into the desert many a time? What should he know of that love which
springs once in every woman's heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh's daughter?

When he had gone, Soada groped her way blindly to the door and out into
the roadway. Her lips moved, but she only said: "Mahommed--Mahommed
Selim!" Her father's words knelled in her ear that her lover was willing
to go, and she kept saying brokenly: "Mahommed--Mahommed Selim!" As the
mist left her eyes she saw the conscripts go by, and Mahommed Selim was
in the rear rank. He saw her also, but he kept his head turned away,
taking a cigarette from young Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, as they passed
on.

Unlike the manner of her people, Soada turned and went back into her
house, and threw herself upon the mud floor, and put the folds of her
garment in her mouth lest she should cry out in her agony. A whole day
she lay there and did not stir, save to drink from the water-bottle which
old Fatima, the maker of mats, had placed by her side. For Fatima
thought of the far-off time when she loved Hassan the potter, who had
been dragged from his wheel by a kavass of conscription and lost among
the sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl's story.

That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter. A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and kept
him there until he married Soada, than to let him go. He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to the
bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive's soldiers in the yellow sands.