Alone in the Wilderness.
’Tis Justice, not Revenge.
“Call it not revenge, my brother; say it is but an act of justice, stern justice, and I am with you.”
“Allah is great, Allah is good,” replied the Arab whom his companion had addressed as brother.
They were both talking in their own language, a language at once so forcible and flowery, that all attempts to render it into English ends but in a poverty-stricken paraphrase.
“Yes, Allah is good.”
The difference between the two speakers was very remarkable. They were brothers only by courtesy.
One sat on the edge of a kind of wooden sofa or dais; in front of him was a small table of Hindoo manufacture, on which there stood a brown earthenware water chatty, some glasses, and a bottle of sherbet (Note 1). He was fair in skin, delicate in complexion, with a mild and almost benevolent aspect. He was unarmed, and though he wore the usual dress of an Arab gentleman, over all he wore a cloak of green camel’s hair, probably denoting him to be a scion of the great prophet.
The other Arab was tall, stately, swarthy, nay, but almost black. He was armed cap-a-pie, and ever as he spoke he strode rapidly up and down the floor of the room. A large apartment it was, in an upper room of a great square flat-roofed house in Brava, a village or town close by the sea, and some distance north of the line.
The room had no signs of luxury or even comfort about it, and no more furniture than a gaol. The walls were of clay, and unadorned except by creeping lizards; the one little window looked out towards the ocean, and a long reef of rocks that lay like a gigantic breakwater—from north to south—about a mile out.