cy Our
Governor).

The Great River Gihon, well used to the moods of kings, slid between his
mile-wide banks toward the sea, while the Governor praised God in a loud
and searching cry never before heard by the river.

When he had lowered his right forefinger from behind his right ear, the
villagers talked to him of their crops--barley, dhurrah, millet, onions,
and the like. The Governor stood in his stirrups. North he looked up
a strip of green cultivation a few hundred yards wide that lay like a
carpet between the river and the tawny line of the desert. Sixty miles
that strip stretched before him, and as many behind. At every half-mile
a groaning water-wheel lifted the soft water from the river to the crops
by way of a mud-built aqueduct. A foot or so wide was the water-channel;
five foot or more high was the bank on which it ran, and its base was
broad in proportion. Abu Hussein, misnamed the Father of Cunning, drank
from the river below his earth, and his shadow was long in the low sun.
He could not understand the loud cry which the Governor had cried.

The Sheikh of the village spoke of the crops from which the rulers of
all lands draw revenue; but the Governor's eyes were fixed, between his
horse's ears, on the nearest water-channel.

"Very like a ditch in Ireland," he murmured, and smiled, dreaming of a
razor-topped bank in distant Kildare.

Encouraged by that smile, the Sheikh continued. "When crops fail it is
necessary to remit taxation. Then it is a good thing, O Excellency
Our Governor, that you come and see the crops which have failed, and
discover that we have not lied."

"Assuredly." The Governor shortened his reins. The horse cantered on,
rose at the embankment of the water-channel, changed leg cleverly on
top, and hopped down in a cloud of golden dust.

Abu Hussein from his earth watched with interest. He had never before
seen such things.

"Assuredly," the Governor repeated, and came back by the way he had
gone. "It is always best to see for one's self."

An ancient and still bullet-speckled stern-wheel steamer, with a barge
lashed to her side, came round the river bend. She whistled to tell the
Governor his dinner was ready, and the horse, seeing his fodder piled on
the barge, whinnied back.

"Moreover," the Sheikh added, "in the days of the Oppression the Emirs
and their creatures dispossessed many people of their lands. All up and
down the river our people are waiting to return to their law