Captain promised and vowed
to go through with this expedition, and if a man's got to die, he'd
better die honest without breaking his word. And the other is what
I said to you in London when I signed on, that he won't die a minute
before his time, and nothing won't happen to him, but what's bound
to happen, and therefore it ain't a ha'porth of use bothering about
anything, and that's where the East's well ahead of the West.

"And now, sir, I'll go and look after the camels and those half-bred
Jew boys what you call Abati, but I call rotten sneaks, for if they get
their thieving fingers into those canisters of picric salts, thinking
they're jam, as I found them trying to do yesterday, something may
happen in Egypt that'll make the Pharaohs turn in their graves and the
Ten Plagues look silly."

So, having finished his oration, Quick went, and in due course we
started for Mur.

The second incident that is perhaps worth recording was an adventure
that happened to us when we had completed about two of our four months'
journey.

After weeks of weary desert travel--if I remember right, it was exactly
a fortnight after the dog Pharaoh, of which I shall soon have plenty to
say, had come into Orme's possession--we reached an oasis called Zeu,
where I had halted upon my road down to Egypt. In this oasis, which,
although not large in extent, possesses springs of beautiful water and
groves of date-trees, we were, as it chanced, very welcome, since when
I was there before, I had been fortunate enough to cure its sheik of
an attack of ophthalmia and to doctor several of his people for various
ailments with good results. So, although I was burning to get forward, I
agreed with the others that it would be wise to accede to the request
of the leader of our caravan, a clever and resourceful, but to my mind
untrustworthy Abati of the name of Shadrach, and camp in Zeu for a week
or so to rest and feed our camels, which had wasted almost to nothing on
the scant herbage of the desert.

This Shadrach, I may add here, whom his companions, for some reason
unknown to me at that time, called the Cat, was remarkable for a triple
line of scars upon his face, which, he informed me, had been set there
by the claws of a lion. Now the great enemies of this people of Zeu were
lions, which at certain seasons of the year, I suppose when food grew
scarce, descended from the slopes of a range of hills that stretched
east and west at a distance of about