Asad clutched his beard, and scowled. “Now what may that portend? Can knowledge of our presence have reached them?”
“Why else should she move from her anchorage thus in the dead of night?” said Biskaine.
“Why else, indeed?” returned Asad, and then he swung upon Oliver standing there in the entrance of the poop-house. “What sayest thou, Sakr-el-Bahr?” he appealed to him.
Sakr-el-Bahr stepped forward, shrugging. “What is there to say? What is there to do?” he asked. “We can but wait. If our presence is known to them we are finely trapped, and there’s an end to all of us this night.”
His voice was cool as ice, contemptuous almost, and whilst it struck anxiety into more than one it awoke terror in Marzak.
“May thy bones rot, thou ill-omened prophet!” he screamed, and would have added more but that Sakr-el-Bahr silenced him.
“What is written is written!” said he in a voice of thunder and reproof.
“Indeed, indeed,” Asad agreed, grasping at the fatalist’s consolation. “If we are ripe for the gardeners hand, the gardener will pluck us.”
Less fatalistic and more practical was the counsel of Biskaine.
“It were well to act upon the assumption that we are indeed discovered, and make for the open sea while yet there may be time.”