This programme scarcely suited the views of the Master of Aberfeldie, but the situation was such a grave one that he dared not laugh at it.
'But you need not go to Mecca,' said the sheikh, as an after-thought.
'Why?'
'God is everywhere—why seek Him at Mecca, when we have Him here in the desert?'
Allan pled hard, and spoke of bribes and ransom, but apparently in vain, and he began to get sorely perplexed by the prospect before him, especially if the tribe took their departure—of which there was every prospect—in search of 'pastures new' further from Grand Cairo, and towards the plain of Muggreh.
He was obliged to dissemble his disgust and mortification, and could only hope of finding an opportunity of 'making,' as he thought, 'a clean bolt of it.'
A few uneventful days passed, and during these he could not help being struck with the simplicity of the domestic life and manners of the Sheikh Zeid-el-Ourdeh and his family.
Though the commander of more than six hundred horse, he did not disdain to saddle and bridle his own steed or to give him his barley and chopped straw.
In his humble tent his wife made the coffee, kneaded the dough, and cooked all the victuals, though a kind of princess in the desert and among her people. His daughters and kinswomen attended to the linen, and, closely veiled, went to the wells or springs for water, with classic-looking pitchers of brown ware balanced on their gracefully-carried heads—in ways, manners, and ideas all unchanged from those described by Homer, or as we find them in the history of Abraham and in Genesis.
It was while a prisoner thus with Zeid, that Allan heard the strange story promulgated by Arabi, that all Egyptians who fell fighting for the faith would come back to earth as spirits mounted on snow-white horses and armed with miraculous swords to completely exterminate the British—an idea evidently borrowed from the Koran, which ascribes Mohamed's victory at Bedr to his having as allies three thousand spirits led by the angel Gabriel mounted on his horse Haizum.