The dark town just then was like a mountain chasm when a storm that has been gathering is about to break. In the air a deep rumble, and then a loud detonation. Blackness overhead, and things around that seemed to move and pass.
Drawing near to the Bab Toot, the gate that witnessed the last scene of Israel's humiliation and Naomi's shame, Ali, with the girl beside him, came suddenly into a sheet of light and a concourse of people. It was the Mahdi and his vast following with lamps in their hands, entering the town on the west, while the Spaniards whom they had brought up to the gates were coming in on the east. The Mahdi himself was locking the synagogues and the sanctuaries.
“Lock them up,” he was saying. “It is enough that the foreigner must burn down the Sodom of our tyrant; let him not outrage the Zion of our God.”
Ali led Naomi up to the Mahdi, who saw her then for the first time.
“I have brought her,” he said breathlessly; “Naomi, Israel's daughter, this is she.” And then there was a moment of surprise and joy, and pain and shame and despair, all gathered up together into one look of the eyes of the three.
The Mahdi looked at Naomi, and his face lightened. Naomi looked at Ali, and her pale face grew paler, and she passed a tress of her fair hair across her lips to smother a little nervous cry that began to break from her mouth. Then she looked at the Mahdi, and her lips parted and her eyes shone. Ali looked at both, and his face twitched and fell.
This was only the work of an instant, but it was enough. Enough for the Mahdi, for it told him a secret that the wisdom of life had not yet revealed; enough for Naomi, for a new sense, a sixth sense, had surely come to her; enough for Ali also, for his big little heart was broken.
“What matter about me?” thought Ali again. “Take her, Mahdi,” he said aloud in a shrill voice. “Her father is waiting for her—take her to him.”
“Lady,” said the Mahdi, “can you trust me?”
And then without a word she went to him; like the needle to the magnet she went to the Mahdi—a stranger to her, when all strangers were as enemies—and laid her hand in his.