thousand eyes and feet and
hands, who cooked his food, and gathered round him fellaheen or Copts
or Soudanese or Nubians whom he himself had tested and found true, and
ruled them with a hand of plenty and a rod of iron. Also, from Nahoum's
spies he learned of plots and counterplots, chiefly on Achmet's part;
and these he hid from Kaid, while he trusted Nahoum--and not without
reason, as yet.

The day of Nahoum's wrath and revenge was not yet come; it was his deep
design to lay the foundation for his own dark actions strong on a
rock of apparent confidence and devotion. A long torture and a great
over-whelming was his design. He knew himself to be in the scheme of
a master-workman, and by-and-by he would blunt the chisel and bend the
saw; but not yet. Meanwhile, he hated, admired, schemed, and got a sweet
taste on his tongue from aiding David to foil Achmet--Higli and Diaz
were of little account; only the injury they felt in seeing the sluices
being closed on the stream of bribery and corruption kept them in the
toils of Achmet's conspiracy. They had saved their heads, but they had
not learned their lesson yet; and Achmet, blinded by rage, not at all.
Achmet did not understand clemency. One by one his plots had failed,
until the day came when David advised Kaid to send him and his friends
into the Soudan, with the punitive expedition under loyal generals. It
was David's dream that, in the field of war, a better spirit might enter
into Achmet and his friends; that patriotism might stir in them.

The day was approaching when the army must leave. Achmet threw dice once
more.

Evening was drawing down. Over the plaintive pink and golden glow of
sunset was slowly being drawn a pervasive silver veil of moonlight. A
caravan of camels hunched alone in the middle distance, making for the
western desert. Near by, village life manifested itself in heavily laden
donkeys; in wolfish curs stealing away with refuse into the waste; in
women, upright and modest, bearing jars of water on their heads; in
evening fires, where the cover of the pot clattered over the boiling
mass within; in the voice of the Muezzin calling to prayer.

Returning from Alexandria to Cairo in the special train which Kaid had
sent for him, David watched the scene with grave and friendly interest.
There was far, to go before those mud huts of the thousand years would
give place to rational modern homes; and as he saw a solitary horseman
spread his sheepskin on