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Updated: June 4, 2025
Woe to you, Abd er-Rahman! You have filled up the measure of your fathers. Woe to you, slave of the Compassionate!" The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State; the women of the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards and the soldiers. But his voice and his message came over them with the terror of a ghostly thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.
At last he cried, as if servants were about him and he were a master still, "Bring me robes clean robes white robes; I am going back to the King!" Meantime Tetuan was looking for the visit of His Shereefian Majesty, the Sultan Abd er-Rahman.
They poured into the town at the western gate, and shuffled and jostled and squeezed their way through the narrow streets firing recklessly into the air, and shouting as they went, "Abd er-Rahman is coming! The Sultan is coming! Dogs! Men! Believers! Infidels! Come out! come out!"
Thus, in his frenzy, pretending to imitate with airs of manifest mockery his outbreak of fear a few minutes before, Ben Aboo raved and raged and lifted his clenched fist to the sky in sham imprecation of God. "Who said it was the Sultan?" he cried again. "He was a fool. Abd er-Rahman? No; but Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! That's it! That's it!"
When Ben Aboo had regained himself, he saw Israel standing at the doorway, and he beckoned to him with the downward motion, which is the Moorish manner. And rising on his quaking limbs he took him aside and said, "I know this fellow. Ya Allah! Allah! For all his vaunts and visions he has gone to Abd er-Rahman. God will show! God will show! I dare not take him!
He pushed his way as one with authority along the winding passages to the garden where the Mahdi had called on Abd er-Rahman and foretold his fate. The garden opened upon the great hall, and a number of guests were standing there, cooling themselves in the night air while they waited for the arrival of the Sultan.
You come to me on this sham errand about the girl, but that is not your purpose, Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! What fool said you were a spy of the Sultan? Abd er-Rahman is here my guest and protector. You are a spy of his enemies, and a revolutionary, come hither to ruin our religion and our State. The penalty for such as you is death, and by Allah you shall die!"
The first, a public one, was that Abd er-Rahman would reach Tetuan within two days, on the opening of the feast of the Moolood, and the other, a private one, that if Naomi had not said the Kelmah by first prayers the following morning she should die and her father be cut off as the penalty of her apostasy.
"Who said that when he was away from Tetuan he went to Fez? The Sultan was there then. He had just come up from Soos. That's it! I knew it! The man is like all the rest of them. Abd er-Rahman has bought him. Allah! Allah! What have I done that every soul that eats my bread should spy and pry on me?"
He had given good proof of his manhood in the past by standing five-and-twenty years scapegoat for Ben Aboo between him and his people, making him rich by his extortions, keeping him safe in his seat, and thereby saving him from the wooden jellab which Abd er-Rahman, the Sultan, kept for Kaids that could not pay. But Israel mastered his anger and held his peace.
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