For many minutes Yussuf stood staring up at this mystery of the desert, and then, slowly, step by step, pulled by the strength of the unknown, halting to listen, hastening to gain the shadows, climbed the rough steps and reached the chapel door.
He stood staring down at the floor littered with stones and across to the altar, before which lay a skull, gleaming in a shaft of moonlight. Making the sign to scare away evil spirits, he stepped across the holy place, though not for a king’s ransom would he have touched the white bones of Father Augustine, the last of the holy men, who had laid himself down to die before the altar, upon which had been roughly chipped a cross.
“Christians!” whispered Yussuf, slipping the rosary of Mecca between his fingers. “Infidels!”
Like a great cat he crept out of the place and up the steps leading to the thirty cells, where, upon the stone floors, showed the marks made by the holy men who had fled the world and the luxury of soft beds. He climbed yet twelve steps more to the refectory, where thirty stones, more or less flat, stood in the circle the holy men had formed for meals or recreation; and up again to other buildings, both great and small, built to what purpose it will never be known; then fled the silent, deserted place, slipping, stumbling down the steps to the plateau, where waited his friend.
Side by side, warily, noiselessly, they climbed to the tombs, high up upon the western flank, natural caves, upon the floors of which twenty-nine holy men slept the long sleep, each underneath a mound of stone.
They lay there now, for all that is known, waiting for the last trump to call them back across the quicksands of time.
They sleep peacefully, undisturbed, for ruthless, savage as were the men who ultimately threw in their lot with Mohammed-Abd, criminals and outlaws every one, from every province and every tribe in the Peninsula, yet they respected the solemnity of that Christian burial ground and left the sleeping forms in peace.
And just as the first sunbeam slid over the mountaintops, filling the rocky bowl with golden light, the two men adopted the place as home.
An impregnable stronghold; a natural fortress in a waste place; a land of dates and water, upon which a man or many men could subsist for lack of better or more tasty nutriment; a citadel surrounded by a sea of death, yet connected with terra firma by a path of rock, which as a foundation cannot be bettered.