But how could a fatherless boy and girl, away off on the edge of an
Arabian desert, hope to resist successfully the mighty power of Imperial
Rome? The story of their lives will tell.

If there are some people who are patriots, there are others who are
poltroons, and such a one was Hairan, the elder brother of young
Odhainat, when, succeeding to his dead father's wealth and power, he
thought less of Roman tyranny than of Roman gold.

"Revenge ourselves on their purses, my brother, and not on their pikes,"
he said. "'T is easier and more profitable to sap the Roman's gold than
to shed the Roman's blood."

But this submission to Rome only angered Odhainat, and to such a
conflict of opinion did it lead that at last Hairan drove his younger
brother from the home of his fathers, and the lad, "an Esau among the
Jacobs of Tadmor," so the record tells us, spent his youth amid the
roving Bedaween of the Arabian deserts and the mountaineers of the
Armenian hills, waiting his time.

But, though a homeless exile, the dark-eyed Bath Zabbai did not forget
him. In the palace of another kinsman, Septimus Worod, the "lord of the
markets," she gave herself up to careful study, and hoped for the day
of Palmyra's freedom. As rich in powers of mind as in the graces of
form and face, she soon became a wonderful scholar for those distant
days--mistress of four languages: Coptic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek,
while the fiery temper of the girl grew into the nobler ambitions of the
maiden. But above all things, as became her mingled Arabic and Egyptian
blood--for she could trace her ancestry back to the free chiefs of the
Arabian desert, and to the dauntless Cleopatra of Egypt,--she loved the
excitement of the chase, and in the plains and mountains beyond the city
she learned to ride and hunt with all the skill and daring of a young
Diana.

And so it came to pass that when the Emperor Valerian sent an embassy
from Rome to Ctesiphon, bearing a message to the Great King, as Sapor,
the Persian monarch, was called, the embassy halted in Palmyra, and
Septimus Hairan, now the head-man of the city, ordered, "in the name of
the senate and people of Palmyra," a grand venatio, or wild beast hunt,
in the circus near the Street of the Thousand Columns, in honor of
his Roman guests. And he despatched his kinsman Septimus Zabbai, the
soldier, to the Armenian hills to superintend the capture and delivery
of the wild game needed for the hunt. With a great f