said one thing to the
Saadat, and, when quite convenient, to say other things to Mustafa,
the boss-sheikh of this settlement. Halim Bey has gone again, but
he has left his tale behind him. I'd stake all I lost, and more
than I ever expect to get out of Mexico on that, and maybe I'll get
a hatful out of Mexico yet. I had some good mining propositions
down there. The Saadat believes in Nahoum, and has made Nahoum what
he is; and on the surface Nahoum pretends to help him; but he is
running underground all the time. I'd like to help give him a villa
at Fazougli. When the Saadat was in England there was a bad time in
Egypt. I was in Cairo; I know. It was the same bad old game--the
corvee, the kourbash, conscription, a war manufactured to fill the
pockets of a few, while the poor starved and died. It didn't come
off, because the Saadat wasn't gone long enough, and he stopped it
when he came back. But Nahoumhe laid the blame on others, and the
Saadat took his word for it, and, instead of a war, there came this
expedition of his own.

Ten days later.--Things have happened. First, there's been awful
sickness among the natives, and the Saadat has had his chance. His
medicine-chest was loaded, he had a special camel for it--and he has
fired it off. Night and day he has worked, never resting, never
sleeping, curing most, burying a few. He looks like a ghost now,
but it's no use saying or doing anything. He says: "Sink your own
will; let it be subject to a higher, and you need take no thought."
It's eating away his life and strength, but it has given us our
return tickets, I guess. They hang about him as if he was Moses in
the wilderness smiting the rock. It's his luck. Just when I get
scared to death, and run down and want a tonic, and it looks as if
there'd be no need to put out next week's washing, then his luck
steps in, and we get another run. But it takes a heap out of a man,
getting scared. Whenever I look on a lot of green trees and cattle
and horses, and the sun, to say nothing of women and children, and
listen to music, or feel a horse eating up the ground under me, 2.10
in the sand, I hate to think of leaving it, and I try to prevent it.
Besides, I don't like the proposition of going, I don't know where.
That's why I get seared. But he says that it's no more than turning
down the light and turning it up again. They