The Mahdi resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning, and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep.  The town was quiet, the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan’s following had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest.  It was a wonderful night.  The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter, but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens behind the town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper of a leaf.  Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white on the white walls and minarets.  Nowhere is night so full of the spirit of sleep as in an Eastern city.  Below, under the moonlight, lay the square white roofs, and between them were the dark streets going in and out, trailing through and along, like to narrow streams of black water in a bed of quarried chalk.  Here or there, where a belated townsman lit himself homeward with a lamp, a red light gleamed out of one of the thin darknesses, crept along a few paces, and then was gone.  Sometimes a clamour of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place, and again everything was still.  Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.

“O Tetuan,” thought the Mahdi, “how soon will your streets be uprooted and your sanctuaries destroyed!”

The Mooddin was chanting the call to prayers, and the old porter at the gate was muttering over his rosary as the Mahdi left the town in the dawn.  He had to pick his way among the soldiers who were lying on the bare soil outside, uncovered to the sky.  Not one of them seemed to be awake.  Even their camels were still sleeping, nose to nose, in the circles where they had last fed.  Only their mules and asses, all hobbled and still saddled, were up and feeding.

The Mahdi found Israel ben Oliel in the hut at Semsa.  So poor a place he had not seen in all his wanderings through that abject land.  Its walls were of clay that was bulged and cracked, and its roof was of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel.  Israel was in his right mind.  He was sitting by the door of his house, with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason.  His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless, and his head was bare.  But so grand a head the Mahdi thought he had never beheld before.  Not until then had he truly seen him, for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out the clearer.  It was the face of a man who for good or ill, for struggle or submission, had walked and wrestled with God.

With salutations, barely returned to him, the Mahdi sat down beside Israel at a little distance.  He began to speak to him in a tender way, telling him who he was, and where they had met before, and why he came, and whither he was going.  And Israel listened to him at first with a brave show of composure as if the very heart of the man were a frozen clod, whereby his eyes and the muscles of his face and even the nerves of his fingers were also frozen.