The public may possibly wonder why it is that they have never heard in
the papers of the fate of the passengers of the _Korosko_. In these
days of universal press agencies, responsive to the slightest stimulus,
it may well seem incredible that an international incident of such
importance should remain so long unchronicled. Suffice it that there
were very valid reasons, both of a personal and of a political nature,
for holding it back. The facts were well known to a good number of
people at the time, and some version of them did actually appear in a
provincial paper, but was generally discredited. They have now been
thrown into narrative form, the incidents having been collated from the
sworn statements of Colonel Cochrane Cochrane, of the Army and Navy
Club, and from the letters of Miss Adams, of Boston, Mass.
These have been supplemented by the evidence of Captain Archer, of the
Egyptian Camel Corps, as given before the secret Government inquiry at
Cairo. Mr. James Stephens has refused to put his version of the matter
into writing, but as these proofs have been submitted to him, and no
correction or deletion has been made in them, it may be supposed that he
has not succeeded in detecting any grave misstatement of fact, and that
any objection which he may have to their publication depends rather upon
private and personal scruples.
The _Korosko_, a turtle-bottomed, round-bowed stern-wheeler, with a
30-inch draught and the lines of a flat-iron, started upon the 13th of
February in the year 1895, from Shellal, at the head of the first
cataract, bound for Wady Halfa. I have a passenger card for the trip,
which I here reproduce:
S.W. “KOROSKO,” FEBRUARY 13TH.
PASSENGERS.
Colonel Cochrane Cochrane London.
Mr. Cecil Brown London.
John H. Headingly Boston, U.S.A.
Miss Adams Boston, U.S.A.
Miss S. Adams Worcester, Mass., U.S.A.
Mons. Fardet Paris.
Mr. and Mrs. Belmont Dublin.
James Stephens Manchester.
Rev. John Stuart Birmingham.
Mrs. Shlesinger, nurse and child Florence.
This was the party as it started from Shellal, with the intention of
travelling up the two hundred miles of Nubian Nile which lie between the
first and the second cataract.
It is a singular country, this Nubia. Varying in breadth from a few
miles to as many yards (for the name is only applied to the narrow
portion which is capable of cultivation), it extends in a thin, green,
palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad coffee-coloured river.
Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable
desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an
equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea.
Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green
sandworm along the course of the river. Here and there it disappears
altogether, and the Nile runs between black and sun-cracked hills, with
the orange drift-sand lying like glaciers in their valleys. Everywhere
one sees traces of vanished races and submerged civilisations.
Grotesque graves dot the hills or stand up against the sky-line:
pyramidal graves, tumulus graves, rock graves--everywhere, graves.
And, occasionally, as the boat rounds a rocky point, one sees a deserted
city up above--houses, walls, battlements, with the sun shining through
the empty window squares. Sometimes you learn that it has been Roman,
sometimes Egyptian, sometimes all record of its name or origin has been
absolutely lost. You ask yourself in amazement why any race should
build in so uncouth a solitude, and you find it difficult to accept the
theory that this has only been of value as a guard-house to the richer
country down below, and that these frequent cities have been so many
fortresses to hold off the wild and predatory men of the south.
But whatever be their explanation, be it a fierce neighbour, or be it a
climatic change, there they stand, these grim and silent cities, and up
on the hills you can see the graves of their people, like the port-holes
of a man-of-war. It is through this weird, dead country that the
tourists smoke and gossip and flirt as they pass up to the Egyptian
frontier.
The passengers of the _Korosko_ formed a merry party, for most of them
had travelled up together from Cairo to Assouan, and even Anglo-Saxon
ice thaws rapidly upon the Nile. They were fortunate in being without
the single disagreeable person who, in these small boats, is sufficient
to mar the enjoyment of the whole party. On a vessel which is little
more than a large steam launch, the bore, the cynic, or the grumbler
holds the company at his mercy. But the _Korosko_ was free from
anything of the kind. Colonel Cochrane Cochrane was one of those
officers whom the British Government, acting upon a large system of
averages, declares at a certain age to be incapable of further service,
and who demonstrate the worth of such a system by spending their
declining years in exploring Morocco, or shooting lions in Somaliland.
He was a dark, straight, aquiline man, with a courteously deferential
manner, but a steady, questioning eye; very neat in his dress and
precise in his habits, a gentleman to the tips of his trim finger-nails.
In his Anglo-Saxon dislike to effusiveness he had cultivated a
self-contained manner which was apt at first acquaintance to be
repellent, and he seemed to those who really knew him to be at some
pains to conceal the kind heart and human emotions which influenced his
actions. It was respect rather than affection which he inspired among
his fellow-travellers, for they felt, like all who had ever met him,
that he was a man with whom acquaintance was unlikely to ripen into a
friendship, though a friendship, when once attained, would be an
unchanging and inseparable part of himself. He wore a grizzled military
moustache, but his hair was singularly black for a man of his years.
He made no allusion in his conversation to the numerous campaigns in
which he had distinguished himself, and the reason usually given for his
reticence was that they dated back to such early Victorian days that he
had to sacrifice his military glory at the shrine of his perennial
youth.
Mr. Cecil Brown--to take the names in the chance order in which they
appear upon the passenger list--was a young diplomatist from a
Continental Embassy, a man slightly tainted with the Oxford manner, and
erring upon the side of unnatural and inhuman refinement, but full of
interesting talk and cultured thought. He had a sad, handsome face, a
small wax-tipped moustache, a low voice and a listless manner, which was
relieved by a charming habit of suddenly lighting up into a rapid smile
and gleam when anything caught his fancy. An acquired cynicism was
eternally crushing and overlying his natural youthful enthusiasms, and
he ignored what was obvious while expressing keen appreciation for what
seemed to the average man to be either trivial or unhealthy. He chose
Walter Pater for his travelling author, and sat all day, reserved but
affable, under the awning, with his novel and his sketch-book upon a
camp-stool beside him. His personal dignity prevented him from making
advances to others, but if they chose to address him they found a
courteous and amiable companion.
The Americans formed a group by themselves. John H. Headingly was a
New Englander, a graduate of Harvard, who was completing his education
by a tour round the world. He stood for the best type of young
American--quick, observant, serious, eager for knowledge and fairly
free from prejudice, with a fine balance of unsectarian but earnest
religious feeling which held him steady amid all the sudden gusts of
youth. He had less of the appearance and more of the reality of culture
than the young Oxford diplomatist, for he had keener emotions though
less exact knowledge. Miss Adams and Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and
niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid,
with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy
features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy
upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of
Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that
the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck
her she had been very fully occupied. The saddle-galled donkeys, the
starved pariah dogs, the flies round the eyes of the babies, the naked
children, the importunate beggars, the ragged, untidy women--they were
all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work
of reformation. As she could not speak a word of the language, however,
and was unable to make any of the delinquents understand what it was
that she wanted, her passage up the Nile left the immemorial East very
much as she had found it, but afforded a good deal of sympathetic
amusement to her fellow-travellers. No one enjoyed her efforts more
than her niece, Sadie, who shared with Mrs. Belmont the distinction of
being the most popular person upon the boat. She was very young--fresh
from Smith College--and she still possessed many both of the virtues and
of the faults of a child. She had the frankness, the trusting
confidence, the innocent straightforwardness, the high spirits, and also
the loquacity and the want of reverence. But even her faults caused
amusement, and if she had preserved many of the characteristics of a
clever child, she was none the less a tall and handsome woman, who
looked older than her years on account of that low curve of the hair
over the ears, and that fullness of bodice and skirt which Mr. Gibson
has either initiated or imitated. The whisk of those skirts, and the
frank, incisive voice and pleasant, catching laugh were familiar and
welcome sounds on board of the _Korosko_. Even the rigid Colonel
softened into geniality, and the Oxford-bred diplomatist forgot to be
unnatural with Miss Sadie Adams as a companion.
The other passengers may be dismissed more briefly. Some were
interesting, some neutral, and all amiable. Monsieur Fardet was a
good-natured but argumentative Frenchman, who held the most decided
views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain, and the illegality
of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey, sturdy
Irishman, famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot, who had
carried off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had to offer.
With him was his wife, a very charming and refined woman, full of the
pleasant playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shlesinger was a middle-aged
widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her
six-year-old child, as a mother’s thoughts are likely to be in a boat
which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a
Nonconformist minister from Birmingham--either a Presbyterian or a
Congregationalist--a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his
ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made
him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from
advanced Radical platforms.
Finally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior
partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off
the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in the
course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the firm’s
windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he had
been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one
idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind
and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he
expounded. A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped
as a busy city man’s is liable to become. His work had become an
engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in
life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually
bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came
this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his
groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring
Manchester and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he
resented it deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his
own petty routine. But gradually his eyes were opened, and he began
dimly to see that it was his work which was trivial when compared to
this wonderful, varied, inexplicable world of which he was so ignorant.
Vaguely he realised that the interruption to his career might be more
important than the career itself. All sorts of new interests took
possession of him; and the middle-aged lawyer developed an after-glow of
that youth which had been wasted among his books. His character was
too formed to admit of his being anything but dry and precise in his
ways, and a trifle pedantic in his mode of speech; but he read and
thought and observed, scoring his “Baedeker” with underlinings and
annotations as he had once done his “Prideaux’s Commentaries.” He had
travelled up from Cairo with the party, and had contracted a friendship
with Miss Adams and her niece. The young American girl, with her
chatter, her audacity, and her constant flow of high spirits, amused and
interested him, and she in turn felt a mixture of respect and of pity
for his knowledge and his limitations. So they became good friends, and
people smiled to see his clouded face and her sunny one bending over the
same guide-book.
The little _Korosko_ puffed and spluttered her way up the river, kicking
up the white water behind her, and making more noise and fuss over her
five knots an hour than an Atlantic liner on a record voyage. On deck,
under the thick awning, sat her little family of passengers, and every
few hours she eased down and sidled up to the bank to allow them to
visit one more of that innumerable succession of temples. The remains,
however, grow more modern as one ascends from Cairo, and travellers who
have sated themselves at Gizeh and Sakara with the contemplation of the
very oldest buildings which the hands of man have constructed, become
impatient of temples which are hardly older than the Christian era.
Ruins which would be gazed upon with wonder and veneration in any other
country are hardly noticed in Egypt. The tourists viewed with languid
interest the half-Greek art of the Nubian bas-reliefs; they climbed the
hill of Korosko to see the sun rise over the savage Eastern desert; they
were moved to wonder by the great shrine of Abou-Simbel, where some old
race has hollowed out a mountain as if it were a cheese; and, finally,
upon the evening of the fourth day of their travels they arrived at Wady
Halfa, the frontier garrison town, some few hours after they were due,
on account of a small mishap in the engine-room. The next morning was
to be devoted to an expedition to the famous rock of Abousir, from which
a great view may be obtained of the second cataract. At eight-thirty,
as the passengers sat on deck after dinner, Mansoor, the dragoman, half
Copt, half Syrian, came forward, according to the nightly custom, to
announce the programme for the morrow.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, plunging boldly into the rapid but
broken stream of his English, “to-morrow you will remember not to forget
to rise when the gong strikes you for to compress the journey before
twelve o’clock. Having arrived at the place where the donkeys expect
us, we shall ride five miles over the desert, passing a temple of
Ammon-ra, which dates itself from the eighteenth dynasty, upon the way,
and so reach the celebrated pulpit rock of Abousir. The pulpit rock is
supposed to have been called so, because it is a rock like a pulpit.
When you have reached it you will know that you are on the very edge of
civilisation, and that very little more will take you into the country
of the Dervishes, which will be obvious to you at the top.
Having passed the summit, you will perceive the full extremity of the
second cataract, embracing wild natural beauties of the most dreadful
variety. Here all very famous people carve their names--and so you will
carve your names also.” Mansoor waited expectantly for a titter, and
bowed to it when it arrived. “You will then return to Wady Halfa, and
there remain two hours to suspect the Camel Corps, including the
grooming of the beasts, and the bazaar before returning, so I wish you a
very happy good-night.”
There was a gleam of his white teeth in the lamplight, and then his
long, dark petticoats, his short English cover-coat, and his red
tarboosh vanished successively down the ladder. The low buzz of
conversation which had been suspended by his coming broke out anew.
“I’m relying on you, Mr. Stephens, to tell me all about Abousir,” said
Miss Sadie Adams. “I do like to know what I am looking at right there
at the time, and not six hours afterwards in my state-room. I haven’t
got Abou-Simbel and the wall pictures straight in my mind yet, though I
saw them yesterday.”
“I never hope to keep up with it,” said her aunt. “When I am safe back
in Commonwealth Avenue, and there’s no dragoman to hustle me around,
I’ll have time to read about it all, and then I expect I shall begin to
enthuse, and want to come right back again. But it’s just too good of
you, Mr. Stephens, to try and keep us informed.”
“I thought that you might wish precise information, and so I prepared a
small digest of the matter,” said Stephens, handing a slip of paper to
Miss Sadie. She looked at it in the light of the deck lamp, and broke
into her low, hearty laugh.
“_Re_ Abousir,” she read; “now, what _do_ you mean by ‘_re_,’ Mr.
Stephens? You put ‘_re_ Rameses the Second’ on the last paper you gave
me.”
“It is a habit I have acquired, Miss Sadie,” said Stephens; “it is the
custom in the legal profession when they make a memo.”
“Make what, Mr. Stephens?”
“A memo--a memorandum, you know. We put _re_ so-and-so to show what it
is about.”
“I suppose it’s a good short way,” said Miss Sadie, “but it feels queer
somehow when applied to scenery or to dead Egyptian kings.
‘_Re_ Cheops’--doesn’t that strike you as funny?”
“No, I can’t say that it does,” said Stephens.
“I wonder if it is true that the English have less humour than the
Americans, or whether it’s just another kind of humour,” said the girl.
She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking
aloud. “I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to
think of it, Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the
humourists we admire most are Britishers. Besides, I never in all my
days heard people laugh so hard as in that London theatre. There was a
man behind us, and every time he laughed Auntie looked round to see if a
door had opened, he made such a draught. But you have some funny
expressions, Mr. Stephens!”
“What else strikes you as funny, Miss Sadie?”
“Well, when you sent me the temple ticket and the little map, you began
your letter, ‘Enclosed, please find,’ and then at the bottom, in
brackets, you had ‘2 enclo.’”
“That is the usual form in business.”
“Yes, in business,” said Sadie demurely, and there was a silence.
“There’s one thing I wish,” remarked Miss Adams, in the hard, metallic
voice with which she disguised her softness of heart, “and that is, that
I could see the Legislature of this country and lay a few cold-drawn
facts in front of them. I’d make a platform of my own, Mr. Stephens,
and run a party on my ticket. A Bill for the compulsory use of eyewash
would be one of my planks, and another would be for the abolition of
those Yashmak veil things which turn a woman into a bale of cotton goods
with a pair of eyes looking out of it.”
“I never could think why they wore them,” said Sadie; “until one day I
saw one with her veil lifted. Then I knew.”
“They make me tired, those women,” cried Miss Adams wrathfully.
“One might as well try to preach duty and decency and cleanliness to a
line of bolsters. Why, good land, it was only yesterday at Abou-Simbel,
Mr. Stephens, I was passing one of their houses--if you can call a
mud-pie like that a house--and I saw two of the children at the door
with the usual crust of flies round their eyes, and great holes in their
poor little blue gowns! So I got off my donkey, and I turned up my
sleeves, and I washed their faces well with my handkerchief, and sewed
up the rents--for in this country I would as soon think of going ashore
without my needle-case as without my white umbrella, Mr. Stephens.
Then as I warmed on the job I got into the room--such a room!--and I
packed the folks out of it, and I fairly did the chores as if I had been
the hired help. I’ve seen no more of that temple of Abou-Simbel than if
I had never left Boston; but, my sakes, I saw more dust and mess than
you would think they could crowd into a house the size of a Newport
bathing-hut. From the time I pinned up my skirt until I came out with
my face the colour of that smoke-stack, wasn’t more than an hour, or
maybe an hour and a half, but I had that house as clean and fresh as a
new pine-wood box. I had a _New York Herald_ with me, and I lined their
shelf with paper for them. Well, Mr. Stephens, when I had done washing
my hands outside, I came past the door again, and there were those two
children sitting on the stoop with their eyes full of flies, and all
just the same as ever, except that each had a little paper cap made out
of the _New York Herald_ upon his head. But, say, Sadie, it’s going on
to ten o’clock, and to-morrow an early excursion.”
“It’s just too beautiful, this purple sky and the great silver stars,”
said Sadie. “Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the
hills. It’s grand, but it’s terrible too; and then when you think that
we really _are_, as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of
civilisation, and with nothing but savagery and bloodshed down there
where the Southern Cross is twinkling so prettily, why, it’s like
standing on the beautiful edge of a live volcano.”
“Shucks, Sadie, don’t talk like that, child,” said the older woman
nervously. “It’s enough to scare any one to listen to you.”
“Well, but don’t you feel it yourself, Auntie? Look at that great
desert stretching away and away until it is lost in the shadows.
Hear the sad whisper of the wind across it! It’s just the most solemn
thing that ever I saw in my life.”
“I’m glad we’ve found something that will make you solemn, my dear,”
said her Aunt. “I’ve sometimes thought--Sakes alive, what’s that?”
From somewhere amongst the hill shadows upon the other side of the river
there had risen a high shrill whimpering, rising and swelling, to end in
a long weary wail.
“It’s only a jackal, Miss Adams,” said Stephens. “I heard one when we
went out to see the Sphinx by moonlight.”
But the American lady had risen, and her face showed that her nerves had
been ruffled.
“If I had my time over again I wouldn’t have come past Assouan,” said
she. “I can’t think what possessed me to bring you all the way up here,
Sadie. Your mother will think that I am clean crazy, and I’d never dare
to look her in the eye if anything went wrong with us. I’ve seen all I
want to see of this river, and all I ask now is to be back at Cairo
again.”
“Why, Auntie,” cried the girl, “it isn’t like you to be faint-hearted.”
“Well, I don’t know how it is, Sadie, but I feel a bit unstrung, and
that beast caterwauling over yonder was just more than I could put up
with. There’s one consolation, we are scheduled to be on our way home
to-morrow, after we’ve seen this one rock or temple, or whatever it is.
I’m full up of rocks and temples, Mr. Stephens. I shouldn’t mope if I
never saw another. Come, Sadie! Good-night!”
“Good-night! Good-night, Miss Adams!”
And the two ladies passed down to their cabins.
Monsieur Fardet was chatting, in a subdued voice, with Headingly, the
young Harvard graduate, bending forward confidentially between the
whiffs of his cigarette.
“Dervishes, Mister Headingly!” said he, speaking excellent English, but
separating his syllables as a Frenchman will. “There are no Dervishes.
They do not exist.”
“Why, I thought the woods were full of them,” said the American.
Monsieur Fardet glanced across to where the red core of Colonel
Cochrane’s cigar was glowing through the darkness.
“You are an American, and you do not like the English,” he whispered.
“It is perfectly comprehended upon the Continent that the Americans are
opposed to the English.”
“Well,” said Headingly, with his slow, deliberate manner, “I won’t say
that we have not our tiffs, and there are some of our people--mostly of
Irish stock--who are always mad with England; but the most of us have a
kindly thought for the mother country. You see they may be aggravating
folk sometimes, but after all they are our _own_ folk, and we can’t wipe
that off the slate.”
“_Eh bien!_” said the Frenchman. “At least I can say to you what I
could not without offence say to these others. And I repeat that there
_are_ no Dervishes. They were an invention of Lord Cromer in the year
1885.”
“You don’t say!” cried Headingly.
“It is well known in Paris, and has been exposed in _La Patrie_ and
other of our so well-informed papers.”
“But this is colossal,” said Headingly. “Do you mean to tell me,
Monsieur Fardet, that the siege of Khartoum and the death of Gordon and
the rest of it was just one great bluff?”
“I will not deny that there was an émeute, but it was local, you
understand, and now long forgotten. Since then there has been profound
peace in the Soudan.”
“But I have heard of raids, Monsieur Fardet, and I’ve read of battles,
too, when the Arabs tried to invade Egypt. It was only two days ago
that we passed Toski, where the dragoman said there had been a fight.
Is that all bluff also?”
“Pah, my friend, you do not know the English. You look at them as you
see them with their pipes and their contented faces, and you say, ‘Now,
these are good, simple folk, who will never hurt any one.’ But all the
time they are thinking and watching and planning. ‘Here is Egypt weak,’
they cry. ‘_Allons!_’ and down they swoop like a gull upon a crust.
‘You have no right there,’ says the world. ‘Come out of it!’
But England has already begun to tidy everything, just like the good
Miss Adams when she forces her way into the house of an Arab.
‘Come out,’ says the world. ‘Certainly,’ says England; ‘just wait one
little minute until I have made everything nice and proper.’ So the
world waits for a year or so, and then it says once again, ‘Come out.’
‘Just wait a little,’ says England; ‘there is trouble at Khartoum, and
when I have set that all right I shall be very glad to come out.’
So they wait until it is all over, and then again they say, ‘Come out.’
‘How can I come out,’ says England, ‘when there are still raids and
battles going on? If we were to leave, Egypt would be run over.’
‘But there are no raids,’ says the world. ‘Oh, are there not?’ says
England, and then within a week sure enough the papers are full of some
new raid of Dervishes. We are not all blind, Mister Headingly.
We understand very well how such things can be done. A few Bedouins, a
little backsheesh, some blank cartridges, and, behold--a raid!”
“Well, well,” said the American, “I’m glad to know the rights of this
business, for it has often puzzled me. But what does England get out of
it?”
“She gets the country, monsieur.”
“I see. You mean, for example, that there is a favourable tariff for
British goods?”
“No, monsieur; it is the same for all.”
“Well, then, she gives the contracts to Britishers?”
“Precisely, monsieur.”
“For example, the railroad that they are building right through the
country, the one that runs alongside the river, that would be a valuable
contract for the British?”
Monsieur Fardet was an honest man, if an imaginative one.
“It is a French company, monsieur, which holds the railway contract,”
said he.
The American was puzzled.
“They don’t seem to get much for their trouble,” said he. “Still, of
course, there must be some indirect pull somewhere. For example, Egypt
no doubt has to pay and keep all those red-coats in Cairo.”
“Egypt, monsieur! No, they are paid by England.”
“Well, I suppose they know their own business best, but they seem to me
to take a great deal of trouble, and to get mighty little in exchange.
If they don’t mind keeping order and guarding the frontier, with a
constant war against the Dervishes on their hands, I don’t know why any
one should object. I suppose no one denies that the prosperity of the
country has increased enormously since they came. The revenue returns
show that. They tell me also that the poorer folks have justice, which
they never had before.”
“What are they doing here at all?” cried the Frenchman angrily.
“Let them go back to their island. We cannot have them all over the
world.”
“Well, certainly, to us Americans, who live all in our own land, it does
seem strange how you European nations are for ever slopping over into
some other country which was not meant for you. It’s easy for us to
talk, of course, for we have still got room and to spare for all our
people. When we begin pushing each other over the edge we shall have to
start annexing also. But at present just here in North Africa there is
Italy in Abyssinia, and England in Egypt, and France in Algiers--”
“France!” cried Monsieur Fardet. “Algiers belongs to France.
You laugh, monsieur. I have the honour to wish you a very good-night.”
He rose from his seat, and walked off, rigid with outraged patriotism,
to his cabin.