“What is to prevent them from coming down on that side?”

“Absolutely nothing,” said Cecil Brown, in his listless voice.

“Nothing, except their fears.  The coming of course would be perfectly simple.  The difficulty would lie in the return.  They might find it hard to get back if their camels were spent, and the Halfa garrison with their beasts fresh got on their track.  They know it as well as we do, and it has kept them from trying.”

“It isn’t safe to reckon upon a Dervish’s fears,” remarked Brown.  “We must always bear in mind that they are not amenable to the same motives as other people.  Many of them are anxious to meet death, and all of them are absolute, uncompromising believers in destiny.  They exist as a reductio ad absurdum of all bigotry—­a proof of how surely it leads towards blank barbarism.”

“You think these people are a real menace to Egypt?” asked the American.  “There seems from what I have heard to be some difference of opinion about it.  Monsieur Fardet, for example, does not seem to think that the danger is a very pressing one.”

“I am not a rich man,” Colonel Cochrane answered after a little pause, “but I am prepared to lay all I am worth, that within three years of the British officers being withdrawn, the Dervishes would be upon the Mediterranean.  Where would the civilisation of Egypt be?  Where would the hundreds of millions which have been invested in this country?  Where the monuments which all nations look upon as most precious memorials of the past?”

“Come now, Colonel,” cried Headingly, laughing, “surely you don’t mean that they would shift the pyramids?”

“You cannot foretell what they would do.  There is no iconoclast in the world like an extreme Mohammedan.  Last time they overran this country they burned the Alexandrian Library.  You know that all representations of the human features are against the letter of the Koran.  A statue is always an irreligious object in their eyes.  What do these fellows care for the sentiment of Europe?  The more they could offend it, the more delighted they would be.  Down would go the Sphinx, the Colossi, the Statues of Abou-Simbel—­as the saints went down in England before Cromwell’s troopers.”

“Well now,” said Headingly, in his slow, thoughtful fashion, “suppose I grant you that the Dervishes could overrun Egypt, and suppose also that you English are holding them out, what I’m never done asking is, what reason have you for spending all these millions of dollars and the lives of so many of your men?  What do you get out of it, more than France gets, or Germany, or any other country, that runs no risk and never lays out a cent?”