‘One,’ said Eustace, ’who has reason to hate Richard as much as that poor lady in there.’

‘Who is that?’

‘My sister Jehane’s lover.’

‘By the visible Host,’ said Montferrat,’ we shall be a loving company, all told.’  So they parted for the time.

The Tower of Flies stands apart from the city on a spit of sand which splays out into two flanges, and so embraces in two hooks a lagoon of scummy ooze, of weeds and garbage, of all the waste and silt of a slack water.  In front of it only is the tidal sea, which there flows languidly with a half-foot rise; on the other is the causeway running up to the city wall.  Above and all about this dead marsh you hear day and night the buzzing of innumerable great flies, and in the daytime see them hanging like gauze in the thick air.  They say the reason is that anciently the pagans sacrificed hecatombs hereabout to the idols they worshipped; but another (more likely) is that the lagoon is a dead slack, and stinks abominably.  All dead things thrown from the city walls come floating thither, and there stay rotting.  The flies get what they can, sharing with the creatures of land and sea; for great fish feed there; and at night the jackals and hyaenas come down, and bicker over what they can drag out.  But more than once or twice the sharks drag them in, and have fresh meat, if their brother sharks allow it.  However all this may be, the place has a dreadful name, a dreadful smell, and a dreadful sound, what with the humming of flies and dull rippling of the sharks.  These can seldom be seen, since the water is too thick; but you can tell their movements by the long oily waves (like the heads of large arrows) which their fins throw behind them as they quest from carcase to carcase down there in the ooze.

Thither in the murk of night came Montferrat in a black cloak, holding his nose, but made feverish through his ears by the veiled chorus of the flies.  By the starshine and glow of the putrid water he saw a tall man in a white robe, who stood at the extreme edge of the spit and looked at the sharks.  Montferrat hid his guards behind the Tower, crossed himself, drew his sword to hack a way through the monstrous flies, and so came swishing forward, like a man who mows a swathe.

The tall man saw him, but did not move.  The Marquess came quite close.

‘What are you looking at, my friend?’ he asked, in the Arabian tongue.

‘I am looking at the sharks, which have a new corpse in there,’ said the man.  ’See what a turmoil there is in the water.  There must be six monsters together in that swirl.  See, see, there speeds another!’

The Marquess turned sick.  ‘God help, I cannot look,’ he said.

‘Why,’ said the Arabian, ‘It is a dead man they fight over.’

‘May be, may be,’ said the Marquess.  ’You, my friend, are very familiar with death.  So am I; nor do I fear living man.  But these great fish terrify me.’