"Allah! Allah! Allah!"
"Pray for it, my brothers, pray for it," cried Zogal, and in another moment, with the delirious strength of one possessed, he had cleared a long passage through the people, and begun to lead a wild, barbaric Zikr, such as he had seen in the depths of the desert.
"The light! The light! Send the light, O Allah!" cried Zogal, striding up and down the long alley of bowing and swaying people, and tossing his sweating and foaming face up to the dark sky.
It has been truly said that everything favours those who have a special destiny—that they may become glorious against their own will and as if by the command of fate. It was so with Ishmael. At the very moment when Zogal on the desert was calling for the light which he believed God had promised, Hafiz, at the Citadel, having received the message which Helena had sent over the telephone from the house of the Princess Nazimah, was running with a powerful lantern up the winding stairway of one of the minarets of the mosque of Mohammed Ali.
"The light! The light! Send the light, O Allah!" cried the dervish, and at the next moment, while the breathless crowd about him were looking through the darkness towards the heights above Cairo, expecting to see the manifestation of God's sign in the sky, the light appeared!
In an instant the whole camp was a scene of frantic rejoicing. Men were shouting, women were lu-lu-ing, camels and asses were being saddled, tents were being struck, and everybody and everything was astir.
Oh, mysterious and divine power of destiny, that could make the fate of an entire nation hang on the accident of time and the unreasoning impulses of one poor demented man!
CHAPTER XII
Next day Ishmael entered Cairo. News of his coming had been noised abroad, and the police at their various stations had been told that beyond the necessary efforts to preserve order they were not in any way to interfere with his procession. Neither Ishmael nor any of his people were to be allowed to pose as martyrs. There was to be no resistance and no bloodshed. If possible there was to be no scene.
The guests at the King's Dinner had left the Ghezirah long before midnight. Such of them as were innocent of all participation in conspiracy (they were the majority) attributed the Consul-General's strange outbreak to an attack of mental vertigo in an old man whose health had long been failing from the pressure of public work. Nothing was allowed to occur which would give the incident a more serious significance. The bridge which had been opened was closed, and the guests had returned to their homes as usual.