oved there was
a glint of armour from the chain mail in which his body was cased,
and from the steel casque about which he had swathed his green turban.
Beside him lay an enormous curved scimitar in a sheath of brown leather
that was heavy with steel ornaments. His face was handsome, and bearded,
but swarthier far than his companion's, and the backs of his long fine
hands were almost black.

Sakr-el-Bahr paid little heed to him. Lying there he looked down the
slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there
was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock
sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the
caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with its
slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of
the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that
formed a little haven two enormous masted galleys, each of fifty oars,
and a smaller galliot of thirty rode gently on the slight heave of the
water, the vast yellow oars standing out almost horizontally from the
sides of each vessel like the pinions of some gigantic bird. That they
lurked there either in concealment or in ambush was very plain. Above
them circled a flock of seagulls noisy and insolent.

Sakr-el-Bahr looked out to sea across the straits towards Tarifa and the
faint distant European coastline just visible through the limpid summer
air. But his glance was not concerned with that hazy horizon; it went no
further than a fine white-sailed ship that, close-hauled, was beating
up the straits some four miles off. A gentle breeze was blowing from
the east, and with every foot of canvas spread to catch it she stood as
close to it as was possible. Nearer she came on her larboard tack,
and not a doubt but her master would be scanning the hostile African
littoral for a sight of those desperate rovers who haunted it and who
took toll of every Christian ship that ventured over-near. Sakr-el-Bahr
smiled to think how little the presence of his galleys could be
suspected, how innocent must look the sun-bathed shore of Africa to the
Christian skipper's diligently searching spy-glass. And there from his
height, like the hawk they had dubbed him, poised in the cobalt heavens
to plumb down upon his prey, he watched the great white ship and waited
until she should come within striking distance.

A promontory to eastward made something of a lee that reached ou