My mother had more than once assured me that she knew not its meaning, and that, although she had sought explanation of my father, he had refused to reveal to her more than she had told me, and he, too, had died with the secret resolutely preserved. But the exact counterpart of the brand burnt into my own flesh was now before me. What could be the significance of the two asps? how, indeed, came the daughter of the great Sultan ’Othman, whom none dare approach, to be disfigured the same as myself, a free-booter of the Khalifa, a Dervish and an outcast?
“How earnest thou to bear the brand of the serpents?” I asked, when again I found speech. “An identical mark is upon my own breast also.”
But ere she could answer my inquiry a stealthy movement behind startled us, and as I turned, two gigantic black eunuchs sprang upon me, while two others appeared from behind the rose silk hangings.
“Behold!” cried a man, whom I knew by his gorgeous dress to be the Aga of the Eunuchs. “It is a man, not a woman! The slave hath not lied. Seize him!”
“May Allah show thee mercy!” gasped Azala, pale and trembling, with clasped hands. “We are betrayed!”
I struggled and fought with all the strength I possessed, but my brutal captors bore me down, and in their sinewy hands I was in a moment helpless as a babe. Then I knew that Azala was, alas! lost to me. Romance, hope, passion, one by one, dropped, emberlike, into the ashes.