He resumed.
"And with him turned all his vizirs and mullahs and khans from the false belief and called on Allah and Mohammed. I—even I, Abd-ul-Islam, who stand before you—am one of them. The Sultan Willem issued a decree to all his people that they should believe in the true faith—and lo! Allah wrought a miracle and they all believed, destroying their false mosques and building new ones to the glory of the Prophet. Great is Allah and Mohammed His Prophet that these things should have come to pass, O children of the Faith! They are hard of belief, for the Franks ye well know are a stiff-necked race. Yet such it is, and my Lord the Sultan hath sent me on an embassy to you that I may tell you these marvellous things. And that ye may more readily believe, Allah in His great mercy has given me power to show you these wonders with your own eyes." His tone took on a deeper, more sonorous solemnity. "O Allah! Allah! In the name of the Prophet, vouchsafe that these thy children may see the great Sultan Willem as he is at this moment!"
He clapped his hands sharply together.
Instantly a beam of intensely white light shot across the dark apartment from the "cage" and fell upon the white wall at the other end. The "Saint" stepped quickly out of the radiance. On the white surface there suddenly appeared a lifesize portrait of His Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II—gowned in long robes and coiffed with a turban. A gasp of astonishment broke from the peering spectators in the dark room. Once more the "Saint" clapped his hands. The Imperial figure walked in stately fashion straight towards the audience—seeming that in another moment it would be walking out in the air over its heads—stopped, stretched out its right hand, smiled. The muscles of its face moved, the mouth opened—in a speech that none heard. "Aie! Aie!" broke from the spellbound tribesmen.
"Alas! that he is so far away that ye cannot hear his words!" lamented the "Saint." "But I can hear them. He tells you to believe in me, who am his messenger, by the grace of Allah and the Prophet. O Allah, vouchsafe that these Thy followers may witness with their own eyes the conversion of the vizirs to the true faith!" Again a clap of the hands, and the picture on the wall changed.
The tribesmen gazed at what to a Western eye would have been an obviously cardboard imitation of an Oriental room with a dais on one side of it. On that dais stood the figure in Moslem robes. Filling the remainder of the room was a throng of men in German uniforms, pickelhaube on their heads. They advanced one by one to the figure on the dais, knelt, offered up their spiked helmets, and received in exchange a turban from their graciously smiling lord.
"See, O people, and believe!" cried the "Saint."
"Aie! Aie!" came the response. "We see and we believe! God is great! There is none great but God, and unto Him be all the praise!"
"Listen! O true believers! The Holy Prophet laid a command on the great Sultan Willem that he should immediately convert all the Frankish nations to the true faith. And the Sultan Willem gave glory to Allah that this command was laid upon him. He sent forth his armies in the great Jehad. The Sultan's armies are the most numerous and bravest in the whole world—not Timur nor Rustum might have stood against them—and none may count the number of their victories in the great war against the infidel Franks. Their triumphs are as the rocks on the hill-sides, beyond reckoning and eternal. All the nations of the Franks fled before them, and were slain like dogs as they ran. And most of all fled before them and were slain the insolent English dogs that, thinking themselves far away from the power of the Sultan Willem, are puffed up with a vain pride and tread upon the neck of the true believer in the land beyond the Indus—nay, who invade your hills and lay waste your crops, seeking to destroy the one true faith. Is it not so?"
"Allah knoweth! He speaketh through thy lips, O holy one!" was the chorused reply from the darkened room. There could be no denial of any statement from a source of such sanctity.