So they sailed southward ever, through smooth waters and past the
islands that lie like water-lilies in the midland sea. Many a strange
sight they saw: vessels bearing slaves, whose sighing might be heard
above the sighing of wind and water--young men and maidens of Ionia and
Achaia, stolen by slave-traders into bondage; now they would touch at
the white havens of a peaceful city; and again they would watch a smoke
on the sea-line all day, rising black into the heavens; but by nightfall
the smoke would change to a great roaring fire from the beacons of a
beleaguered island town; the fire would blaze on the masts of the ships
of the besiegers, and show blood-red on their sails, and glitter on the
gilded shields that lined the bulwarks of their ships. But the Sidonians
sped on till, one night, they anchored off a little isle that lies over
against the mouth of the Nile. Beneath this isle they moored the ship,
and slept, most of them, ashore.

Then the Wanderer began to plot a way to escape, though the enterprise
seemed desperate enough. He was lying in the darkness of the hold,
sleepless and sore with his bonds, while his guard watched under an
awning in the moonlight on the deck. They dreamed so little of his
escaping that they visited him only by watches, now and again; and,
as it chanced, the man whose turn it was to see that all was well fell
asleep. Many a thought went through the prisoner's mind, and now it
seemed to him that the vision of the Goddess was only a vision of sleep,
which came, as they said, through the false Gates of Ivory, and not
through the Gates of Horn. So he was to live in slavery after all, a
king no longer, but a captive, toiling in the Egyptian mines of Sinai,
or a soldier at a palace gate, till he died. Thus he brooded, till out
of the stillness came a thin, faint, thrilling sound from the bow that
hung against the mast over his head, the bow that he never thought