every
conceivable colour, their waists swathed in gaudy scarves, some of which
supported a very arsenal of assorted cutlery; many wore body armour of
mail and the gleaming spike of a casque thrust up above their turbans.
After them, dejected and in chains, came the five score prisoners
taken aboard the Dutchman, urged along by the whips of the corsairs who
flanked them. Then marched another regiment of corsairs, and after these
the long line of stately, sneering camels, shuffling cumbrously along
and led by shouting Saharowis. After them followed yet more corsairs,
and then mounted, on a white Arab jennet, his head swathed in a turban
of cloth of gold, came Sakr-el-Bahr. In the narrower streets, with their
white and yellow washed houses, which presented blank windowless walls
broken here and there by no more than a slit to admit light and air,
the spectators huddled themselves fearfully into doorways to avoid being
crushed to death by the camels, whose burdens bulging on either side
entirely filled those narrow ways. But the more open spaces, such as the
strand on either side of the mole, the square before the sok, and the
approaches of Asad's fortress, were thronged with a motley roaring
crowd. There were stately Moors in flowing robes cheek by jowl with
half-naked blacks from the Sus and the Draa; lean, enduring Arabs in
their spotless white djellabas rubbed shoulders with Berbers from the
highlands in black camel-hair cloaks; there were Levantine Turks, and
Jewish refugees from Spain ostentatiously dressed in European garments,
tolerated there because bound to the Moor by ties of common suffering
and common exile from that land that once had been their own.

Under the glaring African sun this amazing crowd stood assembled to
welcome Sakr-el-Bahr; and welcome him it did, with such vocal thunder
that an echo of it from the mole reached the very Kasbah on the hilltop
to herald his approach.

By the time, however, that he reached the fortress his procession had
dwindled by more than half. At the sok his forces had divided, and
his corsairs, headed by Othmani, had marched the captives away to the
bagnio--or banyard, as my Lord Henry calls it--whilst the camels had
continued up the hill. Under the great gateway of the Kasbah they padded
into the vast courtyard to be ranged along two sides of it by their
Saharowi drivers, and there brought clumsily to their knees. After
them followed but some two score corsairs as a guard