"To the President of the United States," wrote Hood: "In reply to your message requesting further evidence of my power to compel the cessation of hostilities within twenty-four hours, I"--there was a pause for nearly a minute, during which the ticking of the big clock sounded to Thornton like revolver shots--"I will excavate a channel through the Atlas Mountains and divert the Mediterranean into the Sahara Desert. PAX." Silence followed the final transcription of the message from the unknown--a silence broken only by Bill Hood's tremulous, half-whispered: "He'll do it all right!" Then the German Ambassador laughed. "And thus save your ingenious nation a vast amount of trouble, Monsieur Liban," said he. VI A Tripolitan fisherman, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, a holy man nearly seventy years of age, who had twice made the journey to Mecca and who now in his declining years occupied himself with reading the Koran and instructing his grandsons in the profession of fishing for mullet along the reefs of the Gulf of Cabes, had anchored for the night off the Tunisian coast, about midway between Sfax and Lesser Syrtis. The mullet had been running thick and he was well satisfied, for by the next evening he would surely complete his load and be able to return home to the house of his daughter, Fatima, the wife of Abbas, the confectioner. Her youngest son, Abdullah, a lithe lad of seventeen, was at that moment engaged in folding their prayer rugs, which had been spread in the bow of the falukah in order that they might have a clearer view as they knelt toward the Holy City. Chud, their slave, was cleaning mullet in the waist and chanting some weird song of his native land.