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Updated: June 2, 2025
Hardly had the barber fled from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass the being more dreaded in Egypt than the plague.
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh of Mahommed Selim's father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail would have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour. It was quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending Mahommed Selim to the Soudan.
Soada's mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah woman; but Wassef was proud of this ancient heritage of red hair, which belonged to a field-marshal of Great Britain so he swore by the beard of the Prophet. That is why he had not beaten Soada these months past when she refused to answer him, when with cold stubbornness she gave him his meals or withheld them at her will.
So it happened that one evening just at sunset, Wassef came to his hut, with the sun like the red rim of a huge thumb-nail in the sky behind him, ready beyond telling for his breakfast, and found nothing.
No man in the village dare tell you, for you have no friends, but I tell you, that you may save Soada before it is too late. Mahommed Selim lives; or lived last quarter of the moon, so says Yusef the ghaffir. Sell your ten-months' camel, buy the lad out, and bring him back to Soada." "Saadat!" said Wassef, in a quick fear, and dropped the stem of the narghileh, and got to his feet.
He had mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to the bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea caravans and the track of the Khedive's soldiers in the yellow sands. When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran above her for comfort.
That night Mahommed Selim and Soada the daughter of Wassef the camel- driver were married, but the only fantasia they held was their own low laughter over the child. In the village, however, people were little moved to smile, for they knew that Mahommed Selim was a deserter from the army of the Khedive at Dongola, and that meant death.
Wassef laughed, and turned on his heel; and went out: for what should he know of the look in a woman's face he to whom most women were alike, he who had taken dancing-girls with his camels into the desert many a time? What should he know of that love which springs once in every woman's heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh's daughter?
That was a very peculiar thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive down to the ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of Allah. Wassef the camel-driver was the cause.
Soada's mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah woman; but Wassef was proud of this ancient heritage of red hair, which belonged to a field-marshal of Great Britain so he swore by the beard of the Prophet. That is why he had not beaten Soada these months past when she refused to answer him, when with cold stubbornness she gave him his meals or withheld them at her will.
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