The window was open, and the breeze from the east, bearing, as it were, tales of the Nejd, the land of brave men and beautiful women, swayed the curtains softly.  Outside, in the sloping garden, waved the graceful branches of the tamarisk, glittering with dew in the early morning sun; and near the window a jujube tree stretched its dark, shining leaves and yellow fruit temptingly near.  Acacias with sweet-scented yellow blossoms, oleanders glowing with rosy bloom, and a thicket of silver-leaved castors separated the little plot from the gardens below, where grew gourds and cucumbers, lime and fig trees, grape-vines, water-melons and pomegranates; and beyond that lay a bright patch of Bursim, or Egyptian clover, like a yellow-green island on a darker sea.

Amzi, comfortably habited in a jubbeh of pink silk, worn over a caftan of fine white silk flowered with green and confined by a fringed, yellow sash at the waist, reclined in a position of luxurious ease at the window.  Between his plump fingers he held the amber stem of a handsomely carved pipe.  He looked scarcely older than when on that memorable journey in which he first met Yusuf.  His eye was still as bright, his hair scarcely more gray, and his cheek as ruddy as then; yet there was a somewhat discontented look on his face.

His eye wandered over the rich garden before him, and he thought of barren, ashen Mecca.  Then he looked restlessly back over the landscape below.  Surely it was fair enough to calm a restless spirit.

Immediately before, and to the eastward, the sun had risen out of a mass of lilac and rose-colored cloud.  The tufted trees on the distant hills stood black and distinct against the splendor of the sky.  To the right the date-groves of Kuba, famed throughout Arabia, struggled through a sea of mist that piled and surged in waves of amber and purple, leaving the tree tops like islands on a vapory sea.  To the left the seared and scoriae-covered crest of Mount Ohod rose, dark and scowling, like a grim sentinel on the borders of an Elysian valley.  In the rear lay the plain of El Munakhah, and the rush of the torrent El Sayh was borne on the breeze, bearing the willing mind beyond to the cool groves of Kuba, whence this raging flood dispersed itself in gentle rills, or was carried in silent channels to turn the water-wheels, or to fall, with musical plash, into wooden troughs that lay deep in the shade.

The ripple of water,—­ah, what it means to Arabian ears!  Little wonder that the inhabitant of the desert land never omits it from his idea of paradise, save in his conception of the highest heaven,—­a conception not lacking in sublimity—­that of a silent looking upon the face of God.

In the immediate foreground lay El Medina itself, with its narrow streets, its busy bazars, its fair-skinned people, and its low, yellow, flat-roofed houses, each with its well and court-yard, nestling cozily among the feathery-fronded date-trees.