What was this strange communion? Who was this mysterious
Pax? Were these real men or creatures of a grotesque dream? Was he not
drowsing over his eyepiece in the meridian-circle room? Then a
simultaneous movement upon the part of those gathered round the operator
convinced him of the reality of what was taking place. Hood was
laboriously writing upon a sheet of yellow pad paper, and the
ambassadors were unceremoniously crowding each other in their eagerness
to read.

"To the President of the United States," wrote Hood: "In reply to your
message requesting further evidence of my power to compel the cessation
of hostilities within twenty-four hours, I"--there was a pause for
nearly a minute, during which the ticking of the big clock sounded to
Thornton like revolver shots--"I will excavate a channel through the
Atlas Mountains and divert the Mediterranean into the Sahara Desert.
PAX."

Silence followed the final transcription of the message from the
unknown--a silence broken only by Bill Hood's tremulous, half-whispered:
"He'll do it all right!"

Then the German Ambassador laughed.

"And thus save your ingenious nation a vast amount of trouble, Monsieur
Liban," said he.

VI

A Tripolitan fisherman, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, a holy man nearly
seventy years of age, who had twice made the journey to Mecca and who
now in his declining years occupied himself with reading the Koran and
instructing his grandsons in the profession of fishing for mullet along
the reefs of the Gulf of Cabes, had anchored for the night off the
Tunisian coast, about midway between Sfax and Lesser Syrtis. The mullet
had been running thick and he was well satisfied, for by the next
evening he would surely complete his load and be able to return home to
the house of his daughter, Fatima, the wife of Abbas, the confectioner.
Her youngest son, Abdullah, a lithe lad of seventeen, was at that moment
engaged in folding their prayer rugs, which had been spread in the bow
of the falukah in order that they might have a clearer view as they
knelt toward the Holy City. Chud, their slave, was cleaning mullet in
the waist and chanting some weird song of his native land.

Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad was sitting cross-legged in the stern, smoking a
hookah and watching the full moon sail slowly up above the Atlas Range
to the southwest. The wind had died down and the sea was calm, heaving
slowly with great orange-purple swells resembling watered silk. In t