He would bear her away, he thought; she would yet be his bride, won by his spear and horse, like the bride of many an Arab song and story; they would have a home among the fairy-like gardens of Kordofan and beyond the mountains of Haraza. Was he not invulnerable? Had he not an amulet bound to his sword-arm by the Mahdi himself--an amulet before which even the bullets and bayonets of the British had failed? So the caravan with Isha wound on its way towards the Desert! How dark the red round sun had suddenly become. Khasim looked up to see if it still shone, and it was setting fast, amid clouds of crimson and gold, throwing long, long purple shadows far across the plain, and there in its sheen the Nile was running swiftly as ever--swift as life runs in the Desert and elsewhere! Out of the latter arose a cloud of dust, with many a glittering point of steel! The caravan was suddenly attacked, its column broken and pierced by a band of wild Kabbabish Arab horsemen, fifty in number at least, and led by that slippery personage, the Mudir of Dongola, on whom the British Government so grotesquely bestowed the Cross of St. Michael and St. George--a gift ridiculed even by the _Karakush_, or Egyptian _Punch_. A conflict ensued; revolvers and Remington rifles were freely used; saddles were emptied, and sabres flashed in the moonlight. General plunder of everything was the real object of the Mudir and his Kabbabishes; to rescue Isha was the sole object of Khasim, who charged in among them. Amid the wild hurly-burly of the conflict, the shrieks of the women, their incessant cries of _walwalah!_ the grunting of the camels, the yells of the Arabs, and amid the dense clouds of dust and sand raised by hoofs and feet, Khasim Jelalodeen speedily found the litter in which the daughter of Moussa was placed, and was in the act of drawing forth her slight figure across his saddlebow--horror-stricken though the girl was, albeit she had seen death in more than one form before--when the merchant, Ebn al Ajuz, exasperated to lose her after all the treasure he had spent, shot her dead with his long brass pistol; but ere he could draw another Khasim clove him to the chin, through every fold of the turban, by one stroke of his long and trenchant Arab sword, and, with a wild cry of grief and despair, spurred his horse into the desert and was seen no more, though rumour said he joined the banner of Osman Digna before Suakim. So this was a brief Arab romance of the nineteenth century as acted out in a part of the world which changes not, though all the world seems to change elsewhere.