"And then there came from within the prison walls the muffled answer, ’Peace!’
"The second of the incidents occurred about midday. When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand, we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead beneath must be struggling in their sleep.
"At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company who belong to that country stepped out from the caravan and riding round and round the cemetery, shouted the names of their kindred who were buried there: ’Ali!’ ’Abdul!’ ’Mohammed!’ ’Mahmud!’ ’Said!’
"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing the dead as if they could hear, he cried, ’Peace to you, O people of the graves! Wait! Lie still! The night is passing! The daylight dawns!’
"It was thrilling! Strange, simple, primitive, crude in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism of our ’Christian’ vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons to bleach on the bare sand—a condition that is sufficient of itself to account for Jacob’s prayer, ’Bury me not, I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.’
"And so say all of us! But seriously, my dear Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how he spoke to the dead and they replied."
"It has happened! I knew it would! I have seen it coming, and it has come—without any help from Black Zogal’s crazy imagination, either. There was only one thing wanted to complete the faith of these people in Ishmael’s ’divinity’—a miracle, and it has been performed!
"I suppose it really belongs to the order of things that happen according to natural law—magnetism, suggestion, God knows what—but my pen positively jibs at recording it, so surely will it seem as if I had copied it out of a Book I need not name.
"This afternoon our vast human tortoise was trudging along, and a halt was being called to enable stragglers to come up, when a funeral procession crossed our track on its way to a graveyard on the stony hillside opposite.