en had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of
Ebn Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be
marched off to the mudirieh. There the Mudir glared at him and had him
loaded with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred convicts
arrayed themselves against myriad tribes which, killed individually,
made a spot on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit! The carnage
was great, and though Seti was sleepless night after night it was not
because of his crime. He found some solace, however, in provoking his
fellow-prisoners to assaults upon each other; and every morning he
grinned as he saw the dead and wounded dragged out into the clear
sunshine.

The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night
to the Mudir and said deceitfully: "Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I
have been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran
that a man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour's? What
should Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of
Allah, the Effendi Insagi, lives? What is honestly mine is eight
feddans, and the rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi."

Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of
offering backsheesh.

And the Mudir had due anger and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to
have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls.
The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."

Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, "Now shall I sleep in peace, by
the grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my
people?" he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.

"But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast
eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?"

Abou Seti's glance fell and his hands twitched. His fingers fumbled
with his robe of striped silk. He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his
bitter humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with
the Mudir whether he lived or died? So he answered:

"All-seeing and all-knowing art thou, O effendi, and I have reckoned
the rentals even to this hour for the ten years--fifty piastres for each
feddan--"

"A hundred for the five years of high Nile," interposed the Mudir.

"Fifty for the five lean years, and a hundred for the five fat years,"
said Abou Seti, and wished that his words were poisoned arrows, that
they might give the Mudir many deaths at once. "And may Al