into your heads to let everything alone at first;
for we shall have it all by and by! and forward!'

"So far so good. But all those people had heard a prophecy of Napoleon,
under the name of _Kebir Bonaberdis_; a word which in our lingo means,
'The Sultan fires a shot,' and they feared him like the devil. So the
Grand Turk, Asia, and Africa have recourse to magic, and they send a
demon against us, named the Mahdi, who it was thought had come down from
heaven on a white charger which, like its master was bullet-proof, and
the pair of them lived on the air of that part of the world. There are
people who have seen them, but for my part I cannot give you any certain
informations about them. They were the divinities of Arabia and of the
Mamelukes who wished their troopers to believe that the Mahdi had the
power of preventing them from dying in battle. They gave out that he was
an angel sent down to wage war on Napoleon, and to get back Solomon's
seal, part of their paraphernalia which they pretended our general had
stolen. You will readily understand that we made them cry peccavi all
the same.

"Ah, just tell me now how they came to know about that compact of
Napoleon's? Was that natural?

"They took it into their heads for certain that he commanded the genii,
and that he went from place to place like a bird in the twinkling of an
eye; and it is a fact that he was everywhere. At length it came about
that he carried off a queen of theirs. She was the private property of
a Mameluke, who, although he had several more of them, flatly refused to
strike a bargain, though 'the other' offered all his treasures for her
and diamonds as big as pigeon's eggs. When things had come to that pass,
they could not well be settled without a good deal of fighting; and
there was fighting enough for everybody and no mistake about it.

"Then we are drawn up before Alexandria, and again at Gizeh, and before
the Pyramids. We had to march over the sands and in the sun; people
whose eyes dazzled used to see water that they could not drink and shade
that made them fume. But we made short work of the Mamelukes as usual,
and everything goes down before the voice of Napoleon, who seizes Upper
and Lower Egypt and Arabia, far and wide, till we came to the capitals
of kingdoms which no longer existed, where there were thousands and
thousands of statues of all the devils in creation, all done to
the life, and another curious thing too, any quantity of liza