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Updated: May 8, 2025
He struck the camel on the flank with his stick, and rode slowly past the post-office and out into the desert, with his head sunk upon his breast. I wonder whether he rode into a trap. Who could this visitor have been whom he meets in the street of Tewfikieh, and who must come so secretly to Wadi Halfa? What can have been his business with Durrance?
"I had been busy all that day in my office finishing up my work. I turned the key in the door at ten o'clock, thinking with relief that for six weeks I should not open it, and I strolled northward out of Wadi Halfa along the Nile bank into the little town of Tewfikieh.
It was the melody to which Durrance had listened in the street of Tewfikieh on the eve of his last journey into the desert; and which Ethne Eustace had played only the night before in the quiet drawing-room at Southpool. It was the only melody which Feversham knew. When he had done Nejoumi began again. "You are a spy."
Durrance stopped in front of a café where some strolling musicians, who had somehow wandered up to Tewfikieh, were playing and singing for their night's lodging. One of them, a Greek I was told, came outside into the street and took his hat round.
Major Walters, too, it seemed, in spite of his hopeful prophecies, had pondered during the night over Calder's story, and he leaned across the table to Calder. "Did you never inquire whom Durrance talked with at Tewfikieh on that night?" he asked. "I did, and there's a point that puzzles me," said Calder.
Both were at once accepted, and during the course of the same day the "Tewfikieh" again hoisted the Khedivial flag and was employed in towing and ferry work. The captain and crew stood by their ship working her, and though dressed as dervishes were on the flotilla muster-roll for wages and rations. The like befell the other dervish steamers that came into the Sirdar's hands.
"I too remember that night," said Walters. "Durrance dined at the mess and went away early to prepare for his journey." "His preparations were made already," said Calder. "He went away early, as you say. But he did not go to his quarters. He walked along the river-bank to Tewfikieh."
She was, if possible, more dilapidated-looking than ever. By guarded questioning I ascertained that the "Tewfikieh" was three days out from Fashoda. She and the "Safieh," another dervish steamer, had been hotly fired upon by the French who were occupying the old Egyptian fort with 100 Senegalese or natives of Timbuctoo.
She sat gazing into it as she listened, as though it was itself a window through which, if she looked but hard enough, she might see, very small and far away, that lighted café blazing upon the street of the little town of Tewfikieh on the frontier of the Soudan. "Well?" she asked. "And after the song was ended?"
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