The imperial pleasure was unfeigned.
"Your Majesty's grace is full reward for my performance," the Count replied, and rising from the salutation, he began his recital.
"Stay," said the Emperor, "I will have a seat brought that you may be at ease."
Corti declined: "The Arabs have a saying, Your Majesty—'A nest for a setting bird, a saddle for a warrior.' The jaunt has but rested me, and there was barely enough danger in it.... The Turk is an old acquaintance. I have lived with him, and been his guest in house and tent, and as a comrade tempted Providence at his side under countless conditions, until I know his speech and usages, himself scarcely better. My African Berbers are all Mohammedans who have performed the Pilgrimage. One of them is a muezzin by profession; and if he can but catch sight of the sun, he will never miss the five hours of prayer. None of them requires telling the direction to Mecca.... I issued from Your Majesty's great gate about the third hour, and taking the road to Adrianople, journeyed till near midday before meeting a human being. There were farms and farmhouses on my right and left, and the fields had been planted in good season; but the growing grain was wasted; and when I sought the houses to have speech with their tenants they were forsaken. Twice we were driven off by the stench of bodies rotting before the doors."
"Greeks?"
"Greeks, Your Majesty.... There were wild hogs in the thickets which fled at sight of us, and vultures devouring the corpses."
"Were there no other animals, no horses or oxen?" asked Justiniani.
"None, noble Genoese—none seen by us, and the swine were spared, I apprehend, because their meat is prohibited to the children of Islam.... At length Hadifah, whom I have raised to be a Sheik—Your Majesty permitting—and whose eyes discover the small things with which space is crowded as he were a falcon making circles up near the sun—Hadifah saw a man in the reeds hiding; and we pursued the wretch, and caught him, and he too was a Greek; and when his fright allowed him to talk, he told us a band of strange people, the like of whom he had never seen, attacked his hut, burned it, carried off his goats and she buffaloes; and since that hour, five weeks gone, he had been hunting for his wife and three girl-children. God be merciful to them! Of the Turks he could tell nothing except that now, everything of value gone, they too had disappeared. I gave the poor man a measure of oaten cakes, and left him to his misery. God be merciful to him also!"
"Did you not advise him to come to me?"
"Your Majesty, he was a husband and father seeking his family; with all humility, what else is there for him to do?"