hich lay
between Michael's sincere beliefs and the beliefs which he was
professing.

Resolutely he turned his back on the university-mosque. He would visit
his friend at a more suitable hour, and ask him to explain to him some
of the things that had happened. He would ask him if he was aware that
his desert journey had, in a material sense at least, ended in failure,
if his seer's vision had enabled him to discover what had happened to
the treasure.

On his way back to the European quarter of Cairo he rested for a short
time by the roadside, in a strange little cemetery of poor Moslem
tombs. It lay exposed to the turmoil and dust of a rough road, a
sun-baked spot in the daytime; at night it was grimly mysterious. The
memorial stones--the humbler for the women, of course, the grander
ones, with turbans cut in the grey stone, for the men--had sunk into
the ground until they stood at strange angles. The rough white stones
had become grey with age, and many of them were sadly broken.

A donkey-boy, who had perchance taken some portly Turkish merchant back
to his home in the country after his day's work in the city, came
hurrying down the hill. It was steep, and loose stones covered the
path. When he reached the dilapidated cemetery he pulled up his
suffering animal. Michael, from his hidden corner, watched the boy
fling himself from the donkey's back; the animal remained motionless,
while its rider, in his one garment--a short white shirt, which only
reached to the knees of his tanned legs--stepped in amongst the
gravestones. Finding the one he sought, he said a short prayer beside
it in devout tones, then hastened back to his donkey. When he started
down the hill and the tired beast stumbled, he belaboured it with a
heavy stick and cursed it. His foul language rang out into the
stillness; it echoed among the stones under which lay the bones of his
ancestor--or was it, perhaps, the bones of some humble saint, whose
favour he was inciting?

The little incident was as illustrative of the effects of Islam as the
peace within the courts of el-Azhar.

Michael sat in the cemetery, which had seemed to him to be of no more
consequence than a heap of stones by the wayside, awaiting the
roadmender's hammer. Yet, with the strange inconsequence of Orientals,
it was evidently a sacred spot. It had its pilgrims and its uses.
This city cemetery brought to his mind the drifting sand of the open
desert, and the ever-incr