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Donovan Pasha, and Some People of Egypt — Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6260 · 472,467 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Donovan Pasha, and Some People of Egypt — Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 18, 2004 [eBook #6260]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6260

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DONOVAN PASHA, AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT — COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT, Complete

By Gilbert Parker


CONTENTS

     Volume 1.
     WHILE THE LAMP HOLDS OUT TO BURN
     THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE-AND THE DRUM
     THE DESERTION OF MAHOMMED SELIMON
     THE REEF OF NORMAN’S WOE

     Volume 2.
     FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY
     THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
     A TREATY OF PEACE
     AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS
     ALL THE WORLD’S MAD

     Volume 3.
     THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
     A TYRANT AND A LADY

     Volume 4.
     A YOUNG LION OF DEDAN
     HE WOULD NOT BE DENIED
     THE FLOWER OF THE FLOCK
     THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS
     INTRODUCTION


To the FOREWORD of this book I have practically nothing to add. It
describes how the book was planned, and how at last it came to be
written. The novel--‘The Weavers’--of which it was the herald, as
one might say, was published in 1907. The reception of Donovan Pasha
convinced me beyond peradventure, that the step I took in enlarging my
field of work was as wise in relation to my art as in its effect upon my
mind, temperament and faculty for writing. I knew Egypt by study quite
as well as I knew the Dominion of Canada, the difference being, of
course, that the instinct for the life of Canada was part of my very
being itself; but there are great numbers of people who live their lives
for fifty or seventy or eighty years in a country, and have no real
instinct for understanding. There are numberless Canadians who do not
understand Canada, Englishmen who know nothing of England, and Americans
who do not understand the United States. If it is so that I have some
instinct for the life of Canada, and have expressed it to the world
with some accuracy and fidelity, it is apparent that the capacity for
understanding could not be limited absolutely to one environment. That I
understood Canada could not be established by the fact that I had spent
my boyhood there, but only by the fact that some inner vision permitted
me to see it as it really was. That inner vision, however, if it was
anything at all was not in blinders, seeing only one section of the life
of the world. Relatively it might see more deeply, more intimately in
that place where habit of life had made the man familiar with all its
detail, but the same vision turned elsewhere to fields where study
and sympathy played a devoted part, could not fail to see; though the
workman’s craft, which made material the vision, might fail.

The reception given Donovan Pasha convinced me that neither the vision
nor the craftsmanship had wholly failed, whatever the degree of success
which had been reached. Anglo-Egyptians approved the book. Its pages
passed through the hands of an Englishman who had done over twenty
years’ service in the British army in Egypt and in official positions
in the Egyptian administration, and I do not think that he made six
corrections in the whole three hundred pages. He had himself a great
gift for both music and painting; he was essentially exacting where any
literature touching Egypt was concerned; but I am glad to think that,
whatever he thought of the book as fiction, he did not find it necessary
to grant absolution as to the facts and the details of incidents in
character and life pourtrayed in Donovan Pasha.

Who the original of ‘Donovan Pasha’ was I shall never say, but he was
real. There is, however, in the House of Commons today a young and
active politician once in the Egyptian service, and who bears a most
striking resemblance to the purely imaginary portrait which Mr. Talbot
Kelly, the artist, drew of the Dicky Donovan of the book. This young
politician, with his experience in the diplomatic service, is in manner,
disposition, capacity, and in his neat, fine, and alert physical frame,
the very image of Dicky Donovan, as in my mind I perceived him; and when
I first saw him I was almost thunderstruck, because he was to me Dicky
Donovan come to life. There was nothing Dicky Donovan did or said or saw
or heard which had not its counterpart in actual things in Egypt. The
germ of most of the stories was got from things told me, or things that
I saw, heard of, or experienced in Egypt itself. The first story of
the book--‘While the Lamp Holds out to Burn’--was suggested to me by an
incident which I saw at a certain village on the Nile, which I will not
name. Suffice it to say that the story in the main was true. Also the
chief incident of the story, called ‘The Price of the Grindstone--and
the Drum’, is true. The Mahommed Seti of that story was the servant of
a friend of mine, and he did in life what I made him do in the tale. ‘On
the Reef of Norman’s Woe’, which more than one journal singled out as
showing what extraordinary work was being done in Egypt by a handful of
British officials, had its origin in something told me by my friend Sir
John Rogers, who at one time was at the head of the Sanitary Department
of the Government of Egypt.

I could take the stories one by one, and show the seeds from which this
little plantation of fiction sprang, but I will not go further than to
refer to a story called ‘Fielding Had an Orderly’, the idea of which was
contained in the experience of a British official whose courage was
as cool as his wit, and both were extremely dangerous weapons, used at
times against those who were opposed to him. When I read a book like
‘Said the Fisherman’, however, with its wonderfully intimate knowledge
of Oriental life and the thousand nuances which only the born
Orientalist can give, I look with tempered pride upon Donovan Pasha.
Still I think that it caught and held some phases of Egyptian life
which the author of ‘Said the Fisherman’ might perhaps miss, since the
observation of every artist has its own idiosyncrasy, and what strikes
one observer will not strike another.




A FOREWORD

It is now twelve years since I began giving to the public tales of life
in lands well known to me. The first of them were drawn from Australia
and the Islands of the Southern Pacific, where I had lived and roamed
in the middle and late Eighties. They appeared in various English
magazines, and were written in London far from the scenes which
suggested them. None of them were written on the spot, as it were. I did
not think then, and I do not think now, that this was perilous to their
truthfulness. After many years of travel and home-staying observation
I have found that all worth remembrance, the salient things and scenes,
emerge clearly out of myriad impressions, and become permanent in mind
and memory. Things so emerging are typical at least, and probably true.

Those tales of the Far South were given out with some prodigality. They
did not appear in book form, however; for, at the time I was sending out
these Antipodean sketches, I was also writing--far from the scenes where
they were laid--a series of Canadian tales, many of which appeared in
the ‘Independent’ of New York, in the ‘National Observer’, edited by Mr.
Henley, and in the ‘Illustrated London News’. By accident, and on the
suggestion of my friend Mr. Henley, the Canadian tales ‘Pierre and his
People’ were published first; with the result that the stories of the
Southern Hemisphere were withheld from publication, though they have
been privately printed and duly copyrighted. Some day I may send them
forth, but meanwhile I am content to keep them in my own care.

Moved always by deep interest in the varied manifestations of life in
different portions of the Empire, five or six years ago I was attracted
to the Island of Jersey, in the Channel Sea, by the likeness of the
origin of her people with that of the French-Canadians. I went to live
at St. Heliers for a time, and there wrote a novel called ‘The Battle of
the Strong’.

Nor would it be thought strange that, having visited another and newer
sphere of England’s influence, Egypt to wit, in 1889, I should then
determine that, when I could study the country at leisure, I should
try to write of the life there, so full of splendour and of primitive
simplicity; of mystery and guilt; of cruel indolence and beautiful
industry; of tyranny and devoted slavery; of the high elements of a true
democracy and the shameful practices of a false autocracy; all touched
off by the majesty of an ancient charm, the nobility of the remotest
history.

The years went by, and, four times visiting Egypt, at last I began to
write of her. That is now five years ago. From time to time the stories
which I offer to the public in this volume were given forth. It is
likely that the old Anglo-Egyptian and the historical student may find
some anachronisms and other things to criticise; but the anachronisms
are deliberate, and even as in writing of Canada and Australia, which I
know very well, I have here, perhaps, sacrificed superficial exactness
while trying to give the more intimate meaning and spirit. I have never
thought it necessary to apologise for this disregard of photographic
accuracy,--that may be found in my note-books,--and I shall not begin to
do so now. I shall be sufficiently grateful if this series of tales does
no more than make ready the way for the novel of Egyptian life on which
I have been working for some years. It is an avant courier. I hope,
however, that it may be welcomed for its own sake.

                            G. P.


     NOTE: A Glossary will be found at the end of the volume.





WHILE THE LAMP HOLDS OUT TO BURN

There is a town on the Nile which Fielding Bey called Hasha, meaning
“Heaven Forbid!” He loathed inspecting it. Going up the Nile, he would
put off visiting it till he came down; coming down, he thanked his fates
if accident carried him beyond it. Convenient accidents sometimes did
occur: a murder at one of the villages below it, asking his immediate
presence; a telegram from his Minister at Cairo, requiring his return;
or a very low Nile, when Hasha suddenly found itself a mile away from
the channel and there was no good place to land. So it was that Hasha,
with little inspection, was the least reputable and almost the dirtiest
town on the Nile; for even in those far-off days the official Englishman
had his influence, especially when Kubar Pasha was behind him. Kubar had
his good points.

There were certain definite reasons, however, why Fielding Bey shrank
from visiting Hasha. Donovan Pasha saw something was wrong from the
first moment Hasha was mentioned.

On a particular day they were lying below at another village, on the
Amenhotep. Hasha was the next place marked red on the map, and that
meant inspection. When Dicky Donovan mentioned Hasha, Fielding Bey
twisted a shoulder and walked nervously up and down the deck. He stayed
here for hours: to wait for the next post, he said-serious matters
expected from head quarters. He appeared not to realise that letters
would get to Hasha by rail as quickly as by the Amenhotep.

Every man has a weak spot in his character, a sub-rosa, as it were, in
his business of life; and Dicky fancied he had found Fielding Bey’s.
While they waited, Fielding made a pretence of working hard--for
he really was conscientious--sending his orderly for the
mamour--[magistrate]--and the omdah--[head of a village]--, and holding
fatuous conferences; turning the hose on the local dairymen and butchers
and dategrowers, who came with backsheesh in kind; burying his nose in
official papers; or sending for Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer, to find
out what the run would be to the next stopping-place beyond Hasha. Twice
he did this; which was very little like Fielding Bey. The second time,
when Holgate came below to his engine, Dicky was there playing with a
Farshoot dog.

“We don’t stop at Hasha, then?” Dicky asked, and let the Farshoot fasten
on his leggings.

Holgate swung round and eyed Dicky curiously, a queer smile at his lips.

“Not if Goovnur can ‘elp, aw give ye ma woord, sir,” answered Holgate.

Fielding was affectionately called “the Governor” by his subordinates
and friends.

“We all have our likes and dislikes,” rejoined Dicky casually, and blew
smoke in the eyes of the Farshoot. “Aye, aw’ve seen places that bad! but
Hasha has taaste of its own in Goovnur’s mouth, ma life on’t!”

“Never can tell when a thing’ll pall on the taste. Hasha’s turn with the
Governor now, eh?” rejoined Dicky.

Dicky’s way of getting information seemed guileless, and Holgate opened
his basket as wide as he knew. “Toorn, didst tha sway” (Holgate talked
broadly to Dicky always, for Dicky had told him of his aunt, Lady
Carmichael, who lived near Halifax in Yorkshire), “toorn, aw warrant! It
be reg’lar as kitchen-fire, this Hasha business, for three years, ever
sin’ aw been scrapin’ mud o’ Nile River.”

“That was a nasty row they had over the cemetery three years ago, the
Governor against the lot, from mamour to wekeel!”

Holgate’s eyes flashed, and he looked almost angrily down at Dicky,
whose hand was between the teeth of the playful Farshoot.

“Doost think--noa, tha canst not think that Goovnur be ‘feared o’ Hasha
fook. Thinks’t tha, a man that told ‘em all--a thousand therr--that he’d
hang on nearest tree the foorst that disobeyed him, thinks’t tha that
Goovnur’s lost his nerve by that?”

“The Governor never loses his nerve, Holgate,” said Dicky, smiling and
offering a cigar. “There’s such a thing as a man being afraid to trust
himself where he’s been in a mess, lest he hit out, and doesn’t want
to.”

Holgate, being excited, was in a fit state to tell the truth, if he knew
it; which was what Dicky had worked for; but Holgate only said:

“It bean’t fear, and it bean’t milk o’ human kindness. It be soort o’
thing a man gets. Aw had it once i’ Bradford, in Little Cornish Street.
Aw saw a faace look out o’ window o’ hoose by tinsmith’s shop, an’ that
faace was like hell’s picture-aye, ‘twas a killiagous faace that! Aw
never again could pass that house. ‘Twas a woman’s faace. Horrible
‘twas, an’ sore sad an’ flootered aw were, for t’ faace was like a lass
aw loved when aw wur a lad.”

“I should think it was something like that,” answered Dicky, his eyes
wandering over the peninsula beyond which lay Hasha.

“Summat, aw be sure,” answered Holgate, “an’ ma woord on’t... ah, yon
coomes orderly wi’ post for Goovnur. Now it be Hasha, or it be not
Hasha, it be time for steam oop.”

Holgate turned to his engine as Dicky mounted the stairs and went
to Fielding’s cabin, where the orderly was untying a handkerchief
overflowing with letters.

As Fielding read his official letters his face fell more and more. When
he had read the last, he sat for a minute without speaking, his brow
very black. There was no excuse for pushing past Hasha. He had not been
there for over a year. It was his duty to inspect the place: he had
a conscience; there was time to get to Hasha that afternoon. With an
effort he rose, hurried along the deck, and called down to Holgate:
“Full-steam to Hasha!”

Then, with a quick command to the reis, who was already at the wheel,
he lighted a cigar, and, joining Dicky Donovan, began to smoke and talk
furiously. But he did not talk of Hasha.

At sunset the Amenhotep drew in to the bank by Hasha, and, from
the deck, Fielding Bey saluted the mamour, the omdah and his own
subordinates, who, buttoning up their coats as they came, hurried to the
bank to make salaams to him. Behind them, at a distance, came villagers,
a dozen ghaffirs armed with naboots of dom-wood, and a brace of
well-mounted, badly-dressed policemen, with seats like a monkey on a
stick. The conferences with the mamour and omdah were short, in keeping
with the temper of “Fielding Saadat”; and long into the night Dicky lay
and looked out of his cabin window to the fires on the banks, where sat
Mahommed Seti the servant, the orderly, and some attendant ghaffirs,
who, feasting on the remains of the effendi’s supper, kept watch. For
Hasha was noted for its robbers. It was even rumoured that the egregious
Selamlik Pasha, with the sugar plantation near by--“Trousers,” Dicky
called him when he saw him on the morrow, because of the elephantine
breeks he wore--was not averse to sending his Abyssinian slaves through
the sugar-cane to waylay and rob, and worse, maybe.

By five o’clock next day the inspection was over. The streets had been
swept for the Excellency--which is to say Saadat--the first time in a
year. The prison had been cleaned of visible horrors, the first time in
a month. The last time it was ordered there had been a riot among the
starving, infested prisoners; earth had been thrown over the protruding
bones of the dear lamented dead in the cemetery; the water of the
ablution places in the mosque had been changed; the ragged policemen
had new putties; the kourbashes of the tax-gatherers were hid in their
yeleks; the egregious Pasha wore a greasy smile, and the submudir, as he
conducted Fielding--“whom God preserve and honour!”--through the prison
and through the hospital, where goat’s milk had been laid on for this
especial day, smirked gently through the bazaar above his Parisian
waistcoat.

But Fielding, as he rode on Selamlik Pasha’s gorgeous black donkey from
Assiout, with its crimson trappings, knew what proportion of improvement
this “hankypanky,” as Dicky called it, bore to the condition of things
at the last inspection. He had spoken little all day, and Dicky had
noticed that his eye was constantly turning here and there, as though
looking for an unwelcome something or somebody.

At last the thing was over, and they were just crossing the canal, the
old Bahr-el-Yusef, which cuts the town in twain as the river Abana does
Damascus, when Dicky saw nearing them a heavily-laden boat, a cross
between a Thames house-boat and an Italian gondola, being drawn by one
poor raw-bone--raw-bone in truth, for there was on each shoulder a round
red place, made raw by the unsheathed ropes used as harness. The beast’s
sides were scraped as a tree is barked, and the hind quarters gored as
though by a harrow. Dicky was riding with the mamour of the district,
Fielding was a distance behind with Trousers and the Mudir. Dicky pulled
up his donkey, got off and ran towards the horse, pale with fury; for
he loved animals better than men, and had wasted his strength beating
donkey-boys with the sticks they used on their victims. The boat had
now reached a point opposite the mudirieh, its stopping-place; and the
raw-bone, reeking with sweat and blood, stood still and trembled, its
knees shaking with the strain just taken off them, its head sunk nearly
to the ground.

Dicky had hardly reached the spot when a figure came running to the
poor waler with a quick stumbling motion. Dicky drew back in wonder,
for never had he seen eyes so painful as these that glanced from the
tortured beast to himself--staring, bulbous, bloodshot, hunted eyes;
but they were blue, a sickly, faded blue; and they were English! Dicky’s
hand was, on his pistol, for his first impulse had been to shoot the
rawbone; but it dropped away in sheer astonishment at the sight of this
strange figure in threadbare dirty clothes and riding-breeches made by
shearing the legs of a long pair--cut with an unsteady hand, for the
edges were jagged and uneven, and the man’s bare leg showed above the
cast-off putties of a policeman. The coat was an old khaki jacket of
a Gippy soldier, and, being scant of buttons, doubtful linen showed
beneath. Above the hook-nose, once aristocratic, now vulture-like
and shrunken like that of Rameses in his glass case at Ghizeh, was a
tarboosh tilting forward over the eyes, nearly covering the forehead.
The figure must have been very tall once, but it was stooped now, though
the height was still well above medium. Hunted, haunted, ravaged and
lost, was the face, and the long grey moustache, covering the chin
almost, seemed to cover an immeasurable depravity.

Dicky took it all in at a glance, and wondered with a bitter wonder; for
this was an Englishman, and behind him and around him, though not
very near him, were Arabs, Soudanese, and Fellaheen, with sneering yet
apprehensive faces.

As Dicky’s hand dropped away from his pistol, the other shot out
trembling, graceful, eager fingers, the one inexpressibly gentlemanly
thing about him.

“Give it to me--quick!” he said, and he threw a backward glance towards
the approaching group--Fielding, the egregious Pasha, and the rest.

Dicky did not hesitate; he passed the pistol over. The Lost One took the
pistol, cocked it, and held it to the head of the waler, which feebly
turned to him in recognition.

“Good-bye, old man!” he said, and fired.

The horse dropped, kicked, struggled once or twice, and was gone.

“If you know the right spot, there’s hardly a kick,” said the Lost One,
and turned to face the Pasha, who had whipped his donkey forward on
them, and sat now livid with rage, before the two. He stood speechless
for a moment, for his anger had forced the fat of his neck up into his
throat.

But Dicky did not notice the Pasha. His eye was fixed on Fielding Bey,
and the eye of Fielding Bey was on the Lost One. All at once Dicky
understood why it was that Fielding Bey had shrunk from coming to Hasha.
Fielding might have offered many reasons, but this figure before them
was the true one. Trouble, pity, anxiety, pride, all were in Fielding’s
face. Because the Lost One was an Englishman, and the race was shamed
and injured by this outcast? Not that alone. Fielding had the natural
pride of his race, but this look was personal. He glanced at the dead
horse, at the scarred sides, the raw shoulders, the corrugated haunches,
he saw the pistol in the Lost One’s hand, and then, as a thread of
light steals between the black trees of a jungle, a light stole across
Fielding’s face for a moment. He saw the Lost One hand the pistol back
to Dicky and fix his debauched blue eyes on the Pasha. These blue eyes
did not once look at Fielding, though they were aware of his presence.

“Son of a dog!” said the Pasha, and his fat forefinger convulsively
pointed to the horse.

The Lost One’s eyes wavered a second, as though their owner had not
the courage to abide the effect of his action, then they quickened to a
point of steadiness, as a lash suddenly knots for a crack in the hand of
a postilion.

“Swine!” said the Lost One into the Pasha’s face, and his round
shoulders drew up a little farther, so that he seemed more like a man
among men. His hands fell on his hips as, in his mess, an officer with
no pockets drops his knuckles on his waist-line for a stand-at-ease.

The egregious Selamlik Pasha stood high in favour with the Khedive: was
it not he who had suggested a tax on the earnings of the dancing girls,
the Ghazeeyehs, and did he not himself act as the first tax-gatherer?
Was it not Selamlik Pasha also who whispered into the ear of the
Mouffetish that a birth-tax and a burial-tax should be instituted?
And had he not seen them carried out in the mudiriehs under his own
supervision? Had he not himself made the Fellaheen pay thrice over for
water for their onion-fields? Had he not flogged an Arab to death with
his own hand, the day before Fielding’s and Dicky’s arrival, and had he
not tried to get this same Arab’s daughter into his harem--this Selamlik
Pasha!

The voice of the Lost One suddenly rose shrill and excited, and he
shouted at the Pasha. “Swine! swine! swine!... Kill your slaves with a
kourbash if you like, but a bullet’s the thing for a waler!--Swine of a
leper!”

The whole frame of the Lost One was still, but the voice was shaking,
querulous, half hysterical; the eyes were lighted with a terrible
excitement, the lips under the grey moustache twitched; the nervous
slipshod dignity of carriage was in curious contrast to the disordered
patchwork dress.

The trouble on Fielding’s face glimmered with a little ray of hope
now. Dicky came over to him, and was about to speak, but a motion of
Fielding’s hand stopped him. The hand said: “Let them fight it out.”

In a paroxysm of passion Selamlik Pasha called two Abyssinian slaves
standing behind. “This brother of a toad to prison!” he said.

The Lost One’s eyes sought Dicky like a flash. Without a word, and as
quick as the tick of a clock, Dicky tossed over his pistol to the Lost
One, who caught it smoothly, turned it in his hand, and levelled it at
the Abyssinians.

“No more of this damned nonsense, Pasha,” said Fielding suddenly.
“He doesn’t put a high price on his life, and you do on yours. I’d be
careful!”

“Steady, Trousers!” said Dicky in a soft voice, and smiled his girlish
smile.

Selamlik Pasha stared for a moment in black anger, then stuttered forth:
“Will you speak for a dog of a slave that his own country vomits out?”

“Your mother was a slave of Darfur, Pasha,” answered Fielding, in a low
voice; “your father lost his life stealing slaves. Let’s have no airs
and graces.”

Dicky’s eyes had been fixed on the Lost One, and his voice now said in
its quaint treble: “Don’t get into a perspiration. He’s from where we
get our bad manners, and he messes with us to-night, Pasha.”

The effect of these words was curious. Fielding’s face was a blank
surprise, and his mouth opened to say no, but he caught Dicky’s look and
the word was not uttered. The Pasha’s face showed curious incredulity;
under the pallor of the Lost One’s a purplish flush crept, stayed a
moment, then faded away, and left it paler than before.

“We’ve no more business, I think, Pasha,” said Fielding brusquely, and
turned his donkey towards the river. The Pasha salaamed without a word,
his Abyssinian slaves helped him on his great white donkey, and he
trotted away towards the palace, the trousers flapping about his huge
legs. The Lost One stood fingering the revolver. Presently he looked up
at Dicky, and, standing still, held out the pistol.

“Better keep it,” said Dicky; “I’ll give you some peas for it to-night.
Speak to the poor devil, Fielding,” he added quickly, in a low tone.

Fielding turned in his saddle. “Seven’s the hour,” he said, and rode on.

“Thanks, you fellows,” said the Lost One, and walked swiftly away.

As they rode to the Amenhotep Dicky did not speak, but once he turned
round to look after the outcast, who was shambling along the bank of the
canal.

When Fielding and Dicky reached the deck of the Amenhotep, and Mahommed
Seti had brought refreshment, Dicky said: “What did he do?”

Fielding’s voice was constrained and hard: “Cheated at cards.”

Dicky’s lips tightened. “Where?”

“At Hong Kong.”

“Officer?”

“In the Buffs.”

Dicky drew a long breath. “He’s paid the piper.”

“Naturally. He cheated twice.”

“Cheated twice--at cards!” Dicky’s voice was hard now. “Who was he?”

“Heatherby--Bob Heatherby!”

“Bob Heatherby--gad! Fielding, I’m sorry--I couldn’t have guessed, old
man. Mrs. Henshaw’s brother!”

Fielding nodded. Dicky turned his head away; for Fielding was in love
with Mrs. Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs. He realised now
why Fielding loathed Hasha so.

“Forgive me for asking him to mess, guv’nor.”

Fielding laughed a little uneasily. “Never mind. You see, it isn’t the
old scores only that bar him. He’s been a sweep out here. Nothing
he hasn’t done. Gone lower and lower and lower. Tax-gatherer with a
kourbash for old Selamlik the beast. Panderer for the same. Sweep of the
lowest sort!”

Dicky’s eyes flashed. “I say, Fielding, it would be rather strange if he
hadn’t gone down, down, down. A man that’s cheated at cards never finds
anybody to help him up, up, up. The chances are dead against him. But he
stood up well to-day, eh?”

“I suppose blood will tell at last in the very worst.”

       “‘And while the lamp holds out to burn
        The vilest sinner may return--’”

hummed Dicky musingly. Then he added slowly: “Fielding, fellows of that
kind always flare up a bit according to Cavendish, just before the end.
I’ve seen it once or twice before. It’s the last clutch at the grass as
they go slip--slip--slipping down. Take my word for it, Heatherby’s near
the finish.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Selamlik, the old leper, ‘ll lay in wait for him.
He’ll get lost in the sugar-cane one of these evenings soon.”

“Couldn’t we...” Dicky paused.

Fielding started, looked at Dicky intently, and then shook his head
sadly. “It’s no good, Dicky. It never is.”

“‘While the lamp holds out to burn...’” said Dicky, and lighted another
cigarette.

Precisely at seven o’clock Heatherby appeared. He had on a dress-suit,
brown and rusty, a white tie made of a handkerchief torn in two, and a
pair of patent leather shoes, scraggy and cracked.

Fielding behaved well, Dicky was amiable and attentive, and the dinner
being ready to the instant, there was no waiting, there were no awkward
pauses. No names of English people were mentioned, England was not
named; nor Cairo, nor anything that English people abroad love to
discuss. The fellah, the pasha, the Soudan were the only topics. Under
Fielding’s courtesy and Dicky’s acute suggestions, Heatherby’s weakened
brain awaked, and he talked intelligently, till the moment coffee was
brought in. Then, as Mahommed Seti retired, Heatherby suddenly threw
himself forward, his arms on the table, and burst into sobs.

“Oh, you fellows, you fellows!” he said. There was silence for a minute,
then he sobbed out again: “It’s the first time I’ve been treated like
a gentleman by men that knew me, these fifteen years. It--it gets me in
the throat!”

His body shook with sobs. Fielding and Dicky were uncomfortable, for
these were not the sobs of a driveller or a drunkard. Behind them was
the blank failure of a life--fifteen years of miserable torture, of
degradation, of a daily descent lower into the pit, of the servitude
of shame. When at last he raised his streaming eyes, Fielding and Dicky
could see the haunting terror of the soul, at whose elbow, as it were,
every man cried: “You are without the pale!” That look told them how
Heatherby of the Buffs had gone from table d’hote to table d’hote
of Europe, from town to town, from village to village, to make
acquaintances who repulsed him when they discovered who he really was.

Shady Heatherby, who cheated at cards!

Once Fielding made as if to put a hand on his shoulder and speak to him,
but Dicky intervened with a look. The two drank their coffee, Fielding
a little uneasily; but yet in his face there was a new look: of inquiry,
of kindness, even of hope.

Presently Dicky flashed a look and nodded towards the door, and Fielding
dropped his cigar and went on deck, and called down to Holgate the
engineer:

“Get up steam, and make for Luxor. It’s moonlight, and we’re safe enough
in this high Nile, eh, Holgate?”

“Safe enough, or aw’m a Dootchman,” said Holgate. Then they talked in a
low voice together. Down in the saloon, Dicky sat watching Heatherby. At
last the Lost One raised his head again.

“It’s worth more to me, this night, than you fellows know,” he said
brokenly.

“That’s all right,” said Dicky. “Have a cigar?”

He shook his head. “It’s come at the right time. I wanted to be treated
like an Englishman once more--just once more.”

“Don’t worry. Take in a reef and go steady for a bit. The milk’s spilt,
but there are other meadows....” Dicky waved an arm up the river, up
towards the Soudan!

The Lost One nodded, then his eyes blazed up and took on a hungry look.
His voice suddenly came in a whisper.

“Gordon was a white man. Gordon said to me three years ago: ‘Come with
me, I’ll help you on. You don’t need to live, if you don’t want to. Most
of us will get knocked out up there in the Soudan.’ Gordon said that to
me. But there was another fellow with Gordon who knew me, and I couldn’t
face it. So I stayed behind here. I’ve been everything, anything, to
that swine, Selamlik Pasha; but when he told me yesterday to bring
him the daughter of the Arab he killed with his kourbash, I jibbed. I
couldn’t stand that. Her father had fed me more than once. I jibbed--by
God, I jibbed! I said I was an Englishman, and I’d see him damned first.
I said it, and I shot the horse, and I’d have shot him--what’s that?”

There was a churning below. The Amenhotep was moving from the bank.

“She’s going--the boat’s going,” said the Lost One, trembling to his
feet.

“Sit down,” said Dicky, and gripped him by the arm. “Where are you
taking me?” asked Heatherby, a strange, excited look in his face.

“Up the river.”

He seemed to read Dicky’s thoughts--the clairvoyance of an overwrought
mind: “To--to Assouan?” The voice had a curious far-away sound.

“You shall go beyond Assouan,” said Dicky. “To--to Gordon?” Heatherby’s
voice was husky and indistinct.

“Yes, here’s Fielding; he’ll give you the tip. Sit down.” Dicky gently
forced him down into a chair. Six months later, a letter came to Dicky
from an Egyptian officer, saying that Heatherby of the Buffs had died
gallantly fighting in a sortie sent by Gordon into the desert.

“He had a lot of luck,” mused Dicky as he read. “They don’t end that way
as a rule.”

Then he went to Fielding, humming a certain stave from one of Watts’s
hymns.




THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE--AND THE DRUM

He lived in the days of Ismail the Khedive, and was familiarly known as
the Murderer. He had earned his name, and he had no repentance. From
the roof of a hut in his native village of Manfaloot he had dropped a
grindstone on the head of Ebn Haroun, who contended with him for
the affections of Ahassa, the daughter of Haleel the barber, and Ebn
Haroun’s head was flattened like the cover of a pie. Then he had broken
a cake of dourha bread on the roof for the pigeons above him, and had
come down grinning to the street, where a hesitating mounted policeman
fumbled with his weapon, and four ghaffirs waited for him with their
naboots.

Seti then had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of
Ebn Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be
marched off to the mudirieh. There the Mudir glared at him and had him
loaded with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred convicts
arrayed themselves against myriad tribes which, killed individually,
made a spot on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit! The carnage
was great, and though Seti was sleepless night after night it was not
because of his crime. He found some solace, however, in provoking his
fellow-prisoners to assaults upon each other; and every morning he
grinned as he saw the dead and wounded dragged out into the clear
sunshine.

The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night
to the Mudir and said deceitfully: “Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I
have been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran
that a man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour’s? What
should Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of
Allah, the Effendi Insagi, lives? What is honestly mine is eight
feddans, and the rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi.”

Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of
offering backsheesh.

And the Mudir had due anger and said: “No better are ye than a Frank to
have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls.
The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine.”

Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, “Now shall I sleep in peace, by
the grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my
people?” he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.

“But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast
eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?”

Abou Seti’s glance fell and his hands twitched. His fingers fumbled
with his robe of striped silk. He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his
bitter humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with
the Mudir whether he lived or died? So he answered:

“All-seeing and all-knowing art thou, O effendi, and I have reckoned
the rentals even to this hour for the ten years--fifty piastres for each
feddan--”

“A hundred for the five years of high Nile,” interposed the Mudir.

“Fifty for the five lean years, and a hundred for the five fat years,”
 said Abou Seti, and wished that his words were poisoned arrows, that
they might give the Mudir many deaths at once. “And may Allah give thee
greatness upon thy greatness!”

“God prosper thee also, Abou Seti, and see that thou keep only what is
thine own henceforth. Get thee gone in peace.”

“At what hour shall I see the face of my son alive?” asked Abou Seti in
a low voice, placing his hand upon his turban in humility.

“To-morrow at even, when the Muezzin calls from the mosque of El Hassan,
be thou at the west wall of the prison by the Gate of the Prophet’s
Sorrow, with thy fastest camel. Your son shall ride for me through the
desert even to Farafreh, and bear a letter to the bimbashi there. If he
bear it safely, his life is his own; if he fail, look to thy feddans of
land!”

“God is merciful, and Seti is bone of my bone,” said Abou Seti, and laid
his hand again upon his turban. That was how Mahommed Seti did not at
once pay the price of the grindstone, but rode into the desert bearing
the message of the Mudir and returned safely with the answer, and was
again seen in the cafes of Manfaloot. And none of Ebn Haroun’s friends
did aught, for the world knew through whom it was that Seti lived--and
land was hard to keep in Manfaloot and the prison near.

But one day a kavass of the Khedive swooped down on Manfaloot, and
twenty young men were carried off in conscription. Among them was Seti,
now married to Ahassa, the fellah maid for whom the grindstone had
fallen on Ebn Haroun’s head. When the fatal number fell to him and
it was ordained that he must go to Dongola to serve in the Khedive’s
legions, he went to his father, with Ahassa wailing behind him.

“Save thyself,” said the old man with a frown.

“I have done what I could--I have sold my wife’s jewels,” answered Seti.

“Ten piastres!” said old Abou Seti grimly.

“Twelve,” said Seti, grinning from ear to ear. “Thou wilt add four
feddans of land to that I will answer for the Mudir.”

“Thy life only cost me two feddans. Shall I pay four to free thee of
serving thy master the Khedive? Get thee gone into the Soudan. I do not
fear for thee: thou wilt live on. Allah is thy friend. Peace be with
thee!”


II

So it was that the broad-shouldered Seti went to be a soldier, with
all the women of the village wailing behind him, and Ahassa his wife
covering her head with dust and weeping by his side as he stepped out
towards Dongola. For himself, Seti was a philosopher; that is to say,
he was a true Egyptian. Whatever was, was to be; and Seti had a good
digestion, which is a great thing in the desert. Moreover, he had a
capacity for foraging--or foray. The calmness with which he risked his
life for an onion or a water-bag would have done credit to a prince of
buccaneers. He was never flustered. He had dropped a grindstone on the
head of his rival, but the smile that he smiled then was the same smile
with which he suffered and forayed and fought and filched in the desert.
With a back like a door, and arms as long and strong as a gorilla’s,
with no moral character to speak of, and an imperturbable selfishness,
even an ignorant Arab like Seti may go far. More than once his bimbashi
drew a sword to cut him down for the peaceful insolent grin with which
he heard himself suddenly charged with very original crimes; but even
the officer put his sword up again, because he remembered that though
Seti was the curse of the regiment on the march, there was no man
like him in the day of battle. Covered with desert sand and blood,
and fighting and raging after the manner of a Sikh, he could hold
ten companies together like a wall against a charge of Dervishes. The
bimbashi rejoiced at this, for he was a coward; likewise his captain
was a coward, and so was his lieutenant: for they were half Turks, half
Gippies, who had seen Paris and had not the decency to die there. Also
it had been discovered that no man made so good a spy or envoy as Seti.
His gift for lying was inexpressible: confusion never touched him;
for the flattest contradictions in the matter of levying backsheesh he
always found an excuse. Where the bimbashi and his officers were afraid
to go lest the bald-headed eagle and the vulture should carry away their
heads as tit-bits to the Libyan hills, Seti was sent. In more than one
way he always kept his head. He was at once the curse and the pride of
the regiment. For his sins he could not be punished, and his virtues
were of value only to save his life.

In this fashion, while his regiment thinned out by disease, famine,
fighting, and the midnight knife, Seti came on to Dongola, to Berber, to
Khartoum; and he grinned with satisfaction when he heard that they
would make even for Kordofan. He had outlived all the officers who left
Manfaloot with the regiment save the bimbashi, and the bimbashi
was superstitious and believed that while Seti lived he would live.
Therefore, no clansman ever watched his standard flying in the van as
the bimbashi--from behind--watched the long arm of Seti slaying, and
heard his voice like a brass horn above all others shouting his war-cry.

But at Khartoum came Seti’s fall. Many sorts of original sin had been
his, with profit and prodigious pleasure, but when, by the supposed
orders of the bimbashi, he went through Khartoum levying a tax upon
every dancing-girl in the place and making her pay upon the spot at the
point of a merciless tongue, he went one step too far. For his genius
had preceded that of Selamlik Pasha, the friend of the Mouffetish
at Cairo, by one day only. Selamlik himself had collected taxes on
dancing-girls all the way from Cairo to Khartoum; and to be hoist by
an Arab in a foot regiment having no authority and only a limitless
insolence, was more than the Excellency could bear.

To Selamlik Pasha the bimbashi hastily disowned all knowledge of Seti’s
perfidy, but both were brought out to have their hands and feet and
heads cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, in the presence of the dancing-girls
and the populace. In the appointed place, when Seti saw how the bimbashi
wept--for he had been to Paris and had no Arab blood in him; how he
wrung his hands--for had not absinthe weakened his nerves in the cafes
of St. Michel?--when Seti saw that he was no Arab and was afraid to die,
then he told the truth to Selamlik Pasha. He even boldly offered to tell
the pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would
let the bimbashi go. Now, Selamlik Pasha was an Egyptian, and is it
not written in the Book of Egypt that no man without the most dangerous
reason may refuse backsheesh? So it was that Selamlik talked to the
Ulema, the holy men, who were there, and they urged him to clemency, as
holy men will, even in Egypt--at a price.

So it was also that the bimbashi went back to his regiment with all his
limbs intact. Seti and the other half of his ill-gotten gains were left.
His hands were about to be struck off, when he realised of how little
account his gold would be without them; so he offered it to Selamlik
Pasha for their sake. The pasha promised, and then, having found the
money, serenely prepared the execution. For his anger was great. Was not
the idea of taxing the dancing-girls his very own, the most original tax
ever levied in Egypt? And to have the honour of it filched from him by a
soldier of Manfaloot--no, Mahommed Seti should be crucified!

And Seti, the pride and the curse of his regiment, would have been
crucified between two palms on the banks of the river had it not been
for Fielding Bey, the Englishman--Fielding of St. Bartholomew’s--who had
burned gloriously to reform Egypt root and branch, and had seen the
fire of his desires die down. Fielding Bey saved Seti, but not with
backsheesh.

Fielding intervened. He knew Selamlik Pasha well, and the secret of his
influence over him is for telling elsewhere. But whatever its source, it
gave Mahommed Seti his life. It gave him much more, for it expelled him
from the Khedive’s army. Now soldiers without number, gladly risking
death, had deserted from the army of the Khedive; they had bought
themselves out with enormous backsheesh, they had been thieves,
murderers, panderers, that they might be freed from service by some
corrupt pasha or bimbashi; but no one in the knowledge of the world had
ever been expelled from the army of the Khedive.

There was a satanic humour in the situation pleasant to the soul of
Mahommed Seti, if soul his subconsciousness might be called. In the
presence of his regiment, drawn up in the Beit-el-Mal, before his
trembling bimbashi, whose lips were now pale with terror at the loss of
his mascot, Mahommed Seti was drummed out of line, out of his regiment,
out of the Beit-el-Mal. It was opera boufe, and though Seti could
not know what opera boufe was, he did know that it was a ridiculous
fantasia, and he grinned his insolent grin all the way, even to the
corner of the camel-market, where the drummer and the sergeant and his
squad turned back from ministering a disgrace they would gladly have
shared.

Left at the corner of the camel-market, Mahommed Seti planned his
future. At first it was to steal a camel and take the desert for Berber.
Then he thought of the English hakim, Fielding Bey, who had saved his
life. Now, a man who has saved your life once may do it again; one
favour is always the promise of another. So Seti, with a sudden
inspiration, went straight to the house of Fielding Bey and sat down
before it on his mat.

With the setting of the sun came a clatter of tins and a savoury odour
throughout Khartoum to its farthest precincts, for it was Ramadan, and
no man ate till sunset. Seti smiled an avid smile, and waited. At last
he got up, turned his face towards Mecca, and said his prayers. Then he
lifted the latch of Fielding’s hut, entered, eyed the medicine bottles
and the surgical case with childish apprehension, and made his way to
the kitchen. There he foraged. He built a fire; his courage grew; he ran
to the bazaar, and came back with an armful of meats and vegetables.

So it was that when Fielding returned he found Mahommed Seti and a
savoury mess awaiting him. Also there was coffee and a bottle of brandy
which Seti had looted in the bazaar. In one doorway stood Fielding; in
another stood Mahommed Seti, with the same grin which had served
his purpose all the way from Cairo, his ugly face behind it, and his
prodigious shoulders below it, and the huge chest from which came forth,
like the voice of a dove:

“God give thee long life, saadat el bey!”

Now an M.D. degree and a course in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital do not
necessarily give a knowledge of the human soul, though the outlying
lands of the earth have been fattened by those who thought there
was knowledge and salvation in a conquered curriculum. Fielding Bey,
however, had never made pretence of understanding the Oriental mind, so
he discreetly took his seat and made no remarks. From sheer instinct,
however, when he came to the coffee he threw a boot which caught
Mahommed Seti in the middle of the chest, and said roughly: “French, not
Turkish, idiot!”

Then Mahommed Seti grinned, and he knew that he was happy; for it was
deep in his mind that that was the Inglesi’s way of offering a long
engagement. In any case Seti had come to stay. Three times he made
French coffee that night before it suited, and the language of Fielding
was appropriate in each case. At last a boot, a native drum, and a
wood sculpture of Pabst the lion-headed goddess, established perfect
relations between them. They fell into their places of master and man as
accurately as though the one had smitten and the other served for twenty
years.

The only acute differences they had were upon two points--the cleaning
of the medicine bottles and surgical instruments, and the looting. But
it was wonderful to see how Mahommed Seti took the kourbash at the hands
of Fielding, when he shied from the medicine bottles. He could have
broken, or bent double with one twist, the weedy, thin-chested Fielding.
But though he saw a deadly magic and the evil eye in every stopper, and
though to him the surgical instruments were torturing steels which the
devil had forged for his purposes, he conquered his own prejudices so
far as to assist in certain bad cases which came in Fielding’s way on
the journey down the Nile.

The looting was a different matter. Had not Mahommed Seti looted all his
life--looted from his native village to the borders of Kordofan? Did
he not take to foray as a wild ass to bersim? Moreover, as little Dicky
Donovan said humorously yet shamelessly when he joined them at Korosko:
“What should a native do but loot who came from Manfaloot?”

Dicky had a prejudice against the Murderer, because he was a murderer;
and Mahommed Seti viewed with scorn any white man who was not Fielding;
much more so one who was only five feet and a trifle over. So for a time
there was no sympathy between the two. But each conquered the other in
the end. Seti was conquered first.

One day Dicky, with a sudden burst of generosity--for he had a button
to his pocket--gave Mahommed Seti a handful of cigarettes. The next
day Seti said to Fielding: “Behold, God has given thee strong men
for friends. Thou hast Mahommed Seti”--his chest blew out like a
bellows--“and thou hast Donovan Pasha.”

Fielding grunted. He was not a fluent man, save in forbidden language,
and Seti added:

“Behold thou, saadat el bey, who opens a man’s body and turns over his
heart with a sword-point, and sewing him up with silken cords bids him
live again, greatness is in thy house! Last night thy friend, Donovan
Pasha, gave into my hands a score of those cigarettes which are like the
smell of a camel-yard. In the evening, having broken bread and prayed,
I sat down at the door of the barber in peace to smoke, as becomes a man
who loves God and His benefits. Five times I puffed, and then I stayed
my lips, for why should a man die of smoke when he can die by the sword?
But there are many men in Korosko whose lives are not as clean linen.
These I did not love. I placed in their hands one by one the cigarettes,
and with their blessings following me I lost myself in the dusk and
waited.”

Mahommed Seti paused. On his face was a smile of sardonic retrospection.

“Go on, you fool!” grunted Fielding.

“Nineteen sick men, unworthy followers of the Prophet, thanked Allah in
the mosque to-day that their lives were spared. Donovan Pasha is a great
man and a strong, effendi! We be three strong men together.”

Dicky Donovan’s conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a
year later.

The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile. Fielding was chief
medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached. When the
time came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding’s horse
and also Dicky Donovan’s. Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a
Bagarra Arab, and he had come to love Fielding’s waler Bashi-Bazouk as
a Farshoot dog loves his master. And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti’s
love. The sand of the desert, Seti’s breath and the tail of his yelek
made the coat of Bashi-Bazouk like silk. It was the joy of the regiment,
and the regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran
concerning horses, in keeping with Mahomet’s own famous passage--

          “By the CHARGERS that pant,
          And the hoofs that strike fire,
          And the scourers at dawn,
          Who stir up the dust with it,
          And cleave through a host with it!”

But Mahomet’s phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti’s, as he
rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.

There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at
least as much. Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair. That
was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky
mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:

“Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a
bobtailed Arab. Permit me to ride with thee.” And Fielding replied: “You
will fight the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots.”

But Seti was not to be fobbed off. “It is written that the Lord, the
Great One, is compassionate and merciful. Wilt thou then, O saadat.”

Fielding interrupted: “Go, harry the onion-field for dinner. You’re
a dog of a slave, and a murderer too: you must pay the price of that
grindstone!”

But Seti hung by the skin of his teeth to the fringe of Fielding’s
good-nature--Fielding’s words only were sour and wrathful. So Seti
grinned and said: “For the grindstone, behold it sent Ebn Haroun to the
mercy of God. Let him rest, praise be to God!”

“You were drummed out of the army. You can’t fight,” said Fielding
again; but he was smiling under his long moustache.

“Is not a bobtailed nag sufficient shame? Let thy friend ride the
bobtailed nag and pay the price of the grindstone and the drum,” said
Seti.

“Fall in!” rang the colonel’s command, and Fielding, giving Seti a
friendly kick in the ribs, galloped away to the troop.

Seti turned to the little onion-garden. His eye harried it for a moment,
and he grinned. He turned to the doorway where a stew-pot rested, and
his mind dwelt cheerfully on the lamb he had looted for Fielding’s
dinner. But last of all his eye rested upon his bobtailed Arab, the
shameless thing in an Arab country, where every horse rears his tail as
a peacock spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot.
The bobtailed Arab’s nose was up, his stump was high. A hundred times he
had been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker’s apron.
He snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels
of the colonel’s troop.

Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.

That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, “Allala-Akbar!”
 rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti’s strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like
an iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti’s. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh’s horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo. The bobtailed Arab’s lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin. Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.

Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse,
he was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound
and broke into the desert. But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse
lanced under him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with
Fielding in front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the
little band retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead
on the field, and six times that number of Dervishes.

It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding’s supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.

But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.

Fielding said that Seti’s was the good old game for which V.C.’s were
the reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the
enemy; but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of
a horse. To this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not
understand why Seti should have stayed behind and risked his life to
save a horse and bring him wounded back to his master. But little
Dicky Donovan understood, and Fielding understood; and Fielding never
afterwards mounted Bashi-Bazouk but he remembered. It was Mahommed Seti
who taught him the cry of Mahomet:

          “By the CHARGERS that pant,
          And the hoofs that strike fire,
          And the scourers at dawn,
          Who stir up the dust with it,
          And cleave through a host with it!”

And in the course of time Mahommed Seti managed to pay the price of the
grindstone and also of the drum.




THE DESERTION OF MAHOMMED SELIM

The business began during Ramadan; how it ended and where was in the
mouth of every soldier between Beni Souef and Dongola, and there was not
a mud hut or a mosque within thirty miles of Mahommed Selim’s home, not
a khiassa or felucca dropping anchor for gossip and garlic below the
mudirieh, but knew the story of Soada, the daughter of Wassef the
camel-driver.

Soada was pretty and upright, with a full round breast and a slim
figure. She carried a balass of water on her head as gracefully as a
princess a tiara. This was remarked by occasional inspectors making
their official rounds, and by more than one khowagah putting in with
his dahabeah where the village maidens came to fill their water-jars.
Soada’s trinkets and bracelets were perhaps no better than those of her
companions, but her one garment was of the linen of Beni Mazar, as good
as that worn by the Sheikh-Elbeled himself.

Wassef the camel-driver, being proud of Soada, gave her the advantage of
his frequent good fortune in desert loot and Nile backsheesh. But Wassef
was a hard man for all that, and he grew bitter and morose at last,
because he saw that camel-driving must suffer by the coming of the
railway. Besides, as a man gets older he likes the season of Ramadan
less, for he must fast from sunrise to sunset, though his work goes on;
and, with broken sleep, having his meals at night, it is ten to one but
he gets irritable.

So it happened that one evening just at sunset, Wassef came to his hut,
with the sun like the red rim of a huge thumb-nail in the sky behind
him, ready beyond telling for his breakfast, and found nothing. On his
way home he had seen before the houses and cafes silent Mussulmans with
cigarettes and matches in their fingers, cooks with their hands on the
lids of the cooking pots, where the dourha and onions boiled; but
here outside his own doorway there was no odour, and there was silence
within.

“Now, by the beard of the Prophet,” he muttered, “is it for this I
have fed the girl and clothed her with linen from Beni Mazar all these
years!” And he turned upon his heel, and kicked a yellow cur in the
ribs; then he went to the nearest cafe, and making huge rolls of
forcemeat with his fingers crammed them into his mouth, grunting like
a Berkshire boar. Nor did his anger cease thereafter, for this meal of
meat had cost him five piastres--the second meal of meat in a week.

As Wassef sat on the mastaba of the cafe sullen and angry, the village
barber whispered in his ear that Mahommed Selim and Soada had been
hunting jackals in the desert all afternoon. Hardly had the barber fled
from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at
Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef
felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass--the being more
dreaded in Egypt than the plague.

That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by
sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve
others, to begin the march to Dongola. Though the young man’s father
went secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the
tune of a feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it. That was a
very peculiar thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive
down to the ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of
Allah.

Wassef the camel-driver was the cause. He was a deep man and a strong;
and it was through him the conscription descended upon Mahommed
Selim--“son of a burnt father,” as he called him--who had gone shooting
jackals in the desert with his daughter, and had lost him his breakfast.
Wassef’s rage was quiet but effective, for he had whispered to some
purpose in the ear of the Mamour as well as in that of the dreaded
kavass of conscription. Afterwards, he had gone home and smiled at Soada
his daughter when she lied to him about the sunset breakfast.

With a placid smile and lips that murmured, “Praise be to God,” the
malignant camel-driver watched the shrieking women of the village
throwing dust on their heads and lamenting loudly for the thirteen young
men of Beni Souef who were going forth never to return--or so it seemed
to them; for of all the herd of human kine driven into the desert
before whips and swords, but a moiety ever returned, and that moiety so
battered that their mothers did not know them. Therefore, at Beni Souef
that morning women wept, and men looked sullenly upon the ground--all
but Wassef the camel-driver.

It troubled the mind of Wassef that Mahommed Selim made no outcry at his
fate. He was still more puzzled when the Mamour whispered to him that
Mahommed Selim had told the kavass and his own father that since it was
the will of God, then the will of God was his will, and he would go.
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh
of Mahommed Selim’s father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail
would have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour.
It was quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending
Mahommed Selim to the Soudan.

With a shameless delight Wassef went to the door of his own home, and,
calling to Soada, told her that Mahommed Selim was among the conscripts.
He also told her that the young man was willing to go, and that the
Mamour would take no backsheesh from his father. He looked to see her
burst into tears and wailing, but she only stood and looked at him like
one stricken blind. Wassef laughed, and turned on his heel; and went
out: for what should he know of the look in a woman’s face--he to whom
most women were alike, he who had taken dancing-girls with his camels
into the desert many a time? What should he know of that love which
springs once in every woman’s heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh’s
daughter?

When he had gone, Soada groped her way blindly to the door and out into
the roadway. Her lips moved, but she only said: “Mahommed--Mahommed
Selim!” Her father’s words knelled in her ear that her lover was willing
to go, and she kept saying brokenly: “Mahommed--Mahommed Selim!” As the
mist left her eyes she saw the conscripts go by, and Mahommed Selim was
in the rear rank. He saw her also, but he kept his head turned away,
taking a cigarette from young Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, as they passed
on.

Unlike the manner of her people, Soada turned and went back into her
house, and threw herself upon the mud floor, and put the folds of her
garment in her mouth lest she should cry out in her agony. A whole day
she lay there and did not stir, save to drink from the water-bottle
which old Fatima, the maker of mats, had placed by her side. For Fatima
thought of the far-off time when she loved Hassan the potter, who had
been dragged from his wheel by a kavass of conscription and lost among
the sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl’s story.

That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter. A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and
kept him there until he married Soada, than to let him go. He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to
the bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive’s soldiers in the yellow sands.

When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back
and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran
above her for comfort. Then she ate greedily the food which Soada should
have eaten; snatching scraps of consolation in return for the sympathy
she gave.

The long night went, the next day came, and Soada got up and began to
work again. And the months went by.


II

One evening, on a day which had been almost too hot for even the
seller of liquorice-water to go by calling and clanging, Wassef the
camel-driver sat at the door of a malodorous cafe and listened to a
wandering welee chanting the Koran. Wassef was in an ill-humour: first,
because the day had been so hot; secondly, because he had sold his
ten-months’ camel at a price almost within the bounds of honesty; and
thirdly, because a score of railway contractors and subs. were camped
outside the town. Also, Soada had scarcely spoken to him for three days
past.

In spite of all, Soada had been the apple of his eye, although he had
sworn again and again that next to a firman of the Sultan, a ten-months’
camel was the most beautiful thing on earth. He was in a bitter humour.
This had been an intermittent disease with him almost since the day
Mahommed Selim had been swallowed up by the Soudan; for, like her mother
before her, Soada had no mind to be a mat for his feet. Was it not even
said that Soada’s mother was descended from an English slave with red
hair, who in the terrible disaster at Damietta in 1805 had been carried
away into captivity on the Nile, where he married a fellah woman and
died a good Mussulman?

Soada’s mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah
woman; but Wassef was proud of this ancient heritage of red hair, which
belonged to a field-marshal of Great Britain--so he swore by the beard
of the Prophet. That is why he had not beaten Soada these months past
when she refused to answer him, when with cold stubbornness she gave him
his meals or withheld them at her will. He was even a little awed by her
silent force of will, and at last he had to ask her humbly for a savoury
dish which her mother had taught her to make--a dish he always ate upon
the birthday of Mahomet Ali, who had done him the honour to flog him
with his own kourbash for filching the rations of his Arab charger.

But this particular night Wassef was bitter, and watched with stolid
indifference the going down of the sun, the time when he usually said
his prayers. He was in so ill a humour that he would willingly have
met his old enemy, Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, and settled their
long-standing dispute for ever. But Yusef came not that way. He was
lying drunk with hashish outside the mosque El Hassan, with a letter
from Mahommed Selim in his green turban--for Yusef had been a pilgrimage
to Mecca and might wear the green turban.

But if Yusef came not by the cafe where Wassef sat glooming, some one
else came who quickly roused Wassef from his phlegm. It was Donovan
Pasha, the young English official, who had sat with him many a time at
the door of his but and asked him questions about Dongola and Berber and
the Soudanese. And because Dicky spoke Arabic, and was never known to
have aught to do with the women of Beni Souef, he had been welcome; and
none the less because he never frowned when an Arab told a lie.

“Nehar-ak koom said, Mahommed Wassef,” said Dicky; and sat upon a
bench and drew a narghileh to him, wiping the ivory mouthpiece with his
handkerchief.

“Nehar-ak said, saadat el Pasha,” answered Wassef, and touched lips,
breast, and forehead with his hand. Then they shook hands, thumbs up,
after the ancient custom. And once more, Wassef touched his breast, his
lips, and his forehead.

They sat silent too long for Wassef’s pleasure, for he took pride in
what he was pleased to call his friendship with Donovan Pasha, and he
could see his watchful neighbours gathering at a little distance. It did
not suit his book that they two should not talk together.

“May Allah take them to his mercy!--A regiment was cut to pieces by the
Dervishes at Dongola last quarter of the moon,” he said.

“It was not the regiment of Mahommed Selim,” Dicky answered slowly, with
a curious hard note in his voice.

“All blessings do not come at once--such is the will of God!” answered
Wassef with a sneer.

“You brother of asses,” said Dicky, showing his teeth a little, “you
brother of asses of Bagdad!”

“Saadat el basha!” exclaimed Wassef, angry and dumfounded.

“You had better have gone yourself, and left Mahommed Selim your camels
and your daughter,” continued Dicky, his eyes straight upon Wassef’s.

“God knows your meaning,” said Wassef in a sudden fright; for the
Englishman’s tongue was straight, as he well knew.

“They sneer at you behind your back, Mahommed Wassef. No man in the
village dare tell you, for you have no friends, but I tell you, that
you may save Soada before it is too late. Mahommed Selim lives; or
lived last quarter of the moon, so says Yusef the ghaffir. Sell your
ten-months’ camel, buy the lad out, and bring him back to Soada.”

“Saadat!” said Wassef, in a quick fear, and dropped the stem of the
narghileh, and got to his feet. “Saadat el basha!”

“Before the Nile falls and you may plant yonder field with onions,”
 answered Dicky, jerking his head towards the flooded valley, “her time
will be come!”

Wassef’s lips were drawn, like shrivelled parchment over his red gums,
the fingers of his right hand fumbled in his robe.

“There’s no one to kill--keep quiet!” said Dicky, But Wassef saw near
by the faces of the villagers, and on every face he thought he read a
smile, a sneer; though in truth none sneered, for they were afraid of
his terrible anger. Mad with fury he snatched the turban from his head
and threw it on the ground. Then suddenly he gave one cry, “Allah!” a
vibrant clack like a pistol-shot, for he saw Yusef, the drunken ghaffir,
coming down the road.

Yusef heard that cry of “Allah!” and he knew that the hour had come for
settling old scores. The hashish clouds lifted from his brain, and he
gripped his naboot of the hard wood of the dom-palm, and, with a cry
like a wolf, came on.

It would have been well for Wassef the camel-driver if he had not taken
the turban from his head, for before he could reach Yusef with his
dagger, he went down, his skull cracking like the top of an egg under a
spoon.


III

Thus it was that Soada was left to fight her battle alone. She did not
weep or wail when Wassef’s body was brought home and the moghassil and
hanouti came to do their offices. She did not smear her hair with mud,
nor was she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters
of the Koran. She only said to Fatima when all was over: “It is well; he
is gone from my woe to the mercy of God! Praise be to God!” And she held
her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the dust.

She would have borne her trouble alone to the end, but that she was
bitten on the arm by one of her father’s camels the day they were
sold in the marketplace. Then, helpless and suffering and fevered, she
yielded to the thrice-repeated request of Dicky Donovan, and was taken
to the hospital at Assiout, which Fielding Bey, Dicky’s friend, had
helped to found.

But Soada, as her time drew near and the terror of it stirred her heart,
cast restless eyes upon the whitewashed walls and rough floors of the
hospital. She longed for the mud hut at Beni Souef, and the smell of the
river and the little field of onions she planted every year. Day by day
she grew harder of heart against those who held her in the hospital--for
to her it was but a prison. She would not look when the doctor came, and
she would not answer, but kept her eyes closed; and she did not shrink
when they dressed the arm so cruelly wounded by the camel’s teeth, but
lay still and dumb.

Now, a strange thing happened, for her hair which had been so black
turned brown, and grew browner and browner till it was like the hair of
her mother, who, so the Niline folk said, was descended from the English
soldier-slave with red hair.

Fielding Bey and Dicky came to see her in hospital once before they
returned to Cairo; but Soada would not even speak to them, though she
smiled when they spoke to her; and no one else ever saw her smile during
the days she spent in that hospital with the red floor and white walls
and the lazy watchman walking up and down before the door. She kept her
eyes closed in the daytime; but at night they were always open--always.
Pictures of all she had lived and seen came back to her then--pictures
of days long before Mahommed Selim came into her life. Mahommed Selim!
She never spoke the words now, but whenever she thought them her heart
shrank in pain. Mahommed Selim had gone like a coward into the desert,
leaving her alone.

Her mind dwelt on the little mud hut and the onion field, and she saw
down by the foreshore of the river the great khiassas from Assouan and
Luxor laden with cotton or dourha or sugar-cane, their bent prows hooked
in the Nile mud. She saw again the little fires built along the shore
and atop of the piles of grain, round which sat the white, the black,
and the yellow-robed riverine folk in the crimson glare; while from the
banks came the cry: “Alla-haly, ‘m alla-haly!” as stalwart young Arabs
drew in from the current to the bank some stubborn, overloaded khiassa.
She heard the snarl of the camels as they knelt down before her father’s
but to rest before the journey into the yellow plains of sand beyond.
She saw the seller of sweetmeats go by calling--calling. She heard the
droning of the children in the village school behind the hut, the dull
clatter of Arabic consonants galloping through the Koran. She saw the
moon--the full moon-upon the Nile, the wide acreage of silver water
before the golden-yellow and yellow-purple of the Libyan hills behind.

She saw through her tears the sweet mirage of home, and her heart
rebelled against the prison where she lay. What should she know of
hospitals--she whose medicaments had been herbs got from the Nile valley
and the cool Nile mud? Was it not the will of God if we lived or the
will of God if we died? Did we not all lie in the great mantle of the
mercy of God, ready to be lifted up or to be set down as He willed?
They had prisoned her here; there were bars upon the windows, there were
watchmen at the door.

At last she could bear it no longer; the end of it all came. She stole
out over the bodies of the sleeping watchmen, out into the dusty road
under the palms, down to the waterside, to the Nile--the path leading
homewards. She must go down the Nile, hiding by day, travelling by
night--the homing bird with a broken wing-back to the but where she had
lived so long with Wassef the camel-driver; back where she could lie
in the dusk of her windowless home, shutting out the world from her
solitude. There she could bear the agony of her hour.

Drinking the water of the Nile, eating the crumbs of dourha bread she
had brought from the hospital, getting an onion from a field, chewing
shreds of sugarcane, hiding by day and trudging on by night,
hourly growing weaker, she struggled towards Beni Souef.
Fifty--forty--thirty--ten--five miles! Oh! the last two days, her head
so hot and her brain bursting, and a thousand fancies swimming
before her eyes, her heart fluttering, fluttering--stopping, going
on--stopping, going on.

It was only the sound of the river--the Nile, Mother of Egypt, crooning
to her disordered spirit, which kept her on her feet. Five miles, four
miles, three miles, two, and then--she never quite remembered how she
came to the hut where she was born. Two miles--two hours of incredible
agony, now running, now leaning against a palm tree, now dropping to her
knees, now fighting on and on, she came at last to the one spot in the
world where she could die in peace.

As she staggered, stumbled, through the village, Yusef, the drunken
ghaffir, saw her. He did not dare speak to her, for had he not killed
her father, and had he not bought himself free of punishment from
the Mudir? So he ran to old Fatima and knocked upon her door with his
naboot, crying: “In the name of Allah get thee to the hut of Wassef the
camel-driver!”

Thus it was that Soada, in her agony, heard a voice say out of the
infinite distance: “All praise to Allah, he hath even now the strength
of a year-old child!”


IV

That night at sunset, as Soada lay upon the sheepskin spread for her,
with the child nestled between her arm and her breast, a figure darkened
the doorway, and old Fatima cried out:

“Mahommed Selim!”

With a gasping sound Soada gathered the child quickly to her breast,
and shrank back to the wall. This surely was the ghost of Mahommed
Selim--this gaunt, stooping figure covered with dust.

“Soada, in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, Soada,
beautiful one!”

Mahommed Selim, once the lithe, the straight, the graceful, now bent,
awkward, fevered, all the old daring gone from him, stood still in the
middle of the room, humbled before the motherhood in his sight.

“Brother of jackals,” cried old Fatima, “what dost thou here? What dost
thou here, dog of dogs!” She spat at him.

He took no notice. “Soada,” he said eagerly, prayerfully, and his voice,
though hoarse, was softer than she had ever heard it. “Soada, I have
come through death to thee--Listen, Soada! At night, when sleep was upon
the barrack-house, I stole out to come to thee. My heart had been hard.
I had not known how much I loved thee--”

Soada interrupted him. “What dost thou know of love, Mahommed Selim? The
blood of the dead cries from the ground.”

He came a step nearer. “The blood of Wassef the camel-driver is upon
my head,” he said. “In the desert there came news of it. In the desert,
even while we fought the wild tribes, one to ten, a voice kept crying in
my ear, even as thou hast cried, ‘What didst thou know of love, Mahommed
Selim!’ One by one the men of Beni Souef fell round me; one by one they
spoke of their village and of their women, and begged for a drop of
water, and died. And my heart grew hot within me, and a spirit kept
whispering in my ear: ‘Mahommed Selim, think of the village thou hast
shamed, of Soada thou hast wronged! No drop of water shall cheer thy
soul in dying!’”

Fatima and Soada listened now with bated breath, for this was the voice
of one who had drunk the vinegar and gall of life.

“When the day was done, and sleep was upon the barrack-house, my heart
waked up and I knew that I loved Soada as I had never loved her. I ran
into the desert, and the jackals flew before me--outcasts of the desert,
they and I. Coming to the tomb of Amshar the sheikh, by which was a
well, there I found a train of camels. One of these I stole, and again
I ran into the desert, and left the jackals behind. Hour after hour, day
and night, I rode on. But faintness was upon me, and dreams came.
For though only the sands were before me, I seemed to watch the Nile
running--running, and thou beside it, hastening with it, hastening,
hastening towards thy home. And Allah put a thorn into my heart, that a
sharp pain went through my body--and at last I fell.”

Soada’s eyes were on him now with a strange, swimming brilliancy.

“Mahommed--Mahommed Selim, Allah touched thine eyes that thou didst see
truly,” she said eagerly. “Speak not till I have done,” he answered.
“When I waked again I was alone in the desert, no food, no water, and
the dead camel beside me. But I had no fear. ‘If it be God’s will,’ said
I, ‘then I shall come unto Soada. If it be not God’s will, so be it: for
are we not on the cushion of His mercy, to sleep or to wake, to live or
to die?’”

He paused, tottering, and presently sank upon the ground, his hands
drooped before him, his head bent down. Old Fatima touched him on the
shoulder.

“Brother of vultures didst thou go forth; brother of eagles dost thou
return,” she said. “Eat, drink, in the house of thy child and its
mother.”

“Shall the unforgiven eat or drink?” he asked, and he rocked his body
to and fro, like one who chants the Koran in a corner of El Azhar,
forgetting and forgotten.

Soada’s eyes were on him now as though they might never leave him again;
and she dragged herself little by little towards him, herself and the
child--little by little, until at last she touched his feet, and the
child’s face was turned towards him from its mother’s breast.

“Thou art my love, Mahommed Selim,” she said. He raised his head from
his hands, a hunger of desire in his face.

“Thou art my lord,” she added: “art thou not forgiven? The little one is
thine and mine,” she whispered. “Wilt thou not speak to him?”

“Lest Allah should strike me with blindness and dry up the juice of my
veins, I will not touch thee or the child until all be righted. Food
will I not eat, nor water drink until thou art mine--by the law of the
Prophet, mine.”

Laying down the water-jar, and the plate of dourha bread, old Fatima
gathered her robe about her, and cried as she ran from the house:
“Marriage and fantasia thou shalt have this hour.”

The stiffness seemed to pass from her bones as she ran through the
village to the house of the Omdah. Her voice, lifting shrilly, sang the
Song of Haleel, the song of the newly married, till it met the chant of
the Muezzin on the tower of the mosque El Hassan, and mingled with it,
dying away over the fields of bersim and the swift-flowing Nile.

That night Mahommed Selim and Soada the daughter of Wassef the
camel-driver were married, but the only fantasia they held was their own
low laughter over the child. In the village, however, people were little
moved to smile, for they knew that Mahommed Selim was a deserter from
the army of the Khedive at Dongola, and that meant death. But no one
told Soada this, and she did not think; she was content to rest in the
fleeting dream.

“Give them twenty-four hours,” said the black-visaged fat sergeant of
cavalry come to arrest Mahommed Selim for desertion.

The father of Mahommed Selim again offered the Mamour a feddan of
land if the young man might go free, and to the sergeant he offered a
she-camel and a buffalo. To no purpose. It was Mahommed Selim himself
who saved his father’s goods to him. He sent this word to the sergeant
by Yusef the drunken ghaffir: “Give me to another sunset and sunrise,
and what I have is thine--three black donkeys of Assiout rented to old
Abdullah the sarraf.”

Because with this offer he should not only have backsheesh but the
man also, the fat sergeant gave him leave. When the time was up, and
Mahommed Selim drew Soada’s face to his breast, he knew that it was the
last look and last embrace.

“I am going back,” he said; “my place is empty at Dongola.”

“No, no, thou shalt not go,” she cried. “See how the little one loves
thee,” she urged, and, sobbing, she held the child up to him.

But he spoke softly to her, and at last she said: “Kiss me, Mahommed
Selim. Behold now thy discharge shall be bought from the palace of the
Khedive, and soon thou wilt return,” she cried.

“If it be the will of God,” he answered; “but the look of thine eyes I
will take with me, and the face of the child here.” He thrust a finger
into the palm of the child, and the little dark hand closed round it.
But when he would have taken it away, the little hand still clung,
though the eyes were scarce opened upon life.

“See, Mahommed Selim,” Soada cried, “he would go with thee.”

“He shall come to me one day, by the mercy of God,” answered Mahommed
Selim.

Then he went out into the market-place and gave himself up to the fat
sergeant. As they reached the outskirts of the village a sorry camel
came with a sprawling gallop after them, and swaying and rolling above
it was Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, his naboot of dom-wood across his
knees.

“What dost thou come for, friend of the mercy of God?” asked Mahommed
Selim.

“To be thy messenger, praise be to God!” answered Yusef, swinging his
water-bottle clear for a drink.


V

In Egypt, the longest way round is not the shortest way home, and that
was why Mahommed Selim’s court-martial took just three minutes and a
half; and the bimbashi who judged him found even that too long, for he
yawned in the deserter’s face as he condemned him to death.

Mahommed Selim showed no feeling when the sentence was pronounced. His
face had an apathetic look. It seemed as if it were all one to him. But
when they had turned him round to march to the shed where he was to
be kept, till hung like a pig at sunrise, his eyes glanced about
restlessly. For even as the sentence had been pronounced a new idea had
come into his mind. Over the heads of the Gippy soldiers, with their
pipestem legs, his look flashed eagerly, then a little painfully--then
suddenly stayed, for it rested on the green turban of Yusef, the drunken
ghaffir. Yusef’s eyes were almost shut; his face had the grey look of
fresh-killed veal, for he had come from an awful debauch of hashish.

“Allah! Allah!” cried Mahommed Selim, for that was the sound which
always waked the torpid brain of Yusef since Wassef the camel-driver’s
skull had crackled under his naboot.

Yusef’s wide shoulders straightened back, his tongue licked his lips,
his eyes stared before him, his throat was dry. He licked his lips
again. “Allah!” he cried and ran forward.

The soldiers thrust Yusef back. Mahommed Selim turned and whispered to
the sergeant.

“Backsheesh!” he said; “my grey Arab for a word with Yusef the ghaffir.”

“Malaish!” said the sergeant; and the soldiers cleared a way for Yusef.

The palms of the men from Beni Souef met once, twice, thrice; they
touched their lips, their breasts, their foreheads, with their hands,
three times. Then Mahommed Selim fell upon the breast of Yusef and
embraced him. Doing so he whispered in his ear:

“In the name of Allah, tell Soada I died fighting the Dervishes!”

“So be it, in God’s name!” said Yusef. “A safe journey to you, brother
of giants.”

Next morning at sunrise, between two dom-palms, stood Mahommed Selim;
but scarce a handful of the soldiers sent to see him die laughed when
the rope was thrown over his head. For his story had gone abroad, and
it was said that he was mad--none but a madman would throw away his life
for a fellah woman. And was it not written that a madman was one beloved
of Allah, who had taken his spirit up into heaven, leaving only the
disordered body behind?

If, at the last moment, Mahommed Selim had but cried out: “I am mad;
with my eyes I have seen God!” no man would have touched the rope that
hanged him up that day.

But, according to the sacred custom, he only asked for a bowl of
water, drank it, said “Allah!” and bowed his head three times towards
Mecca--and bowed his head no more.

Before another quarter was added to the moon, Yusef, the drunken
ghaffir, at the door of Soada’s hut in Beni Souef, told old Fatima
the most wonderful tale, how Mahommed Selim had died on his sheepskin,
having killed ten Dervishes with his own hand; and that a whole regiment
had attended his funeral.

This is to the credit of Yusef’s account, that the last half of his
statement was no lie.




ON THE REEF OF NORMAN’S WOE

       “It was the schooner Hesperus
        That sailed the wintry sea;
        And the skipper had taken his little daughter
        To bear him company.
        -------------------
        Such was the wreck of the Hesperus
        In the midnight and the snow!
        Christ save us all from a death like this,
        On the reef of Norman’s woe!”

Only it was not the schooner Hesperus, and she did not sail the wintry
sea. It was the stern-wheeled tub Amenhotep, which churned her way up
and down the Nile, scraping over sand banks, butting the shores with
gaiety embarrassing--for it was the time of cholera, just before the
annual rise of the Nile. Fielding Bey, the skipper, had not taken his
little daughter, for he had none; but he had taken little Dicky Donovan,
who had been in at least three departments of the Government, with
advantage to all.

Dicky was dining with Fielding at the Turf Club, when a telegram came
saying that cholera had appeared at a certain village on the Nile.
Fielding had dreaded this, had tried to make preparation for it, had
begged of the Government this reform and that--to no purpose. He knew
that the saving of the country from an epidemic lay with his handful
of Englishmen and the faithful native officials; but chiefly with the
Englishmen. He was prepared only as a forlorn hope is prepared, with
energy, with personal courage, with knowledge; and never were these more
needed.

With the telegram in his hand, he thought of his few English assistants,
and sighed; for the game they would play was the game of Hercules and
Death over the body of Alcestis.

Dicky noted the sigh, read the telegram, drank another glass of claret,
lighted a cigarette, drew his coffee to him, and said: “The Khedive is
away--I’m off duty; take me.”

Fielding looked surprised, yet with an eye of hope. If there was one man
in Egypt who could do useful work in the business, it was little Dicky
Donovan, who had a way with natives such as no man ever had in Egypt;
who knew no fear of anything mortal; who was as tireless as a beaver,
as keen-minded as a lynx is sharp-eyed. It was said to Dicky’s discredit
that he had no heart, but Fielding knew better. When Dicky offered
himself now, Fielding said, almost feverishly: “But, dear old D., you
don’t see--”

“Don’t I?--Well, then,

       “‘What are the blessings of the sight?--
        Oh, tell your poor blind boy!’”

What Fielding told him did not alter his intention, nor was it
Fielding’s wish that it should, though he felt it right to warn the
little man what sort of thing was in store for them.

“As if I don’t know, old lime-burner!” answered Dicky coolly.

In an hour they were on the Amenhotep, and in two hours they were on the
way--a floating hospital--to the infected district of Kalamoun. There
the troubles began. It wasn’t the heat, and it wasn’t the work, and it
wasn’t the everlasting care of the sick: it was the ceaseless hunt for
the disease-stricken, the still, tireless opposition of the natives, the
remorseless deception, the hopeless struggle against the covert odds.
With nothing behind: no support from the Government, no adequate
supplies, few capable men; and all the time the dead, inert,
dust-powdered air; the offices of policeman, doctor, apothecary, even
undertaker and gravedigger, to perform; and the endless weeks of it
all. A handful of good men under two leaders of nerve, conscience and
ability, to fight an invisible enemy, which, gaining headway, would
destroy its scores of thousands!

At the end of the first two months Fielding Bey became hopeless.

“We can’t throttle it,” he said to Dicky Donovan. “They don’t give us
the ghost of a chance. To-day I found a dead-un hid in an oven under a
heap of flour to be used for to-morrow’s baking; I found another doubled
up in a cupboard, and another under a pile of dourha which will be
ground into flour.”

“With twenty ghaffirs I beat five cane and dourha fields this morning,”
 said Dicky. “Found three cases. They’d been taken out of the village
during the night.”

“Bad ones?”

“So so. They’ll be worse before they’re better. That was my morning’s
flutter. This afternoon I found the huts these gentlemen call their
homes. I knocked holes in the roofs per usual, burnt everything that
wasn’t wood, let in the light o’ heaven, and splashed about limewash and
perchloride. That’s my day’s tot-up. Any particular trouble?” he added,
eyeing Fielding closely.

Fielding fretfully jerked his foot on the floor, and lighted his pipe,
the first that day.

“Heaps. I’ve put the barber in prison, and given the sarraf twenty
lashes for certifying that the death of the son of the Mamour was el
aadah--the ordinary. It was one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen. He
fell ill at ten and was dead at two, the permis d’inhumation was given
at four, and the usual thing occurred: the bodywashers got the bedding
and clothing, and the others the coverlet. God only knows who’ll wear
that clothing, who’ll sleep in that bed!”

“If the Lord would only send them sense, we’d supply sublimate
solution--douche and spray, and zinc for their little long boxes of
bones,” mused Dicky, his eyes half shut, as he turned over in his hands
some scarabs a place-hunting official had brought him that day. “Well,
that isn’t all?” he added, with a quick upward glance and a quizzical
smile. His eyes, however, as they fell on Fielding’s, softened in a
peculiar way, and a troubled look flashed through them; for Fielding’s
face was drawn and cold, though the eyes were feverish, and a bright
spot burned on his high cheek-bones.

“No, it isn’t all, Dicky. The devil’s in the whole business. Steady,
sullen opposition meets us at every hand. Norman’s been here--rode over
from Abdallah--twenty-five miles. A report’s going through the native
villages, started at Abdallah, that our sanitary agents are throwing
yellow handkerchiefs in the faces of those they’re going to isolate.”

“That’s Hoskai Bey’s yellow handkerchief. He’s a good man, but he blows
his nose too much, and blows it with a flourish.... Has Norman gone
back?”

“No, I’ve made him lie down in my cabin. He says he can’t sleep, says he
can only work. He looks ten years older. Abdallah’s an awful place, and
it’s a heavy district. The Mamour there’s a scoundrel. He has influenced
the whole district against Norman and our men. Norman--you know what
an Alexander-Hannibal baby it is, all the head of him good for the best
sort of work anywhere, all the fat heart of him dripping sentiment--gave
a youngster a comfit the other day. By some infernal accident the child
fell ill two days afterwards--it had been sucking its father’s old
shoe--and Norman just saved its life by the skin of his teeth. If the
child had died, there’d have been a riot probably. As it is, there’s
talk that we’re scattering poisoned sweetmeats to spread the disease.
He’s done a plucky thing, though....” He paused. Dicky looked up
inquiringly, and Fielding continued. “There’s a fellow called Mustapha
Kali, a hanger-on of the Mudir of the province. He spread a report that
this business was only a scare got up by us; that we poisoned the people
and buried them alive. What does Norman do? He promptly arrests him,
takes him to the Mudir, and says that the brute must be punished or
he’ll carry the matter to the Khedive.”

“Here’s to you, Mr. Norman!” said Dicky, with a little laugh. “What does
the Mudir do?”

“Doesn’t know what to do. He tells Norman to say to me that if he puts
the fellow in prison there’ll be a riot, for they’ll make a martyr of
him. If he fines him it won’t improve matters. So he asks me to name
a punishment which’ll suit our case. He promises to give it ‘his most
distinguished consideration.’”

“And what’s your particular poison for him?” asked Dicky, with his eyes
on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.

“I don’t know. If he’s punished in the ordinary way it will only make
matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something’s needed that will play our
game and turn the tables on the reptile too.”

“A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?” Dicky seemed only idly
watching the moving figures by the hospital.

“Yes, but what is it? I can’t inoculate him with bacilli. That’s what’d
do the work, I fancy.”

“Pocket your fancy, Fielding,” answered Dicky. “Let me have a throw.”

“Go on. If you can’t hit it off, it’s no good, for my head doesn’t think
these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns.”

Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for
himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were.
Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these
days: “I’ve got his sentence pat--it’ll meet the case, or you may say,
‘Cassio, never more be officer of mine.’”

He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano--for there was a piano
on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding
played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and
Fielding could really play! As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of
legal monotone:

   The citizen Mustapha Kali having asserted that there is no cholera,
   and circulated various false statements concerning the treatment of
   patients, is hereby appointed as hospital-assistant for three
   months, in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he may have
   opportunity of correcting his opinions.
           --Signed Ebn ben Hari, Mudir of Abdallah.

Fielding lay back and laughed--the first laugh on his lips for a
fortnight. He laughed till his dry, fevered lips took on a natural
moisture, and he said at last: “You’ve pulled it off, D. That’s
masterly. You and Norman have the only brains in this show. I get worse
every day; I do--upon my soul!”

There was a curious anxious look in Dicky’s eyes, but he only said: “You
like it? Think it fills the bill, eh?”

“If the Mudir doesn’t pass the sentence I’ll shut up shop.” He leaned
over anxiously to Dicky and gripped his arm. “I tell you this pressure
of opposition has got to be removed, or we’ll never get this beast of an
epidemic under, but we’ll go under instead, my boy.”

“Oh, we’re doing all right,” Dicky answered, with only apparent
carelessness. “We’ve got inspection of the trains, we’ve got some
sort of command of the foreshores, we’ve got the water changed in the
mosques, we’ve closed the fountains, we’ve stopped the markets, we’ve
put Sublimate Pasha and Limewash Effendi on the war-path, and--”

“And the natives believe in lighted tar-barrels and a cordon sanitaire!
No, D., things must take a turn, or the game’s lost and we’ll go with
it. Success is the only thing that’ll save their lives--and ours: we
couldn’t stand failure in this. A man can walk to the gates of hell to
do the hardest trick, and he’ll come back one great blister and live,
if he’s done the thing he set out for; but if he doesn’t do it, he falls
into the furnace. He never comes back. Dicky, things must be pulled our
way, or we go to deep damnation.”

Dicky turned a little pale, for there was high nervous excitement in
Fielding’s words; and for a moment he found it hard to speak. He was
about to say something, however, when Fielding continued.

“Norman there,”--he pointed to the deck-cabin, “Norman’s the same.
He says it’s do or die; and he looks it. It isn’t like a few fellows
besieged by a host. For in that case you wait to die, and you fight to
the last, and you only have your own lives. But this is different. We’re
fighting to save these people from themselves; and this slow, quiet,
deadly work, day in, day out, in the sickening sun and smell-faugh! the
awful smell in the air--it kills in the end, if you don’t pull your game
off. You know it’s true.”

His eyes had an eager, almost prayerful look; he was like a child in
his simple earnestness. His fingers moved over the maps on the table,
in which were little red and white and yellow flags, the white flags to
mark the towns and villages where they had mastered the disease, the red
flags to mark the new ones attacked, the yellow to indicate those where
the disease was raging. His fingers touched one of the flags, and he
looked down.

“See, D. Here are two new places attacked to-day.

“I must ride over to Abdallah when Norman goes. It’s all so hopeless!”

“Things will take a turn,” rejoined Dicky, with a forced gaiety. “You
needn’t ride over to Abdallah. I’ll go with Norman, and what’s more I’ll
come back here with Mustapha Kali.”

“You’ll go to the Mudir?” asked Fielding eagerly. He seemed to set so
much store by this particular business.

“I’ll bring the Mudir too, if there’s any trouble,” said Dicky grimly;
though it is possible he did not mean what he said.

Two hours later Fielding, Dicky, and Norman were in conference,
extending their plans of campaign. Fielding and Norman were eager and
nervous, and their hands and faces seemed to have taken on the arid
nature of the desert. Before they sat down Dicky had put the bottle of
whiskey out of easy reach; for Fielding, under ordinary circumstances
the most abstemious of men, had lately, in his great fatigue and
overstrain, unconsciously emptied his glass more often than was wise for
a campaign of long endurance. Dicky noticed now, as they sat round the
table, that Norman’s hand went to the coffee-pot as Fielding’s had gone
to his glass. What struck him as odd also was that Fielding seemed to
have caught something of Norman’s manner. There was the same fever in
the eyes, though Norman’s face was more worn and the eyes more sunken.
He looked like a man that was haunted. There was, too, a certain air of
helplessness about him, a primitive intensity almost painful. Dicky saw
Fielding respond to this in a curious way--it was the kind of fever that
passes quickly from brain to brain when there is not sound bodily health
commanded by a cool intelligence to insulate it. Fielding had done the
work of four men for over two months, and, like most large men, his
nerves had given in before Dicky’s, who had done six men’s work
at least, and, by his power of organisation and his labour-saving
intelligence, conserved the work of another fifty.

The three were sitting silent, having arranged certain measures, when
Norman sprang to his feet excitedly and struck the table with his hand.

“It’s no use, sir,” he said to Fielding, “I’ll have to go. I’m no good.
I neglect my duty. I was to be back at Abdallah at five. I forgot
all about it. A most important thing. A load of fessikh was landed at
Minkari, five miles beyond Abdallah. We’ve prohibited fessikh. I was
going to seize it. ... It’s no good. It’s all so hopeless here.”

Dicky knew now that the beginning of the end had come for Norman. There
were only two things to do: get him away shooting somewhere, or humour
him here. But there was no chance for shooting till things got very
much better. The authorities in Cairo would never understand, and
the babbling social-military folk would say that they had calmly gone
shooting while pretending to stay the cholera epidemic. It wouldn’t be
possible to explain that Norman was in a bad way, and that it was done
to give him half a chance of life.

Fielding also ought to have a few days clear away from this constant
pressure and fighting, and the sounds and the smells of death; but it
could not be yet. Therefore, to humour them both was the only thing,
and Norman’s was the worse case. After all, they had got a system of
sanitary supervision, they had the disease by the throat, and even in
Cairo the administration was waking up a little. The crisis would soon
pass perhaps, if a riot could be stayed and the natives give up their
awful fictions of yellow handkerchiefs, poisoned sweetmeats, deadly
limewash, and all such nonsense.

So Dicky said now, “All right, Norman; come along. You’ll seize that
fessikh, and I’ll bring back Mustapha Kali. We’ll work him as he has
never worked in his life. He’ll be a living object-lesson. We’ll have
all Upper Egypt on the banks of the Nile waiting to see what happens to
Mustapha.”

Dicky laughed, and Fielding responded feebly; but Norman was looking at
the hospital with a look too bright for joy, too intense for despair.

“I found ten in a corner of a cane-field yesterday,” he said dreamily.
“Four were dead, and the others had taken the dead men’s smocks as
covering.” He shuddered. “I see nothing but limewash, smell nothing but
carbolic. It’s got into my head. Look here, old man, I can’t stand it.
I’m no use,” he added pathetically to Fielding.

“You’re right enough, if you’ll not take yourself so seriously,” said
Dicky jauntily. “You mustn’t try to say, ‘Alone I did it.’ Come along.
Fill your tobacco-pouch. There are the horses. I’m ready.”

He turned to Fielding.

“It’s going to be a stiff ride, Fielding. But I’ll do it in twenty-four
hours, and bring Mustapha Kali too--for a consideration.”

He paused, and Fielding said, with an attempt at playfulness: “Name your
price.”

“That you play for me, when I get back, the overture of ‘Tannhauser’.
Play it, mind; no tuning-up sort of thing, like last Sunday’s
performance. Practise it, my son! Is it a bargain? I’m not going to work
for nothing a day.”

He watched the effect of his words anxiously, for he saw how needful
it was to divert Fielding’s mind in the midst of all this “plague,
pestilence, and famine.” For days Fielding had not touched the piano,
the piano which Mrs. Henshaw, widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, had
insisted on his taking with him a year before, saying that it would be a
cure for loneliness when away from her. During the first of these black
days Fielding had played intermittently for a few moments at a time, and
Dicky had noticed that after playing he seemed in better spirits. But
lately the disease of a ceaseless unrest, of constant sleepless work,
was on him. He had not played for near a week, saying, in response to
Dicky’s urging, that there was no time for music. And Dicky knew that
presently there would be no time to eat, and then no time to sleep; and
then, the worst!

Dicky had pinned his faith and his friendship to Fielding, and he saw no
reason why he should lose his friend because Madame Cholera was stalking
the native villages, driving the fellaheen before her like sheep to the
slaughter.

“Is it a bargain?” he added, as Fielding did not at once reply. If
Fielding would but play it would take the strain off his mind at times.

“All right, D., I’ll see what I can do with it,” said Fielding, and with
a nod turned to the map with the little red and white and yellow flags,
and began to study it.

He did not notice that one of his crew abaft near the wheel was watching
him closely, while creeping along the railing on the pretence of
cleaning it. Fielding was absorbed in making notes upon a piece of paper
and moving the little flags about. Now he lit a cigar and began walking
up and down the deck.

The Arab disappeared, but a few minutes afterwards returned. The deck
was empty. Fielding had ridden away to the village. The map was still on
the table. With a frightened face the Arab peered at it, then going to
the side he called down softly, and there came up from the lower deck a
Copt, the sarraf of the village, who could read English fairly. The Arab
pointed to the map, and the Copt approached cautiously. A few feet away
he tried to read what was on the map, but, unable to do so, drew closer,
pale-faced and knockkneed, and stared at the map and the little flags.
An instant after he drew back, and turned to the Arab. “May God burn
his eyes! He sends the death to the village by moving the flags. May God
change him into a dog to be beaten to death! The red is to begin, the
white flag is for more death, the yellow is for enough. See--may God cut
off his hand!--he has moved the white flag to our village.” He pointed
in a trembling fear, half real, half assumed--for he was of a nation of
liars.

During the next half-hour at least a dozen Arabs came to look at the
map, but they disappeared like rats in a hole when, near midnight,
Fielding’s tall form appeared on the bank above.

It was counted to him as a devil’s incantation, the music that he played
that night, remembering his promise to Dicky Donovan. It was music
through which breathed the desperate, troubled, aching heart and
tortured mind of an overworked strong man. It cried to the night its
trouble; but far over in the Cholera Hospital the sick heard it and
turned their faces towards it eagerly. It pierced the apathy of the
dying. It did more, for it gave Fielding five hours’ sleep that night;
and though he waked to see one of his own crew dead on the bank, he
tackled the day’s labour with more hope than he had had for a fortnight.

As the day wore on, however, his spirits fell, for on every hand was
suspicion, unrest, and opposition, and his native assistants went
sluggishly about their work. It was pathetic and disheartening to see
people refusing to be protected, the sick refusing to be relieved, all
stricken with fear, yet inviting death by disobeying the Inglesi.

Kalamoun was hopeless; yet twenty-four hours earlier Fielding had
fancied there was a little light in the darkness. That night Fielding’s
music gave him but two hours’ sleep, and he had to begin the day on
a brandy-and-soda. Wherever he went open resistance blocked his way,
hisses and mutterings followed him, the sick were hid in all sorts of
places, and two of his assistants deserted before noon. Things looked
ominous enough, and at five o’clock he made up his mind that Egypt would
be overrun with cholera, and that he should probably have to defend
himself and the Amenhotep from rioters, for the native police would be
useless.

But at five o’clock Dicky Donovan came in a boat, and with him Mustapha
Kali under a native guard of four men. The Mudir’s sense of humour had
been touched, and this sense of humour probably saved the Mudir from
trouble, for it played Dicky’s game for him.

Mustapha Kali had been sentenced to serve in the Cholera Hospital of
Kalamoun, that he might be cured of his unbelief. At first he had taken
his fate hardly, but Dicky had taunted him and then had suggested that
a man whose conscience was clear and convictions good would carry a high
head in trouble. Dicky challenged him to prove his libels by probing the
business to the bottom, like a true scientist. All the way from Abdallah
Dicky talked to him so, and at last the only answer Mustapha Kali would
make was, “Malaish no matter!”

Mustapha Kali pricked up his ears with hope as he saw the sullen crowds
from Kalamoun gathering on the shore to watch his deportation to the
Cholera Hospital; and, as he stepped from the khiassa, he called out
loudly:

“They are all dogs and sons of dogs, and dogs were their grandsires. No
good is in a dog the offspring of a dog. Whenever these dogs scratch the
ground the dust of poison is in the air, and we die.”

“You are impolite, Mustapha Kali,” said Dicky coolly, and offered him a
cigarette.

The next three days were the darkest in Dicky Donovan’s career. On the
first day there came word that Norman, overwrought, had shot himself. On
the next, Mustapha Kali in a fit of anger threw a native policeman into
the river, and when his head appeared struck it with a barge-pole, and
the man sank to rise no more. The three remaining policemen, two of whom
were Soudanese, and true to Dicky, bound him and shut him up in a hut.
When that evening Fielding refused to play, Dicky knew that Norman’s
fate had taken hold of him, and that he must watch his friend every
minute--that awful vigilance which kills the watcher in the end. Dicky
said to himself more than once that day:

       “Christ save us all from a death like this,
        On the reef of Norman’s woe!”

But it was not Dicky who saved Fielding. On the third day the
long-deferred riot broke out. The Copt and the Arab had spread the
report that Fielding brought death to the villages by moving the little
flags on his map. The populace rose.

Fielding was busy with the map at the dreaded moment that hundreds of
the villagers appeared upon the bank and rushed the Amenhotep. Fielding
and Dicky were both armed, but Fielding would not fire until he saw that
his own crew had joined the rioters on the bank. Then, amid a shower of
missiles, he shot the Arab who had first spread the report about the map
and the flags.

Now Dicky and he were joined by Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer of the
Amenhotep, and together the three tried to hold the boat. Every native
had left them. They were obliged to retreat aft to the deckcabin.
Placing their backs against it, they prepared to die hard. No one could
reach them from behind, at least.

It was an unequal fight. All three had received slight wounds, but the
blood-letting did them all good. Fielding was once more himself; nervous
anxiety, unrest, had gone from him. He was as cool as a cucumber. He
would not go shipwreck now “on the reef of Norman’s woe.” Here was a
better sort of death. No men ever faced it with quieter minds than did
the three. Every instant brought it nearer.

All at once there was a cry and a stampede in the rear of the attacking
natives. The crowd suddenly parted like two waves, and retreated; and
Mustapha Kali, almost naked, and supported by a stolid Soudanese, stood
before the three. He was pallid, his hands and brow were dripping sweat,
and there was a look of death in his eyes.

“I have cholera, effendi!” he cried. “Take me to Abdallah to die, that I
may be buried with my people and from mine own house.”

“Is it not poison?” asked Fielding grimly, yet seeing now a ray of hope
in the sickening business.

“It is cholera, effendi. Take me home to die.”

“Very well. Tell the people so, and I will take you home, and I will
bury you with your fathers,” said Fielding.

Mustapha Kali turned slowly. “I am sick of cholera,” he said as
loudly as he could to the awe-stricken crowd. “May God not cool my
resting-place if it be not so!”

“Tell the people to go to their homes and obey us,” said Dicky, putting
away his pistol.

“These be good men, I have seen with mine own eyes,” said Mustapha
hoarsely to the crowd. “It is for your good they do all. Have I not
seen? Let God fill both my hands with dust if it be not so! God hath
stricken me, and behold I give myself into the hands of the Inglesi, for
I believe!”

He would have fallen to the ground, but Dicky and the Soudanese caught
him and carried him down to the bank, while the crowd scuttled from the
boat, and Fielding made ready to bear the dying man to Abdallah--a race
against death.

Fielding brought Mustapha Kali to Abdallah in time to die there, and
buried him with his fathers; and Dicky stayed behind to cleanse Kalamoun
with perchloride and limewash.

The story went abroad and travelled fast, and the words of Mustapha
Kali, oft repeated, became as the speech of a holy man; and the people
no longer hid their dead, but brought them to the Amenhotep.

This was the beginning of better things; the disease was stayed.

And for all the things that these men did--Fielding Bey and Donovan
Pasha--they got naught but an Egyptian ribbon to wear on the breast and
a laboured censure from the Administration for overrunning the budget
allowance.

Dicky, however, seemed satisfied, for Fielding’s little barque of life
had not gone down “On the reef of Norman’s woe.” Mrs. Henshaw felt so
also when she was told all, and she disconcerted Dicky by bursting into
tears.

“Why those tears?” said Dicky to Fielding afterwards; “I wasn’t
eloquent.”




FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY

His legs were like pipe-stems, his body was like a board, but he was
straight enough, not unsoldierly, nor so bad to look at when his back
was on you; but when he showed his face you had little pleasure in him.
It seemed made of brown putty, the nose was like india-rubber, and the
eyes had that dull, sullen look of a mongrel got of a fox-terrier and a
bull-dog. Like this sort of mongrel also his eyes turned a brownish-red
when he was excited.

You could always tell when something had gone wrong with Ibrahim the
Orderly, by that curious dull glare in his eyes. Selamlik Pasha said
to Fielding that it was hashish; Fielding said it was a cross breed of
Soudanese and fellah. But little Dicky Donovan said it was something
else, and he kept his eye upon Ibrahim. And Dicky, with all his faults,
could screw his way from the front of a thing to the back thereof like
no other civilised man you ever knew. But he did not press his opinions
upon Fielding, who was an able administrator and a very clever fellow
also, with a genial habit of believing in people who served him: and
that is bad in the Orient.

As an orderly Ibrahim was like a clock: stiff in his gait as a pendulum,
regular as a minute. He had no tongue for gossip either, so far as
Fielding knew. Also, five times a day he said his prayers--an unusual
thing for a Gippy soldier-servant; for as the Gippy’s rank increases he
soils his knees and puts his forehead in the dust with discretion. This
was another reason why Dicky suspected him.

It was supposed that Ibrahim could not speak a word of English; and
he seemed so stupid, he looked so blank, when English was spoken, that
Fielding had no doubt the English language was a Tablet of Abydos to
him. But Dicky was more wary, and waited. He could be very patient and
simple, and his delicate face seemed as innocent as a girl’s when he
said to Ibrahim one morning: “Ibrahim, brother of scorpions, I’m going
to teach you English!” and, squatting like a Turk on the deck of the
Amenhotep, the stern-wheeled tub which Fielding called a steamer, he
began to teach Ibrahim.

“Say ‘Good-morning, kind sir,’” he drawled.

No tongue was ever so thick, no throat so guttural, as Ibrahim’s when he
obeyed this command. That was why suspicion grew the more in the mind
of Dicky. But he made the Gippy say: “Good-morning, kind sir,” over and
over again. Now, it was a peculiar thing that Ibrahim’s pronunciation
grew worse every time; which goes to show that a combination of
Soudanese and fellah doesn’t make a really clever villain. Twice, three
times, Dicky gave him other words and phrases to say, and practice made
Ibrahim more perfect in error.

Dicky suddenly enlarged the vocabulary thus: “An old man had three
sons: one was a thief, another a rogue, and the worst of them all was a
soldier. But the soldier died first!”

As he said these words he kept his eyes fixed on Ibrahim in a
smiling, juvenile sort of way; and he saw the colour--the brownish-red
colour--creep slowly into Ibrahim’s eyes. For Ibrahim’s father had three
sons: and certainly one was a thief, for he had been a tax-gatherer; and
one was a rogue, for he had been the servant of a Greek money-lender;
and Ibrahim was a soldier!

Ibrahim was made to say these words over and over again, and the red
fire in his eyes deepened as Dicky’s face lighted up with what seemed a
mere mocking pleasure, a sort of impish delight in teasing, like that of
a madcap girl with a yokel. Each time Ibrahim said the words he jumbled
them worse than before. Then Dicky asked him if he knew what an old man
was, and Ibrahim said no. Dicky said softly in Arabic that the old man
was a fool to have three such sons--a thief and a rogue and a soldier.
With a tender patience he explained what a thief and a rogue were, and
his voice was curiously soft when he added, in Arabic: “And the third
son was like you, Mahommed--and he died first.”

Ibrahim’s eyes gloomed under the raillery--under what he thought the
cackle of a detested Inglesi with a face like a girl, of an infidel who
had a tongue that handed you honey on the point of a two-edged sword.
In his heart he hated this slim small exquisite as he had never hated
Fielding. His eyes became like little pots of simmering blood, and he
showed his teeth in a hateful way, because he was sure he should glut
his hatred before the moon came full.

Little Dicky Donovan knew, as he sleepily told Ibrahim to go, that for
months the Orderly had listened to the wholesome but scathing talk of
Fielding and himself on the Egyptian Government, and had reported it to
those whose tool and spy he was.

That night, the stern-wheeled tub, the Amenhotep, lurched like a turtle
on its back into the sands by Beni Hassan. Of all the villages of Upper
Egypt, from the time of Rameses, none has been so bad as Beni Hassan.
Every ruler of Egypt, at one time or another, has raided it and razed it
to the ground. It was not for pleasure that Fielding sojourned there.

This day, and for three days past, Fielding had been abed in his cabin
with a touch of Nilotic fever. His heart was sick for Cairo, for he
had been three months on the river; and Mrs. Henshaw was in Cairo--Mrs.
Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, who lived with her brother,
a stone’s-throw from the Esbekieh Gardens. Fielding longed for Cairo,
but Beni Hassan intervened. The little man who worried Ibrahim urged him
the way his private inclinations ran, but he was obdurate: duty must be
done.

Dicky Donovan had reasons other than private ones for making haste to
Cairo. During the last three days they had stopped at five villages
on the Nile, and in each place Dicky, who had done Fielding’s work of
inspection for him, had been met with unusual insolence from the Arabs
and fellaheen, officials and others; and the prompt chastisement he
rendered with his riding-whip in return did not tend to ease his mind,
though it soothed his feelings. There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--of
a seditious army in the palm of one man’s hand. At the cafes on the
Nile, Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he
came on them. For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men’s
frowns.

This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection
of the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom. What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made. It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.

As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself “There’s the devil to
pay: now I wonder who pays?” Because he was planning things of moment,
he took a native drum down to Fielding’s cabin, and made Fielding play
it, native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy
ballad, “The Dragoons of Enniskillen.” Yet Dicky was thinking hard all
the time.

Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the
Ghawazee tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said
the better. What her name was does not matter. She was well-to-do. She
had a husband who played the kemengeh for her dancing. She had as good a
house as the Omdah, and she had two female slaves.

Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came
to doing them. He had a gift of keeping his own commandments. If he
had been a six-footer and riding eighteen stone--if he hadn’t been, as
Fielding often said, so “damned finicky,” he might easily have come a
cropper. For, being absolutely without fear, he did what he listed and
went where he listed. An insatiable curiosity was his strongest point,
save one. If he had had a headache--though he never had--he would at
once have made an inquiry into the various kinds of headache possible to
mortal man, with pungent deductions from his demonstrations. So it was
that when he first saw a dancing-girl in the streets of Cairo he
could not rest until by circuitous routes he had traced the history of
dancing-girls back through the ages, through Greece and the ruby East,
even to the days when the beautiful bad ones were invited to the feasts
of the mighty, to charm the eyes of King Seti or Queen Hatsu.

He was an authority on the tribe of the Ghawazee, proving, to their
satisfaction and his own, their descent from the household of Haroon al
Rashid. He was, therefore, welcome among them. But he had found also,
as many another wise man has found in “furrin parts,” that your greatest
safety lies in bringing tobacco to the men and leaving the women alone.
For, in those distant lands, a man may sell you his nuptial bed, but he
will pin the price of it to your back one day with the point of a lance
or the wedge of a hatchet.

Herebefore will be found the reason why Dicky Donovan--twenty-five and
no moustache, pink-cheeked and rosy-hearted, and “no white spots on his
liver”--went straight, that particular night, to the house of the chief
dancing-girl of Beni Hassan for help in his trouble. From her he had
learned to dance the dance of the Ghawazee. He had learned it so that,
with his insatiable curiosity, his archaeological instinct, he should be
able to compare it with the Nautch dance of India, the Hula-Hula of the
Sandwich Islanders, the Siva of the Samoans.

A half-hour from the time he set his foot in Beni Hassan two
dancing-girls issued from the house of the ghdzeeyeh, dressed in
shintiydn and muslin tarah, anklets and bracelets, with gold coins about
the forehead--and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he
had trusted absolutely that class of woman who is called a “rag” in that
far country, and a “drab” in ours. But he was a judge of human nature,
and judges of human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman
who never trusts, no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over
you. He used to say that the better you are and the worse she is, the
more you can trust her. Other men may talk, but Dicky Donovan knows.

What Dicky’s aunt, the Dowager Lady Carmichael, would have said to have
seen Dicky flaunting it in the clothes of a dancing-girl through the
streets of vile Beni Hassan, must not be considered. None would have
believed that his pink-and-white face and slim hands and staringly white
ankles could have been made to look so boldly handsome, so impeachable.
But henna in itself seems to have certain qualities of viciousness in
its brownish-red stain, and Dicky looked sufficiently abandoned. The
risk was great, however, for his Arabic was too good and he had to
depend upon the ghdzeeyeh’s adroitness, on the peculiar advantage of
being under the protection of the mistress of the house as large as the
Omdah’s.

From one cafe to another they went. Here a snakecharmer gathered a
meagre crowd about him; there an ‘A’l’meh, or singing-girl, lilted a
ribald song; elsewhere hashish-smokers stretched out gaunt, loathsome
fingers towards them; and a Sha’er recited the romance of Aboo Zeyd.
But Dicky noticed that none of the sheikhs, none of the great men of
the village, were at these cafes; only the very young, the useless,
the licentious, or the decrepit. But by flickering fires under the
palm-trees were groups of men talking and gesticulating; and now and
then an Arab galloped through the street, the point of his long lance
shining. Dicky felt a secret, like a troubled wind, stirring through the
place, a movement not explainable by his own inner tremulousness.

At last they went to the largest cafe beside the Mosque of Hoseyn. He
saw the Sheikh-el-beled sitting on his bench, and, grouped round him,
smoking, several sheikhs and the young men of the village. Here he and
the ghdzeeyeh danced. Few noticed them; for which Dicky was thankful;
and he risked discovery by coming nearer the circle. He could,
however, catch little that they said, for they spoke in low tones, the
Sheikh-el-beled talking seldom, but listening closely.

The crowd around the cafe grew. Occasionally an Arab would throw back
his head and cry: “Allahu Akbar!” Another drew a sword and waved it
in the air. Some one in front of him whispered one startling word to a
camel-driver.

Dicky had got his cue. To him that whisper was as loud and clear as the
“La ilaha illa-llah!” called from the top of a mosque. He understood
Ibrahim the Orderly now; he guessed all--rebellion, anarchy, massacre.
A hundred thoughts ran through his head: what was Ibrahim’s particular
part in the swaggering scheme was the first and the last of them.

Ibrahim answered for himself, for at that moment he entered the burning
circle. A movement of applause ran round, then there was sudden silence.
The dancing-girls were bid to stop their dancing, were told to be gone.
The ghazeeyeh spat at them in an assumed anger, and said that none but
swine of Beni Hassan would send a woman away hungry. And because the
dancing-girl has power in the land, the Sheikh-el-beled waved his hand
towards the cafe, hastily calling the name of a favourite dish. Eyes
turned unconcernedly towards the brown clattering ankles of the two as
they entered the cafe and seated themselves immediately behind where the
Sheikh-el-beled squatted. Presently Dicky listened to as sombre a tale
as ever was told in the darkest night. The voice of the tale-teller was
that of Ibrahim, and the story was this: that the citadel at Cairo was
to be seized, that the streets of Alexandria were to be swept free of
Europeans, that every English official between Cairo and Kordofan was to
be slain. Mahommed Ibrahim, the spy, who knew English as well as Donovan
Pasha knew Arabic, was this very night to kill Fielding Bey with his own
hand!

This night was always associated in Dicky’s mind with the memory of
stewed camel’s-meat. At Ibrahim’s words he turned his head from the rank
steam, and fingered his pistol in the loose folds of his Arab trousers.
The dancing-girl saw the gesture and laid a hand upon his arm.

“Thou art one against a thousand,” she whispered; “wait till thou art
one against one.”

He dipped his nose in the camel-stew, for some one poked a head in at
the door--every sense in him was alert, every instinct alive.

“To-night,” said Mahommed Ibrahim, in the hoarse gutturals of the
Bishareen, “it is ordered that Fielding Bey shall die--and by my hand,
mine own, by the mercy of God! And after Fielding Bey the clean-faced
ape that cast the evil eye upon me yesterday, and bade me die. ‘An old
man had three sons,’ said he, the infidel dog, ‘one was a thief, another
a rogue, and the third a soldier--and the soldier died first.’ ‘A camel
of Bagdad,’ he called me. Into the belly of a dead camel shall he go, be
sewn up like a cat’s liver in a pudding, and cast into the Nile before
God gives tomorrow a sun.”

Dicky pushed away the camel-stew. “It is time to go,” he said.

The ghdzeeyeh rose with a laugh, caught Dicky by the hand, sprang out
among the Arabs, and leapt over the head of the village barber, calling
them all “useless, sodden greybeards, with no more blood than a Nile
shad, poorer than monkeys, beggars of Beni Hassan!” Taking from her
pocket a handful of quarter-piastres, she turned on her heels and tossed
them among the Arabs with a contemptuous laugh. Then she and Dicky
disappeared into the night.


II

When Dicky left her house, clothed in his own garments once more, but
the stains of henna still on his face and hands and ankles, he pressed
into the ghazeeyeh’s hand ten gold-pieces. She let them fall to the
ground.

“Love is love, effendi,” she said. “Money do they give me for what is no
love. She who gives freely for love takes naught in return but love, by
the will of God!” And she laid a hand upon his arm.

“There is work to do!” said Dicky; and his hand dropped to where his
pistol lay--but not to threaten her. He was thinking of others.

“To-morrow,” she said; “to-morrow for that, effendi,” and her beautiful
eyes hung upon his.

“There’s corn in Egypt, but who knows who’ll reap it to-morrow? And I
shall be in Cairo to-morrow.”

“I also shall be in Cairo to-morrow, O my lord and master!” she
answered.

“God give you safe journey,” answered Dicky, for he knew it was useless
to argue with a woman. He was wont to say that you can resolve all women
into the same simple elements in the end.

Dicky gave a long perplexed whistle as he ran softly under the palms
towards the Amenhotep, lounging on the mud bank. Then he dismissed
the dancing-girl from his mind, for there was other work to do. How he
should do it he planned as he opened the door of Fielding’s cabin softly
and saw him in a deep sleep.

He was about to make haste on deck again, where his own nest was, when,
glancing through the window, he saw Mahommed Ibrahim stealing down the
bank to the boat’s side. He softly drew-to the little curtain of the
cabin window, leaving only one small space through which the moonlight
streamed. This ray of light fell just across the door through which
Mahommed Ibrahim would enter. The cabin was a large one, the bed was in
the middle. At the head was a curtain slung to protect the sleeper from
the cold draughts of the night.

Dicky heard a soft footstep in the companionway, then before the door.
He crept behind the curtain. Mahommed Ibrahim was listening without.
Now the door opened very gently, for this careful Orderly had oiled
the hinges that very day. The long flabby face, with the venomous eyes,
showed in the streak of moonlight. Mahommed Ibrahim slid inside, took a
step forward and drew a long knife from his sleeve. Another move towards
the sleeping man, and he was near the bed; another, and he was beside
it, stooping over...

Now, a cold pistol suddenly thrust in your face is disconcerting, no
matter how well laid your plans. It was useless for the Orderly to raise
his hand: a bullet is quicker than the muscles of the arm and the stroke
of a knife.

The two stood silent an instant, the sleeping man peaceful between
them. Dicky made a motion of his head towards the door. Mahommed Ibrahim
turned. Dicky did not lower his pistol as the Orderly, obeying, softly
went as he had softly come. Out through the doorway, up the stairs,
then upon the moonlit deck, the cold muzzle of the pistol at the head of
Mahommed Ibrahim.

Dicky turned now, and faced him, the pistol still pointed.

Then Mahommed Ibrahim spoke. “Malaish!” he said. That was contempt. It
was Mahommedan resignation; it was the inevitable. “Malaish--no matter!”
 he said again; and “no matter” was in good English.

Dicky’s back was to the light, the Orderly’s face in the full glow of
it. Dicky was standing beside the wire communicating with the engineer’s
cabin. He reached out his hand and pulled the hook. The bell rang below.
The two above stood silent, motionless, the pistol still levelled.

Holgate, the young Yorkshire engineer, pulled himself up to the deck
two steps of the ladder at a time. “Yes, sir,” he said, coming forward
quickly, but stopping short when he saw the levelled pistol. “Drop the
knife, Ibrahim,” said Dicky in a low voice. The Orderly dropped the
knife.

“Get it, Holgate,” said Dicky; and Holgate stooped and picked it up.
Then he told Holgate the story in a few words. The engineer’s fingers
tightened on the knife.

“Put it where it will be useful, Holgate,” said Dicky. Holgate dropped
it inside his belt.

“Full steam, and turn her nose to Cairo. No time to lose!” He had told
Holgate earlier in the evening to keep up steam.

He could see a crowd slowly gathering under the palm-trees between the
shore and Beni Hassan. They were waiting for Mahommed Ibrahim’s signal.

Holgate was below, the sailors were at the cables. “Let go ropes!” Dicky
called.

A minute later the engine was quietly churning away below; two minutes
later the ropes were drawn in; half a minute later still the nose of the
Amenhotep moved in the water. She backed from the Nile mud, lunged free.

“An old man had three sons; one was a thief, another a rogue, and the
worst of the three was a soldier--and he dies first! What have you got
to say before you say your prayers?” said Dicky to the Orderly.

“Mafish!” answered Mahommed Ibrahim, moveless. “Mafish--nothing!” And he
said “nothing” in good English.

“Say your prayers then, Mahommed Ibrahim,” said Dicky in that voice like
a girl’s; and he backed a little till he rested a shoulder against the
binnacle.

Mahommed Ibrahim turned slightly till his face was towards the east. The
pistol now fell in range with his ear. The Orderly took off his shoes,
and, standing with his face towards the moon, and towards Mecca, he
murmured the fatihah from the Koran. Three times he bowed, afterwards he
knelt and touched the deck with his forehead three times also. Then he
stood up. “Are you ready?” asked Dicky.

“Water!” answered Mahommed Ibrahim in English. Dicky had forgotten that
final act of devotion of the good Mahommedan. There was a filter of
Nile-water near. He had heard it go drip-drip, drip-drip, as Mahommed
Ibrahim prayed.

“Drink,” he said, and pointed with his finger. Mahommed Ibrahim took
the little tin cup hanging by the tap, half filled it, drank it off, and
noiselessly put the cup back again. Then he stood with his face towards
the pistol.

“The game is with the English all the time,” said Dicky softly.

“Malaish!” said Mahommed. “Jump,” said Dicky.

One instant’s pause, and then, without a sound, Ibrahim sprang out over
the railing into the hard-running current, and struck out for the shore.
The Amenhotep passed him. He was in the grasp of a whirlpool so strong
that it twisted the Amenhotep in her course. His head spun round like
a water-fly, and out of the range of Dicky’s pistol he shrieked to the
crowd on the shore. They burst from the palm-trees and rushed down to
the banks with cries of rage, murder, and death; for now they saw him
fighting for his life. But the Amenhotep’s nose was towards Cairo, and
steam was full on, and she was going fast. Holgate below had his men
within range of a pistol too. Dicky looked back at the hopeless fight as
long as he could see.

Down in his cabin Fielding Bey slept peacefully, and dreamed of a woman
in Cairo.




THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

In spite of being an Englishman with an Irish name and a little Irish
blood, Dicky Donovan had risen high in the favour of the Khedive,
remaining still the same Dicky Donovan he had always been--astute but
incorruptible. While he was favourite he used his power wisely, and it
was a power which had life and death behind it. When therefore, one day,
he asked permission to take a journey upon a certain deadly business
of justice, the Khedive assented to all he asked, but fearing for his
safety, gave him his own ring to wear and a line under his seal.

With these Dicky set forth for El Medineh in the Fayoum, where his
important business lay. As he cantered away from El Wasta, out through
the green valley and on into the desert where stands the Pyramid of
Maydoum, he turned his business over and over in his mind, that he
might study it from a hundred sides. For miles he did not see a human
being--only a caravan of camels in the distance, some vultures overhead
and the smoke of the train behind him by the great river. Suddenly,
however, as he cantered over the crest of a hill, he saw in the
desert-trail before him a foot-traveller, who turned round hastily,
almost nervously, at the sound of his horse’s feet.

It was the figure of a slim, handsome youth, perhaps twenty, perhaps
thirty. The face was clean-shaven, and though the body seemed young and
the face was unlined, the eyes were terribly old. Pathos and fanaticism
were in the look, so Dicky Donovan thought. He judged the young Arab to
be one of the holy men who live by the gifts of the people, and who do
strange acts of devotion; such as sitting in one place for twenty years,
or going without clothes, or chanting the Koran ten hours a day, or
cutting themselves with knives. But this young man was clothed in the
plain blue calico of the fellah, and on his head was a coarse brown fez
of raw wool. Yet round the brown fez was a green cloth, which may only
be worn by one who has been a pilgrimage to Mecca.

“Nehar-ak koom said--God be with you!” said Dicky in Arabic.

“Nehar-ak said, efendi--God prosper thy greatness!” was the reply, in a
voice as full as a man’s, but as soft as a woman’s--an unusual thing in
an Arab. “Have you travelled far?” asked Dicky.

“From the Pyramid of Maydoum, effendi,” was the quiet reply.

Dicky laughed. “A poor tavern; cold sleeping there, Mahommed.”

“The breath of Allah is warm,” answered the Arab. Dicky liked the lad’s
answer. Putting a hand in his saddle-bag, he drew out a cake of dourha
bread and some onions--for he made shift to live as the people lived,
lest he should be caught unawares some time, and die of the remembrance
of too much luxury in the midst of frugal fare.

“Plenty be in your home, Mahommed!” he said, and held out the bread and
onions.

The slim hands came up at once and took the food, the eyes flashed a
strange look at Dicky. “God give you plenty upon your plenty, effendi,
and save your soul and the souls of your wife and children, if it be
your will, effendi!”

“I have no wife, praise be to God,” said Dicky; “but if I had, her soul
would be saved before my own, or I’m a dervish!” Then something moved
him further, and he unbuttoned his pocket--for there really was a button
to Dicky’s pocket. He drew out a five-piastre piece, and held it down to
the young Arab. “For the home-coming after Mecca,” he said, and smiled.

The young Arab drew back. “I will eat thy bread, but no more, effendi,”
 he said quickly.

“Then you’re not what I thought you were,” said Dicky under his breath,
and, with a quick good-bye, struck a heel into the horse’s side and
galloped away toward El Medineh.

In El Medineh Dicky went about his business--a bitter business it was,
as all Egypt came to know. For four days he pursued it, without halting
and in some danger, for, disguise himself as he would in his frequenting
of the cafes, his Arabic was not yet wholly perfect. Sometimes he went
about in European dress, and that was equally dangerous, for in those
days the Fayoum was a nest of brigandage and murder, and an European--an
infidel dog--was fair game.

But Dicky had two friends--the village barber, and the moghassil of the
dead, or body-washer, who were in his pay; and for the moment they
were loyal to him. For his purpose, too, they were the most useful of
mercenaries: for the duties of a barber are those of a valet-de-chambre,
a doctor, registrar and sanitary officer combined; and his coadjutor in
information and gossip was the moghassil, who sits and waits for some
one to die, as a raven on a housetop waits for carrion. Dicky was
patient, but as the days went by and nothing came of all his searching,
his lips tightened and his eyes became more restless. One day, as he
sat in his doorway twisting and turning things in his mind, with an ugly
knot in his temper, the barber came to him quickly.

“Saadat el basha, I have found the Englishwoman, by the mercy of Allah!”

Dicky looked at Achmed Hariri for a moment without stirring or speaking;
his lips relaxed, his eyes softening with satisfaction.

“She is living?”

“But living, saadat el basha.”

Dicky started to his feet. “At the mudirieh?”

“At the house of Azra, the seller of sherbet, saadat el basha.”

“When did she leave the mudirieh?”

“A week past, effendi.”

“Why did she leave?”

“None knows save the sister of Azra, who is in the harem. The
Englishwoman was kind to her when she was ill, and she gave her aid.”

“The Mudir has not tried to find her?”

“Will the robber make a noise if the horse he has stolen breaks free,
effendi?”

“Why has she not flown the place?”

“Effendi, can the broken-winged bird fly!”

“She is ill?” He caught the barber by the arm.

“As a gazelle with an arrow in its breast.”

Dicky’s small hand tightened like a vice on the barber’s thin arm. “And
he who sped the arrow, Achmed Hariri?”

Achmed Hariri was silent.

“Shall he not die the death?”

Achmed Hariri shrank back.

Dicky drew from his pocket a paper with seals, and held it up to the
barber’s eyes. The barber stared, drew back, salaamed, bowed his head,
and put a hand upon his turban as a slave to his master.

“Show me the way, Mahommed,” said Dicky, and stepped out.

Two hours later Dicky, with pale face, and fingers clutching his heavy
riding-whip fiercely, came quickly towards the bridge where he must
cross to go to the mudirieh. Suddenly he heard an uproar, and saw men
hurrying on in front of him. He quickened his footsteps, and presently
came to a house on which had been freshly painted those rough, staring
pictures of “accidents by flood and field,” which Mecca pilgrims paint
on their houses like hatchments, on their safe return--proclamation of
their prestige.

Presently he saw in the grasp of an infuriated crowd the Arab youth
he had met in the desert, near the Pyramid of Maydoum. Execrations,
murderous cries arose from the mob. The youth’s face was deathly pale,
but it had no fear. Upon the outskirts of the crowd hung women, their
robes drawn half over their faces, crying out for the young man’s death.
Dicky asked the ghaflir standing by what the youth had done.

“It is no youth, but a woman,” he answered--“the latest wife of the
Mudir. In a man’s clothes--”

He paused, for the head sheikh of El Medineh, with two Ulema, entered
the throng. The crowd fell back. Presently the Sheikh-el-beled mounted
the mastaba by the house, the holy men beside him, and pointing to the
Arab youth, spoke loudly:

“This sister of scorpions and crocodiles has earned a thousand deaths.
She was a daughter of a pasha, and was lifted high. She was made the
wife of Abbas Bey, our Mudir. Like a wanton beast she cut off her hair,
clothed herself as a man, journeyed to Mecca, and desecrated the tomb
of Mahomet, who hath written that no woman, save her husband of his
goodness bring her, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

He paused, and pointed to the rough pictures on the walls. “This
morning, dressed as a man, she went in secret to the sacred purple
pillar for barren women in the Mosque of Amrar, by the Bahr-el-Yusef,
and was found there with her tongue to it. What shall be done to this
accursed tree in the garden of Mahomet?”

“Cut it down!” shouted the crowd; and the Ulema standing beside the
Sheikh-el-beled said: “Cut down for ever the accursed tree.”

“To-morrow, at sunrise, she shall die as a blasphemer, this daughter of
Sheitan the Evil One,” continued the holy men.

“What saith the Mudir?” cried a tax-gatherer. “The Mudir himself shall
see her die at sunrise,” answered the chief of the Ulema.

Shouts of hideous joy went up. At that moment the woman’s eyes met
Dicky’s, and they suddenly lighted. Dicky picked his way through the
crowd, and stood before the Sheikh-el-beled. With an Arab salute, he
said:

“I am, as you know, my brother, a friend of our master the Khedive, and
I carry his ring on my finger.” The Sheikh-el-beled salaamed as Dicky
held up his hand, and a murmur ran through the crowd. “What you have
done to the woman is well done, and according to your law she should
die. But will ye not let her tell her story, so it may be written down,
that when perchance evil voices carry the tale to the Khedive he shall
have her own words for her condemnation?”

The Ulema looked at the Sheikh-el-beled, and he made answer: “It is well
said; let the woman speak, and her words be written down.”

“Is it meet that all should hear?” asked Dicky, for he saw the look in
the woman’s eyes. “Will she not speak more freely if we be few?”

“Let her be taken into the house,” said the Sheikhel-beled. Turning to
the holy men, he added: “Ye and the Inglesi shall hear.”

When they were within the house, the woman was brought in and stood
before them.

“Speak,” said the Sheikh-el-beled to her roughly. She kept her eyes
fixed on Dicky as she spoke: “For the thing I have done I shall answer.
I had no joy in the harem. I gave no child to my lord, though often I
put my tongue to the sacred pillar of porphyry in the Mosque of Amrar.
My lord’s love went from me. I was placed beneath another in the
harem.... Was it well? Did I not love my lord? was the sin mine that no
child was born to him? It is written that a woman’s prayers are of no
avail, that her lord must save her at the last, if she hath a soul to be
saved.... Was the love of my lord mine?” She paused, caught a corner of
her robe and covered her face.

“Speak on, O woman of many sorrows,” said Dicky. She partly uncovered
her face, and spoke again: “In the long night, when he came not and
I was lonely and I cried aloud, and only the jackals beyond my window
answered, I thought and thought. My brain was wild, and at last I said:
‘Behold, I will go to Mecca as the men go, and when the fire rises from
the Prophet’s tomb, bringing blessing and life to all, it may be that I
shall have peace, and win heaven as men win it. For behold! what is my
body but a man’s body, for it beareth no child. And what is my soul but
a man’s soul, that dares to do this thing!’...”

“Thou art a blasphemer,” broke in the chief of the Ulema.

She gave no heed, but with her eyes on Dicky continued:

“So I stole forth in the night with an old slave, who was my father’s
slave, and together we went to Cairo.... Behold, I have done all that
Dervishes do: I have cut myself with knives, I have walked the desert
alone, I have lain beneath the feet of the Sheikh’s horse when he makes
his ride over the bodies of the faithful, I have done all that a woman
may do and all that a man may do, for the love I bore my lord. Now judge
me as ye will, for I may do no more.”

When she had finished, Dicky turned to the Sheikhel-beled and said: “She
is mad. Behold, Allah hath taken her wits! She is no more than a wild
bird in the wilderness.”

It was his one way to save her; for among her people the mad, the blind,
and the idiot are reputed highly favoured of God.

The Sheikh-el-beled shook his head. “She is a blasphemer. Her words are
as the words of one who holds the sacred sword and speaks from the high
pulpit,” he said sternly; and his dry lean face hungered like a wolf’s
for the blood of the woman.

“She has blasphemed,” said the Ulema.

Outside the house, quietness had given place to murmuring, murmuring to
a noise, and a noise to a tumult, through which the yelping and howling
of the village dogs streamed.

“She shall be torn to pieces by wild dogs,” said the Sheikh-el-beled.

“Let her choose her own death,” said Dicky softly; and, lighting a
cigarette, he puffed it indolently into the face of the Arab sitting
beside him. For Dicky had many ways of showing hatred, and his tobacco
was strong. The sea has its victims, so had Dicky’s tobacco.

“The way of her death shall be as we choose,” said the Sheikh-el-beled,
his face growing blacker, his eyes enlarging in fury.

Dicky yawned slightly, his eyes half closed. He drew in a long breath of
excoriating caporal, held it for a moment, and then softly ejected it
in a cloud which brought water to the eyes of the Sheikh-el-beled. Dicky
was very angry, but he did not look it. His voice was meditative, almost
languid as he said:

“That the woman should die seems just and right--if by your kindness and
the mercy of God ye will let me speak. But this is no court, it is no
law: it is mere justice ye would do.”

“It is the will of the people,” the chief of the Ulema interjected. “It
is the will of Mussulmans, of our religion, of Mahomet,” he said.

“True, O beloved of Heaven, who shall live for ever,” said Dicky, his
lips lost in an odorous cloud of ‘ordinaire.’ “But there be evil tongues
and evil hearts; and if some son of liars, some brother of foolish
tales, should bear false witness upon this thing before our master the
Khedive, or his gentle Mouffetish--”

“His gentle Mouffetish” was scarcely the name to apply to Sadik Pasha,
the terrible right-hand of the Khedive. But Dicky’s tongue was in his
cheek.

“There is the Mudir,” said the Sheikh-el-beled: “he hath said that the
woman should die, if she were found.”

“True; but if the Mudir should die, where would be his testimony?” asked
Dicky, and his eyes half closed, as though in idle contemplation of a
pleasing theme. “Now,” he added, still more negligently, “I shall see
our master the Khedive before the moon is full. Were it not well that I
should be satisfied for my friends?”

Dicky smiled, and looked into the eyes of the Mussulmans with an
incorruptible innocence; he ostentatiously waved the cigarette smoke
away with the hand on which was the ring the Khedive had given him.

“Thy tongue is as the light of a star,” said the bright-eyed
Sheikh-el-beled; “wisdom dwelleth with thee.” The woman took no notice
of what they said. Her face showed no sign of what she thought; her eyes
were unwaveringly fixed on the distance.

“She shall choose her own death,” said the Sheikhel-beled; “and I will
bear word to the Mudir.”

“I dine with the Mudir to-night; I will carry the word,” said Dicky;
“and the death that the woman shall die will be the death he will
choose.”

The woman’s eyes came like lightning from the distance, and fastened
upon his face. Then he said, with the back of his hand to his mouth to
hide a yawn:

“The manner of her death will please the Mudir. It must please him.”

“What death does this vulture among women choose to die?” said the
Sheikh-el-beled.

Her answer could scarcely be heard in the roar and the riot surrounding
the hut.

A half-hour later Dicky entered the room where the Mudir sat on
his divan drinking his coffee. The great man looked up in angry
astonishment--for Dicky had come unannounced-and his fat hands twitched
on his breast, where they had been folded. His sallow face turned a
little green. Dicky made no salutation.

“Dog of an infidel!” said the Mudir under his breath.

Dicky heard, but did no more than fasten his eyes upon the Mudir for a
moment.

“Your business?” asked the Mudir.

“The business of the Khedive,” answered Dicky, and his riding-whip
tapped his leggings. “I have come about the English girl.” As he said
this, he lighted a cigarette slowly, looking, as it were casually, into
the Mudir’s eyes.

The Mudir’s hand ran out like a snake towards a bell on the cushions,
but Dicky shot forward and caught the wrist in his slim, steel-like
fingers. There was a hard glitter in his eyes as he looked down into the
eyes of the master of a hundred slaves, the ruler of a province.

“I have a command of the Khedive to bring you to Cairo, and to kill you
if you resist,” said Dicky. “Sit still--you had better sit still,” he
added, in a soothing voice behind which was a deadly authority.

The Mudir licked his dry, colourless lips, and gasped, for he might make
an outcry, but he saw that Dicky would be quicker. He had been too long
enervated by indulgence to make a fight.

“You’d better take a drink of water,” said Dicky, seating himself upon
a Louis Quinze chair, a relic of civilisation brought by the Mudir from
Paris into an antique barbarism. Then he added sternly: “What have you
done with the English girl?”

“I know nothing of an English girl,” answered the Mudir.

Dicky’s words were chosen as a jeweller chooses stones for the ring of
a betrothed woman. “You had a friend in London, a brother of hell like
yourself. He, like you, had lived in Paris; and that is why this thing
happened. You had your own women slaves from Kordofan, from Circassia,
from Syria, from your own land. It was not enough: you must have an
English girl in your harem. You knew you could not buy her, you knew
that none would come to you for love, neither the drab nor the lady.
None would lay her hand in that of a leprous dog like yourself. So you
lied, your friend lied for you--sons of dogs of liars all of you,
beasts begotten of beasts! You must have a governess for your children,
forsooth! And the girl was told she would come to a palace. She came to
a stable, and to shame and murder.”

Dicky paused.

The fat, greasy hands of the Mudir fumbled towards the water-glass. It
was empty, but he raised it to his lips and drained the air.

Dicky’s eyes fastened him like arrows. “The girl died an hour ago,” he
continued. “I was with her when she died. You must pay the price, Abbas
Bey.” He paused.

There was a moment’s silence, and then a voice, dry like that of one who
comes out of chloroform, said: “What is the price?”

The little touch of cruelty in Dicky’s nature, working with a sense of
justice and an ever-ingenious mind, gave a pleasant quietness to the
inveterate hate that possessed him. He thought of another woman--of her
who was to die to-morrow.

“There was another woman,” said Dicky: “one of your own people. She was
given a mind and a soul. You deserted her in your harem--what was there
left for her to think of but death? She had no child. But death was
a black prospect; for you would go to heaven, and she would be in the
outer darkness; and she loved you! A woman’s brain thinks wild things.
She fled from you, and went the pilgrimage to Mecca. She did all that
a man might do to save her soul, according to Mahomet. She is to die
to-morrow by the will of the people--and the Mudir of the Fayoum.”

Dicky paused once more. He did not look at the Mudir, but out of the
window towards the Bahr-el-Yusef, where the fellaheen of the Mudir’s
estate toiled like beasts of burden with the barges and the great
khiassas laden with cotton and sugar-cane.

“God make your words merciful!” said the Mudir. “What would you have me
do?”

“The Khedive, our master, has given me your life,” said Dicky. “I will
make your end easy. The woman has done much to save her soul. She buries
her face in the dust because she hath no salvation. It is written in the
Koran that a man may save the soul of his wife. You have your choice:
will you come to Cairo to Sadik Pasha, and be crucified like a bandit of
your own province, or will you die with the woman in the Birket-el-Kurun
to-morrow at sunrise, and walk with her into the Presence and save her
soul, and pay the price of the English life?”

“Malaish!” answered the Mudir. “Water,” he added quickly. He had no
power to move, for fear had paralysed him. Dicky brought him a goolah of
water.

The next morning, at sunrise, a strange procession drew near to the
Birket-el-Kurun. Twenty ghaffirs went ahead with their naboots; then
came the kavasses, then the Mudir mounted, with Dicky riding beside, his
hand upon the holster where his pistol was. The face of the Mudir was
like a wrinkled skin of lard, his eyes had the look of one drunk with
hashish. Behind them came the woman, and now upon her face there was
only a look of peace. The distracted gaze had gone from her eyes, and
she listened without a tremor to the voices of the wailers behind.

Twenty yards from the lake, Dicky called a halt--Dicky, not the Mudir.
The soldiers came forward and put heavy chains and a ball upon the
woman’s ankles. The woman carried the ball in her arms to the very verge
of the lake, by the deep pool called “The Pool of the Slaughtered One.”

Dicky turned to the Mudir. “Are you ready?” he said.

“Inshallah!” said the Mudir.

The soldiers made a line, but the crowd overlapped the line. The
fellaheen and Bedouins looked to see the Mudir summon the Ulema to
condemn the woman to shame and darkness everlasting. But suddenly Abbas
Bey turned and took the woman’s right hand in his left.

Her eyes opened in an ecstasy. “O lord and master, I go to heaven with
thee!” she said, and threw herself forward.

Without a sound the heavy body of the Mudir lurched forward with her,
and they sank into the water together. A cry of horror and wonder burst
from the crowd.

Dicky turned to them, and raised both hands.

“In the name of our master the Khedive!” he cried.

Above the spot where the two had sunk floated the red tarboosh of the
Mudir of the Fayoum.




A TREATY OF PEACE

Mr. William Sowerby, lieutenant in the Mounted Infantry, was in a
difficult situation, out of which he was little likely to come with
credit--or his life. It is a dangerous thing to play with fire, so it
is said; it is a more dangerous thing to walk rough-shod over Oriental
customs. A man ere this has lost his life by carrying his shoe-leather
across the threshold of a mosque, and this sort of thing William Sowerby
knew, and of his knowledge he heeded. He did not heed another thing,
however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in
all the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by
a mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a
hideous eunuch.

William Sowerby had not been long in Egypt, he had not travelled
very far or very wide in the Orient; and he was an impressionable and
harmless young man whose bark and bite were of equal value. His ideas of
a harem were inaccurately based on the legend that it is necessarily
the habitation of many wives and concubines and slaves. It had never
occurred to him that there might be a sort of family life in a harem;
that a pasha or a bey might have daughters as well as wives; or might
have only one wife--which is less expensive; and that a harem is not
necessarily the heaven of a voluptuary, an elysium of rosy-petalled love
and passion. Yet he might have known it all, and should have known it
all, if he had taken one-fifth of the time to observe and study Egyptian
life which he gave to polo and golf and racquets. Yet even if he had
known the life from many stand-points he would still have cherished
illusions, for, as Dicky Donovan, who had a sense of satire, said in
some satirical lines, the cherished amusements of more than one dinner
table:

          “Oh, William William Sowerby
          Has come out for to see
          The way of a bimbashi
          With Egyptian Cavalree.
          But William William Sowerby
          His eyes do open wide
          When he sees the Pasha’s chosen
          In her “bruggam” and her pride.
          And William William Sowerby,
          He has a tender smile,
          Which will bring him in due season
          To the waters of the Nile
          And the cheery crocodile!”

It can scarcely be said that Dicky was greatly surprised when Mahommed
Yeleb, the servant of “William William Sowerby,” came rapping at his
door one hot noon-day with a dark tale of disaster to his master. This
was the heart of the thing--A languid, bored, inviting face, and two
dark curious eyes in a slow-driving brougham out on the Pyramid Road;
William’s tender, answering smile; his horse galloping behind to within
a discreet distance of the palace, where the lady alighted, shadowed by
the black-coated eunuch. The same thing for several days, then a device
to let the lady know his name, then a little note half in Arabic, half
in French, so mysterious, so fascinating--William Sowerby walked on air!
Then, a nocturnal going forth, followed by his frightened servant, who
dared not give a warning, for fear of the ever-ready belt which had
scarred his back erstwhile; the palace wall, an opening door, the
figure of his master passing through, the closing gate; and then no
more--nothing more, for a long thirty-six hours!

Mahommed Yeleb’s face would have been white if his skin had
permitted--it was a sickly yellow; his throat was guttural with anxiety,
his eyes furtive and strained, for was he not the servant of his master,
and might not he be marked for the early tomb if, as he was sure, his
master was gone that way?

“Aiwa, efendi, it is sure,” he said to Dicky Donovan, who never was
surprised at anything that happened. He had no fear of anything that
breathed; and he kept his place with Ismail because he told the truth
pitilessly, was a poorer man than the Khedive’s barber, and a beggar
beside the Chief Eunuch; also, because he had a real understanding of
the Oriental mind, together with a rich sense of humour.

“What is sure?” said Dicky to the Arab with assumed composure; for it
was important that he should show neither anxiety nor astonishment,
lest panic seize the man, and he should rush abroad with grave scandal
streaming from his mouth, and the English fat be in the Egyptian fire
for ever. “What is sure, Mahommed Yeleb?” repeated Dicky, lighting a
cigarette idly.

“It is as God wills; but as the tongue of man speaks, so is he--Bimbashi
Sowerby, my master--swallowed up these thirty-six hours in the tomb
prepared for him by Selamlik Pasha.”

Dicky felt his eyelids twitch, and he almost gave a choking groan of
anxiety, for Selamlik Pasha would not spare the invader of his harem;
an English invader would be a delicate morsel for his pitiless soul.
He shuddered inwardly at the thought of what might have occurred, what
might occur still.

If Sowerby had been trapped and was already dead, the knowledge would
creep through the bazaars like a soft wind of the night, and all the
Arab world would rejoice that a cursed Inglesi, making the unpardonable
breach of their code, had been given to the crocodiles, been smothered,
or stabbed, or tortured to death with fire. And, if it were so, what
could be done? Could England make a case of it, avenge the life of
this young fool who had disgraced her in the eyes of the world, of the
envious French in Cairo, and of that population of the palaces who
hated her because Englishmen were the enemies of backsheesh, corruption,
tyranny, and slavery? And to what good the attempt? Exists the personal
law of the Oriental palace, and who may punish any there save by that
personal law? What outside law shall apply to anything that happens
within those mysterious walls? Who shall bear true witness, when the
only judge is he whose palace it is? Though twenty nations should unite
to judge, where might proof be found--inside the palace, where all men
lie and bear false witness?

If Sowerby was not dead, then resort to force? Go to Selamlik Pasha the
malignant, and demand the young officer? How easy for Selamlik Pasha
to deny all knowledge of his existence! Threaten Selamlik--and raise a
Mahommedan crusade? That would not do.

Say nought, then, and let Sowerby, who had thrust his head into the jaws
of the tiger, get it out as best he might, or not get it out, as the
case might be?

Neither was that possible to Dicky Donovan, even if it were the more
politic thing to do, even if it were better for England’s name. Sowerby
was his friend, as men of the same race are friends together in a
foreign country. Dicky had a poor opinion of Sowerby’s sense or ability,
and yet he knew that if he were in Sowerby’s present situation--living
or dead--Sowerby would spill his blood a hundred useless times, if need
be, to save him.

He had no idea of leaving Sowerby where he was, if alive; or of not
avenging him one way or another if dead. But how that might be he was
not on the instant sure. He had been struck as with a sudden blindness
by the news, though he showed nothing of this to Mahommed Yeleb. His
chief object was to inspire the Arab with confidence, since he was
probably the only man outside Selamlik’s palace who knew the thing
as yet. It was likely that Selamlik Pasha would be secret till he saw
whether Sowerby would be missed and what inquiry was made for him. It
was important to Dicky, in the first place, that this Mahommed Yeleb be
kept quiet, by being made a confidant of his purposes so far as need be,
an accomplice in his efforts whatever they should be. Kept busy, with
a promise of success and backsheesh when the matter was completed, the
Arab would probably remain secret. Besides, as Dicky said to himself,
while Mahommed kept his head, he would not risk parading himself as the
servant of the infidel who had invaded the Pasha’s harem. Again, it was
certain that he had an adequate devotion to his master, who had given
him as many ha’pence as kicks, and many cast-off underclothes and
cigarettes.

Thus it was that before Dicky had arranged what he should do, though
plans were fusing in his brain, he said to Mahommed Yeleb seriously,
as befitting the crime Sowerby had committed--evenly, as befitted the
influence he wished to have over the Arab: “Keep your tongue between
your teeth, Mahommed. We will pull him through all right.”

“But, effendi, whom God honour, for greatness is in all thy ways, friend
of the Commander of the Faithful as thou art--but, saadat el basha, if
he be dead?”

“He is not dead. I know it by the eyes of my mind, Mahommed--yea, by the
hairs of my head, he is not dead!”

“Saadat el basha, thou art known as the truth-teller and the
incorruptible--this is the word of the Egyptian and of the infidel
concerning thee. I kiss thy feet. For it is true he hath deserved death,
but woe be to him by whom his death cometh! And am I not his servant to
be with him while he hath life, and hath need of me? If thou sayest he
is alive, then is he alive, and my heart rejoices.”

Dicky scarcely heard what the Arab said, for the quick conviction he had
had that Sowerby was alive was based on the fact, suddenly remembered,
that Selamlik Pasha had only returned from the Fayoum this very morning,
and that therefore he could not as yet have had any share in the fate of
Sowerby, but had probably been sent for by the Chief Eunuch. It was but
an hour since that he had seen Selamlik Pasha driving hastily towards
his palace.

His mind was instantly made up, his plans formed to his purpose.

“Listen, Mahommed,” he said to the Arab. “Listen to each word I say,
as though it were the prayer to take thee into Paradise. Go at once to
Selamlik Pasha. Carry this ring the Khedive gave to me--he will know it.
Do not be denied his presence. Say that it is more than life and death;
that it is all he values in the world. Once admitted, say these words:
‘Donovan Pasha knows all, and asks an audience at midnight in this
palace. Until that hour Donovan Pasha desires peace. For is it not the
law, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Is not a market a place
to buy and sell?’”

Four times did Dicky make the Arab repeat the words after him, till they
ran like water from his tongue, and dismissed him upon the secret errand
with a handful of silver.

Immediately the Arab had gone, Dicky’s face flushed with excitement,
in the reaction from his lately assumed composure. For five minutes he
walked up and down, using language scarcely printable, reviling Sowerby,
and setting his teeth in anger. But he suddenly composed himself,
and, sitting down, stared straight before him for a long time without
stirring a muscle. There was urgent need of action, but there was
more urgent need of his making no mistake, of his doing the one thing
necessary, for Sowerby could only be saved in one way, not many.

It was useless to ask the Khedive’s intervention--Ismail dared not
go against Selamlik in this. Whatever was done must be done between
Selamlik Pasha, the tigerish libertine, and Richard Donovan, the little
man who, at the tail end of Ismail’s reign, was helping him hold things
together against the black day of reckoning, “prepared for the devil
and all his angels,” as Dicky had said to Ismail on this very momentous
morning, when warning him of the perils in his path. Now Dicky had been
at war with Selamlik ever since, one day long ago on the Nile, he and
Fielding had thwarted his purposes; and Dicky had earned the Pasha’s
changeless hatred by calling him “Trousers”--for this name had gone
up and down throughout Egypt as a doubtful story travels, drawing easy
credit everywhere. Those were the days when Dicky was irresponsible. Of
all in Egypt who hated him most, Selamlik Pasha was the chief. But most
people hated Selamlik, so the world was not confounded by the great
man’s rage, nor did they dislike Dicky simply because the Pasha chose
to do so. Through years Selamlik had built up his power, until even the
Khedive feared him, and would have been glad to tie a stone round his
neck and drop him into the Nile. But Ismail could no longer do this sort
of thing without some show of reason--Europe was hanging on his actions,
waiting for the apt moment to depose him.

All this Dicky knew, and five minutes from the time Mahommed Yeleb had
left him he was on his way to Ismail’s palace, with his kavass behind
him, cool and ruminating as usual, now answering a salute in Turkish
fashion, now in English, as Egyptians or Europeans passed him.


II

There was one being in the Khedive’s palace whose admiration for Dicky
was a kind of fetish, and Dicky loathed him. Twice had Dicky saved
this Chief Eunuch’s life from Ismail’s anger, and once had he saved
his fortune--not even from compassion, but out of his inherent love of
justice. As Dicky had said: “Let him die--for what he has done, not for
something he has not done. Send him to the devil with a true bill
of crime.” So it was that Dicky, who shrank from the creature whom
Ministers and Pashas fawned upon--so powerful was his unique position
in the palace--went straight to him now to get his quid-pro-quo, his
measure for measure.

The tall, black-coated, smooth-faced creature, silent and watchful and
lean, stepped through the doorway with the footfall of a cat. He slid
forward, salaamed to the floor-Dicky wondered how a body could open and
shut so like the blade of a knife--and, catching Dicky’s hand, kissed
it.

“May thy days be watered with the dew of heaven, saadat el basha,” said
the Chief Eunuch.

“Mine eyes have not seen since thy last withdrawal,” answered Dicky
blandly, in the high-flown Oriental way.

“Thou hast sent for me. I am thy slave.”

“I have sent for thee, Mizraim. And thou shalt prove thyself, once for
all, whether thy hand moves as thy tongue speaks.”

“To serve thee I will lay down my life--I will blow it from me as the
wind bloweth the cotton flower. Have I not spoken thus since the Feast
of Beiram, now two years gone?”

Dicky lowered his voice. “Both Mustapha Bey, that son of the he-wolf
Selamlik Pasha, still follow the carriage of the Khedive’s favourite,
and hang about the walls, and seek to corrupt thee with gold, Mahommed
Mizraim?”

“Saadat el basha, but for thy word to wait, the Khedive had been told
long since.”

“It is the sport to strike when the sword cuts with the longest arm, O
son of Egypt!”

The face of Mizraim was ugly with the unnatural cruelty of an unnatural
man. “Is the time at hand, saadat el basha?”

“You hate Selamlik Pasha?”

“As the lion the jackal.”

Dicky would have laughed in scorn if he might have dared--this being to
class himself with lions! But the time was not fit for laughter. “And
the son of Selamlik Pasha, the vile Mustapha Bey?” he asked.

“I would grind him like corn between the stones! Hath he not sent
messages by the women of the bazaar to the harem of my royal master, to
whom God give glory in heaven? Hath he not sought to enter the harem as
a weasel crawls under a wall? Hath he not sought to steal what I hoard
by a mighty hand and the eye of an eagle for Ismail the Great? Shall
I love him more than the dog that tears the throat of a gazelle?” The
gesture of cruelty he made was disgusting to the eyes of Dicky Donovan,
but he had in his mind the peril to Sowerby, and he nodded his head in
careless approval, as it were.

“Then, Mizraim, thou son of secrecy and keeper of the door, take heed
to what I say, and for thine honour and my need do as I will. Thou shalt
to-night admit Mustapha Bey to the harem--at the hour of nine o’clock!”

“Saadat el basha!” The eunuch’s face was sickly in its terrified wonder.

“Even so. At nine.”

“But, saadat--”

“Bring him secretly, even to the door of the favourite’s room; then,
have him seized and carried to a safe place till I send for him.”

“Ah, saadat el basha--” The lean face of the creature smiled, and the
smile was not nice to see.

“Let no harm be done him, but await my messenger, Mahommed Yeleb, and
whatsoever he bids you to do, do it; for I speak.”

“Ah, saadat el basha, you would strike Selamlik Pasha so--the great
beast, the black river pig, the serpent of the slime...!”

“You will do this thing, Mizraim?”

“I shall lure him, as the mirage the pilgrim. With joy I will do this,
and a hundred times more.”

“Even if I asked of thee the keys of the harem?” asked Dicky grimly.

“Effendi, thou wouldst not ask. All the world knows thee. For thee the
harem hath no lure. Thou goest not by dark ways to deeds for thine own
self. Thou hast honour. Ismail himself would not fear thee.”

“See, thou master of many, squeak not thy voice so high. Ismail will
take thy head and mine, if he discovers to-night’s business. Go then
with a soft tread, Mizraim. Let thy hand be quick on his mouth, and
beware that no one sees!”


III

Upon the stroke of midnight Dicky entered the room where Selamlik Pasha
awaited him with a malicious and greasy smile, in which wanton cruelty
was uppermost. Selamlik Pasha knew well the object of this meeting. He
had accurately interpreted the message brought by Mahommed Yeleb. He
knew his power; he knew that the Englishman’s life was in his hands to
do with what he chose, for the law of the harem which defies all outside
law was on his side. But here he was come to listen to Dicky Donovan,
the arrogant little favourite, pleading for the life of the English boy
who had done the thing for which the only penalty was death.

Dicky showed no emotion as he entered the room, but salaamed, and said:
“Your Excellency is prompt. Honour and peace be upon your Excellency!”
 “Honour and the bounty of the stars be upon thee, saadat el basha!”

There was a slight pause, in which Dicky seated himself, lighted a
cigarette, and summoned a servant, of whom he ordered coffee. They did
not speak meantime, but Dicky sat calmly, almost drowsily, smoking, and
Selamlik Pasha sat with greasy hands clasping and unclasping, his yellow
eyes fixed on Dicky with malevolent scrutiny.

When the coffee was brought, the door had been shut, and Dicky had drawn
the curtain across, Selamlik Pasha said: “What great affair brings us
together here, saadat el basha?”

“The matter of the Englishman you hold a prisoner, Excellency.”

“It is painful, but he is dead,” said the Pasha, with a grimace of
cruelty.

Dicky’s eyes twitched slightly, but he answered with coolness, thrusting
his elbow into the cushions and smoking hard: “But, no, he is not dead.
Selamlik Pasha has as great an instinct for a bargain as for revenge.
Also Selamlik Pasha would torture before he kills. Is it not so?”

“What is your wish?”

“That the man be set free, Excellency.”

“He has trespassed. He has stolen his way into the harem. The infidel
dog has defiled the house of my wives.”

“He will marry the woman, with your permission, Excellency. He loved
her--so it would seem.”

“He shall die--the dog of an infidel!”

Dicky was now satisfied that Sowerby was alive, and that the game was
fairly begun. He moved slowly towards his purpose.

“I ask his life, as a favour to me. The Khedive honours me, and I can
serve you betimes, Excellency.”

“You called me ‘Trousers,’ and all Egypt laughed,” answered the Pasha
malignantly.

“I might have called you worse, but I did not. You may call me what you
will--I will laugh.”

“I will call you a fool for bringing me here to laugh at you, who now
would kiss Selamlik Pasha’s shoe. I would he were your brother. I would
tear out his fingernails, pierce his eyes, burn him with hot irons, pour
boiling oil over him and red cinders down his throat--if he were your
brother.”

“Remember I am in the confidence of the Khedive, Pasha.”

“Ismail! What dare he do? Every Egyptian in the land would call him
infidel. Ismail would dare do nothing.” His voice was angrily guttural
with triumph.

“England will ask the price of the young man’s life of you, Excellency.”

“England dare not move--is thy servant a fool? Every Mussulman in the
land would raise the green flag--the Jehad would be upon ye!”

“He is so young. He meant no ill. The face of your daughter drew him on.
He did not realise his crimen--or its penalty.”

“It is a fool’s reasoning. Because he was a stranger and an infidel, so
has he been told of dark things done to those who desecrate our faith.”

“Had he been an Egyptian or a Turk--”

“I should slay him, were he Ismail himself. Mine own is mine own, as
Mahomet hath said. The man shall die--and who shall save him? Not even
the Sultan himself.”

“There are concessions in the Fayoum--you have sought them long.”

“Bah!”

“There is the Grand Cordon of the Mejidieh; there is a way to it,
Excellency.”

“The man’s blood!”

“There is a high office to be vacant soon, near to the person of the
Khedive, with divers moneys and loans--”

“To see Donovan Pasha cringe and beg is better.”

“There is that mercy which one day you may have to ask for yourself or
for your own--”

“The fool shall die. And who shall save him?”

“Well, I will save him,” said Dicky, rising slowly to his feet.

“Pish! Go to the Khedive with the tale, and I will kill the man within
the hour, and tell it abroad, and we shall see where Donovan Pasha will
stand to-morrow. The Khedive is not stronger than his people--and there
are the French, and others!” He spat upon the floor at Dicky’s feet.
“Go, tell the Khedive what you will, dog of an Englishman, son of a dog
with a dog’s heart!” Dicky took a step forward, with an ominous flare of
colour in his cheek. There was a table between him and Selamlik Pasha.
He put both hands upon it, and leaning over said in a voice of steel:

“So be it, then. Shall I go to the Khedive and say that this night
Mustapha Bey, eldest and chosen son of Selamlik Pasha, the darling of
his fat heart, was seized by the Chief Eunuch, the gentle Mizraim, in
the harem of his Highness? Shall I tell him that, Trousers?”

As Dicky spoke, slowly, calmly, Selamlik Pasha turned a greenish-yellow,
his eyes started from his head, his hand chafed the air.

“Mustapha Bey--Khedive’s harem!” he stammered in a husky voice.

“By the gentle Mizraim, I said,” answered Dicky. “Is Mustapha Bey’s life
worth an hour’s purchase? Is Selamlik Pasha safe?”

“Is--is he dead?” gasped the cowardly Egyptian, furtively glancing
towards the door. Suddenly he fell back fainting, and Dicky threw some
water in his face, then set a cup of it beside him.

“Drink, and pull yourself together, if you would save yourself,” said
Dicky.

“Save--save myself,” said Selamlik Pasha, recovering; then, with quick
suspicion, and to gain time, added quickly: “Ah, it is a trick! He is
not a prisoner--you lie!”

“I have not a reputation for lying,” rejoined Dicky quietly. “But see!”
 he added; and throwing open a door, pointed to where the Chief Eunuch
stood with Mahommed Yeleb, Mustapha Bey gagged and bound between them.
Dicky shut the door again, as Selamlik Pasha shrank back among the
cushions, cowardice incarnate.

“You thought,” said Dicky with a soft fierceness, “you thought that I
would stoop to bargain with Selamlik Pasha and not know my way out of
the bargain? You thought an Englishman would beg, even for a life, of
such as you! You thought me, Donovan Pasha, such a fool!”

“Mercy, Excellency!” said Selamlik, spreading out his hands.

Dicky laughed. “You called me names, Selamlik--a dog, and the son of a
dog with a dog’s heart. Was it wise?”

“Is there no way? Can no bargain be made?”

Dicky sat down, lighting a cigarette.

“To save a scandal in Egypt,” answered Dicky drily, “I am ready to grant
you terms.”

“Speak-Excellency.”

“The life of the Englishman for the life of your son and your own. Also,
the freedom of the six Circassian slaves whom you house now at Beni
Hassan, ready to bring to your palace. Also, for these slaves two
hundred Turkish pounds apiece. Also, your written word that you will
bring no more slaves into Egypt. Is the bargain fair?”

“Mizraim may still betray us,” said Selamlik, trembling, with relief,
but yet apprehensive.

“Mizraim is in my power--he acts for me,” said Dicky. “Whose life is
safe here save my own?”

“Malaish! It shall be as your will is, Excellency,” answered Selamlik
Pasha, in a shaking voice; and he had time to wonder even then how an
Englishman could so outwit an Oriental. It was no matter how Mustapha
Bey, his son, was lured; he had been seized in the harem, and all truth
can be forsworn in Egypt, and the game was with this Donovan Pasha.

“Send to your palace, commanding that the Englishman be brought here,”
 said Dicky. Selamlik Pasha did so.

Sowerby of the Mounted Infantry was freed that night, and the next day
Dicky Donovan had six Circassian slaves upon his hands. He passed them
over to the wife of Fielding Bey with whom he had shared past secrets
and past dangers.

Selamlik Pasha held his peace in fear; and the Khedive and Cairo never
knew why there was a truce to battle between Dicky Donovan and that vile
Pasha called Trousers.




AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS

In a certain year when Dicky Donovan was the one being in Egypt who had
any restraining influence on the Khedive, he suddenly asked leave of
absence to visit England. Ismail granted it with reluctance, chiefly
because he disliked any interference with his comforts, and Dicky was
one of them--in some respects the most important.

“My friend,” he said half petulantly to Dicky, as he tossed the plans
for a new palace to his secretary and dismissed him, “are you not happy
here? Have you not all a prince can give?”

“Highness,” answered Dicky, “I have kith and kin in England. Shall a man
forget his native land?” The Khedive yawned, lighted a cigarette, and
murmured through the smoke: “Inshallah! It might be pleasant--betimes.”

“I have your Highness’s leave to go?” asked Dicky. “May God preserve
your head from harm!” answered Ismail in farewell salutation, and,
taking a ring from his finger set with a large emerald, he gave it to
Dicky. “Gold is scarce in Egypt,” he went on, “but there are jewels
still in the palace--and the Khedive’s promises-to-pay with every
money-barber of Europe!” he added, with a cynical sneer, and touched his
forehead and his breast courteously as Dicky retired.

Outside the presence Dicky unbuttoned his coat like an Englishman again,
and ten minutes later flung his tarboosh into a corner of the room; for
the tarboosh was the sign of official servitude, and Dicky was never
the perfect official. Initiative was his strong point, independence his
life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command
it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel. Ismail had discovered this,
and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom
wrote a line. By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at
last than the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the
highest officials bowed low. He was hated profoundly by many of the
household, cultivated by certain of the Ministers, fawned upon by
outsiders, trusted by the Khedive, and entirely believed in by the few
Englishmen and Frenchmen who worked for decent administration faithfully
but without hope and sometimes with nausea.

It was nausea that had seized upon Dicky at last, nausea and one other
thing--the spirit of adventure, an inveterate curiosity. His was the
instinct of the explorer, his feet were the feet of the Wandering
Jew. He knew things behind closed doors by instinct; he was like a
thought-reader in the sure touch of discovery; the Khedive looked upon
him as occult almost and laughed in the face of Sadik the Mouffetish
when he said some evil things of Dicky. Also, the Khedive told the
Mouffetish that if any harm came to Dicky there would come harm to him.
The Khedive loved to play one man off against another, and the death
of Sadik or the death of Dicky would have given him no pain, if either
seemed necessary. For the moment, however, he loved them both after his
fashion; for Sadik lied to him, and squeezed the land dry, and flailed
it with kourbashes for gold for his august master and himself; and Dicky
told him the truth about everything--which gave the Khedive knowledge of
how he really stood all round.

Dicky told the great spendthrift the truth about himself; but he did not
tell the truth when he said he was going to England on a visit to his
kith and kin. Seized by the most irresistible curiosity of his life,
moved by desire for knowledge, that a certain plan in his mind might be
successfully advanced he went south and east, not west and north.

For four months Egypt knew him not. For four months the Khedive was
never told the truth save by European financiers, when truths were
obvious facts; for four long months never saw a fearless or an honest
eye in his own household. Not that it mattered in one sense; but Ismail
was a man of ideas, a sportsman of a sort, an Iniquity with points; a
man who chose the broad way because it was easier, not because he was
remorseless. At the start he meant well by his people, but he meant
better by himself; and not being able to satisfy both sides of the
equation, he satisfied one at the expense of the other and of that x
quantity otherwise known as Europe. Now Europe was heckling him; the
settling of accounts was near. Commissioners had been sent to find where
were the ninety millions he had borrowed. Only Ismail and Sadik the
Mouffetish, once slave and foster-brother, could reply. The Khedive
could not long stave off the evil day when he must “pay the debt of the
lobster,” and Sadik give account of his stewardship. Meanwhile, his mind
turned to the resourceful little Englishman with the face of a girl and
the tongue of an honest man.

But the day Dicky had set for his return had come and gone, and Dicky
himself had not appeared. With a grim sort of satisfaction, harmonious
with his irritation, Ismail went forth with his retinue to the Dosah,
the gruesome celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, following on the
return of the pilgrimage from Mecca. At noon he entered his splendid
tent at one side of a square made of splendid tents, and looked out
listlessly, yet sourly, upon the vast crowds assembled--upon the lines
of banners, the red and green pennons embroidered with phrases from the
Koran. His half-shut, stormy eyes fell upon the tent of the chief of
the dervishes, and he scarcely checked a sneer, for the ceremony to be
performed appealed to nothing in him save a barbaric instinct, and this
barbaric instinct had been veneered by French civilisation and pierced
by the criticism of one honest man. His look fell upon the long pathway
whereon, for three hundred yards, matting had been spread. It was a
field of the cloth of blood; for on this cloth dervishes returned from
Mecca, mad with fanaticism and hashish, would lie packed like herrings,
while the Sheikh of the Dosah rode his horse over their bodies, a
pavement of human flesh and bone.

As the Khedive looked, his lip curled a little, for he recalled
what Dicky Donovan had said about it; how he had pleaded against it,
describing loathsome wounds and pilgrims done to death. Dicky had ended
his brief homily by saying: “And isn’t that a pretty dish to set
before a king!” to Ismail’s amusement; for he was no good Mussulman, no
Mussulman at all, in fact, save in occasional violent prejudices got of
inheritance and association.

To-day, however, Ismail was in a bad humour with Dicky and with the
world. He had that very morning flogged a soldier senseless with his
own hand; he had handed over his favourite Circassian slave to a
ruffian Bey, who would drown her or sell her within a month; and he had
dishonoured his own note of hand for fifty thousand pounds to a great
merchant who had served him not wisely but too well. He was not taking
his troubles quietly, and woe be to the man or woman who crossed him
this day! Tiberius was an hungered for a victim to his temper. His
entourage knew it well, and many a man trembled that day for his place,
or his head, or his home. Even Sadik the Mouffetish--Sadik, who had
four hundred women slaves dressed in purple and fine linen--Sadik, whose
kitchen alone cost him sixty thousand pounds a year, the price of whose
cigarette ash-trays was equal to the salary of an English consul--even
Sadik, foster-brother, panderer, the Barabbas of his master, was silent
and watchful to-day.

And Sadik, silent and watchful and fearful, was also a dangerous man.
As Sadik’s look wandered over the packed crowds, his faded eyes scarce
realising the bright-coloured garments of the men, the crimson silk
tents and banners and pennons, the gorgeous canopies and trappings and
plumes of the approaching dervishes, led by the Amir-el-Haj or Prince
of the Pilgrims, returned from Mecca, he wondered what lamb for the
sacrifice might be provided to soothe the mind of his master. He looked
at the matting in the long lane before them, and he knew that the bodies
which would lie here presently, yielding to the hoofs of the Sheikh’s
horse, were not sufficient to appease the rabid spirit tearing at
the Khedive’s soul. He himself had been flouted by one ugly look this
morning, and one from Ismail was enough.

It did his own soul good now to see the dervish fanatics foaming at the
mouth, their eyes rolling, as they crushed glass in their mouths and ate
it, as they swallowed fire, as they tore live serpents to pieces with
their teeth and devoured them, as they thrust daggers and spikes of
steel through their cheeks, and gashed their breasts with knives and
swords. He watched the effect of it on the Khedive; but Ismail had seen
all this before, and he took it in the stride. This was not sufficient.

Sadik racked his brain to think who in the palace or in official life
might be made the scapegoat, upon whom the dark spirit in the heart
of the Khedive might be turned. His mean, colourless eyes wandered
inquiringly over the crowd, as the mad dervishes, half-naked, some with
masses of dishevelled hair, some with no hair at all, bleached, haggard,
moaning and shrieking, threw themselves to the ground on the matting,
while attendants pulled off their slippers and placed them under their
heads, which lay face downwards. At last Sadik’s eyes were arrested by a
group of ten dervishes, among them one short in stature and very slight,
whose gestures were not so excited as those of his fellows. He also saw
that one or two of the dervishes watched the slight man covertly.

Five of the little group suddenly threw themselves upon the matting,
adding their bodies to the highway of bones and flesh. Then another and
another did the same, leaving three who, with the little man, made
a fanatical chorus. Now the three near the little man began to cut
themselves with steel and knives, and one set fire to his jibbeh and
began to chew the flames. Yet the faces of all three were turned towards
the little man, who did no more than shriek and gesticulate and sway his
body wildly up and down. He was tanned and ragged and bearded and
thin, and there was a weird brilliance in his eyes, which watched his
companions closely.

So fierce and frenzied were the actions of those with him, that the
attention of the Khedive was drawn; and Sadik, looking at his master,
saw that his eyes also were intently fixed on the little man. At that
instant the little man himself caught the eye of the Khedive, and Ismail
involuntarily dropped a hand upon his sword, for some gesture of this
dervish, some familiar turn of his body, startled him. Where had he
seen the gesture before? Who was this pilgrim who did not cut and wound
himself like his companions? Suddenly the three mad dervishes waved
their hands towards the matting and shrieked something into his ear.
The little man’s eyes shot a look at the Khedive. Ismail’s ferret eye
fastened on him, and a quick fear as of assassination crossed his face
as the small dervish ran forward with the other three to the lane of
human flesh, where there was still a gap to be filled, and the cry rose
up that the Sheikh of the Dosah had left his tent and was about to begin
his direful ride.

Sadik the Mouffetish saw the Khedive’s face, and suddenly said in his
ear: “Shall my slave seize him, Highness whom God preserve?”

The Khedive did not reply, for at that moment he recognised the dervish;
and now he understood that Dicky Donovan had made the pilgrimage to
Mecca with the Mahmal caravan; that an infidel had desecrated the holy
city; and that his Englishman had lied to him. His first impulse was to
have Dicky seized and cast to the crowd, to be torn to pieces. Dicky’s
eyes met his without wavering--a desperate yet resolute look--and Ismail
knew that the little man would sell his life dearly, if he had but half
a chance. He also saw in Dicky’s eyes the old honesty, the fearless
straightforwardness--and an appeal too, not humble, but still eager and
downright. Ismail’s fury was great, for the blue devils had him by
the heels that day; but on the instant he saw the eyes of Sadik the
Mouffetish, and their cunning, cruelty, and soulless depravity, their
present search for a victim to his master’s bad temper, acted at once on
Ismail’s sense of humour. He saw that Sadik half suspected something, he
saw that Dicky’s three companions suspected, and his mind was made up on
the instant--things should take their course--he would not interfere.
He looked Dicky squarely in the face, and Dicky knew that the Khedive’s
glance said as plainly as words:

“Fool of an Englishman, go on! I will not kill you, but I will not save
you. The game is in your hands alone. You can only avert suspicion by
letting the Sheikh of the Dosah make a bridge of your back. Mecca is a
jest you must pay for.”

With the wild cry of a dervish fanatic Dicky threw himself down, his
head on his arms, and the vengeful three threw themselves down beside
him. The attendants pulled off their slippers and thrust them under
their faces, and now the siais of the Sheikh ran over their bodies
lightly, calling out for all to lie still--the Sheikh was coming on his
horse.

Dicky weighed his chances with a little shrinking, but with no fear:
he had been in imminent danger for four long months, and he was
little likely to give way now. The three men lying beside him had only
suspected him for the last three days, and during that time they had
never let him out of heir sight. What had roused their suspicion he
did not know: probably a hesitation concerning some Arab custom or
the pronunciation of some Arab word--the timbre of the Arab voice was
rougher and heavier. There had been no chance of escape during these
three days, for his three friends had never left his side, and now they
were beside him. His chances were not brilliant. If he escaped from the
iron hoofs of the Sheikh’s horse, if the weight did not crush the life
out of his small body, there was a fair chance; for to escape unhurt
from the Dosah is to prove yourself for ever a good Mussulman, who has
undergone the final test and is saved evermore by the promise of the
Prophet. But even if he escaped unhurt, and the suspicions of his
comrades were allayed, what would the Khedive do? The Khedive had
recognised him, and had done nothing--so far. Yet Ismail, the chief
Mussulman in Egypt, should have thrown him like a rat to the terriers!
Why he had acted otherwise he was not certain: perhaps to avoid a
horrible sensation at the Dosah and the outcry of the newspapers of
Europe; perhaps to have him assassinated privately; perhaps, after all,
to pardon him. Yet this last alternative was not reasonable, save from
the stand-point that Ismail had no religion at all.

Whatever it was to be, his fate would soon come, and in any case he had
done what only one European before him had done--he had penetrated to
the tomb of Mahomet at Mecca. Whatever should come, he had crowded into
his short life a thousand unusual and interesting things. His inveterate
curiosity had served him well, and he had paid fairly for the candles of
his game. He was ready.

Low moans came to his ears. He could hear the treading hoofs of the
Sheikh’s horse. Nearer and nearer the frightened animal came; the shout
of those who led the horse was in his ears: “Lie close and still,
O brothers of giants!” he heard the ribs of a man but two from him
break-he heard the gurgle in the throat of another into whose neck the
horse

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