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A solemn palaver forthwith took place, at which our three sheikhs showed that they thought little of the supposed danger, and said that, though we were nominally in Dervish country at the time, there was no armed force near of sufficient strength to attack us.
That ornery hound kept coming and coming till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't been so good to him before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started off again.
I had cut the thread of the chaplet, while playing with Aurora. Holding the ninety-nine beads in my hand she guessed "Odd," and in order that she might lose I let one bead fall from my hand. Since then I have sought it daily, but it never has been found. 'Holy dervish! cried the Bassa, 'how true were your words!
"That may be true, charitable dervish," said the vizier, "but depend upon it before night I shall be released and restored to office." "I wish it may be so," replied the sultan; "but upon what ground do you build an expectation, the gratification of which appears to me so improbable?"
Then the dervish turned to the soldier who, encumbered with his rifle, did not run swiftly. By that time I had drawn up so as to interpose between them, passing beyond the dervish. I pulled up my rather sorry nag my best was for carrying despatches and took deliberate aim. The dervish turned upon me as I wished.
He was already drunk with the wine of creation, as delirious as a whirling dervish. And he knew he still had work to do. A white-whiskered gentleman wearing a pearl-buttoned white waistcoat stepped quietly up to the office door and peered guardedly in over his glasses. Then he tip-toed away unseen, with a condoning smile on his astute and thin-nosed old face.
In company with another colleague I rode out from the British lines to join him, curious to see the effect of our fire. At the moment a dervish arose, apparently unwounded, and spear in hand charged the servants, who incontinently bolted back to the zereba. My companion also turned back, but I was yet over 200 yards away, and so rode forward.
To this the sultan consented, when the dervish, with chalk, drew a circle of considerable extent round the sultan and his attendants, then stepping into the middle of it, he drew a small circle round himself, and said, "Now seize me if you can;" and immediately disappeared from sight.
The usher struck his wand on the ground, and, in a shrill voice, proclaimed: "The great Confu is silent for an hour." Instantly the bearers pulled down a sort of blind of bamboo, which descended with a sharp clatter, and secured it at the bottom; and then the man in the tall fez, with the black beard and wand, began a sort of dervish dance.
The process by which the elixir is extracted from the material which hoards its essence is one that requires a hardihood of courage which few possess. This Dervish, who had passed through that process once, was deaf to all prayer, and unmoved by all bribes, to attempt it again.
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