e his own doorway there was no odour, and there was silence
within.

"Now, by the beard of the Prophet," he muttered, "is it for this I
have fed the girl and clothed her with linen from Beni Mazar all these
years!" And he turned upon his heel, and kicked a yellow cur in the
ribs; then he went to the nearest cafe, and making huge rolls of
forcemeat with his fingers crammed them into his mouth, grunting like
a Berkshire boar. Nor did his anger cease thereafter, for this meal of
meat had cost him five piastres--the second meal of meat in a week.

As Wassef sat on the mastaba of the cafe sullen and angry, the village
barber whispered in his ear that Mahommed Selim and Soada had been
hunting jackals in the desert all afternoon. Hardly had the barber fled
from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at
Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef
felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass--the being more
dreaded in Egypt than the plague.

That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by
sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve
others, to begin the march to Dongola. Though the young man's father
went secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the
tune of a feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it. That was a
very peculiar thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive
down to the ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of
Allah.

Wassef the camel-driver was the cause. He was a deep man and a strong;
and it was through him the conscription descended upon Mahommed
Selim--"son of a burnt father," as he called him--who had gone shooting
jackals in the desert with his daughter, and had lost him his breakfast.
Wassef's rage was quiet but effective, for he had whispered to some
purpose in the ear of the Mamour as well as in that of the dreaded
kavass of conscription. Afterwards, he had gone home and smiled at Soada
his daughter when she lied to him about the sunset breakfast.

With a placid smile and lips that murmured, "Praise be to God," the
malignant camel-driver watched the shrieking women of the village
throwing dust on their heads and lamenting loudly for the thirteen young
men of Beni Souef who were going forth never to return--or so it seemed
to them; for of all the herd of human kine driven into the desert
before whips and swords, but a moiety ever returned