense was too great and so the project melted away likewise. His last venture is more successful, and ever since the ice factory added a P to its sign-board and became a "pice factory," copper coins have been plentiful in Oman. A _pice_ is the Indian name for a small copper coin, and the Arabs borrowed the word, with many other words, from the Hindu traders. The Sultan has plenty of wives and horses and retainers; his castle is well-supplied with old cannon and modern rifles; huge coffee-pots pour out cheap hospitality every day; but withal I do not think he is very happy, for he is in debt and his power is not as extensive as it was once. Fessul's proper title is not Sultan, although he is often so called, but _Imam_, which signifies religious leader. It is the old title given to the political chiefs of Oman and Zanzibar.
The word means one "who stands before," and was first used as a title for the leader of prayer in the mosques. In Oman the religious chiefs soon took hold of politics, and so the title has a significance now in this part of Arabia that it never had elsewhere.
Let us get back to the penny. Its face (although being a Mohammedan coin it really has no human _face_ because their religion forbids pictures) bears an English as well as an Arabic inscription. The opposite side only has the Sultan's name in Arabic. On the side that has the English words is the legend: "Struck at Muscat in the year 1315." Yet the penny is only three years old, for the Moslems begin to date their years from the _Hegira_, or flight of their prophet from Mecca to Medina. This took place in the year 622 A.D. But we must also remember that their year is several days shorter than ours, because they have lunar months all of equal length and only 360 days in a year.