l-blue sky overhead, caught at him till he was plucked from his
chair and set pacing restlessly about his room.

He dreamed himself to Port Said, and was marshalled in the long
procession of steamers down the waterway of the canal. The song of the
Arabs coaling the ship was in his ears, and so loud that he could see
them as they went at night-time up and down the planks between the
barges and the deck, an endless chain of naked figures monotonously
chanting and lurid in the red glare of the braziers. He travelled out of
the canal, past the red headlands of the Sinaitic Peninsula, into the
chills of the Gulf of Suez. He zigzagged down the Red Sea while the
Great Bear swung northward low down in the sky above the rail of the
quarterdeck, and the Southern Cross began to blaze in the south; he
touched at Tor and at Yambo; he saw the tall white houses of Yeddah lift
themselves out of the sea, and admired the dark brine-withered woodwork
of their carved casements; he walked through the dusk of its roofed
bazaars with the joy of the homesick after long years come home; and
from Yeddah he crossed between the narrowing coral-reefs into the
land-locked harbour of Suakin.

Westward from Suakin stretched the desert, with all that it meant to
this man whom it had smitten and cast out--the quiet padding of the
camels' feet in sand; the great rock-cones rising sheer and abrupt as
from a rippleless ocean, towards which you march all day and get no
nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the
rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure
pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the
planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places
dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro,
forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a
fever--until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows
bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the
world was white with dawn.

He waked from his dream at the homely sound. There were to be no more
journeys for him; affliction had caged him and soldered a chain about
his leg. He felt his way by the balustrade up the stairs to his bed. He
fell asleep as the sun rose.

* * * * *

But at Dongola, on the great curve of the Nile southwards of Wadi Halfa,
the sun was already blazing and its inhabitants were awake. The