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I wondered if Anthony had as noble a throat as this collarless galabeah left uncovered, reminding myself that I could not at all recall Anthony's throat. Then, as the sombre eyes turned to me, drawn perhaps by my stare, I was stunned, flabbergasted, what you will, by realizing that Anthony himself was looking at me from under the green turban. The dark face was blankly expressionless.
No wonder they had not needed to lock doors, with this giant for a jailer, and a big Sudanese knife conspicuously showing in a belt under his open galabeah! Rechid had perhaps wanted the white mouse in his trap to feel the thrill of hope, and then the shock of disappointment.
Behind them walked scores of young men in snow-white galabeah, their impassive, delicately curved faces surmounted by the scarlet tarboosh, chanting that old-Egyptian marriage song of which the music score was lost some few thousand years ago, lying perhaps securely hidden in a secret chamber, undiscovered in the ruins of Karnak, but which song, without a single alteration of note or word, has descended from Rameses the Second down through the history-laden centuries to us, the discoverers and worshippers of ragtime.
Then the servant returned, ushering in a dwarfish Arab in a dirty white turban, and the shabby black galabeah worn only by the poor who cannot afford good materials and the bright colours loved by Egyptians. "From Antoun Effendi?" asked Biddy, in excitement, as he held out a piece of folded paper, not in an envelope. The man shook his head. "He spik no English," explained the servant who waited.
In the early stages our route lay across the recent battlefield, where on every hand were the terrible signs of a routed army: dead horses, the wreckage of guns and waggons, rifles with the murderous saw-bayonet attached a monstrous weapon for any nation to use, little clusters of shells near dismantled battery positions, long rows of sharpened stakes in front of a trench smashed almost out of recognition, and endless barbed-wire torn and blown into grotesque piles by the violence of our bombardment; and through the débris slunk the predatory Bedouin with his dingy galabeah full of loot.
Very simple and harmless they looked too, the taller one in spotless galabeah and red fez, his smallpox pitted face softened by the light of the dying moon; the other, a mere bundle of clothes with the yashmak covering all except the eyes, dragging back from the hand which pulled her ruthlessly up to the door of a house conspicuous by its length of wall unbroken by windows.
He did not look the type of man Fenton would recommend. And though his face was of an unwholesome olive tint, and he wore a tarbush, and a galabeah as long as a dressing-gown, under his short European coat, I was sure he was not of Arab or Egyptian blood. "Milord Borrow?" he began, displaying large white teeth, of which he was evidently proud. I assented.
I stopped short in my argument. My eyes had found the man with the green turban. He stood at some distance behind the pavement-merchants and self-advertising dragomans who pressed against the railing. In his long galabeah of Sudan silk, ashes of roses in colour, he was tall and straight as a palm, gravely dignified with his folded arms and the haughty remoteness of his expression.
So they imagined, but the exasperated ladies who were continually coming to complain that a sportsman in a blue galabeah was rifling their orchards evidently thought otherwise. All the camel-men had the predatory instinct strongly developed, and they were adepts at concealing the "evidence," which sometimes was very much more than fruit or eggs.
All the Arabs have changed their clothes, although they have brought no visible luggage except vague pieces of sacking. The dragoman is exquisitely arrayed, galabeah and kaftan gray-blue, with a pink petticoat, and a white one under that.
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