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From adversity to adversity, from country to country, we were finally driven to seclusion in the Isle of Candia, part of the quondam Minos territory. Venice had allowed Candia to fall before Mahomet's bloody sword. Europe lost her bulwark, the Cross of the Saviour was thrown down, and the Candian Christians have been massacred or forced to flee.

The news came to the King, who said to the saint, "Why do you act so, now that the royal granaries are empty?" Then he called together the members of his council and wanted to have Sidi Mahomet's head cut off. "Go out," he said to him.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead!

Hammond to be some waif from one of those nethermost worlds a village doctor's son, perhaps, or even a tradesman's sent to the University by some benevolent busybody, and placed at a disadvantage ever afterwards, an unfortunate anomaly, suspended between two worlds like Mahomet's coffin. The butler announced that his lordship's dinner was served.

Then they had gained their lord's displeasure as far as to cause a rebuke against them to be inscribed in the Kuran, but now their rage, though still smouldering, was useless against the triumph of that long-looked-for birth. But Mahomet's joy was short-lived. Scarcely had three months passed when Ibrahim sickened even beneath the most devoted care.

About the time of Mahomet's birth a famine fell upon the Beni Sa'ad, which left nothing of all their stores, and the women of the tribe journeyed, weary and stricken with hunger, into the city of Mecca that they might obtain foster-children whose parents would give them money and blessings if they could but get their little ones taken away from that unhealthy place.

Accordingly, the next night, the two friends met at Cheyne Gardens. And a long time they sat silent, Loveday feeding his eyes upon his friend's face, that hard, rounded brow which seemed harder, and frowned now, that gallant largeness of eye which seemed now wilder, and that manly height, which seemed Mahomet's in the Oriental dress. "But where have you been for five weeks?" asked Loveday.

"It is a prison," said he, "but a traveling prison; and, with the right of putting my nose to the window, I could well stand a lease of a hundred years. You smile, Barbicane. Have you any arriere-pensee? Do you say to yourself, `This prison may be our tomb? Tomb, perhaps; still I would not change it for Mahomet's, which floats in space but never advances an inch!"

And one might have expected some passing word from the Master that would have expressed such a feeling as that, if He had been only a young Teacher seeking for recognition. I remember that in that strange medley of beauty and absurdity, the Koran, somewhere or other, there is an outpouring of Mahomet's heart about the blessedness of his first finding a soul that would believe in him.

"Curses upon the Kureisch!" replied Mahomet. "Who will show me a way where they will not meet us?" A guide was quickly found, and Mahomet turned his company aside, journeying by devious routes until he came to the place of Hodeibia, a plain upon the verge of the sacred territory. Here Al-Cawsa, Mahomet's prized camel, halted, and would in nowise be urged farther.