However, the gale abated towards evening, and the youth himself was so
much worn out that the first respite was spent in sleep. When he
awoke, the sea was much calmer, and the eastern sun was rising in glory
over it; the Turks, with their prayer carpets in a line, were
simultaneously kneeling and bowing in prayer, with their faces turned
towards it. Lanty uttered an only too emphatic curse upon the
misbelievers, and Arthur vainly tried to make him believe that their
'Allah il Allah' was neither addressed to Mohammed nor the sun.

'Sure and if not, why did they make their obeisance to it all one as
the Persians in the big history-book Master Phelim had at school?'

'It's to the east they turn Lanty, not to the sun.'

'And what right have the haythen spalpeens to turn to the east like
good Christians?'

''Tis to their Prophet's tomb they look, at Mecca.'

'There, an' I tould you they were no better than haythens,' returned
Lanty, 'to be praying and knocking their heads on the bare boards--that
have as much sense as they have--to a dead man's tomb.'

Arthur's Scotch mind thought the Moors might have had the best of it in
argument when he recollected Lanty's trust in his scapulary.

They tried to hold a conversation with the Reis, between lingua Franca
and the Provencal of the renegade; and they came to the conclusion that
no one had the least idea where they were, or where they were going;
the ship's compass had been broken in the boarding, and there was no