The sun was dipping swiftly to the world's rim when Sakr-el-Bahr with
his Nubians and his little retinue of corsairs came to the gates of that
white house of his on its little eminence outside the Bab-el-Oueb and
beyond the walls of the city.
When Rosamund and Lionel, brought in the wake of the corsair, found
themselves in the spacious courtyard beyond the dark and narrow
entrance, the blue of the sky contained but the paling embers of the
dying day, and suddenly, sharply upon the evening stillness, came a
mueddin's voice calling the faithful unto prayer.
Slaves fetched water from the fountain that played in the middle of the
quadrangle and tossed aloft a slender silvery spear of water to break
into a myriad gems and so shower down into the broad marble basin. Sakr-el-Bahr washed, as did his followers, and then he went down upon the praying-mat that had been set for him, whilst his corsairs detached their cloaks and spread them upon the ground to serve them in like stead.
The Nubians turned the two slaves about, lest their glances should
defile the orisons of the faithful, and left them so facing the wall and
the green gate that led into the garden whence were wafted on the
cooling air the perfumes of jessamine and lavender. Through the laths
of the gate they might have caught a glimpse of the riot of colour
there, and they might have seen the slaves arrested by the Persian
waterwheel at which they had been toiling and chanting until the call to
prayer had come to strike them into statues.
Sakr-el-Bahr rose from his devotions, uttered a sharp word of command, and entered the house. The Nubians followed him, urging their captives before them up the narrow stairs, and so brought them out upon the terrace on the roof, that space which in Eastern houses is devoted to the women, but which no woman's foot had ever trodden since this house had been tenanted by Sakr-el-Bahr the wifeless.
This terrace, which was surrounded by a parapet some four feet high, commanded a view of the city straggling up the hillside to eastward, from the harbour and of the island at the end of the mole which had been so laboriously built by the labour of Christian slaves from the stones of the ruined fortress—the Peñon, which Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa had wrested from the Spaniards. The deepening shroud of evening was now upon all, transmuting white and yellow walls alike to a pearly greyness. To westward stretched the fragrant gardens of the house, where the doves were murmuring fondly among the mulberries and lotus trees. Beyond it a valley wound its way between the shallow hills, and from a pool fringed with sedges and bullrushes above which a great stork was majestically sailing came the harsh croak of frogs.
An awning supported upon two gigantic spears hung out from the southern
wall of the terrace which rose to twice the height of that forming the
parapet on its other three sides. Under this was a divan and silken
cushions, and near it a small Moorish table of ebony inlaid with
mother-of-pearl and gold. Over the opposite parapet, where a lattice
had been set, rioted a trailing rose-tree charged with blood-red
blossoms, though now their colours were merged into the all-encompassing
greyness.
Here Lionel and Rosamund looked at each other in the dim light, their
faces gleaming ghostly each to each, whilst the Nubians stood like twin
statues by the door that opened from the stair-head.
The man groaned, and clasped his hands before him. The doublet which
had been torn from him in the sôk had since been restored and
temporarily repaired by a strand of palmetto cord. But he was woefully
bedraggled. Yet his thoughts, if his first words are to be taken as an
indication of them were for Rosamund's condition rather than his own.
"O God, that you should be subjected to this!" he cried. "That you
should have suffered what you have suffered! The humiliation of it, the
barbarous cruelty! Oh!" He covered his haggard face with his hands.
She touched him gently on the arm.