After weeks of weary desert travel--if I remember right, it was exactly
a fortnight after the dog Pharaoh, of which I shall soon have plenty to
say, had come into Orme's possession--we reached an oasis called Zeu,
where I had halted upon my road down to Egypt. In this oasis, which,
although not large in extent, possesses springs of beautiful water and
groves of date-trees, we were, as it chanced, very welcome, since when
I was there before, I had been fortunate enough to cure its sheik of
an attack of ophthalmia and to doctor several of his people for various
ailments with good results. So, although I was burning to get forward, I
agreed with the others that it would be wise to accede to the request
of the leader of our caravan, a clever and resourceful, but to my mind
untrustworthy Abati of the name of Shadrach, and camp in Zeu for a week
or so to rest and feed our camels, which had wasted almost to nothing on
the scant herbage of the desert.

This Shadrach, I may add here, whom his companions, for some reason
unknown to me at that time, called the Cat, was remarkable for a triple
line of scars upon his face, which, he informed me, had been set there
by the claws of a lion. Now the great enemies of this people of Zeu were
lions, which at certain seasons of the year, I suppose when food grew
scarce, descended from the slopes of a range of hills that stretched
east and west at a distance of about fifty miles north of the oasis,
and, crossing the intervening desert, killed many of the Zeu sheep,
camels, and other cattle, and often enough any of the tribe whom they
could catch. As these poor Zeus practically possessed no firearms, they
were at the mercy of the lions, which grew correspondingly bold. Indeed,
their only resource was to kraal their animals within stone walls at
night and take refuge in their huts, which they seldom left between
sunset and dawn, except to replenish the fires that they lit to scare