’But what prevents my cutting your throat where
you sit?
‘For one thing, you aren’t Abdullah, and——’
‘There! You confess he’s a cad!’
’And for another, the Government would only
send another officer who didn’t understand your
ways, and then there would be war, and no one
would score except Abdullah. He’d steal
your camels and get credit for it.’
’So he would, the scoundrel! This is a
hard world for honest men. Now, you admit Abdullah
is a cad. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you
a few more things about him. He was, etc.,
etc. He is, etc., etc.’
’You’re perfectly right, Sheikh, but don’t
you see I can’t tell him what I think of him
so long as he’s loyal and you’re out against
us? Now, if you come in I promise you
that I’ll give Abdullah a telling-off—yes,
in your presence—that will do you good to
listen to.’
’No! I won’t come in! But—I
tell you what I will do. I’ll accompany
you to-morrow as your guest, understand, to your camp.
Then you send for Abdullah, and if I judge
that his fat face has been sufficiently blackened
in my presence, I’ll think about coming in later.’
So it was arranged, and they slept out the rest of
the night, side by side, and in the morning they gathered
up and returned all Abdullah’s cattle, and in
the evening, in Farid’s presence, Abdullah got
the tongue-lashing of his wicked old life, and Farid
of the Desert laughed and came in; and they all lived
happy ever afterwards.
Somewhere or other in the nearer provinces the old
heady game must be going on still, but the Soudan
proper has settled to civilisation of the brick-bungalow
and bougainvillea sort, and there is a huge technical
college where the young men are trained to become fitters,
surveyors, draftsmen, and telegraph employees at fabulous
wages. In due time, they will forget how warily
their fathers had to walk in the Mahdi’s time
to secure even half a bellyful; then, as has happened
elsewhere. They will honestly believe that they
themselves originally created and since then have
upheld the easy life into which they were bought at
so heavy a price. Then the demand will go up
for ‘extension of local government,’ ‘Soudan
for the Soudanese,’ and so on till the whole
cycle has to be retrodden. It is a hard law but
an old one—Rome died learning it, as our
western civilisation may die—that if you
give any man anything that he has not painfully earned
for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants
your devoted enemies.
