When a boy, before the doom of slavery had been pronounced upon him and his father, his mother, by the priest’s advice, took him there to recover from the severe attack of fever which he could not shake off amid the damp papyrus plantations surrounding his parents’ house.  In the dry, pure air of the desert he recovered, and he would guide Hermon there before returning to Myrtilus.

From Tanis they reached Tennis in a few hours, and found shelter in the home of the superintendent of Archias’s weaving establishments, whose hospitality Myrtilus and Hermon had enjoyed before their installation in the white house, now burned to the ground.  The Alexandrian bills of exchange were paid in gold by the lessee of the royal bank, who was a good friend of Hermon.  Toward evening, both rowed to the Owl’s Nest, taking the five talents with which the runaway wife intended to purchase freedom from her husband.

As the men approached the central door of the pirates’ house, a middy-aged Biamite woman appeared and rudely ordered them to leave the island.  Tabus was weak, and refused to see visitors.  But she was mistaken; for when Bias, in the dialect of his tribe, shouted loudly that messengers from the wife of her grandson Hanno had arrived, there was a movement at the back of the room, and broken sentences, gasped with difficulty, expressed the old dame’s wish to receive the strangers.

On a sheep’s-wool couch, over which was spread a wolfskin, the last gift of her son Satabus, lay the sorceress, who raised herself as Hermon passed through the door.

After his greeting, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged him to speak louder.  At the same time she gazed into his eyes with a keen, penetrating glance, and interrupted him by the question:  “The Greek sculptor whose studio was burned over his head?  And blind?  Blind still?”

“In both eyes,” Bias answered for his master.

“And you, fellow?” the old dame asked; then, recollecting herself, stopped the reply on the servant’s lips with the hasty remark:  “You are the blackbeard’s slave—­a Biamite?  Oh, I remember perfectly!  You disappeared with the burning house.”

Then she gazed intently and thoughtfully from one to the other, and at last, pointing to Bias, muttered in a whisper:  “You alone come from Hanno and Ledscha, and were with them on the Hydra?  Very well.  What news have you for the old woman from the young couple?”

The freedman began to relate what brought him to the Owl’s Nest, and the gray-haired crone listened eagerly until he said that Ledscha lived unhappily with her husband, and therefore had left him.  She sent back to her, as the head of Hanno’s family, the bridal dowry with which Hanno had bought her from her father as his wife.

Then Tabus struggled into a little more erect posture, and asked:  “What does this mean?  Five talents—­and gold, not silver talents?  And she sends the money to me?  To me?  And she ran away from her husband?  But no—­no!  Once more—­you are a Biamite—­repeat it in our own language—­and loudly.  This ear is the better one.”