See! thus I teach you to boast over your betters! I shave your beard! There!--there!--and there!" In the middle of the reeking floor, so placed that the thin shaft of light from the clefts at the ends might fall on them--a barber-doctor was bleeding a youth from a vein in the arm.

"We're all having it done," he was saying.

"It's good for the internals.

I did it to a shipload of pilgrims once." A wild-looking creature sat in a corner--he was a saint, a madman, of the sect of the Darkaoa--rocking himself to and fro, and crying "Allah! All-lah! All-l-lah! All-l-l-lah!" Near to this person a haggard old man of the Grega sect was shaking and dancing at his prayers.

And not far from either a Mukaddam, a high-priest of the Aissa, brotherhood--a juggler who had travelled through the country with a lion by a halter--was singing a frantic mockery of a Christian hymn to a tune that he had heard on the coast.
Such was the scene of Israel's imprisonment, and such were the companions that were to share it.