"And the Captain," said Isaac Silvera, "despairing of escape, planned to take to the boats with his crew, leaving the passengers to their fate."
"But he did not?" quoth a breathless Cabalist.
"Alas, no," said Abraham Rubio, with a comical grimace. "Would he had done so! For then we should have owned a goodly vessel, and the Master would have saved us all the same."
"But righteousness must needs be rewarded," protested Samuel Primo. "And inasmuch as the Captain wished to save the Master in the boats—"
"The Master was reading," put in Solomon Lagnado. "The Captain cries out, 'The Corsairs are upon us!' 'Where?' says the Master. 'There!' says the Captain. The Master stretches out his hands, one towards each vessel, and raises his eyes to heaven, and in a moment the ships tack and sail away on the high sea."
Sabbataï sat eating his meagre meal in silence.
But when the rumor of his miracle spread, the sick and the crippled hastened to him, and, protesting he could do naught, he laid his hands on them, and many declared themselves healed. Also he touched the lids of the sore-eyed and they said his fingers were as ointment. But Sabbataï said nothing, made no pretensions, walking ever the path of piety with meek and humble tread. Howbeit he could not linger in Egypt. The Millennial Year was drawing nigh—the mystic 1666.
Sabbataï Zevi girded up his loins, and, regardless of the rumors of Arab robbers, nay, wearing his phylacteries on his forehead as though to mark himself out as a Jew, and therefore rich, joined a caravan for Jerusalem, by way of Damascus.
X
O the ecstasy with which he prostrated himself to kiss for the first time the soil of the sacred city! Tears rolled from his eyes, half of rapture, half of passionate sorrow for the lost glories of Zion, given over to the Moslem, its gates guarded by Turkish sentries, and even the beauty of his first view of it—domes, towers, and bastions bathed in morning sunlight—fading away in the squalor of its steep alleys.