with sweet-scented yellow
blossoms, oleanders glowing with rosy bloom, and a thicket of
silver-leaved castors separated the little plot from the gardens below,
where grew gourds and cucumbers, lime and fig trees, grape-vines,
water-melons and pomegranates; and beyond that lay a bright patch of
Bursim, or Egyptian clover, like a yellow-green island on a darker sea.

Amzi, comfortably habited in a jubbeh of pink silk, worn over a caftan
of fine white silk flowered with green and confined by a fringed, yellow
sash at the waist, reclined in a position of luxurious ease at the
window. Between his plump fingers he held the amber stem of a handsomely
carved pipe. He looked scarcely older than when on that memorable
journey in which he first met Yusuf. His eye was still as bright, his
hair scarcely more gray, and his cheek as ruddy as then; yet there was a
somewhat discontented look on his face.

His eye wandered over the rich garden before him, and he thought of
barren, ashen Mecca. Then he looked restlessly back over the landscape
below. Surely it was fair enough to calm a restless spirit.

Immediately before, and to the eastward, the sun had risen out of a mass
of lilac and rose-colored cloud. The tufted trees on the distant hills
stood black and distinct against the splendor of the sky. To the right
the date-groves of Kuba, famed throughout Arabia, struggled through a
sea of mist that piled and surged in waves of amber and purple, leaving
the tree tops like islands on a vapory sea. To the left the seared and
scoriae-covered crest of Mount Ohod rose, dark and scowling, like a grim
sentinel on the borders of an Elysian valley. In the rear lay the plain
of El Munakhah, and the rush of the torrent El Sayh was borne on the
breeze, bearing the willing mind beyond to the cool groves of Kuba,
whence this raging flood dispersed itself in gentle rills, or was
carried in silent channels to turn the water-wheels, or to fall, with
musical plash, into wooden troughs that lay deep in the shade.

The ripple of water,--ah, what it means to Arabian ears! Little wonder
that the inhabitant of the desert land never omits it from his idea of
paradise, save in his conception of the highest heaven,--a conception
not lacking in sublimity--that of a silent looking upon the face of God.

In the immediate foreground lay El Medina itself, with its narrow
streets, its busy bazars, its fair-skinned people, and its low, yellow,
flat-roofed houses, eac