From what Abdul had told him, Tom guessed that the stronghold lay at the upper extremity of the village, about eighty or ninety yards from the wall. The Moor’s knowledge of the place enabled him to lead Tom to a spot where it would clearly be an easy matter to climb the battlements. Secure in their remoteness, and in the fact that no hostile force could come within many miles of the village without being instantly announced, the inhabitants kept only a perfunctory watch. A few men, Abdul said, were regularly on guard at the north-east and south-west corners; but no attempt was made to watch the walls in general. Knowing the state of the defences, this fact gave Tom some amusement. With walls so ruinous the gates were the last places at which unauthorized ingress or egress would be made. The whole place was still sleeping, and would sleep until the muezzin from the mosque gave the call to prayer. Abdul declared it was quite safe to enter the village so far as its human inhabitants were concerned, though there was a risk that some pariah dog might be wakeful. Taking his courage in both hands, Tom climbed up the wall after Abdul, and descended on the other side; then, keeping in the black shadows cast by the moon, the two made their way through round archways and narrow alleys to the outer wall of the kasbah. The village was very silent. It might almost have been an abode of the dead. Only the screech of night-birds beyond the walls broke the stillness. Tom held his breath—and his nose, for sanitary authorities are unknown in Morocco, and heaps of refuse here and there spoke forcibly in the night air. The two intruders crept stealthily round the walls of the kasbah, against which small shops and outbuildings that Abdul called _inzella_ were built, except before the principal entrance—a large gateway through which two or three men could ride abreast. In front of this gateway was a wide, open square, with low shops under a colonnade on the other side. The gateway was shut. It had massive iron doors. Stealing to the further side of it, Abdul touched Tom’s arm, and pointed to a small dark window, unglazed, scarcely more than a slit in the wall, some twenty-five feet above their heads, and a yard or two back from the parapet, which, as the Moor had already explained, extended right round the kasbah, enclosing a kind of terrace. It was the window of the guest-chamber, and there, Abdul had suggested, the captured envoy was confined.