that Fielding sojourned there.

This day, and for three days past, Fielding had been abed in his cabin
with a touch of Nilotic fever. His heart was sick for Cairo, for he
had been three months on the river; and Mrs. Henshaw was in Cairo--Mrs.
Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, who lived with her brother,
a stone's-throw from the Esbekieh Gardens. Fielding longed for Cairo,
but Beni Hassan intervened. The little man who worried Ibrahim urged him
the way his private inclinations ran, but he was obdurate: duty must be
done.

Dicky Donovan had reasons other than private ones for making haste to
Cairo. During the last three days they had stopped at five villages
on the Nile, and in each place Dicky, who had done Fielding's work of
inspection for him, had been met with unusual insolence from the Arabs
and fellaheen, officials and others; and the prompt chastisement he
rendered with his riding-whip in return did not tend to ease his mind,
though it soothed his feelings. There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--of
a seditious army in the palm of one man's hand. At the cafes on the
Nile, Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he
came on them. For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men's
frowns.

This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection
of the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom. What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made. It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.

As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself "There's the devil to
pay: now I wonder who pays?" Because he was planning things of moment,
he took a native drum down to Fielding's cabin, and made Fielding play
it, native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy
ballad, "The Dragoons of Enniskillen." Yet Dicky was thinking hard all
the time.

Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the
Ghawazee tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said
the better. What her name was does not matter. She was well-to-do. She
had a husband who played the kemengeh for her dancing. She had as good a
house as the Omdah