"Do you know, my dear Nuneham, I once heard somebody else talk like
that, though from the opposite standpoint--of sympathy, not contempt."
"Who was it?"
"Your own son."
"Humph!"
The Consul-General frowned and there was silence again for some moments.
When the conversation was resumed it concerned the dangers of the Arab
Empire, which, according to the Grand Cadi, the Khedive (with the help
of Ishmael) expected to found.
"What would it mean?" said the Consul-General. "The utter annihilation
of the unbeliever. Does not the word 'Ghazi' signify a hero who slays
the infidel? Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khuttab in the
mosque, invoke divine wrath on the non-Moslem? What then? The
establishment of an Arab Empire would mean the revolt of the whole
Eastern world against the Western world, and a return to all the
brutality, all the intolerance of the farrago of moribund nonsense known
as the Sacred Law."