Suddenly there was a new element in the vociferation, a movement among the assembly far back in the dark room. "Make way for the holy man with great tidings from India! Make way for the _Haj_! In the name of the Prophet--make way, dogs that ye are!" Schultz looked towards the venerable figure of Muhammed Din pressing through the throng. A sudden doubt leaped up in him, was extinguished in self-confidence. The strange fakir approached. The wild clamour of the tribesmen was stilled in curiosity. They fell back in a sudden awe. Schultz watched the venerable stranger advance solemnly, silently, into the blaze of light in which he himself stood. Again he was conscious of an instinctive tremor. "The peace of Allah be with thee, O _Haj_!" he said, and he found that he had deliberately to control his own voice. There was something uncannily impressive in the advance of this silent, dignified old man. "And with all the faithful!" came the sonorous reply, enigmatic to the German's ears. He found himself looking into a pair of strangely disturbing eyes; heard, with a wild reeling shock of the spirit, his own tongue spoken in a low, level Oriental voice. "Move not a finger and make not a sound, Schultz Sahib, or you are a dead man!" Schultz Sahib's eyes glimpsed the muzzle of a pistol not six inches from his chest. "_Smile, Sahib!_ or your friends may interrupt us." Having once ceded to the menace of the pistol, the German's brain could not resist the command of the imperative eyes that seemed to be boring deep into him. He _smiled_--a deathly smile. "You have forgotten me, Schultz Sahib? It is not so long since we worked together on the railway. One of us at least learned a great deal about the other in those days, _Sahib_. _Smile!_--keep smiling!" A wild revolt surged up in the German, subsided, without exterior evidence, under the glare of the dominating eyes which held his fascinated. He tried to turn away his gaze, was checked by the level, purposeful voice of the fakir. "Keep your eyes on mine, _Sahib_! Look elsewhere and you are dead before you have looked!" He heard the words reverberating through him, endlessly re-echoing in chambers of his soul magically open to them. He felt himself fixed, immobile, in a strange paralysis of the faculties. The terrible eyes looked into his that he could not close--he felt, as it were, waves of immeasurable strange force flowing from them, rolling over him, submerging him. And yet still he looked into the eyes of the fakir, his own eyes an open port to their influence.