Saying this, the worthy ferryman, seating himself in his boat, adjusted the oars, and when Sara, for it was no other than she for whom he had been waiting, had leaped into the little craft, he cast off the rope that held it and began to row toward the opposite shore.
“How many have crossed to-night?” asked Sara of the boatman, when they had scarcely pulled away from the mills, as though referring to something of which they had just been speaking.
“I could not count them,” he replied, “a swarm. It looks as though to-night will be the last of their gatherings.”
“And do you know what they have in mind and for what purpose they leave the city at this hour?”
“I don’t know, but it is likely that they are expecting some one who ought to arrive to-night. I cannot tell why they are lying in wait for him, but I suspect for no good end.”
After this brief dialogue Sara remained for some moments plunged in deep silence as if trying to collect her thoughts. “Beyond a doubt,” she reflected, “my father has discovered our love and is preparing some terrible vengeance. I must know where they go, what they do, and what they are plotting. A moment of hesitation might be death to him.”
While Sara sprang to her feet and, as if to thrust away the horrible doubts that distracted her, passed her hand over her forehead which anguish had covered with an icy sweat, the boat touched the opposite shore.
“Friend,” exclaimed the beautiful Jewess, tossing some coins to the ferryman and pointing to a narrow, crooked road that wound up among the rocks, “is that the way they take?”
“It is, and when they come to the Moor’s Head they turn to the left. Then the Devil and they know where they go next,” replied the boatman.
Sara set out in the direction he had indicated. For some moments he saw her appear and disappear alternately in that dusky labyrinth of dim, steep rocks. When she had reached the summit called the Moor’s Head, her dark silhouette was outlined for an instant against the azure background of the sky and then was lost amid the shades of night.
On the path where to-day stands the picturesque hermitage of the Virgin of the Valley, and about two arrow flights from the summit known by the Toledan populace as the Moor’s Head, there existed at that period the ruins of a Byzantine church of date anterior to the Arab conquest.