How dark the red round sun had suddenly become. Khasim looked up to see if it still shone, and it was setting fast, amid clouds of crimson and gold, throwing long, long purple shadows far across the plain, and there in its sheen the Nile was running swiftly as ever—swift as life runs in the Desert and elsewhere!
Out of the latter arose a cloud of dust, with many a glittering point of steel! The caravan was suddenly attacked, its column broken and pierced by a band of wild Kabbabish Arab horsemen, fifty in number at least, and led by that slippery personage, the Mudir of Dongola, on whom the British Government so grotesquely bestowed the Cross of St. Michael and St. George—a gift ridiculed even by the Karakush, or Egyptian Punch.
A conflict ensued; revolvers and Remington rifles were freely used; saddles were emptied, and sabres flashed in the moonlight. General plunder of everything was the real object of the Mudir and his Kabbabishes; to rescue Isha was the sole object of Khasim, who charged in among them.
Amid the wild hurly-burly of the conflict, the shrieks of the women, their incessant cries of walwalah! the grunting of the camels, the yells of the Arabs, and amid the dense clouds of dust and sand raised by hoofs and feet, Khasim Jelalodeen speedily found the litter in which the daughter of Moussa was placed, and was in the act of drawing forth her slight figure across his saddlebow—horror-stricken though the girl was, albeit she had seen death in more than one form before—when the merchant, Ebn al Ajuz, exasperated to lose her after all the treasure he had spent, shot her dead with his long brass pistol; but ere he could draw another Khasim clove him to the chin, through every fold of the turban, by one stroke of his long and trenchant Arab sword, and, with a wild cry of grief and despair, spurred his horse into the desert and was seen no more, though rumour said he joined the banner of Osman Digna before Suakim.
So this was a brief Arab romance of the nineteenth century as acted out in a part of the world which changes not, though all the world seems to change elsewhere.
Most wearily passed the time of Malcolm Skene's captivity in the zereba of Moussa Abu Hagil. Weeks became months, and the closing days of the year found him still there, and necessitated to be ever watchful, for both Pietro Girolamo and Hassan Abdullah had, he knew, sworn to kill him if an opportunity were given them; and nothing had as yet stayed their hands but the influence of the Sheikh, who protected him for purposes of his own.
Thus his life was in hourly peril; the bondage he endured was maddening, and he could not perceive any end to it or escape from it save death. As for escape, a successful one seemed so hopeless, so difficult to achieve, that it gradually became useless to brood over it—without arms, a horse, money, or a guide.
He knew that he must now be deemed as one of the dead by his regiment, by the authorities, and, more than all, by his widowed mother and dearest friends, and have been mourned by them as such.
Rumour had said ere he left Cairo that a relieving column was to start for Khartoum. How that might affect his fate he knew not; it might be too late to help him in any way, and to be too late was the order of our affairs in Egypt now.
So time passed on, and he was in darkness as to all that passed in the outer world.