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A Young Lion Of Dedan
by
“Your turn comes,” said Dicky, flashing a look of friendly humour at him. “America is putting her hand in the dough–through you. You’ll know, and your country’ll know, what’s going on here in the hum of the dim bazaars. Ismail’s got to see how things stand, and you’ve got to help me tell him. You’ve got to say I tell the truth, when the French gentlemen, who have their several spokes in the Egyptian wheel, politely say I lie. Is it too much, or too little, Yankee?”
Renshaw almost gulped. “By Jerusalem!” was all he could say. “And we wonder why the English swing things as they do!” he growled, when his breath came freely.
Abdalla had finished his prayers; he was coming towards them. Dicky went to meet him.
“Abdalla, I’m hungry,” he said; “so are you. You’ve eaten nothing since sunset, two days ago.”
“I am thirsty, saadat el basha,” he answered, and his voice was husky.
“Come, I will give you to eat, by the goodness of God.”
It was the time of Ramadan, when no Mahommedan eats food or touches liquid from the rising to the going down of the sun. As the sunset-gun boomed from the citadel, lids had been snatched off millions of cooking-pots throughout the land, and fingers had been thrust into the meat and rice of the evening feast, and their owner had gulped down a bowl of water. The smell of a thousand cooking-pots now came to them over the walls of the mosque. Because of it, Abdalla’s command to the crowd to leave had been easier of acceptance. Their hunger had made them dangerous. Danger was in the air. The tax-gatherers had lately gone their rounds, and the agents of the Mouffetish had wielded the kourbash without mercy and to some purpose. It was perhaps lucky that the incident had occurred within smell of the evening feasts and near the sounding of the sunset-gun.
III
A half-hour later, as Abdalla thrust his fingers into the dish and handed Dicky a succulent cucumber filled with fried meat, the latter said to him: “It is the wish of the Effendina, my friend. It comes as the will of God; for even as Noor-ala-Noor journeyed to the bosom of God by your will, and by your prayers, being descended from Mahomet as you are, even then Ismail, who knew naught of your sorrow, said to me, ‘In all Egypt there is one man, and one only, for whom my soul calls to go into the desert with Gordon,’ and I answered him and said: ‘Inshallah, Effendina, it is Abdalla, the Egyptian.’ And he laid his hand upon his head–I have seen him do that for no man since I came into his presence–and said: ‘My soul calls for him. Find him and bid him to come. Here is my ring.'”
Dicky took from his pocket a signet-ring, which bore a passage from the Koran, and laid it beside Abdalla’s drinking-bowl.
“What is Ismail to me–or the far tribes of the Soudan! Here are my people,” was the reply. Abdalla motioned to the next room, where the blind men ate their evening meal, and out to the dimly lighted streets where thousands of narghilehs and cigarettes made little smoky clouds that floated around white turbans and dark faces. “When they need me, I will speak; when they cry to me, I will unsheathe the sword of Ebn Mahmoud, who fought with Mahomet Ali and saved the land from the Turk.”
Renshaw watched the game with an eagerness unnoticeable in his manner. He saw how difficult was the task before Dicky. He saw an Oriental conscious of his power, whose heart was bitter, and whose soul, in its solitude, revolted and longed for action. It was not moved by a pure patriotism, but what it was moved by served. That dangerous temper, which would have let Dicky, whom he called friend, and himself go down under the naboots of the funeral multitude, with a “Malaish” on his tongue, was now in leash, ready to spring forth in the inspired hour; and the justification need not be a great one. Some slight incident might set him at the head of a rabble which would sweep Cairo like a storm. Yet Renshaw saw, too, that once immersed in the work his mind determined on, the Egyptian would go forward with relentless force. In the excitement of the moment it seemed to him that Egypt was hanging in the balance.