track the white man would one day find it, and parties would
row to see it whenever a liner came in; and photographs would appear
in weekly papers with accounts of it underneath by men who had never
left London, and all the mystery would be gone away and there would be
nothing novel in this story.

Ali had scarcely gone a hundred yards through cactus and creeper
underneath the palms when he came to the golden shrine that nothing
guards except the deeps of the forest, and found the Diamond Idol. The
Diamond Idol is five inches high and its base a good inch square, and
it has a greater lustre than those diamonds that Mr. Moses bought last
year for his wife, when he offered her an earldom or the diamonds, and
Jael his wife had answered, "Buy the diamonds and be just plain Mr.
Fortescue."

Purer than those was its luster and carved as they carve not in
Europe, and the men thereby are poor and held to be fearless--yet they
do not sell that idol. And I may say here that if any one of my
readers should ever come by ship to the winding harbour where the
forts of the Portuguese crumble in infinite greenery, where the baobab
stands like a corpse here and there in the palms, if he goes ashore
where no one has any business to go, and where no one so far as I know
has gone from a liner before (though it's little more than a mile or
so from the pier), and if he finds a golden shrine, which is near
enough to the shore, and a five-inch diamond in it carved in the shape
of a god, it is better to leave it alone and get back safe to the ship
than to sell that diamond idol for any price in the world.

Ali Kareeb Ahash went into the golden shrine, and when he raised his
head from the seven obeisances that are the due of the idol, behold!
it glowed with such a lustre as only it wears after answering recent
prayer. No native of those parts mistakes the tone of the idol, they
know its varying shades as a tracker knows blood; the moon was
streaming in through the open door and Ali saw it clearly.

No one had been that night but Boob Aheera.

The fury of Ali rose and surged to his heart, he clutched his knife
till the hilt of it bruised his hand, yet he did not utter the prayer
that he had made ready about Boob Aheera's liver, for he saw that Boob
Aheera's prayers were acceptable to the idol and knew that divine
protection was over his enemy.

What Boob Aheera's prayer was he did not know, but he went back to the
beach as fast as one c