It was a very lavish feast. It arrived almost at once, with a dull whoomping noise, on a long table with a striped awning above it for shade, and with it arrived liveried slaves to serve it. The rest of the bandits rather quickly got over their fear and came racing back to lounge on cushions and eat delicate food from golden dishes and to shout at the slaves for more, more, more! The servants were, Abdullah found when he got a chance to talk to some of them, the slaves of the Sultan of Zanzib himself, and the feast should have been the Sultan’s.

This news made Abdullah feel just a little better. He spent the feast still in chains, hitched up against a handy palm tree. Though he had not expected anything better from Kabul Aqba, it was still hard. At least Kabul Aqba remembered him from time to time and, with a lordly wave of his hand, sent a slave over with a golden dish or a jug of wine.

For there was plenty. Every so often there was another muffled whoomp and a fresh course would arrive, carried by more bewildered slaves, or there would be what looked like the pick of the Sultan’s wine cellar loaded onto a jeweled trolley, or an astonished group of musicians. Whenever Kabul Aqba sent a new slave over to Abdullah, Abdullah found that slave only too ready to answer questions.

“In truth, noble captive of a desert king,” one told him, “the Sultan was most enraged when the first and second courses so mysteriously disappeared. On the third course, which is this roast peacock that I carry, he placed a guard of mercenaries to escort us from the kitchen, but we were snatched from beside them, even at the very door of the banquet hall, and instantly found ourselves in this oasis instead.”

The Sultan, Abdullah thought, must be getting hungrier and hungrier.

Later a troupe of dancing girls appeared, snatched in the same way. That must have enraged the Sultan even more. These dancers made Abdullah melancholy. He thought of Flower-in-the-Night, who was twice as beautiful as any of them, and tears came into his eyes. As the jollity around the table grew, the two toads sat in the shallow edge of the pond, hooting mournfully. No doubt they felt at least as bad about things as Abdullah did.