s 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 perfectly
simple. The difficulty would lie in the return. They might find it
hard to get back if their camels were spent, and the Halfa 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British officers being withdrawn, the Dervishes would be upon the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 which have been invested in this country?
Where the monuments which all nations look upon as most precious
memorials of the past?"

"Come now, Colonel," cried Headingly, laughing, "surely you don't mean
that they would shift the pyramids?"

"You cannot foretell what they would do. There is no iconoclast in the
world like an extreme Mohammedan. Last time they overran this country
they burned t