the city and its inhabitants—­clear drawn in black and white before—­ fade into masses of black and deeper black.  Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest.  It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops.  What must the torment be in the latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling?  There are footfalls in the court below.  It is the Muezzin—­faithful minister; but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep—­the sleep that will not come to the city.

The Muezzin fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar—­a magnificent bass thunder—­ tells that he has reached the top of the Minar.  They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself!  Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering.  The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined in black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs—­’Allah ho Akbar’; then a pause while another Muezzin somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call—­’Allah ho Akbar.’  Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already.—­’I bear witness that there is no God but God.’  What a splendid cry it is, the proclamation of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores at midnight!  Once again he thunders through the same phrase, shaking with the vehemence of his own voice; and then, far and near, the night air rings with ’Mahomed is the Prophet of God.’  It is as though he were flinging his defiance to the far-off horizon, where the summer lightning plays and leaps like a bared sword.  Every Muezzin in the city is in full cry, and some men on the roof-tops are beginning to kneel.  A long pause precedes the last cry, ‘La ilaha Illallah,’ and the silence closes up on it, as the ram on the head of a cotton-bale.

The Muezzin stumbles down the dark stairway grumbling in his beard.  He passes the arch of the entrance and disappears.  Then the stifling silence settles down over the City of Dreadful Night.  The kites on the Minar sleep again, snoring more loudly, the hot breeze comes up in puffs and lazy eddies, and the Moon slides down towards the horizon.  Seated with both elbows on the parapet of the tower, one can watch and wonder over that heat-tortured hive till the dawn.  ’How do they live down there?  What do they think of?  When will they awake?’ More tinkling of sluiced water-pots; faint jarring of wooden bedsteads moved into or out of the shadows; uncouth music of stringed instruments softened by distance into a plaintive wail, and one low grumble of far-off thunder.  In the courtyard of the mosque the janitor, who lay across the threshold of the Minar when I came up, starts wildly in his sleep, throws his hands above his head, mutters something, and falls back again.  Lulled by the snoring of the kites—­they snore like over-gorged humans—­I drop off into an uneasy doze, conscious that three o’clock has struck, and that there is a slight—­a very slight—­coolness in the atmosphere.  The city is absolutely quiet now, but for some vagrant dog’s love-song.  Nothing save dead heavy sleep.