Nubians shall go also."

"Effendina, I will go alone. It is the only way. There is great danger
to the throne. Who can tell what a night will bring forth?"

"If Harrik should escape--"

"If I were an Egyptian and permitted Harrik to escape, my life would pay
for my failure. If I failed, thou wouldst not succeed. If I am to serve
Egypt, there must be trust in me from thee, or it were better to pause
now. If I go, as I shall go, alone, I put my life in danger--is it not
so?"

Suddenly Kaid sat down again among his cushions. "Inshallah! In the name
of God, be it so. Thou art not as other men. There is something in thee
above my thinking. But I will not sleep till I see thee again."

"I shall see thee at midnight, Effendina. Give me the ring from thy
finger."

Kaid passed it over, and David put it in his pocket. Then he turned to
go.

"Nahoum?" he asked.

"Take him hence. Let him serve thee if it be thy will. Yet I cannot
understand it. The play is dark. Is he not an Oriental?"

"He is a Christian."

Kaid laughed sourly, and clapped his hands for the slave.

In a moment David and Nahoum were gone. "Nahoum, a Christian!
Bismillah!" murmured Kaid scornfully, then fell to pondering darkly over
the evil things he had heard.

Meanwhile the Nubians in their glittering armour waited without in the
blistering square.

CHAPTER XII. THE JEHAD AND THE LIONS

"Allah hu Achbar! Allah hu Achbar! Ashhadu an la illaha illalla!"
The sweetly piercing, resonant voice of the Muezzin rang far and
commandingly on the clear evening air, and from bazaar and crowded
street the faithful silently hurried to the mosques, leaving their
slippers at the door, while others knelt where the call found them, and
touched their foreheads to the ground.

In his palace by the Nile, Harrik, the half-brother of the Prince Pasha,
heard it, and breaking off from conversation with two urgent visitors,
passed to an alcove near, dropping a curtain behind him. Kneeling
reverently on the solitary furniture of the room--a prayer-rug from
Medina--he lost himself as completely in his devotions as though his
life were an even current of unforbidden acts and motives.

Cross-legged on the great divan of the room he had left, his less pious
visitors, unable to turn their thoughts from the dark business on which
they had come, smoked their cigarettes, talking to each other in tones
so low as would not have been heard by a European, and with apparent
l