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 outsid