"Silence!" shouted the Egyptian in impetuous fury; "too well we understand your frauds. Out with your hands! the handcuffs are ready here, and you and the slave that you have stolen must come along to Pharaoh. Never fear but ample justice shall be done!"
The scribe was opening his inkhorn for the purpose of taking down our names, when I burst out into a roar of laughter.
"Do you take us for fools?" I said; "why on earth should we leave our ships to go and hear a slanderous catalogue of lies alleged against us? No, no, sire, we remain where we are."
The Egyptian literally stamped with rage. "Villains! pirates! thieves!" he cried; "every one of you shall die a death of torment."
To face [page 86].
Throughout this interview I had taken care never for a moment to lose sight of the fleet above-stream; and seeing that the ships were now in motion, without paying the least regard to the continued ravings of the grand official, I ordered my trumpeter to sound an alarm. The Egyptian, followed closely by his scribe, hurried towards his boat; his soldiers, to cover his retreat, rapidly crossed their lances. Chamai, Hannibal, and Hanno, mistaking the movement, and supposing they were making an attack on me, fell upon them with drawn swords; and the huge Jonah, throwing down his trumpet, rushed into the fray, and wresting a lance from one of the soldiers' hands, took him by the shoulders and dashed his head twice or thrice against the side of the ship. It is a popular belief that the Egyptians are a hard-headed race, but I avow that this fellow's skull cracked like a ripe water-melon.
Meanwhile, Hannibal had cut the throat of another of the soldiers, and Chamai had plunged his sword into the body of a third. I was struggling to wrench the lance from the grasp of a fourth, when taking alarm at the number of my men, he turned about, and following the example of his sole remaining comrade, sprang overboard and swam like a frog. But they were not to escape so easily; Bichri, who was standing near the wale of the vessel, hit one of them with an arrow, and the rowers stunned the other by blows with their oars. Thus the whole five were entirely disposed of; but the real conflict was yet to come.
As soon as the Egyptians were aware of the fray, one of their galleys from the right bank drew rapidly towards us, and the whole bevy of small boats that had gathered round kept up a continuous flight of arrows, every one of which, however, either stuck in the ship's side or went whistling over our heads.