Was her father alive?
Was he in some bleak cell behind that crumbling masonry?
Did he know that she was here?
Or was he really dead?
Ah, perhaps it were better that death should have taken him--better that than having his living heart wrung by the tale of his daughter's unspeakable miseries.
Even as she sent a last lingering look at the prison the prisoner within, his head buried in his thin wasted hands, beheld her in a vision--but in a happy, joyous vision, busying about the living room of the bungalow.
And far away a younger man beheld a vision as very tenderly he gazed at Kathlyn's discarded robe and resumed his determined quest.

Often, standing beside his evening fires, he would ask the silence, "Kathlyn, where are you ?" Even then he was riding fast toward Allaha.
A slave mart is a rare thing these days, but at the time these scenes were being enacted there existed many of them here and there across the face of the globe.

Men buy and sell men and women these times--enlightened, so they say--but they do it by legal contract or from vile hiding places.
Allaha had been a famous mart in its prime.

It had drawn the agents of princes from all over India.

Persia, Beloochistan, Afghanistan, and even southern Russia had been rifled of their beauties to adorn the zenanas of the slothful Hindu princes.
The slave mart in the capital town of Allaha stood in the center of the bazaars, a great square platform with a roof, but open on all four sides.