“Ceuta!” shouts Julian, “yes, O Mousa, you have said well. It is true I drove your Moslems from the field like sheep before the wolves. Yes!” (and even as he speaks his voice grows loud and fierce) “on every side I was hailed as a deliverer, and my heart swelled within me as I thought upon the victory I had won. Then, in the moment when the shouts of the Goths were echoing in my ears, and Roderich made of me almost a king, a letter came to my hand.” Here all expression died out of his face, his powerful frame seemed to stiffen into stone, but from out of the upraised bars of his helmet a menacing fire shone in his eyes, which belied the seeming calm of his demeanour. His gaze was fixed on Mousa, not as though he perceived him, but rather as if the eyes of his mind were ranging far away among the scenes which had brought him to this pass.
“Explain, noble Goth,” replies Mousa, “else is your coming vain.”
Recalled to himself by the Emir’s voice, Julian proceeded; but he visibly faltered as the words came slowly to his lips. “The dishonour of my house is my reward. My name is blasted while Roderich lives. For this purpose am I come.”
“This is a wild tale,” answers Mousa, crossing his arms within the draperies of his robe. “Your own words proclaim you a traitor. You may be true. If false, Allah judge you!”
Then it was that Tháryk-el-Tuerto rose and stood forth from among the sheikhs, his one eye gleaming with a savage joy.
“Doubt not the words of Don Julian, O Emir,” he cries. “The wrong which Roderich has wrought him would move the lowest Berber of the desert to revenge. By his offer, O Emir, a new land spreads out before us, inviting us to conquest. What is to prevent us from becoming the inheritors of the Goth? Let me go forth with Don Julian and prove the land.”
The bold words of “the one-eyed Tháryk” find favour with Mousa and the chiefs. “Allah is great,” is their answer. “Mahomet the Prophet speaks by the mouth of Tháryk. Let it be as he desires.”
So Julian and Tháryk departed with five galleys and five hundred men; landed at Algeciras in the Bay of Gibraltar (Gibel Taric to this day, in memory of him), and returned to Africa with such tidings of the power of Julian to raise the land, that a formidable invasion was decided on.