To close out Victoria Day in Canada, here's another installment of our authentic Victorian adventure yarn, written by Conan Doyle in 1897, the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. In this episode of The Tragedy of the Korosko, we find our party of Anglo-Irish-Franco-American tourists listening to the local mullah (one-eyed, like Mullah Omar) lay out the choice between death and conversion to Islam:
"For why should you die, my sweet lambs, when all that is asked of you is that you should set aside that which will carry you to everlasting Gehenna, and accept the law of Allah as written by his prophet, which will assuredly bring you unimaginable joys, as is promised in the Book of the Camel? For what says the chosen one?"—and he broke away into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument. "Besides, is it not clear that God is with us, since from the beginning, when we had but sticks against the rifles of the Turks, victory has always been with us? Have we not taken El Obeid, and taken Khartoum, and destroyed Hicks and slain Gordon, and prevailed against every one who has come against us? How, then, can it be said that the blessing of Allah does not rest upon us?"
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