gatively.

"Now, sir, can you tell me what's wrong? Mr. Cheniston is ill, you say.
Do you know the nature of his illness?"

"Enteric, I'm afraid," Sir Richard informed him gravely. "He went on a
shooting expedition a week or two ago with the rich Egyptian for whom he
has been carrying through a big irrigation job, and one day, when,
through a miscalculation, the wine and provisions did not turn up, the
party lunched at a mud-village on eggs and coffee. Being particularly
thirsty Bruce indulged in a small glass of water with slices of citron,
and although the host's servants swore by the Beard of the Prophet and
so on through all their most sacred oaths that they had boiled the water
first, the odds are that they had not, and that it came straight from
the river or some indescribably polluted well. It seems that the
pilgrims had passed that way, and owing to their pleasing habit of
dropping a little of their precious 'holy' water into the wells they
meet, some of those wells are absolute hotbeds of infection, so to
speak."

"Whew!" Anstice whistled to express his consternation. "And then, of
course, Mr. Cheniston came home and sickened for this illness."

"Yes. At first he made light of it, said the expedition had been
fatiguing, he had a touch of the sun, and so on. But at last the disease
manifested itself unmistakably, and three days ago I set out for Cairo
to try to get some medical help."

"There is no doctor out there?"

"No. You see it is only a tiny village--hardly that--a settlement in the
midst of a little colony of Bedouins. Iris was first persuaded to go
there by a woman she met in Cairo, a Padre's wife who had gone out--at
least the Padre had--to try the effect of the climate on weak lungs.
They have one kiddie, a child of seven or eight, and they were so
pleased with the place that they stayed on, and were the only white
people in the village, with the exception of a young Australian who had
lost his money and went out there to try to grow vegetables, and a
rather eccentric French artist who set up his studio in a sort of
disused fort built on a high rocky plateau about a mile above the little
settlement. He has gone back to France now, taking with him some really
marvellous studies of the desert, so they say."

"How far is the place from Cairo?"

"About a day and a half's journey on horseback. Of course, if it had
been possible to bring Bruce in to Cairo that would have been the best
thing. But w