ther? Wait for a
week, till the inundations have subsided. Truly there is no enemy on
thy borders. In thy whole realm there is not so much as a rat to
nibble at thy walls. What dost thou want now with chariots and armed
men?"

Ali now turned to Vely, who was sitting on his right hand. "Go thou
over to Misrim," said he, "and purchase for me two thousand horses; a
thousand of them shall be meet for war-chargers, and a thousand for
drawing guns."

"Oh, my father!" answered Vely, who was the eldest and wisest of Ali's
sons, "I will not object to thy command that the simoon has now begun
in Misrim, before whose burning, suffocating breath every living
creature is forced to fly. I reck little of that, but the horses, thy
precious horses, will perish. And, moreover, I would ask of thee one
question. Wherefore dost thou get together a host, and horses and
guns, without cause, and with no danger threatening thee? Will not all
these warlike preparations excite the rage of the Padishah against
thee, and so thy preparing against an imagined peril will saddle thee
with a real war?"

Ali Pasha laughed aloud--a very unusual habit with him.

"Well," said he, "it is for me to prove to you, I suppose, that you
are all wrong in your calculations. Dine with me and be merry. After
dinner you shall see that the sea is not stormy, that the rivers are
not in flood, and that the simoon is not suffocating. I have a
talisman which will convince you thereof."

So he entertained his sons till late in the evening, and immediately
after dinner he whispered to one of the dumb eunuchs, and then he took
his sons with him into the red tower, the doors of which were left
wide open. He stopped short with them in one of the rooms, the
solitary semicircular window of which looked out upon the lake of
Acheruz. The window was guarded by an iron grating. Here he sat down
with them to smoke his narghily and sip his coffee. The sons would
have preferred to mount upon the roof of the tower, where the fresh
air and the fine view would have made their siesta perfect; but Ali
facetiously observed that in the open air cold and hot winds were just
then blowing together at the same time, and he did not want the simoon
to make them sweat or the trade-winds to make them shiver.

As they were sipping their coffee there the splashing of oars was
audible beneath the tower, and the sons beheld three large,
flat-bottomed boats propelled upon the surface of the water, i