throat, and he had neither time nor chance to cry Allah! before the
breath left him.

Wyndham crept on. The sound of the sakkia was in his ears--the long,
creaking, crying song, filling the night. And now there arose the Song
of the Sakkia from the man at the wheel:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left;
The heron feeds by the water side--shall I starve in my onion-field!
Shall the Lord of the World withhold his tears that water the land--
Turn, O Sakkia!"

. . . The hard white stars, the cold blue sky, the far-off Libyan
hills in a gold and opal glow, the smell of the desert, the deep swish of
the Nile, the Song of the Sakkia. . . .

Wyndham's heart beat faster, his blood flowed quicker, he strangled a
sigh in his breast. Here, with death on every hand, with immediate and
fearful peril before him, out of the smell of the desert and the ghostly
glow of the Libyan hills there came a memory--the memory of a mistake he
had made years before with a woman. She had never forgiven him for the
mistake--he knew it at last. He knew that no woman could ever forgive
the blunder he had made--not a blunder of love but a blunder of self-will
and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit. It had nearly wrecked her life: and
he only realised it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which comes to
every being once in a lifetime. Well, it was something to have seen the
mistake at last.

He had come to the sluice-gate. It was impossible to open it without the
fellah on the water-wheel seeing him.