The following morning Hassan was for some time with Delì Pasha explaining to him the results of his examination of his predecessor’s accounts, and pointing out defalcations and deficiencies in some quarters, and certain sums due, but not collected, in others. Delì Pasha hated accounts and business, but he saw so much earnest zeal in Hassan’s desire to render them clear that he forced himself to give them some attention, and even that little sufficed to make it evident that his former khaznadâr[67] had complicated them on purpose to cheat him, and that his present one made them as simple as possible, and compensated for his want of experience by his conscientious industry. Scarcely had he got through the summary which Hassan had drawn up, ere he clapped his young treasurer on the shoulder and broke out into a fit of laughter.
“Hassan,” he said, “you are the cream of khaznadârs, and I am sensible of all the zeal and industry you have shown, but I cannot help laughing when I see my young Bedouin-Antar doing the work of a Coptic clerk.”
“I grant,” said Hassan, smiling, “that the pen is not so familiar to my hand as the lance; but if I know too little, I see plainly that my predecessor knew too much, and I hope that the khazneh will furnish you with more purses this year than the last. It is my wish and duty to do you good service, and be it with lance or pen, Inshallah! I will do it.”
“Would you like a little exercise for your lance?” said Delì Pasha. “I do not mean a jereed game, but a few sharp thrusts and hard blows in earnest.”
“On my head be it—I am ready,” said Hassan, his eyes brightening. “Where is such occupation to be found?”
“I have this morning received a note from the Kiahia,” said Delì Pasha, drawing it out as he spoke from under a cushion of his divan, “and he tells me that a band of the Sammalous tribe have lately come up on a plundering expedition from their own country, near the Bahirah, and have ravaged several villages near Ghizeh, carrying off money and horses. It is said that they are now not very far from the Pyramids. The Kiahia proposes to send eighty horsemen instead of fifty to escort the English party going to-morrow to the Ghizeh Pyramids: forty can remain to guard them, and the remaining forty can make an excursion into the desert and try to find and capture these Sammalous thieves. He adds in his note that he should be glad if you could accompany that party, as you were trained in Bedouin warfare, and he has formed a high opinion of your skill and courage. What say you to the proposal?”
“Most willingly will I go,” replied Hassan, “to have a bout with those rascally Sammalous, who are the enemies of my old tribe the Oulâd-Ali. The very last fight that I saw among the Arabs was with them, and they wounded my adopted father.”
“El-hamdu-lillah” (Allah be praised), said Delì Pasha, “that the expedition is to your taste. I will write to the Kiahia that you accept, and will advise him to put the horsemen sent after the Sammalous under your command. And now as a chance hurt may befall from lance or bullet, and you might be unwilling to expose a horse not your own, to make your mind easy on that score I make you a present of your friend Shèitan: you have well deserved him, and, to say the truth, I do not believe he would obey any other master.”
Hassan carried the Pasha’s hand to his lips and said, “May your life and happiness be prolonged.”[68]
“Go, then, to-morrow morning,” continued Delì Pasha, “and Allah go with you: the Kiahia’s horsemen will meet you at Ghizeh, where you will also find one or two of those who were plundered by the Sammalous, and who will aid you in tracking the party.”
Hassan took his leave, and as he went to his own room he met his dumb protégé. Greeting him kindly, he informed him that he was going on an excursion which might detain him a few days, and at the same time thinking that the boy might be in want of some necessary during his absence, he offered him a few small pieces of silver.
Murad smiled, and declined the money, showing his protector a few coins of similar value in his own possession. In his rapid finger-language he then explained to Hassan that he was now sufficiently recovered to run with messages as before, and that he was already employed in this way at a coffee-house and one or two other houses in the neighbourhood. With a few words of encouragement Hassan left him and went on to his own room, where he busied himself in examining and cleaning his pistols, which he carefully loaded. He took care to see that both his sword and dagger were loose in the sheath, and that the point of his lance was sharp. While busied in these preparations, and in putting into his saddle-bags the few articles of clothing which he meant to take with him, he hummed rather than sung snatches of old Arab songs.
All at once the thought struck him that Amina might be at the lattice. He crept up the ladder and peeped through the aperture, that could not be called a window. There, indeed, was Amina, and the lattice was open, and though the twilight was darkening, Hassan could see that she was weeping, for the snowy Damascus kerchief was often applied to her eyes.
Hassan knew not what to do. He longed to comfort her, to sympathise with her, but he knew that if he showed himself or made her aware of his presence by addressing a word to her, she would immediately close the lattice and withdraw. So he looked on in silence, and partook of her unknown grief till the tears stole into his own eyes.
At length, unable any longer to keep silence, he drew his head away from the aperture so that he could still see her but she could not see him. He began to sing a well-known Turkish love-song in a very low tone. The sound of the air, though not the words, reached her ear; she cast her eyes furtively at the aperture in the opposite wall, but seeing nothing, she did not withdraw. A little louder he sung, and the words reached her ear, and she dried her tears and listened. It was a popular song, about Youssuf and Zuleika, which, even if others could have heard, would not compromise her; but her beating heart told her who was singing, and for whom the song was meant. In the last verse the voice sank nearly to a whisper. Still she caught the words, and the name of Amina was substituted for Zuleika. With a deep blush she disappeared from the casement, and all was silence and darkness.
On the following morning early Hassan set forth, mounted on Shèitan, and crossed the Nile to Ghizeh by a ferry, which then, as now, existed at a short distance to the southward of Boulak. He was accompanied by his sàis, who drove before him a donkey carrying our hero’s saddle-bags, and the large cloak and Arab blanket which served him on such occasions for a bed.
On reaching Ghizeh he found the whole Thorpe party, with the horsemen who were to accompany them, already arrived: there were also forty or fifty donkeys laden with tents, bedding, cooking-utensils, and all the creature comforts which Demetri’s foresight had prepared for a residence of several days in the desert.
Hassan saluted them all in turn, and Demetri and Foyster insisted on shaking hands with him in English fashion. After exchanging a few words he turned towards the Kiahia’s horsemen, and was pleased to recognise in their leader the same good-looking young Georgian whom he had seen at the head of the Kiahia’s Mamelukes at the jereed play. Calling him on one side, Hassan inquired whether he had any precise instructions as to the course to be pursued for the discovery and seizure of the Sammalous Arabs.
“Yes,” he replied; “I have a letter to the Governor of this district ordering him to provide one or two villagers well acquainted with the road to guide the English party to the Pyramids,[69] and also to place under our charge two Arabs now waiting here who belong to the villages robbed by the Sammalous, and who are supposed to have some knowledge of the direction in which they have retreated.”
It was deemed advisable that the whole party should proceed towards the divan of the Governor of Ghizeh, which was at no great distance from the spot where they were now assembled. They moved onward accordingly, and as they approached the Governor’s house the Georgian and Hassan rode forward to demand an interview with that personage, while the remainder of the party halted at a short distance from the house. They had not been there long before their ears were saluted by sounds too familiar to all who have passed any time in the neighbourhood of a Government divan in Egypt—namely, the heavy and swiftly-descending blows of a stick, accompanied by shrieks and cries of the victim, “Amân! amân! [mercy! mercy!] I am dead. Mercy! mercy! You may kill me, but I have not a farthing.”
The Europeans stopped their ears to shut out these painful sounds, while Demetri, more accustomed to such sights, went forward to witness the punishment, and ascertain what might be its cause and issue. The cries died away into moans and groans, which soon became altogether inaudible, leaving the Europeans to imagine that the sufferer was dead or had fainted; and Mr Thorpe was virtuously and indignantly inveighing against the barbarous cruelty of the Turkish governors when Demetri arrived.
As he approached they saw that he was convulsed with laughter, which only redoubled Mr Thorpe’s indignation; and he asked the dragoman, in an angry voice, how he could be so brutal as to jest over the agony and torture of a fellow-creature.
“You shall hear, you shall hear, O my master,” said Demetri, still unable to compose his features to a serious expression. “The man whom they were beating is a fellah who occupies some land in the neighbourhood, and though he sells his beans and his wheat like others, he never has any money to pay the taxes on the day that they are collected: either he has been robbed, or the crop failed, or the rats devoured half of it, or he lost his purse on the road as he was coming to pay in the money due to the Government—always some excuse; and though for two successive seasons he has been severely beaten, they never could find a piastre about his person nor extract one from him. This morning, just as your Excellencies came, the same scene had been repeated: he had vowed his inability to pay, and the Governor ordered him two hundred and fifty blows on the feet. The fellow took them all, bawling and screaming and groaning as you heard; and a stranger might well suppose that he was almost, if not quite, murdered. As soon as he had received the number of blows ordered, he was released, and began to stagger out of the Governor’s presence as if he could scarcely stand on his feet. In doing so he nearly ran up against one of the kawàsses standing by, a strong, rough fellow, who struck him a smart blow on the cheek with his open hand. The suddenness of the blow took him so by surprise that it opened his mouth unawares, and there dropped from it to the ground something enveloped in a piece of rag. The kawàss darted forward and seized it. On opening it they found within four gold sequins, being the exact amount of the sum which he owed to the Government. The rascal had come with a full determination not to pay if he could help it, and rather to take any amount of punishment he could conveniently bear: if he found the beating carried to a length that his patience could not endure, he could at any time stop it by producing the money. It seems that the two hundred and fifty which he had received had produced little or no effect on his leathern feet, and he was going off, chuckling at having cheated the Government once more, when that accidental blow on the cheek made him spit out the money.”[70]
It may be believed that this version of the story changed the compassion of the Thorpe party into an inclination to laugh, and shortly afterwards the fellah who had received the beating, and had unintentionally paid his taxes, was pointed out to them by Demetri walking homeward to his village, apparently with as little suffering in his feet as if he had been beaten by children with straws.
While Mr Thorpe was discussing with the Missionary Müller the peculiar features of character exhibited by the Egyptian fellah in the scene which had just occurred, Hassan and the Georgian returned, accompanied by the guides required, so the whole party set off merrily towards the Pyramids.
Mr Thorpe had now reached the goal of wishes long entertained, for although Thebes, Memphis, and other places of antiquarian interest had mingled in his dreams, there was something in the grand and antique simplicity of the Pyramids which had assigned to them a pre-eminence in his imagination. Immediately on arriving he commenced his tour and survey of the Great Pyramid with his daughter and Müller. Hassan went with them also, rightly judging that his services might be necessary not only to interpret for them, but to protect them against the importunity of the Arabs, who had flocked in considerable numbers to see the strangers, and to devise various projects for extracting money from them. There were not then, as now, crowds of Arabs, half Bedouins, half villagers, who make a living at the Pyramids by running up and down them for prizes and assisting the numerous travellers to reach the top; but there was even then a remnant of some tribe located there in tents, who enjoyed a kind of prescriptive right to the custody of the place, and Hassan and the Georgian had agreed to pay a score of these to act as guards or watchmen while the party remained.
Mr Thorpe and Müller were already engaged in a discussion concerning the history of the Pyramids; Emily had fallen a little behind, and was turning to ask some question of Hassan, who had spoken to her a moment before, when she observed him standing on a large stone at the base of the Pyramid, his eyes cast down to the ground in a fit of profound abstraction. There was an air of melancholy in his countenance, so different from its usual expression, that she could not resist the impulse which led her to ask him the subject of his meditations, which she imagined to be something connected with the story of the Pyramids.
“Lady,” he replied in a tone of deep feeling, “the dream of my infancy passed across my mind. This stone on which I stand was once my cradle.”
“Your cradle, Hassan! How mean you?”
“It is now about twenty years ago,” said Hassan, “that my foster-mother was sitting here—perhaps on this very stone, for she said it faced towards Cairo—when a horseman, believed to be my father, placed me—an infant wrapped in a shawl—at her side, and fled at full speed. He has never since been heard of. I know not who he was, nor whether he yet lives. I know not who was my mother—I am a stray leaf blown about by the wind of destiny.”
“Be assured he was no mean or ignoble man—it could not be,” said Emily. “I hope you may yet find him, and be happy with him.”
“May Allah bless you, and grant this and all your other prayers,” said Hassan. “But, lady, do not speak of this matter to others: though known to many, it pains my heart to hear it spoken of.”
After making the tour of the Great Pyramid, and admiring with reverence and wonder the architectural energy and skill which, in the infancy of mankind, had piled upon each other those enormous blocks, brought from a distance of many hundred miles, Mr Thorpe proposed to ascend, and to see from the top the effect of a sunset on the valley of the Nile. A score of Arabs were already on the alert to assist the worthy gentleman and his party in the ascent, and so zealously obtrusive were they in their manner of bestowing their assistance that Hassan was obliged to tell them angrily not to pull and haul the strangers as if they were baskets of dates. When they reached the top, what a magnificent spectacle awaited them! There lay the broad and verdant valley of the Nile stretched out beneath them. Far as the eye could reach were gardens, villages, and palm-groves, among which the Nile, studded with white sails, wound its sinuous course, while beyond its eastern bank rose the Mother of the World,[71] her multitudinous domes and minarets all bathed in the golden flood of the sun’s descending rays. All there felt the softening influence of the hour—the imposing magnificence of the scene. None dared to break the spell by an exclamation of admiration. Emily glided to her father’s side and looked up in his face, and as he returned the silent pressure of her hand, she saw that the heart of the kind and enthusiastic antiquarian was filled with emotions that could not find vent in words. After a while they descended as they had come up, and found that the servants had prepared in their tent a dinner, which, following the fatigues of the day, was far from unwelcome.