I foresaw a brawl, and felt thankful that my boon companion had forgotten his dagger.  Prudence whispered me to return to my room, to bolt the door, and to go to bed, but conscience suggested that it would be unfair to abandon the Albanian in his present helpless state.  I followed him into the outer gallery, pulling him, and begging him, as a despairing wife might urge a drunken husband, to return home.  And he, like the British husband, being greatly irritated by the unjovial advice, instantly belaboured with his pipe-stick[FN#30] the first person

[p.139]he met in the gallery, and sent him flying down the stairs with fearful shouts of “O Egyptians!  O ye accursed!  O genus of Pharaoh!  O race of dogs!  O Egyptians!”

He then burst open a door with his shoulder, and reeled into a room where two aged dames were placidly reposing by the side of their spouses, who were basket-makers.  They immediately awoke, seeing a stranger, and, hearing his foul words, they retorted with a hot volley of vituperation.

Put to flight by the old women’s tongues, Ali Agha, in spite of all my endeavours, reeled down the stairs, and fell upon the sleeping form of the night porter, whose blood he vowed to drink-the Oriental form of threatening “spiflication.”  Happily for the assaulted, the Agha’s servant, a sturdy Albanian lad, was lying on a mat in the doorway close by.  Roused by the tumult, he jumped up, and found the captain in a state of fury.  Apparently the man was used to the master’s mood.  Without delay he told us all to assist, and we lending a helping hand, half dragged and half carried the Albanian to his room.  Yet even in this ignoble plight, he shouted with all the force of his lungs the old war-cry, “O Egyptians!  O race of dogs!  I have dishonoured all Sikandariyah-all Kahirah-all Suways.[FN#31]” And in this vaunting frame of mind he was put to bed.  No Welsh undergraduate at Oxford, under similar circumstances, ever gave more trouble.

“You had better start on your pilgrimage at once,”

[p.140]said Haji Wali, meeting me the next morning with a “goguenard” smile.

He was right.  Throughout the Caravanserai nothing was talked of for nearly a week but the wickedness of the captain of Albanian Irregulars, and the hypocrisy of the staid Indian doctor.  Thus it was, gentle reader, that I lost my reputation of being a “serious person” at Cairo.  And all I have to show for it is the personal experience of an Albanian drinking-bout.

I wasted but little time in taking leave of my friends, telling them, by way of precaution, that my destination was Meccah via Jeddah, and firmly determining, if possible, to make Al-Madinah via Yambu’.  “Conceal,” says the Arab’s proverb, “Thy Tenets, thy Treasure, and thy Travelling.”