"The Prince of India who is the friend of the Sultan Mahommed?" the other inquired, with greater particularity. "Sultan Mahommed? Prince Mahommed, you mean."
"No—Mahommed the Sultan."
A flash of joy leaped from the Prince's eyes—the first of the kind in two days.
The stranger addressed himself to explanation.
"Forgive my bringing the smell of mullet and mackerel into your house. I am obeying instructions which require me to communicate with you in disguise. I have a despatch to tell who I am, and more of my business than I know myself."
The messenger took from his head the dirty cloth covering it, and from its folds produced a slip of paper; with a salute of hand to breast and forehead, declarative of a Turk to the habit born, he delivered the slip, and walked apart to give opportunity for its reading. This was the writing in free translation:
"Mahommed, Son of Amurath, Sultan of Sultans, to the Prince of India.
"I am about returning to Magnesia. My father—may the prayers of the Prophet, almighty with God, preserve him from long suffering!—is fast falling into weakness of body and mind. Ali, son of Abed-din the Faithful, is charged instantly the great soul is departed on its way to Paradise to ride as the north wind flies, and give thee a record which Abed-din is to make on peril of his soul, abating not the fraction of a second. Thou wilt understand it, and the purpose of the sending."
The Prince of India, with the slip in his hand, walked the floor once from west to east to regain the mastery of himself.
"Ali, son of Abed-din the Faithful," he then said, "has a record for me."