uous
enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in
Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who had just been
smoking hasheesh.

He gave a start, and looked like a man who in his sleep has fallen off
a roof. But immediately, lowering his full eyelids, he became the
handsome statue, or perhaps the delicately bearded effigy, in
tan-colored wax, of a young caliph who had incurred the hatred of the
jinn.

It was simple. He had squandered his fortune. It had sifted through
his fingers like sand, the price of one clove tree after another, till
the whole grove was gone. Then the Hindu money lenders had got the
ancestral house. The friends had departed to make merry elsewhere; the
gazelle-eyed girls with short, silk dresses and frilled pantalettes had
turned cold; and, in the market, little boys had sung songs about the
ruined young man. Burning with resentment and shame, he had sailed
away in a dhow--it had landed him at Beira--believing that he would
hate Zanzibar forever.

When he began to starve, he joined the safari of a Muscat trader,
traveled up-country, returned to the coast sick with fever. Late one
night, while walking below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw
a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and
another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand. He
waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of
gold-dust. Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster.
Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez!

In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an
American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take
him to America. Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a
second-hand pronouncement of God. At that time there was even a ship
at Suez bound for New York.

"It was my destiny," he averred, sitting motionless in his atrocious
suit, so young yet so full of bizarre recollections, impassive at the
inevitable thought that this "destiny" of his might be preparing events
stranger still than those which he had endured.

CHAPTER XXII

A pallid, black-haired woman with pendent earrings--a woman who rather
resembled Anna Zanidov--was playing a sea-piece by MacDowell in the
light of a tall lamp. The hall door swung open; the unsympathetic face
and square shoulders of David Verne's attendant appeared above the back
of the wheel chair. Th