ngers
and bosoms of the captive and the dead. Those days were no more. No
vision of loot or luxury allured these. They saw only the yellow sand,
the ever-receding oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered
and fruitless date-tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and
the keen, sharp night to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking
sleep. And then the savage struggle for life--with all the gain to the
pashas and the beys, and those who ruled over them; while their own
wounds grew foul, and, in the torturing noon-day heat of the white
waste, Death reached out and dragged them from the drooping lines
to die. Fighting because they must fight--not patriot love, nor
understanding, nor sacrifice in their hearts. War! War! War! War!

David had been too late to stop it. It had grown to a head with
revolution and conspiracy. For months before he came conscripts had
been gathered in the Nile country from Rosetta to Assouan, and here and
there, far south, tribes had revolted. He had come to power too late
to devise another course. One day, when this war was over, he would go
alone, save for a faithful few, to deal with these tribes and peoples
upon another plane than war; but here and now the only course was that
which had been planned by Kaid and those who counselled him. Troubled by
a deep danger drawing near, Kaid had drawn him into his tough service,
half-blindly catching at his help, with a strange, almost superstitious
belief that luck and good would come from the alliance; seeing in him
a protection against wholesale robbery and debt--were not the English
masters of finance, and was not this Englishman honest, and with a brain
of fire and an eye that pierced things?

David had accepted the inevitable. The war had its value. It would draw
off to the south--he would see that it was so--Achmet and Higli and Diaz
and the rest, who were ever a danger. Not to himself: he did not think
of that; but to Kaid and to Egypt. They had been out-manoeuvred,
beaten, foiled, knew who had foiled them and what they had escaped;
congratulated themselves, but had no gratitude to him, and still plotted
his destruction. More than once his death had been planned, but the dark
design had come to light--now from the workers of the bazaars, whose
wires of intelligence pierced everywhere; now from some hungry fellah
whose yelek he had filled with cakes of dourha beside a bread-shop;
now from Mahommed Hassan, who was for him a