He told stories of Baroudi, stories which the Europeans of Egypt knew nothing of, but which some Egyptians knew and smiled at; one or two of them sounded very ugly to European ears.

“He’s a Turco-Egyptian, you know,” Starnworth said, presently, “and has the cunning that comes from the Bosphorus grafted on to the cunning that flourishes beneath the indifference of the Sphinx.  We should call him a rank bad lot”—­the dressing-gown and slippers manner was very much in evidence just here—­“but the Turco-Egyptian has a different code from ours.  I must say I admire the man.  He’s got so much grit in him.  Worker, lover, hater—­there’s grit and go in each.  Whichever bobs up, bobs up to win right out.  But it’s the madness for women that really rules the fellow’s life, according to Egyptians who are near him and who know him well.  And that’s so with far more men of Eastern blood than you would suppose, unless you’d lived among them and knew them as I do.  Arabs will literally run crazy for a fair face.  So will Egyptians.  And once they are dominated, they are dominated to an extent an Englishman would scarcely be able to understand.  I knew an Arab of the Sahara who broke down the palm-wood door of an auberge at El-Kelf and cut the throat of the Frenchwoman who kept it, cut it while she was screaming her soul out—­and only to get the few francs in the till to send to a girl in Paris he’d met at the great Exhibition.  And the old Frenchwoman had befriended that man for over sixteen years, had almost brought him up from a boy, had written his letters for him to the tourists and sportsmen whose guide he was.  Mahmoud Baroudi would do as much for a woman, once he’d got the madness for her into his body, but he’d do it in a more brainy way.”

Starnworth talked on and on.  The time of the third prayer was at hand when at last he said good-night.  Turning at the door, just as he was going out, he looked at Isaacson with his light and imaginative eyes.

“A different code from ours, you see!” he murmured.

He went out and gently shut the door.

Although it was so late and Isaacson had that day arrived from a journey, he felt strongly alive, and as if no power to sleep were in him.  Of course, he must go to bed, nevertheless.  Slowly he began to undress, slowly and reluctantly.

And he was in Cairo, actually in Cairo!  All around him in the night was Cairo, with its houses full of Egyptians sleeping, with its harims, with its mosques!  Not far away was the Sphinx looking east in the sand!

He pottered about his room.  He did things very slowly.  Eastern life, as it had flowed from the lips of Starnworth, went before his imagination like a great and strange procession.  And in this procession Mahmoud Baroudi drove Russian horses, and walked, almost like a mendicant, in a discoloured gibbeh.  And then the procession stopped, and Isaacson saw the dingy cafe in the entrails of Cairo, and Mahmoud Baroudi crouched upon the floor drawing the smoke of the hashish into his nostrils.