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Updated: May 18, 2025
Fatimah took her the four miles to Marteel, that the breath of the sea might bring colour to her cheeks, which had been whitened by the heat and fumes of the town. The day was soft and beautiful, the water was quiet, and only a gentle wind came creeping over it.
Then Ben Aboo rose in silent consternation, but his guests only laughed the louder, until a second messenger, a soldier of the guard, came running with more startling news. Marteel had been bombarded by the Spaniards; the army of Marshall O'Donnel was under the walls of Tetuan, and their own people were opening the gates to him.
On and on, hand in hand, they had walked through the winding paths of the oleander, between the creeping fences of the broom, and the sprawling limbs of the prickly pear, until they came to a stream, a tributary of the Marteel, trickling down from the wild heights of the Akhmas, over the light pebbles of its narrow bed.
Was it his duty to wipe out these beautiful dream-stories of the maid born blind and newly come upon the joy of hearing with his own sadder tales of what the world was and what life was, and death and heaven? The question was soon decided for him. Two days after Naomi had been taken to Marteel she was missed again. Israel hurried away to the sea, and there he came upon her.
It was loud and long and terrible. First from the direction of Marteel, over the four miles which divide Tetuan from the coast, came the warning which the sea sends before trouble comes to the land a deep moan as of waters falling from the sky. Next came the moan of the wind down the valley that opens on the gate called the Bab el Marsa, and along the river that flows to the port.
The day was hot, and they wandered far down the banks and dry bed of the Marteel. And as they ran and raced, the little black people plucked the wild flowers, and called to the cattle and the sheep and the dogs, and whistled to the linnets that whistled to their young. Thus the hours went on unheeded. The afternoon passed into evening, the evening into twilight, the twilight into early night.
War was to be declared, Marteel was to be bombarded, the army of Marshal O'Donnel was to come up the valley of the river, and Tetuan was to be taken. Such were the operations which by the whim of fate had been so strangely revealed to Ali, but Ali's own plan was a different matter.
There had been no group of beggars at the gate, and the streets around it were deserted; but in the distance, far across the town in the direction of the Bab el Marsa, the gate that goes out to Marteel, they heard a low hum as of vast droves of sheep. The Spaniard was coming, and the townsmen were going out to meet him.
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