I will show thee all these things--and others! "_Come_!" In silence the Legionaries followed old Bara Miyan through the curtained doorway; and after them came the sub-chiefs.

The Maghrabi stranglers, noiseless and bare-footed, fell in behind; a long ominous line of black human brutes, seeming hardly above the intellectual level of so many gorillas.
Stout-hearted as the Legionaries were, a kind of numbing oppression was closing in upon them.

City battlements and double walls of inner citadel, then massive gates and now again more doors that closed behind them, intervened between them and even the perilous liberty of the plain of El Barr.

And, in addition to all this, some hundreds of thousands of Arabs, waiting without, effectually surrounded them, and the Maghrabi men cast their black shadow, threatening and ominous, over the already somber enough canvas.
A web, they all felt, was closing about them that only chance and boldness could unravel.

Everything now hung on the word of an aged fanatic, who for any fancied breach of the Oath of Salt might deliver them to slavery, torture, death.
"Remember, men," the Master warned his men as they penetrated the dim, golden-walled passage also lighted with sandal-oil _mash'als_--"remember the mercy-bullets.