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Mohammed had returned with the tea, and Michael, who was more than ready for it, lapsed into silence while he ate his Huntley and Palmer biscuits and drank his tea. His thoughts went back to el-Azhar. His silence lasted for some time. He was very far from Shepheard's Hotel. Margaret had not forgotten her promise. She was closer than Millicent.
It was a part of his nature to be practical about the unpractical. The words of his old friend in el-Azhar often came back to him as his camel bore him through a spell of light, or as he listened to the thundering silence of the Arabian desert.
These cold mountains, rushing streams and hidden glens would just go on smiling in the sunshine by day and sleeping peacefully under the moonlight, while golden youth was sacrificing itself on the altar of Liberty. As the train rushed on through the darkness, emitting sparks which showed her pace, Michael's thoughts drifted to the old African in el-Azhar and all that he had visualized.
In the courts of el-Azhar these children of Allah become brothers; their united flag is the green banner of Islam; their nationality is Islam. This, Michael felt, was what religion ought to do for mankind.
He lived as a hermit and a recluse inside his little cell, which was lost in the vast dimensions of the Mosque of el-Azhar. As he was lost to the world, so was he surrounded by things of the spirit. It was late in the afternoon when at last Michael said good-bye and the aged student locked himself into his cell. His adieu was lengthy and beautiful and expressed in the true Moslem fashion.
Here, in Egypt, where the need is felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too, to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of the chief centres of Islam. One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand years. Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided upon.
It was clearer than the village of flies, or the African's cell in far-off el-Azhar, or the procession of white figures returning from the burial of the desert saint. It moved along in the clear air in front of him.
The sand drifts very quickly, it runs and runs along the surface of the desert, so quickly and silently, like oozing water over a dry river-bed." He gazed wildly at Abdul. "Will you tell my old friend at el-Azhar that I have been dead for a long time? Tell him that the sands drift very quickly. Margaret mustn't cry. The wind is the desert grave-digger. Take your wicked hands away!"
High up in the blue, on his swaying seat on the camel's back, he felt like a man in a cinematograph-theatre, gazing upon film after film as it came into view and dissolved away. The desert was the stage, his thoughts were the films. At one moment the picture presented was his old friend in el-Azhar, rejoicing in the knowledge that Michael's journey was accomplished, the treasure realized.
Thousands of precious manuscripts, dating back some hundreds of years, but which here in El-Azhar are no whit out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous inestimable Korans, which in olden times had been written fair and illuminated on parchment by pious khedives.
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