Daoud stood perfectly still, looking into the violet sky, reciting in his mind the salat, the prayer required of a Muslim five times daily. This was Mughrab, the moment when the last light of sunset had drained away. An evening breeze cooled his face, welcome after a day of traveling under the summer sky of Italy. Oriented by a bright crescent moon just rising, he faced southeast, toward Mecca. His back was to the stone wall of the inn called the Capo di Bue, the Ox's Head, where he and Sophia and Celino had decided to spend the night. On the other side of the wall, loud voices contended for attention, the sound of travelers in the common room settling down to supper. Praying in the dusk reminded Daoud that he was alone. What would it be like now in El Kahira, the Guarded One? He would be praying with hundreds of fellow Muslimin, standing shoulder to shoulder, all equal before God, in the Gray Mosque, all listening to the call of the blind muezzins from the minarets--"Come to the house of praise. God is Almighty. There is no god but God."--all facing the Prophet's birthplace together in holy submission. Daoud's prayer might be the only one going up to God tonight from anywhere near Rome. All around him towered ruins. The silhouettes of broken columns rose against the darkening sky, and across the Appian Way the ragged shape of what had once been a wall. Pines stood tall and black where, according to Lorenzo, some wealthy woman of ancient Rome had her tomb. He tried to forget his surroundings and to think only of the salat. It was hard to concentrate when he could not assume the proper positions for prayer--raise his hands, kneel, strike his forehead on the ground. He fixed his mind on the infinity of God. "Do not try to see Him," Abu Hamid al-Din Saadi had told him. "If you see Him in your mind, you are looking at an idol." Daoud did not try to see God, but as he prayed, a Muslim all alone in the heart of Christendom, he could not help but see Sheikh Saadi, the Sufi master who had brought him to Islam. * * * * * The face was very dark, the rich black of a cup of kaviyeh. Out of the blackness peered eyes that _saw_--saw into the very souls of his students. Often as he sat listening to Sheikh Saadi read from the Koran, the Book to be Read, and explain its meaning, voices from the past reproached him. The voice of Father Adrian, the chaplain of their castle, rang in his mind. The quiet voice of his mother, teaching him the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, whispered to him. Like thunder his father spoke of war and of what it was to be a knight. He could escape the torment of these voices only by listening closely to the Sufi sheikh. Saadi was trying to teach him how to be good, and that was the same thing his mother and father had wanted for him. So they would not mind if he learned from Saadi.