Street of the Sisters (Sharia el Benat) where the crocodile grinned
over the door, and the vision of a face looked down from a latticed
window. The women thought of the water gate at the back of the house;
the little children, who had heard secret words spoken, thought of the
crocodile, and ran crying past the house; but the handsome young men
thought only of the face, and each one said to himself, "She will not
make _me_ pay the price." Still, as years went on, bodies were seen in
the water from time to time, with a tiny purple spot over the heart to
show the curious that death had not come from drowning. And some, who
looked for lost ones, could not reclaim them from the canal, for bodies
were not always found. As time passed, it seemed to people who hurried
by the house in the narrow street, that the crocodile grew larger and
larger. It was said that it had been fed on the children of men Tiger
Ahmed had murdered in Sennaar.

None dared to say what they believed of Princess Zohra, but when, after
a long imprisonment by her nephew Abbas, in the House of the Crocodile,
she escaped to Constantinople, nobody would live where she had lived,
and the palace fell almost into ruin.

This was the story of the house where Monny Gilder and Rachel Guest and
Anthony Fenton were now. I had heard it talked about by our Arab
servants when I was a child, and had never forgotten, though scarcely
since then had I thought of the tale, until the remembered name and the
horrors attached to it jumped into my mind on reading Anthony's letter.
What had happened in the House of the Crocodile since Zohra's day, I
did not know; but because of the old story it seemed more sinister that
my friends should appeal for help from that place than from any other
in Cairo.