Hafiz was among the first to go. With his mouth full of a fresh message he was flying back to Gordon. As he passed through the echoing streets he met the band of one of the British battalions, and it was playing a march from the latest opera. *CHAPTER X* Gordon, lying in his bed, heard the voice of Hafiz in the hall. "Only me, Michael! All right! Don’t get up yet." At the next moment Hafiz himself, puffing and blowing, and with the cool air of morning in his clothes, came dashing into the room. "Halloa! Thought I was never coming back, I suppose! Couldn’t tear myself away—had to see it through—only just over. Tell you what, though—I do believe ... yes, I do really believe that brute of a Macdonald has set the trackers on to you! Coming down by El Azhar, behold, two damned blacks—Soudanese, I mean—poking their noses into the soft ground as if looking for footsteps. But no matter! We’ll dish the devil yet!" Thus the good fellow, after the nightlong flight of his spirit among sacred things, was giving way to the natural man, with chuckles and crows and shouts of joy and even harmless oaths that had no bitterness behind them. "Lord God! you should have seen it, Gordon! Just like one of the ’Nights of the Prophet,’ only bigger—yes, by my soul, bigger!" Then, sitting on the side of the bed, he described the doings of the night—how Ishmael had passed from group to group, comforting the mourners and laying a soothing hand on every mother’s sorrow, every father’s grief. "Can’t tell what the deuce it is in the man—whether it’s the prophet or the poet or the diviner—but he doesn’t need that anybody should tell him anything, because he _knows_." It was not at first that Gordon, coming out of the long night of his sufferings, caught the contagion of Hafiz’s good spirits, but his weary, bloodshot eyes began to shine when Hafiz described Ishmael’s appeal to the people to leave everything behind them and go with him into the desert—out of the empire of man into the empire of Allah. "It was thrilling! _Wallahi_! You had to hear it, though! It was not so much what he said as something in the man himself that set all your nerves tingling." And when Hafiz went on to tell of Ishmael’s appeal for help, not to the saints, the men whom God had cleansed of all sins, the souls that were as pure as the sands of the sea-shore and as fruitless, but to the sinners, the sin-laden and sin-stained, to whom the peace of life and the repose of death were both denied, he felt Gordon’s hand clutching at his own and his whole body quivering. "Sinners, not saints—did he say that, Hafiz?"