petition, the cry of the wind over an
interminable expanse. The subtler emotions which cannot be translated
into words are still to be hinted at by chords and harmonies."

"It seems wilder and more savage than ever to-night," remarked the
American. "It gives me the same feeling of pitiless force that the
Atlantic does upon a cold, dark, winter day. Perhaps it is the knowledge
that we are right there on the very edge of any kind of law and
order. How far do you suppose that we are from any Dervishes, Colonel
Cochrane?"

"Well, on the Arabian side," said the Colonel, "we have the Egyptian
fortified camp of Sarras about forty miles to the south of us. Beyond
that are sixty miles of very wild country before you would come to the
Dervish post at Akasheh. On this other side, however, there is nothing
between us and them."

"Abousir is on this side, is it not?"

"Yes. That is why the excursion to the Abousir Rock has been forbidden
for the last year. But things are quieter now."

"What is to prevent them from coming down on that side?"

"Absolutely nothing," said Cecil Brown, in his listless voice.

"Nothing, except their fears. The coming, of course, would be absolutely
simple. The difficulty would lie in the return. They might find it hard
to get back if their camels were spent and the Haifa garrison with their
beasts fresh got on their track. They know it as well as we do, and it
has kept them from trying."

"It isn't safe to reckon upon a Dervish's fears," remarked Brown. "We
must always bear in mind that they are not amenable to the same motives
as other people. Many of them are anxious to meet death, and all of
them are absolute, uncompromising believers in destiny. They exist as a
_reductio ad absurdum_ of all bigotry,--a proof of how surely it leads
towards blank barbarism."

"You think these people are a real menace to Egypt?" asked the American.
"There seems from what I have heard to be some difference of opinion
about it. Monsieur Fardet, for example, does not seem to think that the
danger is a very pressing one."

"I am not a rich man," Colonel Cochrane answered, after a little pause,
"but I am prepared to lay all I am worth that within three years of
the British officers being withdrawn, the Dervishes would be upon the
Mediterranean. Where would the civilisation of Egypt be? where would the
hundreds of millions be which have been invested in this country? where
the monuments which all nations look upon