a tender nerve that this one Soudanese boy should believe in him and do
for him what he would give much to do for the men under him. For his
own life he did not care--his confusion and shame were so great.

He watched Hassan steal out into the white brilliance of the night.

"Mind you keep a whole skin, Hassan," he said, as the slim lad with the
white teeth, oily hair, and legs like ivory, stole along the wall, to
drop presently on his belly and make for some palm-trees a hundred yards
away.

The minutes went by in silence; an hour went by; the whole night went by;
Hassan had got beyond the circle of trenchant steel.

They must now abide Hassan's fate; but another peril was upon them.
There was not a goolah of water within the walls!

It was the time of low Nile when all the land is baked like a crust of
bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the
sakkia are heard the night long like untiring crickets with throats of
frogs. It was the time succeeding the khamsin, when the skin dries like
slaked lime and the face is for ever powdered with dust; and the
fellaheen, in the slavery of superstition, strain their eyes day and
night for the Sacred Drop, which tells that the flood is flowing fast
from the hills of Abyssinia.

It was like the Egyptian that nothing should be said to Wyndham about the
dearth of water until it was all gone. The house of the Sheikh, and its
garden, where were a pool and a fountain, were supplied from the great
Persian wheel at the waterside. On this particular sakkia had been wont