“It would not be possible,” he answered in a melancholy voice. “Day and night we are watched and should be seized before we had travelled a mile. Moreover, could she leave her father, and could I leave all my relations to be murdered in payment for our sacrilege?” “Have you no thought in your mind at all?” I asked again. “Is there nothing that would save the Lady Sabeela?” “Nothing, Lord, except the end of Heu-Heu and his priests. It is to you, great Lord, that we look to find a way to destroy them, as the prophecy declares will be done by the White Deliverer from the South.” “Oh, dash the prophecy! I never knew prophecies to help anybody yet,” I ejaculated in English, as I contemplated that beautiful but helpless pair. Then I added in Arabic, “I am tired and am going to bed. I hope that I shall find more wisdom in my dreams then I do in you, Issicore,” I added, staring at the man in whom I seemed to detect some subtle change, some access of fatalistic helplessness, even of despair. Now Sabeela, seeing that I was angry, broke in, “O Lord, be not wrath, for we are but flies in the spider’s web, and the threads of that web are the priests of Heu-Heu, and the posts to which it is fixed are the beliefs of my people, and Heu-Heu himself is the spider, and in my breast his claws are fixed.” Now, listening to her allegory, I thought to myself that a better one might have been drawn from a snake and a bird, for really, like the rest of them, this poor girl seemed to be mesmerized with terror and to have made up her mind to sit still waiting to be struck by the poisoned fangs. “Lord,” she went on, “we have done all we could. Did not Issicore make a great journey to find you? Yes, did he not even dare the curse which falls upon the heads of those who try to leave our country, and travel south to seek the counsel of the Great Wizard, who once sent messengers here to obtain the leaves of the tree that grows in Heu-Heu’s garden, the tree that makes men drunk and gives them visions?” “Yes,” I answered, “he did that, Lady, and might I say to you that his health seems none the worse. Those curses of which you speak have not hurt him.” “It is true they have not hurt his body—yet,” she said in a musing voice, as though a new thought had struck her. “Well, if that is true, Sabeela, may it not be true also that all this talk about the power of Heu-Heu is nonsense? Tell me, have you ever spoken with or seen Heu-Heu?” “No, Lord, no, though unless you can save me I shall soon see him.” “Well, and has any one else?” “No, Lord, no one has ever spoken with him, except, of course, his priests, such as my distant cousin, Dacha, who is the head of them, but whom I used to know before he was chosen by Heu-Heu to be of their company.” “Oh! So no one has seen him? Then he must be a very secret kind of god who does not take exercise, but lives, I understand, in a cave with priests.”