“You will set a guard upon that gate, Captain Laguessière. No one is to go out until I give a further order.”
“Very well, my Commandant.”
“You will have the town patrolled and the walls watched. I will bring up another company to act with you.”
He wrote an order with a pencil in his note book, detached the leaf, and sent it back by an orderly to the camp. “Now we will move on,” he said. All his good humour had vanished. He had no longer any jests to exchange with the Basha as the little cavalcade rode upwards among the olive trees and through the steep, narrow streets of the town.
In an open space just below that last big house which made the apex of the triangle, a seat was placed, and to this Gerard de Montignac was conducted. The little city lay spread out in a fan beneath him. The great Mosque in which the tomb of the Founder of the Moorish Empire was sheltered stood at the southern angle. Gerard looked down into a corner of its open precincts and saw men walking to and fro. He called the Basha to his side, and pointed down to it.
“Yes, that is the great Mosque, your Excellency.”
“No one will violate it. For us it is sacred as for you,” said Gerard. “But no food must go into it. That is a strict order.”
“It shall be obeyed.”
“I shall place men of my own in the streets about the entrances. They will molest no one, but they will see to it that the order is obeyed.”
The Mosque was sanctuary, of course. Any man who took refuge there was safe. Neither the law nor any vengeance could touch him. But no man must die in it, for that would be a defilement. A little time, therefore, and any refugee would be thrust out by the guardians of the sanctuary, lest his death should taint the holy place.