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Sharif had come at the right moment for Sharif. Kaid looked at him with dull yet anxious eyes. "Did I not command that none should enter?" he asked presently in a thick voice. "Am I not thy physician, Effendina, to whom be the undying years? When the Effendina is sick, shall I not heal?
They seemed very close to us in that clear atmosphere, but their foot hills lay a day's ride away, and the natives would be prompt to resent the visit of a stranger who did not come to them with the authority of a kaid or governor whose power and will to punish promptly were indisputable.
Two of them were hanged last week; the other, caught but a few days since, is to hang within three days. To-day Kaid goes to the Mosque of Mahmoud, as is the custom at this festival. The old man hath been persuaded to attempt the life of Kaid, upon condition that his son his Benjamin is set free.
It was an ample, perspiring person in evening dress, who now and again mopped a prematurely bald head, and who said to himself, as Kaid talked to the reactionaries: "Say, Kald's overdoing it. He's putting potted chicken on the butter. But it's working all right-r-i-g-h-t. It's worth the backsheesh!"
In a thousand narrow streets and lanes, in the warm glow of the bazaars, in earth-damp huts, by blistering quays, on the myriad ghiassas on the river, from long before sunrise till the sunset-gun boomed from the citadel rising beside the great mosque whose pinnacles seem to touch the blue, the slaves of the city of Prince Kaid ground out their lives like corn between the millstones.
Troubled by a deep danger drawing near, Kaid had drawn him into his tough service, half-blindly catching at his help, with a strange, almost superstitious belief that luck and good would come from the alliance; seeing in him a protection against wholesale robbery and debt were not the English masters of finance, and was not this Englishman honest, and with a brain of fire and an eye that pierced things?
If I laboured for better things outside Kaid's Palace, how long dost thou think I should escape the Nile, or the diamond-dust in my coffee? The work which I did, is it not so that it, with much more, falls now to thy hands, Saadat, with a confidence from Kaid that never was mine?" "I sought not the office." "Have I a word of blame? I come to ask for work to do with thee. Do I not know Prince Kaid?
Would it be strange to the bowab or the slave that he should return with thee stark and still? They would but count it mercy of Kaid that he was not given to the serpents of the Nile. A word from thee would one open his mouth? Would not the shadow of thy hand, of the swift doom, be over them? Would not a handful of gold bind them to me? Is not the man dead?
But from this man's words he knew that the stroke was now with the Prince Pasha. Yet, if this pale Inglesi, this Christian sorcerer, knew the truth in a vision only, and had not declared it to Kaid, there might still be a chance of escape. The lions were near it would be a joy to give a Christian to the lions to celebrate the capture of Cairo and the throne.
I have made no change in my plans on the basis of a breach." At that moment he caught sight of Nahoum some distance away and moved towards him. Out of the corner of his eye Nahoum saw David coming, and edged away towards that point where Kaid would enter, and where the crowd was greater. As he did so Kaid appeared. A thrill went through the chamber.
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