In the evening, the Franks were again summoned to pay Hafiz Bey a visit, but neither Mr Lascelles Hamilton nor the accomplished Mohammed, the dragoman of Mr Ringlady, could be found. Achmet too had fallen ill in the morning, so that the party had to present itself before the governor with diminished splendour. On their arrival at the divan, they beheld a Frank in an European dress seated beside Hafiz Bey, and a consular cavas standing near the door. Inquiries were soon made for Mr Lascelles Hamilton, and when the Frank on the sofa heard that he was nowhere to be found, he jumped up and made twenty inquiries one after the other in English, as strongly marked with a foreign accent as that of Mr Lascelles Hamilton, but by no means equal to it in choice of words or correctness of grammatical construction. The worthy stranger then informed the travellers that he was an agent of the British Consulate at Alexandria, sent to arrest Mr Lascelles Hamilton for a variety of offences committed under a variety of names. The hue and cry was now raised, but no Mr Lascelles Hamilton was to be found, and it almost appeared difficult to produce any evidence that such a person had ever existed. Dozens of persons who had seen him that morning, and every morning he had spent at Gaza, became alarmed lest they should be in some way compromised by a connexion with him, and stoutly denied that such a person had accompanied Sidney to Gaza. Sidney himself, amused with the events of the day, boasted to Campbell that he would achieve fame as a literary man by writing a novel in three volumes based on the adventures of a single day at Gaza. In the mean time, Ringlady became frantic on discovering, in the search for Lascelles Hamilton, that he had lost not only his pearl of dragomans, the accomplished Mohammed, but likewise the whole of his baggage, which the accomplished Mohammed had doubtless carried off by mistake. To increase the grief of the party at losing these two valuable companions, it appeared that the best part of the baggage of Sidney and Campbell had also disappeared, but whether with the Frank or the Mussulman, it was impossible to say. The night was spent in vain endeavours to ascertain the direction in which the fugitives had fled. Hafiz Bey sent out horsemen on every road, who probably did not go very far from the fear of falling in with the Bedoweens. Achmet, however, who now began to recover from his attack of illness, declared, that all search would be useless, for he felt sure that his brother dragoman--the father of a jackass, as he politely termed him--had attempted to poison him in order to escape to the Arabs with the Frank Sheitan.