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While yet considering his reply, George saw out of the corner of his eye the fearful kourbash raised from the ground. Quickly making up his mind that no subterfuge would hold him, Helmar replied "I am not a secret agent, neither do I possess any information whatsoever of the British movements. How should I? Have I not been a captive ever since Arabi was expelled from Alexandria?"
Again the fiendish inquisitor asked his question, and again our hero replied in the negative. Four more frightful cuts of the inexorable kourbash fell on his rapidly-scarring back.
I've been everything, anything, to that swine, Selamlik Pasha; but when he told me yesterday to bring him the daughter of the Arab he killed with his kourbash, I jibbed. I couldn't stand that. Her father had fed me more than once. I jibbed by God, I jibbed! I said I was an Englishman, and I'd see him damned first. I said it, and I shot the horse, and I'd have shot him what's that?"
The dreaded kourbash, he was determined, should do its fell work with no response from him, terrible as he knew that punishment would be; they might kill him, they might flay him alive, but they could not reduce his stubborn pride as no doubt they hoped to do.
"Where there's a will there's a way, and the way in this instance was the kourbash. I hope the fellow got it hot, Harry." "Pretty fairly; I think Kavanagh would have been satisfied, though he has been disappointed in his desire to wield the lash himself. Don't you remember?"
Dicky's invariable reply was that we couldn't, and that things weren't moving very much towards a higher civilisation in Egypt. But he asked her if she ever heard of a slave running away from Kingsley Bey, or had she ever heard of a case of cruelty on his part? Her reply was that he had given slaves the kourbash, and had even shot them.
A kourbash is a strip of old hippo-hide with a sort of keel on it, like the cutting edge of a boar's tusk. But we use the rounded side for a first offender." "And do any consequences follow this sort of thing? For the victim, I mean not for you?" "Ve-ry rarely. Let me be fair. I've never seen a man die under the lash, but gangrene may set up if the kourbash has been pickled." "Pickled in what?"
He was even a little awed by her silent force of will, and at last he had to ask her humbly for a savoury dish which her mother had taught her to make a dish he always ate upon the birthday of Mahomet Ali, who had done him the honour to flog him with his own kourbash for filching the rations of his Arab charger.
It was hardly possible that the fertile soil and enervating climate of the Delta would have evolved a warrior race. Ages of oppression and poverty rarely produce proud and warlike spirits. Patriotism does not grow under the 'Kourbash. The fellah soldier lacks the desire to kill. Even the Mohammedan religion has failed to excite his ferocity. He may be cruel. He is never fierce.
Dicky thereupon suggested that Kingsley Bey was a government, and that the kourbash was not yet abolished in the English navy, for instance; also that men had to be shot sometimes. At last she had made a direct appeal to Kingsley Bey. She sent an embassy to him Dicky prevented her from going herself; he said he would have her deported straightway, if she attempted it.
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