t noticed them before. No doubt the sea had cast them up
thither out of some ship that had been wrecked there before.

One of the boxes resembled those chests in which sailors keep their
biscuits, but the shape of the other suggested that it was one of
those hermetically sealed vessels used for holding good wines. Why
should they not turn them to some account?

They were not long in forcing them open, and what was their
astonishment when they perceived that the biscuits in the first box
were not even mouldy, but quite dry and sound, as if they had only
been brought thither quite recently; while in the second box not one
of the scores of flasks there displayed was broken or cracked, but lay
neatly stored away in layers of straw?

The refugees did not greatly concern themselves with the question, Who
put these boxes here? and why? Nobody who, after being tossed about on
the sea for three days with nothing to eat or drink all the time, and
is then unexpectedly confronted with rich stores of bread and
wine--nobody, I am sure, under such circumstances would think of
consulting the Kuran as to whether a conscientious Mussulman should
eat and drink such things, but would fall to at once, and thank Allah
for the chance.

The children forgot, in the twinkling of an eye, the dangers to which
they had been exposed, and, after the first glass or two of wine,
overcome by fatigue, lay down on the soft bed which Nature had made
ready for them with her most fragrant moss. Leonidas, however,
remained sitting where he was, considering it his bounden duty to
taste all the wines which were here offered to him gratis, one after
the other; in consequence whereof, when he _did_ lie down at last, he
chose a position in which his head was very low down while his feet
were high in the air, and so they all three slumbered peacefully
together.

Then the voices of men were heard once more far off in the cavern, and
not long afterwards there emerged from its black mouth six
gray-haired, pale-faced human beings. He who came first was the
eldest. His white beard reached to his girdle, his mouth was hidden by
his mustache, and his eyes were covered by his white eyebrows.

These men were fakirs of the Omarite Order, whose rule obliges them to
endure the most terrible of all renunciations--abstention from all
enjoyment of the light of day. Plunging themselves into eternal
darkness for the glory of Allah, they make of life a long midnight,
and the