After the usual compliments and some customary observations about horses and pistols, Fakredeen, who had seated himself close to Tancred, with a kind of shrinking cajolery, as if he were seeking the protection of some superior being, addressing Amalek in a tone of easy assurance, which remarkably contrasted with the sentimental deference he displayed towards his prisoner, said: ‘Sheikh of Sheikhs, there is but one God: now is it Allah, or Jehovah?’ ‘The palm tree is sometimes called a date tree,’ replied Amalek, ‘but there is only one tree.’ ‘Good,’ said Fakredeen, ‘but you do not pray to Allah?’ ‘I pray as my fathers prayed,’ said Amalek. ‘And you pray to Jehovah?’ ‘It is said.’ ‘Sheikh Hassan,’ said the Emir, ‘there is but one God, and his name is Jehovah. Why do you not pray to Jehovah?’ ‘Truly there is but one God,’ said Sheikh Hassan, ‘and Mahomet is his Prophet. He told my fathers to pray to Allah, and to Allah I pray.’ ‘Is Mahomet the prophet of God, Sheikh of Sheikhs?’ ‘It may be,’ replied Amalek, with a nod of assent. ‘Then why do you not pray as Sheikh Hassan?’ ‘Because Moses, without doubt the prophet of God,--for all believe in him, Sheikh Hassan, and Emir Fakredeen, and you too, Prince, brother of queens,--married into our family and taught us to pray to Jehovah. There may be other prophets, but the children of Jethro would indeed ride on asses were they not content with Moses.’ ‘And you have his five books?’ inquired Tancred. ‘We had them from the beginning, and we shall keep them to the end.’ ‘And you learnt in them that Moses married the daughter of Jethro?’ ‘Did I learn in them that I have wells and camels? We want no books to tell us who married our daughters.’ ‘And yet it is not yesterday that Moses fled from Egypt into Midian?’ ‘It is not yesterday for those who live in cities, where they say at one gate that it is morning, and at another it is night. Where men tell lies, the deed of the dawn is the secret of sunset. But in the desert nothing changes; neither the acts of a man’s life, nor the words of a man’s lips. We drink at the same well where Moses helped Zipporah, we tend the same flocks, we live under the same tents; our words have changed as little as our waters, our habits, or our dwellings. What my father learnt from those before him, he delivered to me, and I have told it to my son. What is time and what is truth, that I should forget that a prophet of Jehovah married into my house?’ ‘Where little is done, little is said,’ observed Sheikh Hassan, ‘and silence is the mother of truth. Since the Hegira, nothing has happened in Arabia, and before that was Moses, and before him the giants.’