Read "The Slaves of the Padishah" by Mór Jókai online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Let the gentle shadows of night descend which guard them that sleep from the eyes of evil spectres! Let the weary errant bee rest in the fragrant chalice of the closed flower. Everything sleeps, all is quiet, only the stars and burning hearts are still awake.
What a gentle, mystical song resounds from among the willows, as of a nightingale endowed with a human voice in order to sing to the listening night in coherent rhymes the song of his love and his melancholy rapture. It is the poet Hariri whom, sword in hand, they call Feriz Beg, "The Lion of Combat," but who, when evening descends, and the noise and tumult of the camp are still, discards his coat of mail, puts on a light grey burnush, and, lute in hand, strolls through the listening groves and by the side of the murmuring streams and calls forth languishing songs from the depths of his heart and the strings of his lute, uninterrupted by the awakening appeals of the trumpet.