ghaffirs armed with naboots of dom-wood, and a brace of well-mounted,
badly-dressed policemen, with seats like a monkey on a stick. The
conferences with the mamour and omdah were short, in keeping with the
temper of "Fielding Saadat"; and long into the night Dicky lay and looked
out of his cabin window to the fires on the banks, where sat Mahommed
Seti the servant, the orderly, and some attendant ghaffirs, who, feasting
on the remains of the effendi's supper, kept watch. For Hasha was noted
for its robbers. It was even rumoured that the egregious Selamlik Pasha,
with the sugar plantation near by--"Trousers," Dicky called him when he
saw him on the morrow, because of the elephantine breeks he wore--was not
averse to sending his Abyssinian slaves through the sugar-cane to waylay
and rob, and worse, maybe.

By five o'clock next day the inspection was over. The streets had been
swept for the Excellency--which is to say Saadat--the first time in a
year. The prison had been cleaned of visible horrors, the first time in
a month. The last time it was ordered there had been a riot among the
starving, infested prisoners; earth had been thrown over the protruding
bones of the dear lamented dead in the cemetery; the water of the
ablution places in the mosque had been changed; the ragged policemen had
new putties; the kourbashes of the tax-gatherers were hid in their
yeleks; the egregious Pasha wore a greasy smile, and the submudir, as he
conducted Fielding--"whom God preserve and honour!"--through the prison
and through the hospital, where goat's milk had been laid on for this
especial day, smirked gently through the bazaar above his Parisian
waistcoat.

But Fielding, as he rode on Selamlik Pasha's gorgeous black donkey from
Assiout, with its crimson trappings, knew what proportion of improvement
this "hankypanky," as Dicky called it, bore to the condition of things at