Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/126

 CHAPTER IX

AN OPAL IN AN EMERALD SETTING

HEN the great Sultan Mulay Idris II el-Azhar ordered his vanguard to halt on the summit of the Zalagh range, they saw there before them a deep valley, filled with a lush and beautiful vegetation and watered by two life-giving rivers." Thus a Moorish bard, surrounded by a crowd of the Faithful returning from the cemetery of Bab Futuh, began his tale, which my guide, a young Arab of Fez, translated for me, as we stood in the circle before him and listened to his recital of earlier days.

"'I do not know,' spake the sultan, 'what has drawn me to this place about which I have never heard but which I have distinctly seen with the eyes of my soul. Now, as this valley spreads itself before me, I seem to feel that there has fallen here from the finger of my great father the ring with the milky, iridescent opal set about with dark-green emeralds, which a mysterious Hendi (Hindoo) gave him with a powerful incantation. The place is beautiful and worthy of a descendant of the holy Ali, who had as his wife the daughter of our great Prophet, through whom the blood of the holy one came to the veins of the Idrises.'