"In the name of our master the Khedive!" he cried.

Above the spot where the two had sunk floated the red tarboosh of the
Mudir of the Fayoum.






A TREATY OF PEACE

Mr. William Sowerby, lieutenant in the Mounted Infantry, was in a
difficult situation, out of which he was little likely to come with
credit--or his life. It is a dangerous thing to play with fire, so it
is said; it is a more dangerous thing to walk rough-shod over Oriental
customs. A man ere this has lost his life by carrying his shoe-leather
across the threshold of a mosque, and this sort of thing William Sowerby
knew, and of his knowledge he heeded. He did not heed another thing,
however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in all
the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by a
mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a
hideous eunuch.

William Sowerby had not been long in Egypt, he had not travelled very
far or very wide in the Orient; and he was an impressionable and harmless
young man whose bark and bite were of equal value. His ideas of a harem
were inaccurately based on the legend that it is necessarily the
habitation of many wives and concubines and slaves. It had never
occurred to him that there might be a sort of family life in a harem;