great fortune and great power, a very boy, he was planning to win the
heart of, and marry, his avowed foe, the woman who had condemned him
without stint.




II

On her wide veranda, a stone's-throw from the banks of the Nile, My Lady
sat pen in hand and paper-pad upon her knee. She had written steadily
for an hour, and now she raised her head to look out on the swift-
flowing, muddy water, where broad khiassas floated down the stream, laden
with bersim; where feluccas covered the river, bearing natives and
donkeys; where faithful Moslems performed their ablutions, and other
faithful Moslems, their sandals laid aside, said their prayers with their
faces towards Mecca, oblivious of all around; where blue-robed women
filled their goolahs with water, and bore them away, steady and stately;
where a gang of conscripts, chained ankle to ankle, followed by a crowd
of weeping and wailing women, were being driven to the anchorage of the
stern-wheeled transport-steamer. All these sights she had seen how many
hundred times! To her it was all slavery. The laden khiassas
represented the fruits of enforced labour; the ablutions and prayers were
but signs of submission to the tyranny of a religion designed for the
benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed and code of gross
selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession
of their husbands and after unceasing prayer? Whether beasts of burden,
the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or servants of pleasure,
they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the land was in moral
darkness. So it seemed to her.