ef any longer sell rock-salt in the bazaar. Yet wait for me another
week."

The Arab of the Bisharin who wrote the letter was Harry Feversham.
Wearing the patched jubbeh of the Dervishes over his stained skin, his
hair frizzed on the crown of his head and falling upon the nape of his
neck in locks matted and gummed into the semblance of seaweed, he went
about his search for Yusef through the wide streets of New Berber with
its gaping pits. To the south, and separated by a mile or so of desert,
lay the old town where Abou Fatma had slept one night and hidden the
letters, a warren of ruined houses facing upon narrow alleys and winding
streets. The front walls had been pulled down, the roofs carried away,
only the bare inner walls were left standing, so that Feversham when he
wandered amongst them vainly at night seemed to have come into long
lanes of five courts, crumbling into decay. And each court was only
distinguishable from its neighbour by a degree of ruin. Already the
foxes made their burrows beneath the walls.

He had calculated that one night would have been the term of his stay in
Berber. He was to have crept through the gate in the dusk of the
evening, and before the grey light had quenched the stars his face
should be set towards Obak. Now he must go steadily forward amongst the
crowds like a man that has business of moment, dreading conversation
lest his tongue should betray him, listening ever for the name of Yusef
to strike upon his ears. Despair kept him company at times, and fear
always. But from the sharp pangs of these emotions a sort of madness
was begotten in him, a frenzy of obstinacy, a belief fanatical as the
dark religion of those amongst whom he moved, that he could not now fail
and the world go on, that there could be no injustice in the whole
scheme of the universe great enough to lay this heavy burden upon the
one man least fitted to bear it and then callously to destroy him
because he tried.

Fear had him in its grip on that morning three days after he had left
Abou Fatma at the wells, when coming over a slope he first saw the sand
stretched like a lagoon up to the dark brown walls of the town, and the
overshadowing foliage of the big date palms rising on the Nile bank
beyond. Within those walls were the crowded Dervishes. It was surely the
merest madness for a man to imagine that he could escape detection
there, even for an hour. Was it right, he began to ask, that a man
should even try?