She dropped the veils from her head, the yashmak from before her face, and the cloak from her shoulders, standing revealed in the garments she had donned at Hutah in the oasis of Hareek.
She was ravenous from hunger and almost dead with fatigue, but she stood without a tremor, glittering from head to foot in the jewels which embroidered the voluminous orange-satin trousers, the golden, travel-stained sandals, and the bolero, which allowed the satin skin to show at the waist. Her face was white, her crimson mouth parted in a slight smile; her yellow eyes passed slowly from one face to the other and on to the next of those fierce, unscrupulous men, who watched her for a while and then, with all the inconstancy of the Arab, reverted, with the exception of Al-Asad, to their former allegiance as they succumbed to the call of her beauty.
A sudden, tremendous shout of reception and of welcome went up:
“Ahlan wasahlan! Ahlan wasahlan!”
They shouted the words over and over again, until the women and children wakened on the far side of the mountains and the birds, which inhabited the secluded spot, rose twittering and screaming in clouds, to be whirled this way and that way by the wind from the south, which seemed, in its suffocating heat, to have swept across the open mouth of hell.
Slowly Zarah the beautiful, the relentless, raised her right hand, upon which shone her father’s ring, above her head to quell the tumult, and, as a great silence fell, stretched it out to the men, who, with the exception of Al-Asad, rushed forward and, kneeling, touched her sandalled foot, acknowledging her as chief.
She had won.
There was no tenderness, no love, in her eyes as she looked down upon them, neither was there softness in her heart as she looked into the future. She would rule the men with an iron hand and drive them with a whip of steel, favouring those who did her bidding, treading beneath her heel those who rebelled until she ground them in the dust. She would be their hadeeyah, the woman to lead them into battle, even as had led Ayesha, the wife of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, the one and only God; she would make the mountain home a corner of paradise and her dwelling a place of gold and precious stones, as a frame to her beauty.
“I stand in my father’s place, O men!” she cried. “I have taken the reigns of government from the Sheikh’s fingers, which are locked in those of death. Obey me and I will raise you to heights you—nay, not one of you—have dreamed of; rebel, and I will set your bodies upon the highest peak as food for vultures. I will go forth with you, lead you—nay, give ear until I have come to the end of my words, for I will not speak again. Yea! I will lead you forth and bring you back with gold and cattle and fair women, until the fame of these rocks is spread from the north to the south and from the east to the west. I will have none but the beautiful, none but the brave, about me to do my bidding. I——”