was a small offset to the fact that his want of tact and his overbearing
manner had been the means of turning a certain tribe of Arabs loose upon
the country, raiding and killing.

But he could not, or would not, see his own vain stupidity. The climax
came in a foolish sortie against the Arab tribe he had offended. In that
unauthorised melee, in covert disobedience to a general order not to
attack, unless at advantage--for the Gippies under him were raw levies--
his troop was diminished by half; and, cut off from the Nile by a flank
movement of the Arabs, he was obliged to retreat and take refuge in the
well-fortified and walled house which had previously been a Coptic
monastery.

Here, at last, the truth came home to Wyndham bimbashi. He realised that
though in his six years' residence in the land he had acquired a command
of Arabic equal to that of others who had been in the country twice that
time, he had acquired little else. He awoke to the fact that in his
cock-sure schemes for the civil and military life of Egypt there was
not one element of sound sense; that he had been all along an egregious
failure. It did not come home to him with clear, accurate conviction--
his brain was not a first-rate medium for illumination; but the facts
struck him now with a blind sort of force; and he accepted the blank
sensation of failure. Also, he read in the faces of those round him an
alien spirit, a chasm of black misunderstanding which his knowledge of
Arabic could never bridge over.

Here he was, shut up with Gippies who had no real faith in him, in the
house of a Sheikh whose servants would cut his throat on no provocation
at all; and not an eighth of a mile away was a horde of Arabs--a circle
of death through which it was impossible to break with the men in his