“Listen!  I hear something,” said Fatimah.

“Where?” said Habeebah.

“The way we are going,” said Fatimah.

On and on Naomi passed from street to street.  They were the same streets whereby she had returned to her father’s house on the day that her goat was slain.  Never since then had she trodden them, but she neither altered not turned aside to the right or the left, but made straight forward, until she came to the Sok el Foki, and to the place where the goat had fallen before the foaming jaws of the dog from the Mukabar.  Then she could go no farther.

“Holy saints, what is this?” cried Habeebah.

“Didn’t I tell you—­the girl heard something?” said Fatimah.

“God’s face shine on us,” said Habeebah.  “What is all this crowd?”

An immense throng covered the upper half of the market-square, and overflowed into the streets and arched alleys leading to the Kasbah.  It was not a close and dense crowd of white-hooded forms such as gathered on that spot on market morning—­a seething, steaming, moving mass of haiks and jellabs and Maghribi blankets, with here and there a bare shaven head and plaited crown-lock—­but a great crowd of dark figures in black gowns and skull-caps.  The assemblage was of Jews only—­Jews of every age and class and condition, from the comely young Jewish butcher in his blood-stained rags to the toothless old Jewish banker with gold braid on his new kaftan.

They were gathered together to consider the posture of affairs in regard to the plague of locusts.  Hence the Moorish officials had suffered them to remain outside the walls of their Mellah after sunset.  Some of the Moors themselves stood aside and watched, but at a distance, leaving a vacant space to denote the distinction between them.  The scribes sat in their open booths, pretending to read their Koran or to write with their reed pens; the gunsmiths stood at their shop-doors; and the country Berbers, crowded out of their usual camping ground on the Sok, squatted on the vacant spots adjacent.  All looked on eagerly, but apparently impassively, at the vast company of Jews.

And so great was the concourse of these people, and so wild their commotion, that they were like nothing else but a sea-broken by tempestuous winds.  The market-place rang as a vault with the sounds of their voices, their harsh cries, their protests, their pleadings, their entreaties, and all the fury of their brazen throats.  And out of their loud uproar one name above all other names rose in the air on every side.  It was the name of Israel ben Oliel.  Against him they were breathing out threats, foretelling imminent dangers from the hand of man, and predicting fresh judgments from God.  There was no evil which had befallen him early or late but they were remembering it, and reckoning it up and rejoicing in it.  And there was no evil which had befallen themselves but they were laying it to his charge.