mmenced a dreadful series of tortures, such as I had
only read of as pertaining to the dark ages. It was of no use to resist.
They clutched hold of the back of my neck, and I thought they were going
to strangle me; then they pulled at my arms and legs, and I thought
again they were going to put me on the rack; and lastly, when they both
began to roll backward and forward on my chest, doubling my cracking
elbows underneath them, I thought, finally, that my last minute was
come, and that death by suffocation would finish me. They were fiends,
and evidently delighted in my agony; not allowing me to look to the
right or left after my companions, and throwing themselves on me again,
whenever they conceived I was going to call the dragoman to my
assistance. I do not know that I ever passed such a frightful five
minutes, connected with bathing, nervous as are some of the feelings
which that pastime gives rise to. It is very terrible to take the first
summer plunge into a deep, dark river and when you are at the bottom,
and the water is roaring in your ears, to think of dead bodies and
crocodiles; it is almost worse to make that frightful journey down a
steep beach, in a bathing machine, with a vague incertitude as to where
you will find yourself when the doors open again: but nothing can come
up to what I suffered in my last extremity, in this Constantinople bath.
Thoughts of Turkish cruelty and the sacks of the Bosphorus; of home, and
friends, and my childhood's bowers--of the sadness of being murdered in
a foreign bath--and the probability of my Giaour body being eaten by the
wild dogs, crowded rapidly on me, as these demons increased their
tortures; until, collecting all my strength for one last effort, I
contrived to throw them off, one to the right and the other to the left,
some half dozen feet--and regained my legs.

The worst was now over, certainly; but the persecution still continued
sufficiently exciting. They seized on me again, and led me to the tanks,
where they almost flayed me with horse-hair gloves, and drowned me with
bowls of warm water, poured continuously on my head. I could not see,
and if I again tried to cry out, they thrust a large soapy swab, made of
the fibres that grow at the foot of the date palm, into my mouth,
accompanying each renewed act of cruelty with a demand for _baksheesh_.
At last, being fairly exhausted, themselves, they swathed me in a great
many towels; and I was then half carried, half