Fifty times his schemes seemed marching to fulfilment; but something always intervened. He wrote reams of protest, he made many arid journeys to Cairo, he talked himself hoarse; and always he was met by the sympathetic smiling of Imshi Pasha, by his encouraging approval.
"Ah, my dear friend, may. Heaven smooth your path! It is coming right.
All will be well. Time is man's friend. The dam shall be built.
The reservoirs shall be made. But we are in the hands of the nations.
Poor Egypt cannot act alone—our Egypt that we love. The Council sits
to-morrow—we shall see." This was the fashion of the Pasha's speech.
After the sitting of the Council, Dimsdale would be sent away with unfruitful promises.
Futility was written over the Temple of Endeavour, and by-and-by Dimsdale lost hope and health and heart. He had Nilotic fever, he had ophthalmia; and hot with indomitable will, he had striven to save one great basin from destruction, for one whole week, without sleeping or resting night and day: working like a navvy, sleeping like a fellah, eating like a Bedouin.
Then the end came. He was stricken down, and lay above Assouan in a hut by the shore, from which he could see the Temple of Philoe, and Pharaoh's Bed, and the great rocks, and the swift-flowing Nile. Here lay his greatest hope, the splendid design of his life—the great barrage of Assouan. With it he could add to the wealth of Egypt one-half. He had believed in it, had worked for it and how much else! and his dreams and his working had come to naught. He was sick to death—not with illness alone, but with disappointment and broken hopes and a burden beyond the powers of any one man.
He saw all now: all the falsehood and treachery and corruption. He realised that Imshi Pasha had given him his hand that he might ruin himself, that his own schemes might overwhelm him in the end. At every turn he had been frustrated—by Imshi Pasha: three years of underground circumvention, with a superficial approval and a mock support.
He lay and looked at the glow, the sunset glow of pink and gold on the Libyan Hills, and his fevered eyes scarcely saw them; they were only a part of this last helpless, senseless dream. Life itself was very far away-practical, generous, hot-blooded life. This distance was so ample and full and quiet, this mystery of the desert and the sky was so immense, the spirit of it so boundless, that in the judgment of his soul nothing mattered now. As he lay in reverie, he heard his servant talking: it was the tale of the Mahdi and British valour and hopeless fighting, and a red martyrdom set like a fixed star in a sunless sky. What did it matter—what did it all matter, in this grave tremendous quiet wherein his soul was hasting on?
The voices receded; he was alone with the immeasurable world; he fell asleep.
IV
When he woke again it was to find at his bedside a kavass from Imshi Pasha at Cairo. He shrank inwardly. The thought of the Pasha merely nauseated him, but to the kavass he said: "What do you want, Mahommed?"