National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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Overland to India : vol.2 |
XXXVIII PASSION-PLAY IN MOHARREM 53
but he refuses to accept anything—a most unusual thing
in Persia.
More shouts are heard. The crowd of spectators
becomes closer, and they are packed together everywhere.
After the horsemen in cuirasses come forty men who
testify their grief at Hussein's death in a loathsome
manner. Their dress consists only of a pair of wide
white trousers, and their bodies, heads, and feet are bare.
They walk in couples, not straight forwards as usual, but
turned towards each other, taking side steps round the
course. Those with their backs to us put out the left
foot sideways along the course and then draw the right
foot up to it. They are covered with blood, partly clotted,
partly streaming over the face, breast, and white trousers.
In their hands are sharp-pointed knives with which they
cut vertical wounds in their heads and foreheads. Some
have deep, long, and hideous wounds in the head, others
cut themselves also in the breast and arms.
Walking face to face they incite and egg on one
another, and stimulate their eagerness for self- torture.
And when they are opposite my eivan and have thus
completed half the circuit, they are wild, idiotic, and in-
spired by uncontrolled passion in their religious fanaticism.
They keep time, smacking their soles against the pavement,
and in time with their feet they plunge the knives into
their heads and yell out their heartrending raucous " Ya
Hussein." Their features are distorted, their looks frenzied
and dreadful; they open their eyes wide to see better
through the blood that is running over them. This bloody
cortège reeks of blood, it leaves bloody footsteps behind,
and those who come after tread in the blood of their
predecessors.
The wild troop is attended by men on either side,
whose duty it is to keep an eye on those who seem likely
to lose control of themselves altogether, and may kill
themselves by a too powerful blow. Then they interfere
and forcibly remove the crazy man from the performance.
The procession moves slowly round the arena, and it is
wonderful if they all complete the circle alive. IN of one
comes off with a whole skin—that much is certain.
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