h a
woman safe behind bars clapped her hands over the pain she had caused.

But is it surprising that Zulannah's enemies were legion?

CHAPTER X

"_The wind that sighs before the dawn
Chases the gloom of night;
The curtains of the East are drawn
And suddenly--'tis light_."

SIR LEWIS MORRIS.

The desert stretched before Damaris.

As a lover, clad in golden raiment, in quick pursuit of his love with
dusky hair and starry eyes across a field of purple iris, Day flinging
wide his arms leaped clear of the horizon which lies like a string
across the sandy wastes. Gathering her draperies, hiding her starry
jewels in misty scarves, Night fled in seeming fear, leaving behind her
a trail of sweet-scented, silver-embroidered purple, grey and saffron
garments, which melted in the warmth of love.

But leap he from the horizon ever so quickly, don he his most brilliant
armour and pursue he ever so hastily, yet, save for two short hours
when he may barely touch her hem, Night stands ever mockingly,
beckoning, just out of reach.

O thrice-wise woman! How else would there be pursuit?

And Damaris laughed aloud from sheer content as she touched the
coal-black stallion with her heel, and held him, fretting, eager to be
away over the sand, to wherever Fate pointed.

Half-believing, half-doubting the words of the fortune-teller, this
early morning following hard upon her arrival in Heliopolis she slipped
from her room, wakened the astounded night-porter of the Desert Palace
Hotel, and demanded a car to be brought upon the instant. And lucky it
was for her that she made one of the ducal party, for nothing else
would have procured her her heart's desire at that untoward hour before
dawn.

With Wellington beside her, she drove hard along the deserted high-road
towards the village of Makariyeh where, under a sycamore, 'tis said the
Virgin and Child rested on their Flight into Egypt.

The head-lights seemed to hurl the shadows back as she raced down the
Sharia el-Misalla towards the ruins of old Heliopolis, which is all
that remains of the great seat of learning, the biblical City of On.
And the sky lightened way down in the east as she drove along the outer
edge of the fort to the Obelisk, known to the Arab as el-Misalla.

And there the words of the fortune-teller came true, for fretting and
fuming in an endeavour to unseat his _sayis_, who rode him native-wise,
without his feet in the stirrups, r