in
that venal fellow's reckoning.

PART II. SAKR-EL-BAHR

CHAPTER I. THE CAPTIVE

Sakr-el-Bahr, the hawk of the sea, the scourge of the Mediterranean and
the terror of Christian Spain, lay prone on the heights of Cape Spartel.

Above him on the crest of the cliff ran the dark green line of the
orange groves of Araish--the reputed Garden of the Hesperides of the
ancients, where the golden apples grew. A mile or so to eastward were
dotted the huts and tents of a Bedouin encampment on the fertile emerald
pasture-land that spread away, as far as eye could range, towards Ceuta.
Nearer, astride of a grey rock an almost naked goatherd, a lithe
brown stripling with a cord of camel-hair about his shaven head,
intermittently made melancholy and unmelodious sounds upon a reed pipe.
From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the joyous
trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the tideless sea.

Sakr-el-Bahr lay prone upon a cloak of woven camel-hair amid luxuriating
fern and samphire, on the very edge of the shelf of cliff to which he
had climbed. On either side of him squatted a negro from the Sus both
naked of all save white loin-cloths, their muscular bodies glistening
like ebony in the dazzling sunshine of mid-May. They wielded crude fans
fashioned from the yellowing leaves of date palms, and their duty was
to wave these gently to and fro above their lord's head, to give him air
and to drive off the flies.

Sakr-el-Bahr was in the very prime of life, a man of a great length
of body, with a deep Herculean torso and limbs that advertised a giant
strength. His hawk-nosed face ending in a black forked beard was of a
swarthiness accentuated to exaggeration by the snowy white turban wound
about his brow. His eyes, by contrast, were singularly light. He wore
over his white shirt a long green tunic of very light silk, woven along
its edges with arabesques in gold; a pair of loose calico breeches
reached to his knees; his brown muscular calves were naked, and his feet
were shod in a pair of Moorish shoes of crimson leather, with up-curling
and very pointed toes. He had no weapons other than the heavy-bladed
knife with a jewelled hilt that was thrust into his girdle of plaited
leather.

A yard or two away on his left lay another supine figure, elbows on the
ground, and hands arched above his brow to shade his eyes, gazing out to
sea. He, too, was a tall and powerful man, and when he m