Was it accident or murder, he thought, and then felt keenly that 'Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.' CHAPTER XXIII. THE CITY OF THE CALIPHS--OCTOBER IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS. Malcolm Skene had been three weeks among 'the flesh-pots of Egypt,' as he wrote to Roland Lindsay, since he landed from a great white 'trooper' at Alexandria. It was now nearly the close of what is called the first season in that part of the world--that of the inundation of the Nile--which extends from the first of July to the winter solstice, and when, till the month preceding Skene's arrival, the whole country appears like one vast sea, in which the towns and villages rise like so many islands, and when the air is consequently moist, the mornings and evenings foggy; and Malcolm thought of what brown October was at home in his native land, where new vistas of hamlet and valley are seen through the half-stripped groves, a few hardy apples yet hang in the orchards, and nests are seen in the hedges where none were seen before; where the flocks are driven to fold as the dim sunset comes and the landscape assumes its sober hue, while the call of the partridge and of the few remaining birds on the low sighing wind, fall sadly on the ear. He thought of all this, and of the thick old woods that sheltered his ancestral home, where Dunnimarle looks down on the northern shore of the Forth. He often thought of Hester Maule too, and _why_ she had refused him, after all--after all he had been half led to hope. 'So--so,' he reflected, 'we shall live out the rest of our lives each without the other--forgetting and perhaps in time forgot.' Thought was not dead nor memory faint yet, and he seemed, just then, to have no object to live for, save to kill both, if possible, amid any excitement that came to hand, and such was not wanting at that crisis both in Alexandria and Grand Cairo. No fighting--though such was expected daily--was going on in the Upper Province or on its frontier; and to kill time, Skene more than once resorted to the gambling booths of the Greeks and Italians, as most of our officers did occasionally--a perilous resource at times, as the reader will admit, when we describe some of the events connected with them; and, curious to say, it was amid such scenes that Malcolm Skene was to hear some startling news of his friends at Earlshaugh.