der. Through the laths of
the gate they might have caught a glimpse of the riot of colour there,
and they might have seen the slaves arrested by the Persian waterwheel
at which they had been toiling and chanting until the call to prayer had
come to strike them into statues.

Sakr-el-Bahr rose from his devotions, uttered a sharp word of command,
and entered the house. The Nubians followed him, urging their captives
before them up the narrow stairs, and so brought them out upon the
terrace on the roof, that space which in Eastern houses is devoted to
the women, but which no woman's foot had ever trodden since this house
had been tenanted by Sakr-el-Bahr the wifeless.

This terrace, which was surrounded by a parapet some four feet high,
commanded a view of the city straggling up the hillside to eastward,
from the harbour and of the island at the end of the mole which had been
so laboriously built by the labour of Christian slaves from the stones
of the ruined fortress--the Penon, which Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa had
wrested from the Spaniards. The deepening shroud of evening was now upon
all, transmuting white and yellow walls alike to a pearly greyness. To
westward stretched the fragrant gardens of the house, where the doves
were murmuring fondly among the mulberries and lotus trees. Beyond it a
valley wound its way between the shallow hills, and from a pool fringed
with sedges and bullrushes above which a great stork was majestically
sailing came the harsh croak of frogs.

An awning supported upon two gigantic spears hung out from the southern
wall of the terrace which rose to twice the height of that forming the
parapet on its other three sides. Under this was a divan and silken
cushions, and near it a small Moorish table of ebony inlaid with
mother-of-pearl and gold. Over the opposite parapet, where a lattice had
been set, rioted a trailing rose-tree charged with blood-red blossoms,
though now their colours were merged into the all-encompassing greyness.

Here Lionel and Rosamund looked at each other in the dim light, their
faces gleaming ghostly each to each, whilst the Nubians stood like twin
statues by the door that opened from the stair-head.

The man groaned, and clasped his hands before him. The doublet which had
been torn from him in the sok had since been restored and temporarily
repaired by a strand of palmetto cord. But he was woefully bedraggled.
Yet his thoughts, if his first words are to be taken as an in