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 black horsehair ferauj, and accompanied by Mahsud Hakki, the chief eunuch to whom she had evidently confided the story of the mysterious summons; for the Nubian was laughing with a great flash of even, white teeth and waving a plum-colored paw at the Afghan in hearty greeting.

'Many, many moons have I longed for the sight of the Hajji Akh—”

“Silence, babbler!” had come the Afghan's rough, angry interruption. “Walls have ears—and so have”—he had walked up to the slave girl and had shaken her—“so have little, soft, downy things! Little, soft, downy things that will have their ears cut off if they babble and blab!”

Then all three had left, leaving the harem by a back stairway that led to the kitchen and was hardly ever used this time of the day, down to a small, walled garden heavy with the acrid scent of marigold and the pungent sweetness of red jessamine, thence by an underground passage known only to a few that, running for nearly a mile, opened, through a grass covered, intricate trap door, into a curious congeries of houses not far from the Ghulan River, within sight of the dead Ameer's mausoleum—the combined Hell's Kitchen, Rue de Venise, and Pimlico of the capital, the hiding-place of those who were in distress, and in debt, and in trouble of every kind; a place where brawling and bibbing of forbidden spirits and murder were the order of the day; where vice ran freely in and out of a dozen painted doors, where the pungent fumes of the Black Smoke rose nightly in morose spirals, where recklessness dwelt side by side with