He kept his word.
Five days later he swept out of the desert with a horde of wild horsemen. And in less than half an hour there was only one of Raoul Le Breton's ill-fated expedition left alive.
The next day, with Annette limp across his saddle, the Sultan Casim Ammeh set off with his following to his desert stronghold.
CHAPTER II
The city of El-Ammeh lies about a hundred miles within the Sahara proper. It is a walled town of Moorish aspect, built of brown rock and baked mud. Within the walls is a tangle of narrow, twisted, squalid lanes—a jumble of flat-roofed houses, practically devoid of windows on the sides overlooking the streets. Here and there a minaret towers, and glimpses of strange trees can be seen peeping over walled gardens.
Along one side stands a domed palace; a straggling place, with horse-shoe arches, stone galleries and terraces. In front of it a blue lake spreads, surrounded by fertile gardens and groves of fruit trees. And the whole is encircled by the desert.
Annette Le Breton remembered nothing of her journey to El-Ammeh. Her life was a nightmare of horror that held nothing but her husband's murderer, whom she could not escape from. She was taken to the palace, and placed in the apartment reserved for the Sultan's favourite. A big room with walls and floor of gold mosaic, furnished with ottomans, rugs and cushions, and little tables and stools of carved sandalwood inlaid with ivory and silver.
On one side of the apartment a series of archways opened on a screened and fretted gallery, at the end of which a flight of wide, shallow steps led down into a walled garden, a dream of roses.
But it was weeks before Annette knew anything of this.