“You hear?  The Rock speaks!  It spoke in plain words when the Prophet prayed here, and was translated instantly to heaven on his horse El-Burak.  Here, deep in the Rock, is the print of the hand of the angel, who restrained the Rock from following the Prophet on his way to Paradise.  Here, in this niche, is where Abraham used to pray; here, Elijah.  On the last day the Kaaba of Mecca must come to this place.  For it is here, in this cave, that the blast of the trumpet will sound, announcing the day of judgment.  Then God’s throne will be planted on the Rock above us.  Be humble in the presence of these marvels.”

He turned on his pompous heel and led the way out again without as much as a sidewise glance at me.  The spy was satisfied; he followed the party up the rock-hewn steps, and as a matter of fact went to sleep on a mat near the north door, for so I found him later on.

The silence shut down again.  Suliman went fast asleep, snoring with the even cadence of a clock’s tick, using my knees for a pillow with a perfect sense of ownership.  He was there to keep care of me, not I of him.  The sleep suggestion very soon took hold of me, too, for there was nothing whatever to do but sit and watch the shadows move, trying to liken them to something real as they changed shape in answer to the flickering of the tiny, naked flame.  Thereafter, the vigil resolved itself into a battle with sleep, and an effort to keep my wits sufficiently alert for sudden use.

I had no watch.  There was nothing to give the least notion of how much time had passed.  I even counted the boy’s snores for a while, and watched one lonely louse moving along the wall—­so many snores to the minute—­so many snores to an inch of crawling; but the louse changed what little mind he had and did not walk straight, and I gave up trying to calculate the distance he traveled in zigzags and curves, although it would have been an interesting problem for a navigator.  Finally, Suliman’s snoring grew so loud that that in itself kept me awake; it was like listening to a hair-trombone; each blast of it rasped your nerves.

You could not hear anything in the mosque above, although there were only eleven steps and the opening was close at hand; for the floor above was thickly carpeted, and if there were any sounds they were swallowed by that and the great, domed roof.  When I guessed it might be midnight I listened for the voice of the muezzin; but if he did call the more-than-usually faithful to wake up and pray, he did it from a minaret outside, and no faint echo of his voice reached me.  I was closed in a tomb in the womb of living rock, to all intents and purposes.

But it must have been somewhere about midnight when I heard a sound that set every vein in my body tingling.  At first it was like the sort of sound that a rat makes gnawing; but there couldn’t be rats eating their way through that solid stone.  I thought I heard it a second time, but Suliman’s snoring made it impossible to listen properly.  I shook him violently, and he sat up.