"My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person! But all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering about him is positively frightening. I suspect Black Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good deal of this idolatry. He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.
"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. It is all very crude in its half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying, too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will surely come when they find out, and he finds out, that after all he is nothing but a man.
"What sights, what scenes! The other day there was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath, and fell on us like a mountain of hell. As long as it lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation and despair. But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we can never know anything so bad again.'
"That simple word set every face shining, and as soon as we reached the next village—Black Zogal as usual having gone before us—lo, we heard a story of how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass over our heads without touching us—and it had!
"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn like the breath of a furnace. The water in the water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to the back of our hands, and even some of the camels dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun.
"And when at length the sun sank beneath the horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted them, telling them it was never intended that man should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's end.
"After that the people lay down on the scorching sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched; and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'
"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper desolation.
"Then they would fling themselves down in despair and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as before, would tell them that the life of this world was all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep, that the life to come was the awakening, and that he whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates of Paradise.
"Result—at the next town we came to, we were told that when we were in the middle of the wilderness Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us, with waving trees and rippling water and the air full of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in Heaven!