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The Arabs were dead-drunk, he saw at a glance, and had got the blood-thirst upon them; roused and burning with brandy and raki, these men were like tigers to deal with; the words he had spoken they never heard, and their horses hemmed him in powerless, while their steel flashed on every side they were not of the tribe of Khalifa.
"Uncle Redgie was so glad to see the hoops come into fashion again," and Vera and Paula hardly knew the game, they had always played at lawn tennis; but they were delighted to learn, for Uncle Redgie proved to be a very fine-looking retired General, and there was a lad besides, grown to manly height; and one boy, at home for Easter, who, caring not for croquet, went with Primrose to exhibit to Thekla the tame menagerie, where a mungoose, called of course Raki raki, was the last acquisition.
The center figure was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunken debauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out of the town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood.
Now a corpse is waked in true Irish style in this country, and by the time the escort had returned to the valley of Cetinje and halted at Bajice for a parting glass, the condition of the mourners resembled the close of a Bank Holiday in London. The too liberal indulgence in raki or spirits does not always provoke that mellowness which follows a good dinner and a glass of port.
After another anxious glance round, as though he feared that, even at that distance, his and Frobisher's conversation might have been overheard, Ling turned away with a heavy scowl on his face presumably to give the correct colour to his proposed part and with an admirable assumption of indifference went toward the place where the soldiers were already partaking of their simple meal of boiled rice and a thin kind of soup, washed down by copious draughts of raki, a strong, pungent spirit distilled from rice.
Gerôme was in great request on these occasions, and, under the influence of some fiery raki, of which he seemed to have an unlimited stock, would have trolled out "Matoushka Volga" and weird Cossack ditties till the stars were paling, if not suppressed.
It dawned upon us that this was only another trick of the zaptiehs to get a rest. We pushed on the next 500 feet of the ascent without much trouble or controversy, the silence broken only by the muleteer, who took the raki bottle off the donkey’s pack, and asked if he could take a drink. As we had only a limited supply, to be used to dilute the snow-water, we were obliged to refuse him.
They probably don't require any such protection really; they are nevertheless wise in employing a Circassian to guard them, if for nothing else for the sake of freeing their own unwarlike minds of all disquieting apprehensions, and enjoying their family reunion in the calm atmosphere of perfect security; some lawless party passing along the road might peradventure drop in and abuse their hospitality, or partaking too freely of raki, make themselves obnoxious, were they unprotected; but with one Circassian patrolling the camp, they are doubly sure against anything of the kind.
The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of morning, and the day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its peace; the carnage went on, hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk with slaughter as with raki.
Into that blended heat and cold, dead blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence; drunk with pain as deliriously as men grow drunk with raki. The challenge rang on the air: "Who goes there?" He never heard it. Even the old, long-accustomed habits of a soldier's obedience were killed in him. "Who goes there?" the challenge rang again. Still he never heard, but went on blindly.
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