Yet when I come to think of it, there was nothing very strange in such contemplations. What soldier or sailor has not often in his quiet moments tried to picture his own death, defiant to the last as he goes down before a more powerful enemy? And, after all, thousands and thousands of men and women in civilized countries are enduring a worse captivity and imprisonment than many did in the Soudan; but they are unfortunate in this—that no one has thrown a halo of romance over their sufferings. My lot was a hard, very hard one, I must admit; but the lot of some other captives was such that thousands in Europe would have been pleased to exchange theirs for it, and would have gained in the exchange. |226| CHAPTER XIX RUMOURS OF RELIEF [Illustration: ONOOR ISSA.] Soon after the departure of Onoor Issa I was saved any further trouble in the way of scheming for excuses to get out of the Saier. Awwad-el-Mardi, the successor of Nur-el-Gerafawi as the Amin Beit-el-Mal on the appointment of the latter as director of the Khaleefa’s ordnance stores, had been approached by Nahoum Abbajee and others on the subject of the extraction of gold and silver from certain stones which had been discovered in the neighbourhood. Awwad sent Nahoum to see me about the erection of a crushing-mill or furnaces. My interview with Nahoum was a stormy one. It commenced by his upbraiding me for the pranks I had played in smashing the arsenal punching-machine when we were associated in the establishment of a mint. The more I laughed the angrier Nahoum became; he is deaf, and like most deaf people, invariably speaks in an undertone, which is as distressing to the hearer as is the necessity he is under of bawling back his replies. It is next to impossible to hold a conversation with a deaf person without the natural result of raising the voice exhibiting itself in the features; the annoyance is there plain |227| enough, but when the face flushes with the unwonted exertion, your deaf friend thinks you are getting angry, and follows suit. This is precisely what Abbajee did. He showed me his specimens, and I bawled into his ear, “Mica—not gold, not silver—mica;” and he yelled back, “Gold, silver, gold.” The noisy discussion, accompanied as it was with gesticulations, attracted other prisoners around us, and Nahoum went off in high dudgeon.