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THE PROFESSOR GOES OUT SHOOTING
Of all our tremendous journey across the desert until we had passed the forest and reached the plains which surrounded the mountains of Mur, there are, I think, but few incidents with which the reader need be troubled. The first of these was at Assouan, where a letter and various telegrams overtook Captain Orme, which, as by this time we had become intimate, he showed to me. They informed him that the clandestine infant whom his uncle left behind him had suddenly sickened and died of some childish ailment, so that he was once again heir to the large property which he thought he had lost, since the widow only took a life interest in some of the personalty. I congratulated him and said I supposed this meant that we should not have the pleasure of his company to Mur.
“Why not?” he asked. “I said I was going and I mean to go; indeed, I signed a document to that effect.”
“I daresay,” I answered, “but circumstances alter cases. If I might say so, an adventure that perhaps was good enough for a young and well-born man of spirit and enterprise without any particular resources, is no longer good enough for one who has the ball at his feet. Think what a ball it is to a man of your birth, intelligence, record, and now, great fortune come to you in youth. Why, with these advantages there is absolutely nothing that you cannot do in England. You can go into Parliament and rule the country; if you like you can become a peer. You can marry any one who isn’t of the blood royal; in short, with uncommonly little effort of your own, your career is made for you. Don’t throw away a silver spoon like that in order, perhaps, to die of thirst in the desert or be killed in a fight among unknown tribes.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered. “I never set heart much on spoons, silver or other. When I lost this one I didn’t cry, and now that I have found it again I shan’t sing. Anyway, I am going on with you, and you can’t prevent me under the agreement. Only as I have got such a lot to leave, I suppose I had better make a will first and post it home, which is a bore.”
Just then the Professor came in, followed by an Arab thief of a dealer, with whom he was trying to bargain for some object of antiquity. When the dealer had been ejected and the position explained to him, Higgs, who whatever may be his failings in small matters, is unselfish enough in big ones, said that he agreed with me and thought that under the circumstances, in his own interest, Orme ought to leave us and return home.
“You may save your breath, old fellow,” answered the Captain, “for this reason if for no other,” and he threw him a letter across the table, which letter I saw afterwards. To be brief, it was from the young lady to whom he had been engaged to be married, and who on his loss of fortune had jilted him. Now she seemed to have changed her mind again, and, although she did not mention the matter, it is perhaps not uncharitable to suppose that the news of the death of the inconvenient child had something to do with her decision.
“Have you answered this?” asked Higgs.
“No,” answered Orme, setting his mouth. “I have not answered, and I am not going to answer it, either in writing or in person. I intend to start to-morrow for Mur and to travel as far on that road as it pleases fate to allow, and now I am going to look at the rock sculptures by the cataract.”
“Well, that’s flat,” said Higgs after he had departed, “and for my part I am glad of it, for somehow I think he will be a useful man among those Fung. Also, if he went I expect that the Sergeant would go too, and where should we be without Quick, I should like to know?”
Afterwards I conversed with the said Quick about this same matter, repeating to him my opinions, to which the Sergeant listened with the deference which he was always kind enough to show to me.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, when I had finished, “but I think you are both right and wrong. Everything has two ends, hasn’t it? You say that it would be wicked for the Captain to get himself killed, there being now so much money for him to live for, seeing that life is common as dirt while money is precious, rare and hard to come by. It ain’t the kings we admire, it’s their crowns; it ain’t the millionaires, it’s their millions; but, after all, the millionaires don’t take their millions with them, for Providence, that, like Nature, hates waste, knows that if they did they’d melt, so one man dead gives another bread, as the saying goes, or p’raps I should say gingerbread in such cases.
“Still, on the whole, sir, I admit you are right as to the sinfulness of wasting luck. But now comes the other end. I know this young lady what the Captain was engaged to, which he never would have been if he had taken my advice, since of all the fish-blooded little serpents that ever I set eyes on she’s the serpentest, though pretty, I allow. Solomon said in his haste that an honest woman he had not found, but if he had met the Honourable Miss—well, never mind her name—he’d have said it at his leisure, and gone on saying it. Now, no one should never take back a servant what has given notice and then says he’s sorry, for if he does the sorrow will be on the other side before it’s all done; and much less should he take back a fiancée (Quick said a ‘finance’), on the whole, he’d better drown himself—I tried it once, and I know. So that’s the tail of the business.
“But,” he went on, “it has a couple of fins as well, like that eel beast I caught in the Nile. One of them is that the Captain promised and vowed to go through with this expedition, and if a man’s got to die, he’d better die honest without breaking his word. And the other is what I said to you in London when I signed on, that he won’t die a minute before his time, and nothing won’t happen to him, but what’s bound to happen, and therefore it ain’t a ha’porth of use bothering about anything, and that’s where the East’s well ahead of the West.
“And now, sir, I’ll go and look after the camels and those half-bred Jew boys what you call Abati, but I call rotten sneaks, for if they get their thieving fingers into those canisters of picric salts, thinking they’re jam, as I found them trying to do yesterday, something may happen in Egypt that’ll make the Pharaohs turn in their graves and the Ten Plagues look silly.”
So, having finished his oration, Quick went, and in due course we started for Mur.
The second incident that is perhaps worth recording was an adventure that happened to us when we had completed about two of our four months’ journey.
After weeks of weary desert travel—if I remember right, it was exactly a fortnight after the dog Pharaoh, of which I shall soon have plenty to say, had come into Orme’s possession—we reached an oasis called Zeu, where I had halted upon my road down to Egypt. In this oasis, which, although not large in extent, possesses springs of beautiful water and groves of date-trees, we were, as it chanced, very welcome, since when I was there before, I had been fortunate enough to cure its sheik of an attack of ophthalmia and to doctor several of his people for various ailments with good results. So, although I was burning to get forward, I agreed with the others that it would be wise to accede to the request of the leader of our caravan, a clever and resourceful, but to my mind untrustworthy Abati of the name of Shadrach, and camp in Zeu for a week or so to rest and feed our camels, which had wasted almost to nothing on the scant herbage of the desert.
This Shadrach, I may add here, whom his companions, for some reason unknown to me at that time, called the Cat, was remarkable for a triple line of scars upon his face, which, he informed me, had been set there by the claws of a lion. Now the great enemies of this people of Zeu were lions, which at certain seasons of the year, I suppose when food grew scarce, descended from the slopes of a range of hills that stretched east and west at a distance of
