truth. He knew it now, despite the longing that
Cairo, the real Cairo of the strange, dimly-lit and brightly-tinted
interiors, of the shrill and weary music, of the painted girls and the
hashish smokers, and of that voice which cried aloud in the mystic hour
the acclamation of the Creator--had waked in his Eastern nature to sink
into the life which his ancestors knew--the life of the Eastern Jews. He
knew what his real purpose had been.

Yet he left Cairo with regret. Starnworth had asked him to come on that
six weeks' desert journey. He longed to do that, too. With this
cessation of work, this abrupt and complete change of life, had come an
almost wild desire for liberty, for adventure. This persistent worker
woke to the great, stretching life outside--outside of his
consulting-room, of the grey sea that ringed the powerful Island,
outside of Europe, a little weary, a little over-civilized. And a voice
that seemed to come from the centre of his soul clamoured for wild
empires, for freedoms unutterable. It was as if the walls of his
consulting-room fell with a noise of the walls of Jericho. And he looked
out upon what he needed, what he had always needed, sub-consciously. But
he could not take it yet.

In the train he slept but little. Early in the morning he was up and
dressed. From his window he saw the sunrise, and, for the first time was
moved by the hard wonder of barren hills in an Eastern land. Those hills
on the left bank of the river, glowing with delicate colours, hills with
dimples that looked like dimples in iron, with outlines that were cruel
and yet romantic, stirred his imagination and made him again regret his
life. Why had he never been here before? Why had he grown to middle age
encompassed by restrictions? A man like Starnworth had a truer
conception of life than he. Even now, at this moment, he was not running
quite free. And then he thought of the _Loulia_. Was he not really a man
in pursuit? Suppose he gave up this pursuit. No one constrained him to
it. He was here with plenty of money, entirely independent. If he chose
to hire a caravan, to start away for the Gold Coast, there was no one to
say him nay. He could go, if he would, forgetting that in the world
there were men who were sick, forgetting everything except that he was
in liberty and in a land where he was at home.

And then he asked himself whether he would have the power to forget that
in the world there were men who were sick. And he