Before the end of those seventy-and-six days the harvest of wheat and barley would be yellow to the scythe and ripe for the granary, but the locust would cover the face of the earth, and there would be no grain to gather.  The scythe would be idle, the granaries would be empty, the tillers of the ground would come hungry into the markets, and they themselves that were town-dwellers and tradesmen would be perishing for bread, both they and their children with them.

Thus in Israel’s absence, while he was away at Shawan, the three-and-twenty judges of the new Synhedrin of Tetuan had—­contrary to Jewish custom—­tried and convicted him.  God would not let them perish for this man’s life, and neither would He charge them with his blood.

Nevertheless, judges though they were, they could not kill him.  They could only appeal against him to the Kaid.  And what could they say?  That the Lord had sent this plague of locusts in punishment of Israel’s sin?  Ben Aboo would laugh in their faces and answer them, “It is written.”  That to appease God’s wrath it was expedient that this Jew should die?  Convince the Muslim that a Jew had brought this desolation upon the land of the Shereefs, and he would arise, and his soldiers with him, and the whole community of the Jewish people would be destroyed.

The judges had laid their heads together.  It was idle to appeal to Ben Aboo against Israel on any ground of belief.  Nay, it was more than idle, for it was dangerous.  There was nothing in common between his faith and their own.  His God was not their God, save in name only.  The one was Allah, great, stern, relentless, inexorable, not to be moved striding on to an inevitable end, heedless of man and trampling upon him—­though sometimes mocked with the names of the Compassionate and the Merciful.  But the other was Jehovah, the father of His people Israel, caring for them, upholding them, guiding the world for them, conquering for them; but visiting His anger upon them when they fell away from Him.

The three-and-twenty judges in session in the synagogue up the narrow lane of the Sok el Foki had sat far into the night, with the light of the oil-lamps gleaming on their perplexed and ashen faces.  Some other ground of appeal against Israel had to be found, and they could not find it.  At length they had remembered that, by ancient law and custom the trial of an Israelite, for life or death, must end an hour after sunset.  Also they had been reminded that the day that heard the evidence in a capital case must not be the same whereon the verdict was pronounced.  So they had broken up and returned home.  And, going out at the gate, they had told the crowds that waited there that judgment had fallen upon Israel ben Oliel, but that his doom could not be made known until sunset on the following day.

That time was now come.  In eagerness and impatience, in hot blood and anger, the people had gathered in the Sok three hours after midday.  The Judges had reassembled in the synagogue in the early morning.  They had not broken bread since yesterday, for the day that condemned a son of Israel to death must be a fast-day to his judges.