Why should those words so powerfully affect him? What were these uncomprehended, new emotions stirring in his hard soul, tempered by war and by unnumbered stern adventurings?
The Master had no skill in self-analysis, to tell him. Leader of others, himself he did not understand. But as that night aboard Nìssr, when he had laid a hand on the woman's cabin door, something unknown to him seemed drawing him to her, making her welfare and her life assume a strange import.
"Come, O Frank!" Bara Miyan was saying. The Olema's words recalled the
Master to himself with a start. "Such food and drink as we men of El
Barr have, gladly we share with thee and thine!"
The old man entered the dark doorway of the citadel, noiselessly in soft sandals. Beside him walked the Master; and, well grouped and flanked and followed by the Arabs in their white robes—all silent, grave, watchful—the Legion also entered.
Behind them once more closed the massive doors, silently.
The eighteen Legionaries were pent in solid walls of metal, there in the heart of a vast city of fighting-men whose god was Allah and to whom all unbelievers were as outcasts and as pariah dogs—anathema.
CHAPTER XLI
THE MASTER'S PRICE
A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil mash'als, or cressets, the glimmer of the dull-gold walls could be distinguished.
Pillars rose to the roof, and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any portion. The imagination was staggered at thought of the infinite skill and labor required for such a task. The creation of this city of El Barr seemed far beyond the possible; yet here it was, all the result of the graver's chisel.[1]