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What is honestly mine is eight feddans, and the rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi." Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of offering backsheesh. And the Mudir had due anger and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls. The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."
A negro farmer in the Feddan, who was bent double over a hoof as he was shoeing a bony and scabby mule, lifted his ugly face, bathed in sweat, and grinned at Israel as he went along. A group of Reefians, dirty and lean and hollow-eyed, feeding their gaunt donkeys, and glancing anxiously at the sky over the heads of the mountains, snarled like dogs as he strode through their midst.
Here he encountered Katrina and a guard of five black soldiers who were helping her flight. "We are safe," she whispered "they've gone back into the Feddan come;" and by the light of a lamp which she carried she made for the winding corridor that led past the bath and the sanctuary to the Kasbah gate.
Every morning the town was awakened by the deafening crackle of flintlocks, which the mountaineers discharged in the Feddan by way of signal that the Sultan was going to say his prayers at the door of some saint's house. Beside the firing of long guns and the twanging of the ginbri the chief business of the day seemed to be begging.
Near by the fellah worked in his onion-field; and on the khiassas loaded with feddan at the shore, just out of the current, and tied up for the night, sat the riverine folk eating their dourha and drinking black coffee. Now Dimsdale noticed that, nearer still, just below the Sefi, on the shore, sat a singing-girl, an a'l'meh, with a darkfaced Arab beside her, a kemengeh in his lap.
Red-and-white shapeless carcases were balanced on a donkey's back, kept steady by a sanguinary Moor who sloped along behind: the donkey knew its own way well, across the wide feddan, down a narrow street, and into the meat market. Thither hurried the lady missionary to buy a joint. If cooked before it has time to get cold the meat is tender, otherwise it must be hung.
But no one told Soada this, and she did not think; she was content to rest in the fleeting dream. "Give them twenty-four hours," said the black-visaged fat sergeant of cavalry come to arrest Mahommed Selim for desertion. The father of Mahommed Selim again offered the Mamour a feddan of land if the young man might go free, and to the sergeant he offered a she-camel and a buffalo. To no purpose.
They led her into the street, into the Feddan, into the walled lane to the great gate, into the steep arcades leading to the Kasbah; and no more as of old did she thread her way through the people, seeming to see them through the flesh of her face and to salute them with the laugh on her lips, but only followed on and on with helpless footsteps.
"I saw a fellah yesterday who has worked nine months on the corvee six months for the Government and three for a Pasha, the friend of the Government. He supplied his own spades and baskets; his lantern was at the service of the Khedive; he got his own food as best he could. He had one feddan of land in his own village, but he had no time to work it or harvest it.
Sometimes he would rave and blaspheme. Then he would make another effort for his life. But the whirlpool was closing in upon him; and at last, like one who flings himself over a precipice from dizziness, fears, and irresistible fascination, he flung himself into the middle of the infuriated throng as they scurried across the open Feddan. From that moment Ben Aboo's doom was sealed.
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