ed me, so I led him without and mounted him ... and
struck him withal. When he felt the blow he neighed a neigh with a
sound like deafening thunder and opening a pair of wings flew up
with me in the firmament of heaven far beyond the eyesight of man.
After a full hour of flight he descended and shaking me off his back
lashed me on the face with his tail, and gouged out my left eye,
causing it to roll along my cheek. Then he flew away."

On rolled the voice, narrating the prince's descent to the table of
the other one-eyed youths, but Ryder was unheeding. And at the close
he inclined his head with the other listeners, murmuring "May Allah
increase thy prosperity," as he felt in his pockets for the silver
which the others were drawing from turban and sleeves and sash to
lay in the patriarch's lap, and then raised his head to question
diffidently, "Would you interpret, O Khazib, the meaning of that
door? For I hear that it hath now become a saying of a forbidden
thing."

The sage hesitated, sucking at his pipe. Then he said slowly, "To
every man, O Youth, is there a forbidden door, beyond which waits
the steed of high adventure ... with wings beyond man's riding. And
so the rider is lost and his vision is gone."

"But for him who could ride?" Ryder suggested.

"Inshallah! Who can say till he has tried his destiny--and better
are the nine and thirty chambers of safe pleasance than the lonely
sightlessness of the outcast one.... It is a tale which if it were
written upon the eye-corners with needle-gravers, were a warning to
those who would be warned."

For a moment their eyes held each other, smiling but grave. Ryder's
thoughts were of the morrow, of that forbidden entry he was planning
to make, of the risks, the wild uncertainties....

Wisdom and counsel looked significantly out at him out of those
patriarchal eyes. Prudence and sanity clamored within him for a
hearing.

And then he smiled, the whimsical, boyish smile of young
adventuring.

"But whoever, O, my father, had opened that forbidden door
the veriest crack, and breathed its scent and glimpsed its
dazzlement--then for him there is no turning back," he confided.

He rose and Khazib's eyes followed him.

"Luck go with you, my son," he said clearly, "in Allah's name," and
smiling in faint ruefulness, "May Allah heed thee!" Ryder murmured
piously.

CHAPTER XII

THE UNINVITED GUEST

Now as he stood before Aimee, and saw her eyes widen with
r