"My father is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Alone, in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt! As for his Secretaries and Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him, and I would enlarge the Biblical warning about not putting one's trust in princes to include parvenus as well.
"My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder? What is happening to you? What occurred after I left Khartoum? These are the questions which during half the day and nearly the whole of the night are hammering, hammering, hammering on my brain. Ishmael was to follow me in a few days, so I suppose you are on the desert by this time. The desert! In the midst of that vast horde! The scourings of a whole continent! Poor old Hafiz had something like a fit when I told him you were not in England but in the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe that everything will work out for the best and he asks me to send his high regard to you.
"It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like seeing things from another state of existence, to be here in Cairo walking about unrecognised amid the familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from the Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of the hacking thought of where you are and what circumstances surround you. In fact, memory is always playing some devilish trick with me and raking up thoughts of the condition in which I found you in Khartoum.
"Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith in your strength and your courage. You are mine, mine, mine—remember that! I do—I have to—all the time. That is what sets me at ease in my dark hours and gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids. For the rest, we must resign ourselves and continue to wait for the direction of fate. The fact that I was not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately on my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be right—that, D.V. one way or another, God knows how, everything is working out for the best. It's damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul, dearest, I believe it. So keep up heart, my poor old girl, and God bless you! GORDON.
"P.S.—I'll hold this letter back until I think you must be nearing Assouan, and then send it D.V. by safe hands to be delivered to you there.
"P.P.S.—I open my envelope to tell you of a new development! I am invited with the Chancellor of El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner in honour of the King's Birthday. This, in the character of Sheikh Omar Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe of the Ababdah, inhabiting the wild country between Assouan and the Red Sea, a person with a great reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word is truth.
"What does it mean? One thing certainly—that acting on the information contained in your letter the authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael Ameer, and proposing some scheme to capture me. But why don't they take me without further ado? What unfathomable reason can there be for the delay in doing so? Intrigue on intrigue! I must wait and see.
"Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael is and what he is doing now? Is the belief in his 'divine' guidance increasing? Is he acquiring the influence of a Mahdi? If so, God help him! God help his people! God help my father! God help everybody!
"But sit tight, my girl! Something good is going to happen to us! I feel it, I know it! All my love to you, Helena! Maa-es-salamah!"
CHAPTER V