"People are divided," said the Khan, pleased with his own sally, "whether this was a palace or a temple; if it was built and inhabited by Jemsheed, it was probably both; for he says, in the Shâh-nâmeh, 'By the Divine favour, I am both a sovereign and a priest;'[64] and if this first and most wonderful man of Persia studied his ease and convenience half as much as his countrymen now do, it is most probable, that, to save himself trouble, he would join his palace and his temple together."
"You Europeans," continued Khan Sâhib, turning to me, "believe that Alexander, to please a beautiful lady, set fire to this palace in a spirit of mischief; we Mahomedans have the consolation to think this proud abode of unbelievers was destroyed when our first caliphs conquered Persia, through a spirit of holiness. It was a rule," said he, smiling, "of the first pious propagators of our religion, always to give to infidels an earnest in this world of what they were to expect in the next; so they and their profane works were included in one common sentence of destruction."
Though neither the Indian Moonshee, Mahomed Hoosein, nor the Persian Meerzâ, liked the levity with which my little friend treated such a serious subject; they saw he was in too lively a vein to expect to check him, but they looked grave. This, he observed, and to change the subject, asked me what I thought was the meaning of a figure, to which he pointed, half of whose body appeared rising out of a circle, and to which wings were attached? I told him, he could not apply to one who was more ignorant of such subjects than myself, but I would tell him what the learned of Europe had conjectured regarding this mystical figure.
The detail was long, and embraced a variety of opinions; but I concluded by observing, that the figure was believed to be that of a Ferooher, or spirit, which, according to the doctrine of Zoroaster, is an associate of an existing being, with whose soul or spiritual part it is united before birth and after death.
"These Feroohers," said I, "were sometimes invoked as guardian angels: they were male and female, and were not, in their connection with this earth, limited to human creatures; some of the race belonged to the vegetable world. Trees had their Feroohers." I was becoming more than learned, I was mystical, and on the point of showing some striking analogies between these aerial spirits of the ancient Persians, and the Sylphs, the Dryads, and the Hamadryads of the Greeks, when Khan Sâhib, anxious to make amends with his Mahomedan friends, for the slight which he saw they supposed he had put upon the first caliphs, interrupted me by saying--