The new message flashed like fire through Ishmael's followers. Every eventide for thirteen centuries in Islam the prayer had gone up to heaven for the advent of the divinely-appointed guide who was to redeem the world from sorrow and sin, to deliver believers from the hated bondage of the foreigner, and to re-establish the universal Caliphate; and now, in the utmost depths of their oppression and suffering, when hope had all but died out of their hearts, the true Mahdi, the Messiah, the Christ, was about to come!
The people were beside themselves with joy. They were like children of the desert who, after a long drought in which their wells have been dried up, run about in glee when the first drops of rain begin to fall. They were ready for any task, any enterprise, and Ishmael, who began to make plans for going back to Cairo (for it was there, according to his view, that the Expected One was to appear), sent letters to all corners of the country telling his messengers to return home.
Helena wrote these letters with a trembling hand. In spite of her secret errand she was surprised by a certain sympathy. The great hope, the great dream touched her pity, and gave her at the beginning some moments of compunction. But after a while she began to see it as a wicked madness, and that enabled her to steel her heart against Ishmael again.
The man who held out such crazy hopes to a credulous people might be harmless in England, but in Egypt he was a peril. Once let an ignorant and superstitious populace believe that the end of the world was coming, that a Messiah was about to appear, and human government was a dead-letter. What then? Revolution and bloodshed, for the first duty of a Government was to preserve law and order!
Helena asked herself if the time had not come at last to write to the Consul-General, or perhaps to steal away from Khartoum and return to Cairo that she might report what she had seen and learned.
After reflection she concluded that the only result of doing so would be that of punishing yet further the poor, misguided populace who had been punished enough already. It was Ishmael alone who ought to suffer, whether for his offences against his followers, his conspiracy against the Government or his crime against herself, and in order to punish him apart, she would have to separate him from his people.
How was she to do this? It seemed impossible, but fate itself assisted her.
A few days after Abdel Kader had gone off in his humiliation, the shadow of his lanky body appeared across the threshold of the guest-room, where Ishmael was sitting with no other company than old Mahmud and Helena who was writing the usual letters while little Mosie fanned her to drive off the flies.
"The peace of God be with you, Master," he said in a low and humble voice, and then with a shy look of triumph he produced a letter which had been given to him at Haifa.
The letter was from the Chancellor of El Azhar, and it told Ishmael, after the usual Arabic salutations, that the festival of which he had already been informed was to take place on the Ghezirah (the island in front of Cairo); that the rejoicings were to begin on the anniversary of the birthday of the English King, something more than a month hence; that the British soldiers would still be in the provinces at that time, quelling disturbances and helping the district officers to enforce the payment of taxes, and that, as a consequence, the Egyptian army alone would be left in charge of the city.