A great weariness beset the sheykh—the accumulated claims of all the nights and days when he had shunned repose. Though he wrestled with it, aware that now, more than ever, there was call to watch, little by little that lassitude overpowered him. He beheld the star-flecked sky for a while fitfully, as if a curtain flapped between it and his eyes. Then he saw no more of sky, or stars, or darkness veiling the face of earth. He dreamed. He sat again in his shop in the small bazaar, with hands outspread over the brazier. He heard the chime of camel bells. Some one spoke behind him, when, turning, he beheld an afrìt of baleful aspect, having eyes of flame. And what that devil bade him do, that perforce he did, though well knowing that it was against his own soul. At blush of day he set out from his small white city of the tawny hills, and the people thronged about him, called him holy, cried to him for a blessing. And he blessed them—he, the slave of evil. The welkin rang with laughter of foul fiends. He stood beneath the dying tree, denouncing Fatmeh as in righteous anger. And as the woman writhed in anguish at his feet, a voice came from within the litter, “Is the woman’s sin above thine? Hast not thou recourse to another than Allah, a creature no more potent than this tree?” He fell down and strove to pray. But his prayer went crooked, turned away from God. That jinni was at his ear, distracting him. So he arose and went his way through the tainted air. Friends turned to foes. Old friends grinned aside, mocking him. Then came one who mistook him for a saint—a poor man, good and faithful. He longed to undeceive him, but could not, the devil preventing. He stood in the smiling court of the Frank’s house. He knelt; he prostrated himself; he offered gifts; he prayed to that unbeliever in place of Allah; wide awake to the sin he thus committed, yet constrained thereto by the evil thing possessing him. “Save but the life! but the life alone!” he cried; and the infidel, though something loath, consented. Abd-ur-Rahman, Shibli, Hassan—all old friends forsook him. Only that simple one, who believed in him, still clung to him with reverence. The aged Chief of the Learned, all wise men, remonstrated with him. He saw their mouths open and shut, he felt their disapproval; but his mind made nothing of what they said. “Save but the life!” he cried in their defiance. He sat in a chamber of the Frank’s house and waited, his soul racked with suspense. The chair on which he sat proved an instrument of torture, crushing both his feet. Suddenly, a man moved in the room with him, supporting something with both hands. “The life is saved, O sheykh, the life only. See it here before thee.” The speaker turned, revealing the earth-hued face, the eyes of flame, of that same jinni who had beguiled him at the first. His laugh had the rattle of dry bones as he repeated: “Behold what it is, the life only!”