Page:Tales of Today.djvu/95

Rh shadowy group, composed of a white-robed figure pursued by a horde of black, fantastic, monstrous forms in disorderly array and with maniacal gestures. The white shadow seemed to fly over the house-tops, and the distance between it and its enemies was so small that there was reason to fear that it would soon be overtaken should the chase be protracted or should nothing happen to favor it. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed at first believed that it was a peri beset by a pack of ghouls, who munch the flesh of the dead with their huge tusks, or of djinns, with flabby, membranous wings and long nails like those of bats, and, drawing from his pocket his comboloio of beads of ruddy aloe-wood, he began to recite the ninety-nine names of Allah by way of exorcism. He had not yet reached the twentieth when he desisted. It was not a peri, a supernatural being, who was flying thus, leaping from terrace to terrace and bounding across the streets, four or five feet in width—which, in eastern cities, bisect the close-built blocks of houses—but a woman of flesh and blood, and the djinns were only mutes, chaouses, and eunuchs, who were after her in hot pursuit.

Only two or three terraces and a street now lay between the fugitive and the platform where Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed was standing, but her strength seemed to be abandoning her; she turned her head convulsively for a look backward, and, as a spent horse that feels the spur tearing his flank, beholding the hideous band so close upon her trail, she made a supreme effort, and with a desperate leap placed the street between her and her foes.

She grazed Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed in her headlong