"Lord God! you should have seen it, Gordon! Just like one of the 'Nights of the Prophet,' only bigger—yes, by my soul, bigger!"
Then, sitting on the side of the bed, he described the doings of the night—how Ishmael had passed from group to group, comforting the mourners and laying a soothing hand on every mother's sorrow, every father's grief.
"Can't tell what the deuce it is in the man—whether it's the prophet or the poet or the diviner—but he doesn't need that anybody should tell him anything, because he knows."
It was not at first that Gordon, coming out of the long night of his sufferings, caught the contagion of Hafiz's good spirits, but his weary, bloodshot eyes began to shine when Hafiz described Ishmael's appeal to the people to leave everything behind them and go with him into the desert—out of the empire of man into the empire of Allah.
"It was thrilling! Wallahi! You had to hear it, though! It was not so much what he said as something in the man himself that set all your nerves tingling."
And when Hafiz went on to tell of Ishmael's appeal for help, not to the saints, the men whom God had cleansed of all sins, the souls that were as pure as the sands of the sea-shore and as fruitless, but to the sinners, the sin-laden and sin-stained, to whom the peace of life and the repose of death were both denied, he felt Gordon's hand clutching at his own and his whole body quivering.
"Sinners, not saints—did he say that, Hafiz?"
"Yes! 'Come to me, my brothers,' he said. 'Your purification is here. A pilgrimage is before you that will cleanse you from all sin.' They took him at his word too. Good Lord! You never saw such scrambling! Such a crew! Sinners, by Jove! Some of them the most notorious scoundrels in Cairo—rich rascals who have been living for themselves all their lives and beggaring everybody about them. Assassins too, or men who have been suspected of being so. Yet there they were, fighting for a chance of going out to starvation and danger and death."
Gordon's eyes were running over by this time, but they were glistening too, like the sun when it shines through a cloud of rain.
"Open the curtains, Hafiz," he said, and when Hafiz had done so it was almost as if an angel of hope had parted them and come sweeping with a stream of sunlight into the room.