"Yes, I've heard all about Hamul-Kammesh," he declared, quietly, when I had finished. "Especially about his prophecies, which have given him great fame. But I would not take them too seriously, if I were you."
"Your father seems to take them very seriously."
"Yes, of course, father would," remarked Karem, pointedly. "All the more so, since he wants to keep you from my sister."
"So you don't think there's anything in them?"
"Oh, I would not say that. There is just as much in them as you want to see—and just as little. The old folks would chop off their hands if Hamul-Kammesh told them to, but we younger Ibandru—well, we younger Ibandru sometimes have our doubts."
"I see," said I, glad to know that youth could be skeptical even in Sobul. "But your father tells me that Hamul-Kammesh's prophecies always come true."
Karem looked across at me with an ingenuous smile.
"So they will all tell you. But that too depends upon what you want to believe. Naturally, Hamul-Kammesh had to make a prediction when Yasma was born; he's expected to make a prediction at the time of every birth. So as to be sure of himself, he foretold something that was not to happen for seventeen years, when everyone would have forgotten just what he said. Then, again, he said a stranger was coming to Sobul, and there too he was safe, because if no man had appeared there would certainly have been some male babe born during the year; and then Hamul-Kammesh would have said that that babe was the man he meant in his prophecy, but we should have to wait twenty years more until the man was grown up and the prediction could come true. Of course, when you unexpectedly arrived, he recognized his opportunity, and claimed to have foreseen your coming seventeen years before."
"Nevertheless," I contended, doubtfully, "it is a strange coincidence, is it not?"
"If it were not for coincidences, Prescott, soothsayers would have to pass their days tilling the soil like the rest of us!"