"This is the last word that will pass between you and me.

So part we now for ever, Ben Aboo--I to the work that waits for me,
and you to shame and contempt, and death and hell."

Saying this, he made a downward sweep of his open hand over the place
where the Basha lay, and Ben Aboo shrank under it as a worm shrinks

under a blow. Then with head erect he went out unhindered.
But he was not yet done. In the garden of the palace,

as he passed through it to the street, he stood a moment in the darkness
under the stars before the chamber where he knew the Sultan lay,

and cried, "Abd er-Rahman! Abd er-Rahman! slave of the Merciful!
Listen: I hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarum of war.

My heart makes a noise in me for my country, but the day
of her tribulation is near. Woe to you, Abd er-Rahman!

You have filled up the measure of your fathers. Woe to you,
slave of the Compassionate!"

The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State;
the women of the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards

and the soldiers. But his voice and his message came over them
with the terror of a ghostly thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.

"The Mahdi," they whispered with awe, and fell back when he approached.
The streets were quiet as he left the Kasbah. The rabble

of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs,
with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom

from the various mosques; and from these there came out
into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone

of singing voices behind the screens.
The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure

called the M'Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo's came to him
in secret. It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master,

whom she had visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble
and in madness; also of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume

in her memory, as well as of Naomi, their daughter, and
all her sufferings. In spasms, in gasps, without sequence

and without order, she told her story; but he listened to her
with emotion while the agitated black face was before him,

and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of night,
a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was imprisoned

in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father,
who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy

while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home.
These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit

of Israel's madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would,
the man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.

The Mahdi resolved" target="_blank" title="a.决心的；坚定的">resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning,
and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep. The town was quiet,

the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan's following
had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest. It was a wonderful night.

The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter,
but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens

behind the town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper
of a leaf. Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white

on the white walls and minarets. Nowhere is night so full of the spirit
of sleep as in an Eastern city. Below, under the moonlight,

lay the square white roofs, and between them were the dark streets
going in and out, trailing through and along, like to narrow streams

of black water in a bed of quarried chalk. Here or there,
where a belated townsman lit himself homeward with a lamp,

a red light gleamed out of one of the thin darknesses,
crept along a few paces, and then was gone. Sometimes a clamour

of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place,
and again everything was still. Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.

"O Tetuan," thought the Mahdi, "how soon will your streets be uprooted
and your sanctuaries destroyed!"

The Mooddin was chanting the call to prayers, and the old porter
at the gate was muttering over his rosary as the Mahdi left the town

in the dawn. He had to pick his way among the soldiers who were lying
on the bare soil outside, uncovered to the sky. Not one of them seemed

to be awake. Even their camels were still sleeping, nose to nose,
in the circles where they had last fed. Only their mules and asses,

all hobbled and still saddled, were up and feeding.
The Mahdi found Israel ben Oliel in the hut at Semsa. So poor a place

he had not seen in all his wanderings through that abject land.
Its walls were of clay that was bulged and cracked, and its roof was

of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel.
Israel was in his right mind. He was sitting by the door of his house,

with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason.
His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless,

and his head was bare. But so grand a head the Mahdi thought
he had never beheld before. Not until then had he truly seen him,

for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out
the clearer. It was the face of a man who for good or ill,

for struggle or mission" target="_blank" title="n.屈服；谦恭">submission, had walked and wrestled with God.
With salutations, barely returned to him, the Mahdi sat down

beside Israel at a little distance. He began to speak to him
in a tender way, telling him who he was, and where they had met before,

and why he came, and whither he was going. And Israel listened to him
at first with a brave show of composure as if the very heart of the man

were a frozen clod, whereby his eyes and the muscles of his face
and even the nerves of his fingers were also frozen.

Then the Mahdi spoke of Naomi, and Israel made a slow shake of the head.
He told him what had happened to her when her father was taken to prison,

and Israel listened with a great outwardcalmness. After that
he described the girl's journey in the hope of taking food to him,

and how she fell into the hands of Habeebah; and then he saw
by Israel's face that the affection of the father was tearing

his old heart woefully. At last he recited the incidents
of her cruel trial, and how she had yielded at length, knowing nothing

of religion, being only a child, seeing her father in everything
and thinking to save his life, though she herself must see him no more

(for all this he had gathered from Fatimah), and then the great thaw came
to Israel, and his fingers trembled, and his face twitched,

and the hot tears rained down his cheeks.
"My poor darling!" he muttered in a trembling undertone,

and then he asked in a faltering voice where she was at that time.
The Mahdi told him that she was back in prison, for rebelling

against the fortune intended for her--that of becoming a concubine
of the Sultan.

"My brave girl!" he muttered, and then his face shone with a new light
that was both pride and pain.

He lifted his eyes as if he could see her, and his voice
as if she could hear: "Forgive me, Naomi! Forgive me, my poor child!

Your weak old father; forgive him, my brave, brave daughter!"
This was as much as the Mahdi could bear; and when Israel turned

to him, and said in almost a childish tone, "I suppose there is
no help for it now, sir. I meant to take her to England--

to my poor mother's home, but--"
"And so you shall, as sure as the Lord lives," said the Mahdi,

rising to his feet, with the resolve that a plan for Naomi's rescue
which he had thought of again and again, and more than once rejected,

which had clamoured at the door of his heart, and been turned away
as a barbarousimpulse, should at length be carried into effect.

CHAPTER XXVI
ALI'S RETURN TO TETUAN

The plan which the Mahdi thought of had first been Ali's,
for the black lad was back in Tetuan. After he had fulfilled his errand

of mercy at Shawan; he had gone on to Ceuta; and there,
with a spirit afire for the wrongs of his master, from whom he was

so cruelly parted, he had set himself with shrewdness and daring
to incite the Spanish powers to vengeance upon his master's enemies.