“You stop that, Zarah!”
The words sounded like the crack of a whip as the two beautiful girls faced each other over the crouching woman.
“She’s dumb, and I never knew it! It’s awful!”
“You fool!” replied the Arabian. “Her husband beats her after every meal, and sometimes between. Get up!” She kicked the woman, who leapt to her feet and stood shivering with bent head.
“The white woman has a desire for exercise after her long confinement owing to the unruliness of the prisoners. Dost hear, thou fool? She wishes to walk across the path of peril even to the far side. It is dangerous, and I have tried to prevail against her. One step too far, as thou knowest, and she passes into the keeping of Allah, the one and only God. Watch thou and pray to Allah for her safe return.”
The negress watched them walk slowly along the narrow path until they were out of sight; then, with all the cunning of her race in her rolling eyes, and all a child’s glee at its naughtiness, crept back to the room, and, sidling along the wall, grabbed a handful of French chocolates. If she had waited one instant longer she might have seen a hidden figure crawl away between the rocks as silently as a snake.
Blind Yussuf went quickly amongst the rocks, as at home and as sure of his footing in his blindness as any goat. He crept through incredibly small places, swinging himself hand over hand at a height where no person with vision would have dared to have even moved, arrived at the cleft, thanks to the short cut, ahead of the girls, dropped like a cat from rock to rock, then, slipping like a shadow between the boulders, sat down in the shadow near the thrown spear.
He listened to the girls’ voices as they made their way down the steep incline. “‘A mouth that prays, a hand that kills.’” He drew a finger down the scars upon his face as he quoted the proverb and sat like an image of Fate as the girls stopped quite close to him at the beginning of the path.
“It is quite hard, you see,” said Zarah, as she bent and drove her fingers through a few inches of the wet sand. “It is not quite three of your yards wide.”
“But how wonderful!” Helen bent and dug her fingers in, then moved them along sideways until her whole hand disappeared into soft, wet, warm sand which pulled it gently. “How dreadful!” Then she laughed. She had found her way to the secret path and learned its secret. “I tell you what! You lead the way out, Zarah, then we’ll turn and I’ll tread in our footsteps and lead you back.”