the procession was brought to a
stand. Seizing this opportunity, Reuben Maliki stepped up to Israel and
said, so that all might hear, "Look at the crowds that have come out to
speed you, O saviour of your people! Look! look! We shall all remember
this day!"

"So you shall!" cried Israel. "Until your days of death you shall all
remember it!"

He had not spoken before, and some of the Moors tried to laugh at his
answer; but his voice, which was like a frenzied cry, went to the hearts
of the Jews, and many of them fell away from the crowd straightway, and
followed it no farther. It was the cry of the voice of a brother. They
had been insulting calamity itself.

"Balak!" shouted the soldier, and the crier cried once more, and the
procession moved again.

It was the hour of Israel's last temptation. Not a glance in his face
disclosed passion, but his heart was afire. The devil seemed to be
jarring at his ear, "Look! Listen! Is it for people like these that you
have come to this? Were they worth the sacrifice? You might have been
rich and great, and riding on their heads. They would have honoured you
then, but now they despise you. Fool! You have sold all and given to the
poor, and this is the end of it." But in the throes and last gasp of his
agony, hearing his voice in his ear, and seeing Naomi going barefooted
on the stones before him, an angel seemed to come to him and whisper,
"Be strong. Only a little longer. Finish as you have begun. Well done,
servant of God, well done!"

He did not flinch, but rode on without a word or a cry. Once he lifted
his head and looked down at the steaming, gaping, grinning cauldron
of faces black and white. "O pity of men!" he thought. "What devil is
tempting _them_?"

By this time the procession had come to the town walls at a point near
to the Bab Toot. No one had observed until then that the rain was no
longer falling, but now everybody was made aware of this at once by
sight of a rainbow which spanned the sky to the north-west immediately
over the arch of the gate.

Israel saw the rainbow, and took it for a sign. It was God's hand in the
heavens. To this gate then, and through it, out of Tetuan, into the land
beyond--the plains, the hills, the desert where no man was wronged--God
Himself, and not these people, had that day been leading them!

What happened next Israel never rightly knew. His proper sense of life
seemed lost. Through thick waves of hot air he heard many voices.