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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.
"Well, Bimbashi," Captain Keppel said, when the work for the day was over, "so you have had your first brush with the enemy. What do you think of it?" "I would rather that you did not call me Bimbashi, Captain Keppel. The title is ridiculous for me, and it was only given me that it might be useful when with Egyptian or Soudanese soldiers.
More than once his bimbashi drew a sword to cut him down for the peaceful insolent grin with which he heard himself suddenly charged with very original crimes; but even the officer put his sword up again, because he remembered that though Seti was the curse of the regiment on the march, there was no man like him in the day of battle.
Would it be possible to shut one sluice and open the other without the man at the wheel knowing? Suppose you killed the man at the wheel what then? The Gippies and the friendlies scowled, but did not speak. The bimbashi was responsible for all; he was an Englishman, let him get water for them, or die like the rest of them perhaps before them!
Yet even if he had known the life from many stand-points he would still have cherished illusions, for, as Dicky Donovan, who had a sense of satire, said in some satirical lines, the cherished amusements of more than one dinner table: "Oh, William William Sowerby Has come out for to see The way of a bimbashi With Egyptian Cavalree.
The Egyptian's dark eyes skirted the encampment and rested on the cook's fire. "Perhaps," said he, "if the Bimbashi thought fit " He looked at the prisoner and then at the burning wood. "No, no; it wouldn't do. No, by Jove, that's going too far." "A very little might do it." "No, no. It's all very well here, but it would sound just awful if ever it got as far as Fleet Street.
Here Hilary Joyce slumbered in the heat, and in the cool he inspected his square-shouldered, spindle-shanked Soudanese, with their cheery black faces and their funny little pork-pie forage caps. Joyce was a martinet at drill, and the blacks loved being drilled, so the Bimbashi was soon popular among them. But one day was exactly like another.
This was the reason that Wyndham bimbashi and his Gippies, and the Sheikh and his household, faced the fact, the morning after Hassan left, that there was scarce a goolah of water for a hundred burning throats. Wyndham understood now why the Arabs sat down and waited, that torture might be added to the oncoming death of the Englishman, his natives, and the "friendlies."
But at Khartoum came Seti's fall. Many sorts of original sin had been his, with profit and prodigious pleasure, but when, by the supposed orders of the bimbashi, he went through Khartoum levying a tax upon every dancing-girl in the place and making her pay upon the spot at the point of a merciless tongue, he went one step too far.
The nearest garrison was at Kerbat, sixty miles away, where five hundred men were stationed. Now that his cup of mistakes was full, Wyndham bimbashi would willingly have made the attempt to carry word to the garrison there. But he had no right to leave his post. He called for a volunteer. No man responded. Panic was upon the Gippies.
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