United States or Bosnia and Herzegovina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As for inducing Miss Gilder to give up her dream of a private dahabeah, I foresaw that it would be like persuading the youngest lioness in the Cairo Zoo to surrender her cherished wooden ball. But I began by giving Monny a present; a fine old turban-box of rare, red tortoise shell inlaid with mother of pearl, which I found at an antiquary's.
And if this poor thing can't get any one else to drag, he shall drag us up the Nile, if he's as intelligent in his ways as he is in that one eye, which is so like a hard-boiled egg. You see, Lord Ernest, we're going to have a boat of our own. A steam dahabeah is what we want, so we won't be at the mercy of the wind. And we can have all the dragomen we choose, can't we?"
It was almost certain that a steam dahabeah could not unseen have passed the Enchantress Isis at Abu Simbel in broad daylight, going back toward Assuan. Therefore, since it was not moored near the temple, if it had been in the neighbourhood at all it must have dashed on ahead of us in the direction of Wady Haifa.
"Why, I want you to take Colonel Corkran's place on the Candace as conductor. And I want you and your friend Fenton to go up Nile in charge of the splendid steam dahabeah I've bought to supplement the Mediterranean trip. There you have my motives in a nutshell!" I burst out laughing. "A cracked nutshell," I remarked. Sir Marcus' rosy face turned royal purple. "What you won't undertake it?"
"That doesn't look as if he were entertaining the idea of going up the Nile on your steam dahabeah." "I have heard that he's left. But I happen to know it isn't so. I saw him standing in front of Shepheard's Hotel this morning, waiting for you. I got on to what was in that green turban before the pretty girl in white Miss Gilder, I've found out since called him on to the terrace.
"It could easily have been hired at Assuan," Biddy exclaimed. "And it could have beaten us. We've stopped at such heaps of temples where other boats only touch coming back." "If there were a plot, as you are always imagining, the dahabeah would have to be near here, too," Monny laughed incredulously. "And so it may be. We haven't seen round the corner of the Great Temple yet."
The Enchantress would have to pick her way slowly through the silver sands of the Nile, which mingled with the spilt gold-dust of the desert shore. All the same, these impudent rascals would find it hard to hide from us at Wady Haifa, especially if we stopped the boat and wired from the next telegraph station to have them watched on the arrival of their dahabeah.
Soada was pretty and upright, with a full round breast and a slim figure. She carried a balass of water on her head as gracefully as a princess a tiara. This was remarked by occasional inspectors making their official rounds, and by more than one khowagah putting in with his dahabeah where the village maidens came to fill their water-jars.
Perhaps nobody but a green-turbaned Hadji could so speedily have screwed information out of secretive Arabs, paid to be silent. And he had to fit deductions into spaces of the puzzle left empty by fibs and glib self-excusings. What he did learn was this: a dragoman had come, in a small boat, from a steam dahabeah to the Enchantress Isis while we were away at Kasr Ibrim.
He was just under thirty years, as good-looking as most men, with no one dependent upon him and an income that had withstood both the Maison Doree and a dahabeah on the Nile. He never tired of seeing things and peoples and places. "There's game to be found anywhere," he said, "only it's sometimes out of season. If I had my way and millions I should run a newspaper.
Word Of The Day