a little while the streets were alive with motley and noisy crowds.
The sun was up, if still red and hazy, and sunlight came like a tunnel
of gold down the swampy valley and from over the sea; the orange
orchards lying to the south, called the gardens of the Sultan, were red
rather than yellow, and the snowy crests of the mountain heights above
them were crimson rather than white. In the town itself the small red
flag that is the Moorish ensign hung out from every house, and carpets
of various colours swung on many walls.

The sun was not yet high before the Sultan's army began to arrive. It
was a mixed and noisy throng that came first, a sort of ragged regiment
of Arabs, with long guns, and with their gun-cases wrapped about their
heads--a big gang of wild country-folk lately enlisted as soldiers. They
poured into the town at the western gate, and shuffled and jostled and
squeezed their way through the narrow streets firing recklessly into the
air, and shouting as they went, "Abd er-Rahman is coming! The Sultan is
coming! Dogs! Men! Believers! Infidels! Come out! come out!"

Thus they went puffing along, covered with dust and sweltering in
perspiration, and at every fresh shot and shout the streets they passed
through grew denser. But it was a grim satire on their lawless loyalty
that almost at their heels there came into the town, not the Sultan
himself, but a troop of his prisoners from the mountains. Ten of them
there were in all, guarded by ten soldiers, and they made a sorry
spectacle. They were chained together, man to man in single file,
not hand to hand or leg to leg but neck to neck. So had they walked a
hundred miles, never separated night or day, either sleeping or waking,
or faint or strong. The feet of some were bare and torn, and dripping
blood; the faces of all were black with grime, and streaked with lines
of sweat. And thus they toiled into the streets in that sunlight
of God's own morning, under the red ensigns of Morocco, by the
many-coloured carpets of Rabat, to the Kasbah beyond the market-place.
They were Reefians whose homes the Sultan had just stripped, whose
villages he had just burnt, whose wives and children he had just driven
into the mountains. And they were going to die in his dungeons.

It was seven o'clock by this time, and rumour had it that the Sultan's
train was moving down the valley. From the roofs of the houses a vast
human ant-hill could be seen swarming across the plain in the