Then, those persistent efforts suddenly ceased, and dully I told myself that this weird being, having done his best to save me, had fled in order to save himself. I was wrong. You have asked me for a story of the magic of Egypt, and although, as you see, it has cost me tears--oh! I am not ashamed of those tears, my friends!--I have recounted this story to you. You say, where is the magic? and I might reply: the magic was in the changing of my false love to a true. But there was another magic as well, and it grew up around me now at this moment when I lay inert, waiting for death. From behind me, from above me, arose a cry--a cry. You may have heard of the Bedouin song, the 'Mizmûne': "Ya men melek ana dêri waat sa jebb, Id el' ish hoos' a beb hatsa azât ta lebb." You may have heard how when it is sung in a certain fashion, flowers drop from their stalks? Also, you may have doubted this, never having heard a magical cry. _I_ do not doubt it, my friends! For I _have_ heard a magical cry--this cry which arose from behind me! It started some chord in my dulled consciousness which had never spoken before. I turned my head--and there upon the highest point of the rocks stood the cave man. He suddenly stretched forth his hands. Again he uttered that uncanny, that indescribable cry. It was not human. It was not animal. Yet it was nearer to the cry of an animal than to any sound made by the human species. His eyes gleamed with an awful light, his spare body had assumed a strange significance; he was transfigured. A third time he uttered the cry, and out from one of those openings in the rock which I have mentioned, crept a jackal. You know how a jackal avoids the day, how furtive, how nocturnal a creature it is? but there in the golden glory which proclaimed the coming of the sun, black silhouettes moved. A great wonder possessed me, as the first jackal was followed by a second, by a third, by a fourth, by a fifth. Did I say a fifth?... By five hundred--by five thousand! From every visible hole in the rocks, jackals poured forth in packs. Wonder left me, fear left me; I forgot my sorrow, I became a numbed intelligence amid a desert of jackals. Over a sea of moving furry backs, I saw that upstanding crag and the weird crouching figure upon it. Right and left, above and below, jackals moved ... and all turned their heads towards the approaching Bedouins! Again--again I heard that dreadful cry. The jackals, in a pack, thousands strong, began to advance upon the Bedouins!... Not east or west, north or south, could you hope to find a braver man than was the Sheikh Saïd Mohammed; but--he fled! I saw the four horsemen riding like furies into the morning sun. The white mare, riderless, galloped with them--and the desert behind was yellow with jackals! For the last time I heard the cry. The jackals began to return!