Upon a ledge, high up on the mountainside, to which it seemed that only a goat could possibly have climbed, sat blind Yussuf, singing to himself: “‘The corn passeth from hand to hand, but it cometh at last to the mill.’”
He sang the words of the proverb as he sat staring down at Zarah the Cruel as though he had eyes in the scarred face with which to see her.
“It cometh at last to the mill! It cometh at last to the mill!”
He repeated the words over and over again whilst the rosary of Mecca slipped between his sensitive fingers, and the girl, steeped in the superstition of her race, spread hers in the gesture to ward off misfortune and touched an amulet of good luck which hung about her neck.
Did he know she was there? Had he come, ironically, to welcome her and to bid her hasten to her father’s side, as had bidden the man who had awaited her at Hutah with swiftest camels? Or had he, dire figure of ill omen, been set upon her path by Fate this night, when the scorching wind blew from the south heralding the storm? There was no time to ponder the question; there was only just time enough in which to register a vow to lay some cunning trap into which the blind man should set his feet and find his death as though by dire mischance. No! there was no time, for she suddenly fathomed the meaning of the intense silence and stillness, and, gathering her draperies about her, slipped as noiselessly as some tiger cat under the ledge upon which the blind man sat, and down the steep path.
She did not look up, she did not look back, else might she have seen the face of Yussuf the blind turned in her direction, with the scarred mouth twisted in a smile. She sped as quickly as the path would allow her, spurred by the thought of the men who, gathered round their dying chief, only waited for the failing heart to cease beating to acclaim one of themselves as his successor in her place.
She knew full well the man who would be chosen if she failed to reach her father in time. Even Al-Asad, half-caste, bloodthirsty, ambitious, as physically powerful as the lion after which he had been named, outcast from the Benoo-Harb tribe, but more through the fact that his father had been a Nubian slave than for the crimes he had committed in the light-heartedness of youth.
As she ran she conjured up a picture of the man who had taken blind Yussuf’s place at her father’s right hand and who had dared to look at her with something more than the respect due to the Sheikh’s daughter in his handsome eyes.
There was no sign of any man as she fled across the plateau, neither—the hour for sleep having come for the women and children—was there sound of life, but a great light shone through the barred windows of the Hall of Judgment far up on the mountainside. She raced up the steps and stood, breathless, in the doorway, unseen by the men gathered about the man whom they loved and who lay dying of the wounds received in the last great fight with the Bedouins, who had fallen upon the brigands as they peacefully returned, with much spoil, from raiding a caravan journeying towards Oman.
Knowing the effect of mystery upon her race, she wrapped herself in her great white cloak, pulled the veils about her face and a yashmak beneath her eyes, which flashed with no soft light. She cursed beneath her breath when the men rose and spoke together, looking towards Al-Asad, who stared down at the Sheikh lying so quietly at his feet.