It was as Gorlias had told her. A very different watch was set there since the attempt of the previous night, and she found herself face to face with an obstacle she had not anticipated. The iron door was shut and was guarded by two huge Africans in black mail armour, who stood on either side with drawn scimitars. They looked over her head as she approached them, and they seemed to take no notice of her existence. She thought she had never seen such expressionless faces as theirs; the features were as shiny and motionless as bronze, and the purple haze of the sunset without filled the deep arch and lent them an unnatural colour which was positively terrifying. 'If you please, kind sirs,' Zoë began as she stood still, 'my mistress sends some fine wheat bread and fresh cream cheese to the wife of the captain.' She might as well have spoken to statues; neither of the negroes paid the slightest attention. But she was not to be put off so easily. 'If you please,' she repeated with pleading emphasis and more loudly, 'my mistress----' She stopped speaking in the middle of the sentence, suddenly scared by the immobility of the two black men, and by their size, and by the purple glare that was reflected from their great polished scimitars, of which one noiseless sweep could sever her head from her body. They were like the genii in one of those tales of the Arabian Nights which Greek story-tellers were then just learning from the Persians, and from the Tartar merchants of Samarcand and Tashkent. Zoë had listened to them by the hour when she was a little girl, and now she suddenly felt an irrational conviction that she had dreamed herself into one of them, and that the imprisoned Emperor was guarded by supernatural beings. However, when she looked at the motionless features and at the broad, polished blades, she did not feel that painful shiver which had run down her when she had thought of being tortured by the people of the palace, and she soon took courage again and began to speak a third time. 'If you please,' she said, but she got no further, for she had gently plucked at the mailed sleeve of the man on her right, to attract his attention, and he moved at once, and bent down a little. He touched his ear with his left forefinger and shook his head slowly to show that he was deaf, and pointed to his companion and back to his own ear and shook his head again; and then, to Zoë's horror, he opened his enormous mouth just before her eyes, and she saw that it was empty. He had no tongue. Johannes was guarded by deaf mutes, and Zoë knew Constantinople and the ways of the palace well enough to understand that they were placed there to make an end of any one, man or woman, who should attempt to pass.