led empty chambers and long corridors, the
voices of the lions growing nearer and nearer. He sped faster now, and
presently came to two great doors, on which he knocked thrice. The doors
opened, and two slaves held up lights for him to enter. Taking a torch
from one of them, he bade them retire, and the doors clanged behind
them.

Harrik held up the torch and came nearer. In the centre of the room was
a cage in which one great lion paced to and fro in fury. It roared
at him savagely. It was his roar which had come to Harrik through the
distance and the night. He it was who had carried Fatima, the beloved,
about his cage by that neck in which Harrik had laid his face so often.

The hot flush of conflict and the long anger of the years were on him.
Since he must die, since Destiny had befooled him, left him the victim
of the avengers, he would end it here. Here, against the thing of savage
hate which had drunk of the veins and crushed the bones of his fair
wife, he would strike one blow deep and strong and shed the blood of
sacrifice before his own was shed.

He thrust the torch into the ground, and, with the dagger grasped
tightly, carefully opened the cage and stepped inside. The door clicked
behind him. The lion was silent now, and in a far corner prepared to
spring, crouching low.

"Fatima!" Harrik cried, and sprang forward as the wild beast rose at
him. He struck deep, drew forth the dagger--and was still.

CHAPTER XIII. ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES

War! War! The chains of the conscripts clanked in the river villages;
the wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes
on the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old,
who knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of
dourha would go ungathered, the water-channels go unattended, and
the onion-fields be bare. War! War! War! The strong, the
broad-shouldered--Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies
of Seti and the faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled
feet--would go into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd
Kings. But there would be no spoil for them--no slaves with swelling
breasts and lips of honey; no straight-limbed servants of their pleasure
to wait on them with caressing fingers; no rich spoils carried back from
the fields of war to the mud hut, the earth oven, and the thatched roof;
no rings of soft gold and necklaces of amber snatched from the fi