At the next moment the melancholy notes of the great horn rang out over the dark camp, and within a few minutes an immense multitude had gathered.
It was a strange spectacle under the blank darkness of the sky. Men carrying lanterns, which cast coarse lights upward into their swarthy faces, were standing in a surging and murmuring mass, while women, like shadows in the gloom, were huddling together on the outskirts of the crowd.
They were Ishmael's faithful people, all of them, broken-hearted believers in his spiritual mission, for at the shadow of disaster those who had followed him for personal gains alone had gone.
Ishmael caused the people to be drawn up in a great square, and then, mounting a camel, he rode into the midst of them. He was seen to be in a state of great excitement.
"Brothers," he said, "we have passed through many hard days together. You have shared with me your joys and your sorrows. I have shared with you my hopes and my dreams. We are one."
Touched to the heart by his voice as much as his words, the people cried—
"May God preserve thee!"
"Nay," he cried, "may God punish me, for I have permitted myself to be deceived."
The people thought he was going to speak of the woman who was understood to have betrayed him, but he did not do so.
"Look!" he cried, pointing towards the pyramid. "We stand amid the ruins of a pagan world. Where are the Kings and Counsellors who slept in these desolate places? Gone! All gone! Have not strangers from a far country taken away their bodies to wonder at? Where is the king who built this tomb? He thought himself the equal of God, yet what was he? A man, shaped out of a little clay! And I?" he said, "I, too, have been drunk with power. I have been living in the greatness of my own strength. I have permitted myself to believe that I was the messenger of God, and therefore God—God has brought me down. He has laid me in the dust. Blessed be the name of God!"