for a moment safe from his rage, save that of Sida, his mother. His unfailing regard for her was the one trace of natural feeling in his breast, but with this exception nothing in humanity was sacred to him. Sex and kindred, age and infancy, were alike to his indiscriminate ferocity, or rather it raged more furiously where the ordinary dictates of nature would have stayed its frenzy, seeming to seek in those nearest to him in blood its more especial objects, and in women its choicest victims. One of his sons and eight brothers, beheaded in his presence, paid the penalty of standing too near the throne, and its heir, Abdallah — brave, loyal, and blameless — never felt his neck a moment safe from the scimitar of the executioner. No daughter born to him was allowed to live; and though Sida contrived to save and rear fourteen of the condemned infants from the unnatural decree, she only deferred its execution. With the mistaken idea that the sight of his offspring would soften his implacable determination, she presented them to him when nearly grown up, but though he dissembled his grim resolve under an appearance of amiable satisfaction, he only waited for her departure to order the executioner to bring him, without delay, the heads of her protégées.
Superstition added its contingent to the long roll of Ibrahim's victims, for the prediction of his astrologers that he should be slain by a little one — fulfilled in a certain ambiguous sense by his death in the infancy of the century, in the year 902 — bore for him a more obvious significance, and directed his cruel suspicion to seek the predestined assassin among the boy-pages of his court. Those who showed particular promise of youthful daring were first made away with, the survivors then despatched, lest they should avenge them, and their places supplied by negro youths who quickly shared the same fate. A rumored plot in the palace, caused on one occasion the massacre of three hundred guards; on another, all the attendants were butchered en masse, lest one, unfortunate enough to have picked up a handkerchief with which the tyrant had wiped his lips after secretly drinking wine, should survive to tell the tale, and convict him of a breach of the Mahometan law. So each fresh murder brought several others in its train, tyranny engendered suspicion, suspicion was acted out in massacre, and the terrible cycle of crime went on repeating and renewing itself in an ever-widening orbit of destruction.
A dark and morbid desire to profane and scrutinize the very sources of life, was part of the sanguinary frenzy of this human tiger — indeed all deliberate cruelty, analyzed as an independent passion, will be found to spring from an evil physiological curiosity, lurking in the secret depths of our nature. Thus, as he himself declared, the desire to discover the spirit that had defied him, drove him to tear out and anatomize the yet quivering hearts of his victims, pursuing the hated principle of life to its inmost stronghold, and slaking his rabid thirst for human blood at the fountain-head. Such excesses of ferocity seem rather to belong to some African Moloch — some dreadful imaginary demon of carnage — than to a being with the attributes of ordinary humanity; but they are recorded by too many independent authorities, and affirmed by too much weight of corroborative evidence to be rejected as fables or discredited as exaggerations. They lasted for twenty-seven years of triumphant tyranny, but the complaints of Ibrahim's subjects at last reached the ears of his nominal suzerain, the caliph of Bagdad, who sent him a despatch, requiring his immediate abdication in favor of his son Abdallah. And now comes the strangest part of this strange drama, for the haughty tyrant yielded unqualified obedience to the mandate of his distant superior, although his chagrin on its receipt brought on a severe attack of jaundice. The most probable conjecture of historians to account for his submission is that it was due to the critical position of his own dominions, then menaced by the rapidly advancing followers of the Shiita, inflamed with zeal for their newly adopted creed, and marching from the mountains with the irresistible momentum of its first fanaticism. In any case the fierce African potentate offers the spectacle of a conversion as strange as any narrated in history, whether we ascribe it to policy, hypocrisy, or a genuine, though perverted, impulse of repentance.
Summoning Abdallah from Sicily to assume the reins of government in his stead, he exercised his last acts of sovereignty in reversing his previous abuses of power. He abolished the taxes, threw open the jails, reformed the laws, and gave large sums in charity from his private coffers. Calling the date of his abdication — 902 of our era, 289 of the Ægira — the Brachimo Affricano, he whose crimes had procured for him, even among African tyrants, the distinctive appellation of the Impious, clad himself in haircloth, girt his loins with a rope, proclaimed the holy war in the
