os
and the low drone of singing voices behind the screens.

The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure called the
M'Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo's came to him in secret.
It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master, whom she had
visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble and in madness; also
of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume in her memory, as
well as of Naomi, their daughter, and all her sufferings. In spasms, in
gasps, without sequence and without order, she told her story; but he
listened to her with emotion while the agitated black face was before
him, and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of
night, a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was
imprisoned in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father,
who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy
while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home.
These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit of
Israel's madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would, the
man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.

The Mahdi resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning,
and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep. The town was quiet,
the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan's
following had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest. It was a
wonderful night. The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter,
but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens behind the
town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper of a leaf.
Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white on the white
walls and minarets. Nowhere is night so full of the spirit of sleep as
in an Eastern city. Below, under the moonlight, lay the square white
roofs, and between them were the dark streets going in and out, trailing
through and along, like to narrow streams of black water in a bed of
quarried chalk. Here or there, where a belated townsman lit himself
homeward with a lamp, a red light gleamed out of one of the thin
darknesses, crept along a few paces, and then was gone. Sometimes a
clamour of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place,
and again everything was still. Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.

"O Tetuan," thought the Mahdi, "how soon will your streets be uprooted
and your sanctuaries destroyed!"

T