straps, and jingling on the
pavement the carved ends of their silver knife-shields, they laughed and
jested, and told dubious stories, and held doubtful discourse generally.
The talk turned on the distinction between great sins and little ones.
In the circle of the Sultan it was agreed that the great sins were two:
unbelief in the Prophet, whereby a man became Jew and dog; and smoking
keef and tobacco, which no man could do and be of correct life and
unquestionable Islam. The atonement for these great sins were five
prayers a day, thirty-four prostrations, seventeen chapters of the
Koran, and as many inclinations. All the rest were little sins; and
as for murder and adultery, and bearing false witness--well, God was
Merciful, God was Compassionate, God forgave His poor weak children.

This led to stories of the penalises paid by transgressors of the great
sins. These were terrible. Putting on a profound air, the Vizier, a fat
man of fifty, told of how one who smoked tobacco and denied the Prophet
had rotted piecemeal; and of how another had turned in his grave with
his face from Mecca. Then the Kaid of Fez, head of the Mosque and
general Grand Mufti, led away with stories of the little sins. These
were delightful. They pictured the shifts of pretty wives, married
to worn out old men, to get at their youthful lovers in the dark by
clambering in their dainty slippers from roof to roof. Also of the
discomfiture of pious old husbands and the wicked triumph of rompish
little ladies, under pretences of outraged innocence.

Such, and worse, and of a kind that bears not to be told, was the
conversation after supper of the roysterers in the Kasbah. At every
fresh story the laughter became louder, and soon the reserve and dignity
of the Moor were left behind him and forgotten. At length Ben Aboo,
encouraged by the Sultan's good fellowship, broke into loud praises of
Naomi, and yet louder wails over the doom that must be the penalty of
her apostasy; and thereupon Abd er-Rahman, protesting that for his
part he wanted nothing with such a vixen, called on him to uncover her
boasted charms to them. "Bring her here, Basha," he said; "let us see
her," and this command was received with tumultuous acclamations.

It was the beginning of the end. In less than a minute more, while the
rascals lolled over the floor in half a hundred different postures, with
the hazy lights from the brass lamps and the glass candelabras on their
dusky face