There came a stir and a murmuring among the crowd, and cries of “Allahu Akbar!” “Peace, peace!” urged the figure in white. “Nay, make no noise. This is the house of the dead, of one who hath seen God.... ‘Nothing shall be repaired, save the gates of the mosque of Ebn Mahmoud, the mosque of my father’s father,’ so said my father. Also said he, ‘And one shall stand at the gates and watch, though the walls crumble away, till the day when the land shall again be our land, and the chains of the stranger be forged in every doorway.’... But no, ye shall not lift up your voices in anger. This is the abode of peace, and the mosque is my mosque, and the dead my dead.” “The dead is our dead, effendi--may God give thee everlasting years!” called a blind man from the crowd. Up in the tower Dicky had listened intently, and as the speech proceeded his features contracted; once he gripped the arm of Renshaw. “It’s coming on to blow,” he said, in the pause made by the blind man’s interruption. “There’ll be shipwreck somewhere.” “Ye know the way by which I came,” continued Abdalla loudly. “Nothing is hid from you. I came near to the person of the Prince, whom God make wise while yet the stars of his life give light! In the palace of Abdin none was preferred before me. I was much in the sun, and mine eyes were dazzled. Yet in season I spake the truth, and for you I laboured. But not as one hath a life to give and seeks to give it. For the dazzle that was in mine eyes hid from me the fulness of your trials. But an end there was to these things. She came to the palace a slave-Noor-ala-Noor.... Nay, nay, be silent still, my brothers. Her soul was the soul of one born free. On her lips was wisdom. In her heart was truth like a flaming sword. To the Prince she spoke not as a slave to a slave, but in high level terms. He would have married her, but her life lay in the hollow of her hand, and the hand was a hand to open and shut according as the soul willed. She was ready to close it so that none save Allah might open it again. Then in anger the Prince would have given her to his bowab at the gates, or to the Nile, after the manner of a Turk or a Persian tyrant--may God purge him of his loathsomeness...!” He paused, as though choking with passion and grief, and waved a hand over the crowd in agitated command. “Here’s the old sore open at last--which way now?” said Dicky in a whisper. “It’s the toss of a penny where he’ll pull up. As I thought ... ‘Sh!” he added as Renshaw was about to speak.