“If the source is pure the whole stream is pure,” he answered enigmatically.
He hesitated a moment, and then replied: “No, by God and the Prophet! A king should go about among his subjects, see them and hear them. He should not sit imprisoned in his house, listening to the talk of spies.”
I know another, poles asunder from the first, one of the richest men in the town and one of the most evil: a slave by birth, he might not sit in the presence of his former master, although the master, great gentleman as he was, could scarcely outmatch the wealth of the liberated slave. Him I asked whether there was any strength behind the Arab movement.
“The Khalîfah should be of the tribe of the Ḳureish,” he answered significantly.
“Who would be Khalîfah if he were chosen from out of the Ḳureish?” I asked.
“The Sherîf of Mecca is of that blood,” he answered. “The Arabs would govern themselves.”
He left me to reflect upon his words, for I was well aware that if he chose to support them with force, all the rogues with whom the city abounds were at his command, and all the plots and counterplots of the vilayet were familiar to him.
I sat long in the guest chamber of a third acquaintance, the head of the greatest family in Môṣul. So stainless is his lineage that his sisters must remain unwed, since Môṣul cannot provide a husband equal to them in birth. His forebears were Christians who migrated from Diyârbekr two hundred years ago. The legend runs that his Christian ancestor, soon after he had come to Môṣul, went out in the morning to be shaved, but when he reached the barber’s shop it was filled with low-born Moslems and the barber kept him waiting until the heads of the Faithful had been trimmed. “Shall a man of my house wait for such as these?” he cried, and forthwith abjured the creed of slaves. His descendant was one of those who would gladly have seen the new order triumph and give peace to the land. He called down vengeance upon the head of Aḥmed ’Izzet Pasha, one of the worst of the late Sultan’s sycophants, and upon that of his brother, Muṣṭafâ, sometime Vâlî of Môṣul. “If he had stayed two years more he would have ruined the town,” said he. But his hatred of ’Izzet Pasha had not blinded him to the dictates of honour. It happened that by those methods of persuasion of which ’Izzet was master, he had induced my friend to present him with a valuable piece of land. Two months later ’Izzet fell and fled in terror of death from Constantinople, but the beg would not revoke a gift which the disgraced favourite was powerless to exact from him. _Noblesse oblige._