Page:Tales of Today.djvu/94

78 formed a coup d’œil than which there could have been found nothing more magnificent to delight the eye. In the far distance the ashy hues of the desert sands blended away into the milky tints of the firmament, and the three pyramids of Ghizeh described their huge triangular masses of stone, vaporous and unsubstantial as shadows in the blue moonlight, against the line of the horizon.

Reclining on a pile of cushions with the long, flexible tube of his nargile enwrapping his form in its coils, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed endeavored to make out through the transparent darkness the shape of the distant palace where slumbered the fair Ayesha. A deep silence reigned over this picture that one might have taken for the work of the painter's brush, for not a breath, not a sound was there to reveal the presence of a living being: the only noise perceptible was that made by the smoke of Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed's nargile as it passed through the ball of rock-crystal that contained water designed to cool its white wreaths. All at once this tranquillity was broken by a piercing cry, a cry of supreme distress, such as the antelope at the border of the spring must utter when it feels the lion's paw upon its shoulder, or its head buried deep in the wide-extended jaws of the crocodile. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, terror-stricken at this cry of agony arid despair, sprang to his feet at a single bound and instinctively placed his hand upon the pommel of his yataghan and partially drew it so as to assure himself that it was free in the scabbard, then bent his ear in the direction whence the sound had seemed to him to proceed.

Far away in the darkness he descried a strange,