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There was a satanic humour in the situation pleasant to the soul of Mahommed Seti, if soul his subconsciousness might be called. In the presence of his regiment, drawn up in the Beit-el-Mal, before his trembling bimbashi, whose lips were now pale with terror at the loss of his mascot, Mahommed Seti was drummed out of line, out of his regiment, out of the Beit-el-Mal. It was opera boufe, and though Seti could not know what opera boufe was, he did know that it was a ridiculous fantasia, and he grinned his insolent grin all the way, even to the corner of the camel-market, where the drummer and the sergeant and his squad turned back from ministering a disgrace they would gladly have shared.

Left at the corner of the camel-market, Mahommed Seti planned his future. At first it was to steal a camel and take the desert for Berber. Then he thought of the English hakim, Fielding Bey, who had saved his life. Now, a man who has saved your life once may do it again; one favour is always the promise of another. So Seti, with a sudden inspiration, went straight to the house of Fielding Bey and sat down before it on his mat.

With the setting of the sun came a clatter of tins and a savoury odour throughout Khartoum to its farthest precincts, for it was Ramadan, and no man ate till sunset. Seti smiled an avid smile, and waited. At last he got up, turned his face towards Mecca, and said his prayers. Then he lifted the latch of Fielding’s hut, entered, eyed the medicine bottles and the surgical case with childish apprehension, and made his way to the kitchen. There he foraged. He built a fire; his courage grew; he ran to the bazaar, and came back with an armful of meats and vegetables.

So it was that when Fielding returned he found Mahommed Seti and a savoury mess awaiting him. Also there was coffee and a bottle of brandy which Seti had looted in the bazaar. In one doorway stood Fielding; in another stood Mahommed Seti, with the same grin which had served his purpose all the way from Cairo, his ugly face behind it, and his prodigious shoulders below it, and the huge chest from which came forth, like the voice of a dove:

“God give thee long life, saadat el bey!”

Now an M.D. degree and a course in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital do not necessarily give a knowledge of the human soul, though the outlying lands of the earth have been fattened by those who thought there was knowledge and salvation in a conquered curriculum. Fielding Bey, however, had never made pretence of understanding the Oriental mind, so he discreetly took his seat and made no remarks. From sheer instinct, however, when he came to the coffee he threw a boot which caught Mahommed Seti in the middle of the chest, and said roughly: “French, not Turkish, idiot!”

Then Mahommed Seti grinned, and he knew that he was happy; for it was deep in his mind that that was the Inglesi’s way of offering a long engagement. In any case Seti had come to stay. Three times he made French coffee that night before it suited, and the language of Fielding was appropriate in each case. At last a boot, a native drum, and a wood sculpture of Pabst the lion-headed goddess, established perfect relations between them. They fell into their places of master and man as accurately as though the one had smitten and the other served for twenty years.

The only acute differences they had were upon two points–the cleaning of the medicine bottles and surgical instruments, and the looting. But it was wonderful to see how Mahommed Seti took the kourbash at the hands of Fielding, when he shied from the medicine bottles. He could have broken, or bent double with one twist, the weedy, thin-chested Fielding. But though he saw a deadly magic and the evil eye in every stopper, and though to him the surgical instruments were torturing steels which the devil had forged for his purposes, he conquered his own prejudices so far as to assist in certain bad cases which came in Fielding’s way on the journey down the Nile.