He used every means of persuasion and cajolery which his ingenuity could devise to persuade Abdul to release him. One of his propositions was that they should convey the German to the sheikh of Ain Afroo and claim a sufficient reward. Abdul ridiculed the idea. Both he and the Jew would get short shrift from the sheikh now that the more valuable of his captives was snatched from his grasp. Salathiel then proposed that they should try to gain the nearest town where they might find Europeans, and tell a moving story of the sufferings and perils they had endured in rescuing the German from the hands of his captors. But to this, as to his other suggestions, Abdul turned a deaf ear. They were a strangely assorted trio. Schwab only half trusted the Moor; the Moor despised Schwab; both disliked the Jew. It was not long before Schwab declared that he was hungry, and illustrated the privations he had already suffered by exhibiting the unwonted gap between his waistcoat and his person: “And I have ze straps of my vaistcoat drawn _so_ tight!” he added. Salathiel’s scanty stock of provisions having been exhausted, Abdul descended to forage, and returned with a supply of dates and olives, and the tin filled with water at the spring. “Ach! My pipe! It is in ze room vere first I vas laid up. Mein Gott! And ze list of Schlagintwert; ze last edition, revise and enlarge. Ze Moors zey vill now order vizout me, and I lose colossal sum in commission!” All this was Greek to Abdul, but a little more comprehensible to the Jew, with whom, however, Schwab refused to discuss business. He preferred to ply Abdul diligently with questions about the airship: where it came from; how it was driven; what was the composition of the fuel. “Already is it partly known to me,” he said. “It contain large quantity Photographic Sensitizer Preparation Number Six. But zat is not all. I know it! Vy? Because my Jarman intellex tell me so. But vizout doubt I discover it; zen zere shall be business for Schlagintwert. You do not know vat ze ozer zink is?” Abdul shook his head. “Zen you vas never made for business. Vun cannot learn it; it is born. So vas I born!” He discoursed on business and other things, despising his audience for their want of appreciation; then fell to bemoaning his fate. Thus the hours passed away. At last the monotony of the situation was broken. Abdul, like a good Mohammedan, was engaged in his devotions when the Jew, at the mouth of the cave, caught sight of a party of Moors far below, and signalled to them before he could be prevented. Springing up, Abdul was on the point of killing him with his knife when Schwab hastily interposed. “No, I vill not have it,” he said. “You kill him; zen am I accomplice; and vat is zat for a kind of business, I say?” But he did not decline to assist Abdul to truss up the Jew and render him incapable of further mischief. No more than Abdul himself did he wish to attract visitors.