Before these curtains Billali motioned us to halt.
After a whispered colloquy with someone beyond carried on through the join of the curtains, he vanished between them, leaving us alone for five minutes or more.

At length they opened and a tall and elegant woman with an Arab cast of countenance and clad in white robes, appeared and beckoned to us to enter.

She did not speak or answer when I spoke to her, which was not wonderful as afterwards I discovered that she was a mute.

We went in, I wondering very much what we were going to see.
On the further side of the curtains was a room of no great size illumined with lamps of which the light fell upon sculptured walls.

It looked to me as though it might once have been the inmost court or a sanctuary of some temple, for at its head was a dais upon which once perhaps had stood the shrine or statue of a god.