“Nahoum?” he asked.
“Take him hence. Let him serve thee if it be thy will. Yet I cannot understand it. The play is dark. Is he not an Oriental?”
“He is a Christian.”
Kaid laughed sourly, and clapped his hands for the slave.
In a moment David and Nahoum were gone. “Nahoum, a Christian! Bismillah!” murmured Kaid scornfully, then fell to pondering darkly over the evil things he had heard.
Meanwhile the Nubians in their glittering armour waited without in the blistering square.
CHAPTER XII. THE JEHAD AND THE LIONS
“Allah hu Achbar! Allah hu Achbar! Ashhadu an la illaha illalla!” The sweetly piercing, resonant voice of the Muezzin rang far and commandingly on the clear evening air, and from bazaar and crowded street the faithful silently hurried to the mosques, leaving their slippers at the door, while others knelt where the call found them, and touched their foreheads to the ground.
In his palace by the Nile, Harrik, the half-brother of the Prince Pasha, heard it, and breaking off from conversation with two urgent visitors, passed to an alcove near, dropping a curtain behind him. Kneeling reverently on the solitary furniture of the room—a prayer-rug from Medina—he lost himself as completely in his devotions as though his life were an even current of unforbidden acts and motives.