“You feel,” said the Egyptian, “that I want your Amulet. That makes you distrust me.”
“But you also, you want my Amulet, and I am trusting you.”
“There’s something in that,” said Robert.
“We have the two halves of the Amulet,” said the Priest, “but not yet the pin that joined them. Our only chance of getting that is to remain together. Once part these two halves and they may never be found in the same time and place. Be wise. Our interests are the same.”
Before anyone could say more the skipper came back, and with him the dye-master. His hair and beard were curled like the men’s in Babylon, and he was dressed like the skipper, but with added grandeur of gold and embroidery. He had necklaces of beads and silver, and a glass amulet with a man’s face, very like his own, set between two bull’s heads, as well as gold and silver bracelets and armlets. He looked keenly at the children. Then he said—
“My brother Pheles has just come back from Tarshish. He’s at his garden house—unless he’s hunting wild boar in the marshes. He gets frightfully bored on shore.”
“Ah,” said the skipper, “he’s a true-born Phoenician. ‘Tyre, Tyre for ever! Oh, Tyre rules the waves!’ as the old song says. I’ll go at once, and show him my young barbarians.”
“I should,” said the dye-master. “They are very rum, aren’t they? What frightful clothes, and what a lot of them! Observe the covering of their feet. Hideous indeed.”
Robert could not help thinking how easy, and at the same time pleasant, it would be to catch hold of the dye-master’s feet and tip him backward into the great sunken vat just near him. But if he had, flight would have had to be the next move, so he restrained his impulse.
There was something about this Tyrian adventure that was different from all the others. It was, somehow, calmer. And there was the undoubted fact that the charm was there on the neck of the Egyptian.
So they enjoyed everything to the full, the row from the Island City to the shore, the ride on the donkeys that the skipper hired at the gate of the mainland city, and the pleasant country—palms and figs and cedars all about. It was like a garden—clematis, honeysuckle, and jasmine clung about the olive and mulberry trees, and there were tulips and gladiolus, and clumps of mandrake, which has bell-flowers that look as though they were cut out of dark blue jewels. In the distance were the mountains of Lebanon.