第51章

There was a strange and bodeful silence on every side.The coffee-house of the Moors beyond the gate was already lit up, and the door was open, but the floor was empty.No snake-charmers, no jugglers, no story-tellers, with their circles of squatting spectators, were to be seen or heard.These professors of science and magic and jocularity had never before been absent.Even the blind beggars, crouching under the town walls, were silent.But out of the mosques there came a deep low chant as of many voices, from great numbers gathered within.

"The girl was right," said Fatimah; "something has happened.""What is it?" said Habeebah.

"Nay, how should I know that either?" said Fatimah.

"I tell you we are a pair of fools," said Habeebah.

Meantime Naomi held their hands, and they must needs follow where she led.Her body was between them; they were borne along by her feeble frame as by an irresistible force.And pitiful it would have seemed, and perhaps foolish also, if any human eye had seen them then, these helpless children of God, going whither they knew not and wherefore they knew not, save that a fear that was like to madness drew them on.

"Listen! I hear something," said Fatimah.

"Where?" said Habeebah.

"The way we are going," said Fatimah.

On and on Naomi passed from street to street.They were the same streets whereby she had returned to her father's house on the day that her goat was slain.Never since then had she trodden them, but she neither altered not turned aside to the right or the left, but made straight forward, until she came to the Sok el Foki, and to the place where the goat had fallen before the foaming jaws of the dog from the Mukabar.Then she could go no farther.

"Holy saints, what is this?" cried Habeebah.

"Didn't I tell you- the girl heard something?" said Fatimah.

"God's face shine on us," said Habeebah."What is all this crowd?"An immense throng covered the upper half of the market-square, and overflowed into the streets and arched alleys leading to the Kasbah.

It was not a close and dense crowd of white-hooded forms such as gathered on that spot on market morning--a seething, steaming, moving mass of haiks and jellabs and Maghribi blankets, with here and there a bare shaven head and plaited crown-lock--but a great crowd of dark figures in black gowns and skull-caps.The assemblage was of Jews only--Jews of every age and class and condition, from the comely young Jewish butcher in his blood-stained rags to the toothless old Jewish banker with gold braid on his new kaftan.

They were gathered together to consider the posture of affairs in regard to the plague of locusts.Hence the Moorish officials had suffered them to remain outside the walls of their Mellah after sunset.

Some of the Moors themselves stood aside and watched, but at a distance, leaving a vacant space to denote the distinction between them.

The scribes sat in their open booths, pretending to read their Koran or to write with their reed pens; the gunsmiths stood at their shop-doors;and the country Berbers, crowded out of their usual camping ground on the Sok, squatted on the vacant spots adjacent.All looked on eagerly, but apparently impassively, at the vast company of Jews.

And so great was the concourse of these people, and so wild their commotion, that they were like nothing else but a sea-broken by tempestuous winds.The market-place rang as a vault with the sounds of their voices, their harsh cries, their protests, their pleadings, their entreaties, and all the fury of their brazen throats.

And out of their loud uproar one name above all other names rose in the air on every side.It was the name of Israel ben Oliel.

Against him they were breathing out threats, foretelling imminent dangers from the hand of man, and predicting fresh judgments from God.

There was no evil which had befallen him early or late but they were remembering it, and reckoning it up and rejoicing in it.

And there was no evil which had befallen themselves but they were laying it to his charge.

Yesterday, when they passed through the town in their procession of penance, following their Grand Rabbi as he walked abreast of the Imam, that they might call on God to destroy the eggs of the locust, they had expected the heavens to open over their heads, and to feel the rain fall instantly.The heavens had not opened, the rain had not fallen, the thick hot cake as of baked air had continued to hang and to palpitate in the sky, and the fierce sun had beaten down as before on the parched and scorching earth.Seeing this, as their petitions ended, while the Muslims went back to their houses, disappointed but resigned, and muttering to themselves, "It is written" they had returned to their synagogues, convinced that the plague was a judgment, and resolved, like the sailors of the ship going down to Tarshish, to cast lots and to know for whose cause the evil was upon them.

They were more than a hundred and twenty families, and had thought they were therefore entitled to elect a Synhedrin.This was in defiance of ceremonial law, for they knew full well that the formation of a Synhedrin and the right to try a capital charge had long been forbidden.But they were face to face with death, and hence the anachronism had been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom of their fathers.So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed, without usurers, or slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men or childless ones.

The judges had sat in session the same night, and their judgment had been unanimous.The lot of Jonah had fallen on Israel.

He had sold himself to their masters and enemies, the Moors, against the hope and interest of his own people; he had driven some of the sons of his race and nation into exile in distant cities;he had brought others to the Kasbah, and yet others to death:

he was a man at open enmity with God, and God had given him, as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was cursed with devils, a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and deaf, and was still without sight and speech.