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This man before him was like no other he had ever met. Did voices speak to him? Were there, then, among the Christians such holy men as among the Muslims, who saw things before they happened, and read the human mind? Were there sorcerers among them, as among the Arabs? In any case his treason was known. What were to be the consequences? Diamond-dust in his coffee?
They put on their "specs," and pounce down upon some microscopic mote, which they think to be ignorance, but which is really the diamond-dust of imagination. "But let us see the place," said Grande. "We must drive within sight of it." "Yes," I said. "Halicarnassus, ask the driver to be sure to tell us where Lord Howe fell." "Fell into the brook," said that Oracle, and sat as stiff as a post.
The lean, invisible, ghastly arm of death could find him, if Kaid willed, though he delved in the bowels of the Cairene earth, or climbed to an eagle's eyrie in the Libyan Hills. Whether it was diamond-dust or Achmet's thin thong that stopped the breath, it mattered not; it was sure.
This man before him was like no other he had ever met. Did voices speak to him? Were there, then, among the Christians such holy men as among the Muslims, who saw things before they happened, and read the human mind? Were there sorcerers among them, as among the Arabs? In any case his treason was known. What were to be the consequences? Diamond-dust in his coffee?
He might have died by diamond-dust, and men would have set down their coffee-cups in surprise, and then would have forgotten; or he might have been struck down by the hand of an assassin, and, unless it was in the Palace, none would have paused to note it. And so the sands sweep over his steps upon the shore of time."
If I laboured for better things outside Kaid's Palace, how long dost thou think I should escape the Nile, or the diamond-dust in my coffee? The work which I did, is it not so that it, with much more, falls now to thy hands, Saadat, with a confidence from Kaid that never was mine?" "I sought not the office." "Have I a word of blame? I come to ask for work to do with thee. Do I not know Prince Kaid?
Again there were elaborate salutations and salaams, and Kaid presently said: "Foorgat?" "Effendina," answered High, "it is not known how he died. He was in this Palace alive at night. In the morning he was found in bed at his own home." "There was no wound?" "None, Effendina." "The thong?" "There was no mark, Effendina." "Poison?" "There was no sign, Effendina." "Diamond-dust?"
An exceedingly fine iron wire, with a small portion of sweet-oil and diamond-dust, is then laid upon this guiding scratch; and the workman draws the wire backwards and forwards, as we may see blocks of stone sawn on a larger scale in the yard of the statuary.
As they slowly passed the crowd on their way to the starting-point at the lower end of the field, and listened to the rattling fire of wagers and comments, they looked defiant, and alive to the importance of the coming event. El Rayo shone like burnished copper, his silver mane and tail glittering as if powdered with diamond-dust. He was long and graceful of body, thin of flank, slender of leg.
It was the age of cabalistic ciphers, like that of De Retz, of which Guy Joli dreamed the solution; of inexplicable secrets, like the Man in the Iron Mask, whereof no solution was ever dreamed; of poisons, like that diamond-dust which in six hours transformed the fresh beauty of the Princess Royal into foul decay; of dungeons, like that cell at Vincennes which Madame de Rambouillet pronounced to be "worth its weight in arsenic."
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