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Ali sabred the fugitives mercilessly, but fear carried them away, and, forced to follow the crowd, he perceived the Kersales and Baltadgi Pacha descending the side of Mount Paktoras, intending to cut off his retreat. He attempted another route, hastening towards the road to Dgeleva, but found it held by the Tapagetae under the Bimbashi Aslon of Argyro-Castron.
It is a rule in our army, you know, that all white officers have the honorary rank of major, so as to make them senior to all Egyptian officers. Will you tell Mr. Hilliard that I authorize him to call himself Bimbashi? There is no occasion to put it in orders. My authorization is sufficient.
And he did not apologise for paraphrasing the famous ballad. He has shamed Egypt at last into admiration for Wyndham bimbashi: to the deep satisfaction of Hassan, the Soudanese boy, who received his fifty pounds, and to this day wears the belt which once kept him in the narrow path of duty.
He even boldly offered to tell the pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would let the bimbashi go. So it was that Selamlik talked to the Ulema, the holy men, who were there, and they urged him to clemency, as holy men will, even in Egypt at a price. So it was also that the bimbashi went back to his regiment with all his limbs intact.
As long as he was on your staff it did not matter; but as, presently, he may be attached to an Egyptian regiment, it is as well that he should bear the usual rank, and it may save misunderstanding in communicating with the natives. He will be much more respected, as Bimbashi, than he would be as lieutenant, a title that they would not understand.
Fifty eyes hungered for the blood of Wyndham bimbashi; not because he was Wyndham bimbashi, but because the heathen in these men cried out for sacrifice; and what so agreeable a sacrifice as the Englishman who had led them into this disaster and would die so well had they ever seen an Englishman who did not die well?
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.
The proceedings of the Americans, who cut holes in the roofs and played through them upon the fires within, were watched by the Turks with stupid amazement. "Mashallah!" said a fat Bimbashi, as he stood sweltering in the heat; "The Franks are a wonderful people." To those initiated into the mysteries of Turkish politics, these fires are more than accidental; they have a most weighty significance.
The title of Bimbashi, which had seemed absurd to him seven months before, was now nothing out of the way, for he looked as old as many of the British subalterns serving with that rank in the Egyptian army.
Here, at last, the truth came home to Wyndham bimbashi. He realised that though in his six years' residence in the land he had acquired a command of Arabic equal to that of others who had been in the country twice that time, he had acquired little else.
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