Having presented his credentials to the favourite who occupied the position of the Khan’s foreign minister for the nonce, he was received with suitable compliments, and assured that his arrival had been expected, and a house and servants prepared for him. He was half afraid that this house might prove to be within the circuit of the inner wall enclosing the hill on which the Khan’s palace and the public offices stood, in which case he would have anticipated the possibility of foul play, but it turned out to be one of the ordinary houses of the town. It was furnished sufficiently, according to oriental ideas, with carpets and cushions; the servants in it accepted with remarkably little friction the direction of those he had brought with him; and when he had seen to the securing of the door opening into the street, he felt that what looked like a prison from without might be a fortress from within.
CHAPTER XV. A LAND OF DARKNESS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH.
After a night’s rest Ferrers prepared to pursue the inquiry on which he had come, but he found that the blank walls of the city were only a type of the passive opposition to be offered to his efforts. The mob of the place was so fanatical and so threatening that, as he persisted in maintaining his right to ride, he found it advisable to comply with the request of the Khan’s advisers, and only show himself when he was to be granted an audience at the palace or the house of one of the ministers. Visitors he had none--none at least of the type that in most oriental cities delights in calling upon a new-comer and spending long hours in eliciting all manner of useless information. Gamara was the scene of a perpetual reign of terror, exercised from above by the Khan, and from below by the mob, reinforced by the hordes of theological students, and between these two forces the mere moderate man was crushed out of existence or frightened into silence. A whisper against the orthodoxy of even a high official would send a raging crowd to attack his house or to tear him limb from limb in the public street, and the truth of the rumour would only be inquired into afterwards, if at all. The Khan maintained his unquestioned ascendancy by outdoing all his subjects in their zeal for orthodoxy, which had no connection with morals, and by repressing that zeal with atrocious severity when it clashed with his own wishes. Mob-law offered a very useful means of getting rid of undesirable persons; but one or two stern examples had been needed to teach the mob not to proceed to extremities unless they were smiled upon by the palace. The presence of a Christian in the sacred city was a standing defiance of its inhabitants, and it was only the drawn scimitars of the Khan’s bodyguard that protected Ferrers from certain death as he rode to and from the palace in full uniform.