The pulling, bartering symphony rose ever more shrilly until the Prince, at last awakened by the tumult, sat up, opened his eyes, rubbed them, and dismissed the merchants with a promise to look at their wares some other time. Today he could not. For he was awaiting Hakim Ali, that descendant of the Archangel Ishrafil and the Kurdish vampire, who had been notified of the Prince's coming by a swift messenger galloping ahead of the caravan.
Hakim Ali, in spite of his—to say the least—peculiar, mixed ancestry, was a good, one hundred per cent Persian patriot and eager to do all in his unhallowed power so as to help his sovereign lord. He came now, crippled, naked but for a beggar's loin cloth, and carried in the arms of two slaves. His was not a very prepossessing exterior. His eyes were yellow flecked with green, his hair was red, and his face brown—unpleasantly so, resembling in color, texture and outlines an over-dried cocoanut. His body was emaciated and ribbed like a bamboo frame, and from his mother, the Kurdish vampire, he had inherited birds' claws that took the place of hands and
