f
Soudanese and fellah doesn't make a really clever villain. Twice, three
times, Dicky gave him other words and phrases to say, and practice made
Ibrahim more perfect in error.

Dicky suddenly enlarged the vocabulary thus: "An old man had three
sons: one was a thief, another a rogue, and the worst of them all was a
soldier. But the soldier died first!"

As he said these words he kept his eyes fixed on Ibrahim in a
smiling, juvenile sort of way; and he saw the colour--the brownish-red
colour--creep slowly into Ibrahim's eyes. For Ibrahim's father had three
sons: and certainly one was a thief, for he had been a tax-gatherer; and
one was a rogue, for he had been the servant of a Greek money-lender;
and Ibrahim was a soldier!

Ibrahim was made to say these words over and over again, and the red
fire in his eyes deepened as Dicky's face lighted up with what seemed a
mere mocking pleasure, a sort of impish delight in teasing, like that of
a madcap girl with a yokel. Each time Ibrahim said the words he jumbled
them worse than before. Then Dicky asked him if he knew what an old man
was, and Ibrahim said no. Dicky said softly in Arabic that the old man
was a fool to have three such sons--a thief and a rogue and a soldier.
With a tender patience he explained what a thief and a rogue were, and
his voice was curiously soft when he added, in Arabic: "And the third
son was like you, Mahommed--and he died first."

Ibrahim's eyes gloomed under the raillery--under what he thought the
cackle of a detested Inglesi with a face like a girl, of an infidel who
had a tongue that handed you honey on the point of a two-edged sword.
In his heart he hated this slim small exquisite as he had never hated
Fielding. His eyes became like little pots of simmering blood, and he
showed his teeth in a hateful way, because he was sure he should glut
his hatred before the moon came full.

Little Dicky Donovan knew, as he sleepily told Ibrahim to go, that for
months the Orderly had listened to the wholesome but scathing talk of
Fielding and himself on the Egyptian Government, and had reported it to
those whose tool and spy he was.

That night, the stern-wheeled tub, the Amenhotep, lurched like a turtle
on its back into the sands by Beni Hassan. Of all the villages of Upper
Egypt, from the time of Rameses, none has been so bad as Beni Hassan.
Every ruler of Egypt, at one time or another, has raided it and razed it
to the ground. It was not for pleasure