he Ministers, fawned upon by
outsiders, trusted by the Khedive, and entirely believed in by the few
Englishmen and Frenchmen who worked for decent administration faithfully
but without hope and sometimes with nausea.

It was nausea that had seized upon Dicky at last, nausea and one other
thing--the spirit of adventure, an inveterate curiosity. His was the
instinct of the explorer, his feet were the feet of the Wandering
Jew. He knew things behind closed doors by instinct; he was like a
thought-reader in the sure touch of discovery; the Khedive looked upon
him as occult almost and laughed in the face of Sadik the Mouffetish
when he said some evil things of Dicky. Also, the Khedive told the
Mouffetish that if any harm came to Dicky there would come harm to him.
The Khedive loved to play one man off against another, and the death
of Sadik or the death of Dicky would have given him no pain, if either
seemed necessary. For the moment, however, he loved them both after his
fashion; for Sadik lied to him, and squeezed the land dry, and flailed
it with kourbashes for gold for his august master and himself; and Dicky
told him the truth about everything--which gave the Khedive knowledge of
how he really stood all round.

Dicky told the great spendthrift the truth about himself; but he did not
tell the truth when he said he was going to England on a visit to his
kith and kin. Seized by the most irresistible curiosity of his life,
moved by desire for knowledge, that a certain plan in his mind might be
successfully advanced he went south and east, not west and north.

For four months Egypt knew him not. For four months the Khedive was
never told the truth save by European financiers, when truths were
obvious facts; for four long months never saw a fearless or an honest
eye in his own household. Not that it mattered in one sense; but Ismail
was a man of ideas, a sportsman of a sort, an Iniquity with points; a
man who chose the broad way because it was easier, not because he was
remorseless. At the start he meant well by his people, but he meant
better by himself; and not being able to satisfy both sides of the
equation, he satisfied one at the expense of the other and of that x
quantity otherwise known as Europe. Now Europe was heckling him; the
settling of accounts was near. Commissioners had been sent to find where
were the ninety millions he had borrowed. Only Ismail and Sadik the
Mouffetish, once slave and foster-brother, could