"What in the world were you doing in the Maldive Islands?"
"Nothing at all," replied Hatch. "I did not go to them. I joined the
Sultan at Suez."
This time Ralston, who had been moving about the room in search of some papers which he had mislaid, came to a stop. His attention was arrested. He sat down in a chair and prepared to listen.
"Go on," he said.
"I wanted to go to Mecca," said Hatch, and Ralston nodded his head as though he had expected just those words.
"I did not see how I was going to get there by myself," Hatch continued, "however carefully I managed my disguise."
"Yet you speak Arabic," said Ralston.
"Yes, the language wasn't the difficulty. Indeed, a great many of the pilgrims—the people from Central Asia, for instance—don't speak Arabic at all. But I felt sure that if I went down the Red Sea alone on a pilgrim steamer, landed alone at Jeddah, and went up with a crowd of others to Mecca, living with them, sleeping with them, day after day, sooner or later I should make some fatal slip and never reach Mecca at all. If Burton made one mistake, how many should I? So I put the journey off year after year. But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage. He was a friend of mine. I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me."
"So you went to Mecca," exclaimed Ralston.
"Yes; I have just come from Mecca. As I told you, I only landed at
Calcutta last night."