A feeling of intense relief from responsibility came over me as I found myself back in the impossibly familiar surroundings of a first-class compartment, and four hours of heat and dust were the end of my physical discomfort.
Remembering Edmund’s injunction I wiped my heated face and neck and donned my clerical collar as the train ran into the Gare de Caire at Alexandria.
CHAPTER IX
THE DOPE TRADE
I HAVE said that Jakoub had compelled my grudging respect as he faced the sand-storm. Now I had to recognise in him again a master of circumstance, as from a fiercely clamouring crowd of apparently hostile natives, and some over-excited railway officials, he mobilised a little force of porters, and conjured from somewhere a kind of wagon, or rather a long beam mounted on two pairs of wheels and drawn by a couple of under-sized ponies.
On this he had all our cargo stowed in the time an ordinary man would have taken to find a hat-box. He had a gharry ready for me, with my hold-all on the front seat. Our tickets were delivered up, and the crowd more or less pacified with backshish. We drove off, watched with haughty indifference by a couple of Egyptian policemen.
I was back in the world of men and wires, and my first care was to send a cable home.
I had decided on Bates as the recipient of the first news of my resurrection.
So we stopped at the office of the Eastern Telegraph Company.
I had thought out my message during the long weeks in which I had been tending to this ganglion in the nervous system of the world, and I cabled simply “Unable to communicate earlier. Returning next boat via Marseilles.”
There was no need to say I was writing, as I would be home as soon as a letter, and in any case I felt that it would be utterly impossible ever to explain why I had been lost so long. I intended simply to say that the weather had tempted me to a longer cruise than I had contemplated, and that I had not had time to write.