He lay stretched on a patch of grass, where two or three banana-trees grew near a ruined wall. The setting sun shed its red light far along the desert that stretched to the land of Goshen, with its luxuriant plains--yea, to the far horizon--and Allan, a thoughtful and a well-read man, as he looked around him, reflected, as he often did, how strange was the land where just then his duty led him--how strange that the Egyptians were there, without a tradition of a parent stock or of another land; that it was only known that a few generations after the Deluge they had become a great nation. In the words of Apollonius Rhodius: 'Oldest of mortals they who peopled earth, Ere yet in heaven the sacred signs had birth. . . . . . . . . Ere men the lunar wanderings learned to read, Ere yet the heroes of Deucalion's blood Pelasgia purpled with a glorious brood; The fertile plains of Egypt flourished then, Productive cradle of the first of men.' Allan thought as he manipulated and lit another cigar, that the Egyptians of Arabi Pasha must be of different and inferior stuff from those to whom the poet of the Argonauts referred. And there, but a little way off, lay Heliopolis and Matarieh, two places of great and solemn memories--Heliopolis, where Herodotus sought the wisest men in Egypt; where Strabo says they pointed out the house of Plato, where he then resided; where Potiphar lived, who bought Joseph from the patriarch; and Matarieh, a spot where the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, and the Holy Child Jesus tarried, including a well under a withered sycamore in which--according to the legendaries--the Holy Mother washed her Divine Infant's linen; a spot the turbanned Mussulmans still view with respect; and thereby was the piper of Allan's company playing 'The Evening Retreat,' and from the distance, over the flat ground, came the sound of his pipes, as he played 'The Birks of Aberfeldie.' Perhaps it was that his reflections were not of a very lively nature, or that he was wearied by a long reconnaissance that morning in the direction of El Khan-Kah, but he, perilously for himself, dropped insensibly asleep, all unaware that a party of Bedouin horsemen, with hoofs muffled in the soft sand, had formed a kind of semi-circle round him, cutting off all chance of escape. He could not have been asleep more than five minutes when the little prick of a lance which drew blood roughly roused him. He started to his feet and found himself confronted, surrounded indeed, by some twenty dusky sons of the desert, with hawk-like features, eyes that gleamed, and teeth that glistened exultantly. The adjective had rather an unpleasant sound just then, so Allan said, 'And if not ransomed?' The Bedouin slapped the butt of his Remington rifle and grinned, showing all his pearly teeth, with fierce signification. 'Who is your leader?' asked Allan, after a pause. 'That you will discover when you see him.'