And, torn from the pocket of the wretched creature's tattered surtout, the fatal diamonds were placed in the hands of Zeid-el-Ourdeh. Allan, as he saw them sparkling in the sunshine, thought of all he heard his father say of them, and marvelled to whom they would bring evil next. If to the sheikh, he was fated never to know. It was some time before he recovered the shock this scene gave him, but it rendered his desire to be gone--to be free--irrepressible; yet he dreaded just then to approach the subject with Zeid. Whether it was the excitement of a blood-shedding or acquisition of the diamonds, or both together, Zeid was in high good humour, and about noon gave Allan a dinner unusually sumptuous in his own tent. Upon a tray of tinned copper were placed saucers of pickles, salad, and salt, with thin cakes of bread, and in the centre a dish of rice, highly seasoned with spice and saffron. Neither forks nor spoons were there, and he had to use his fingers. Thus it made him shiver to see the sheikh plunge his copper-coloured digits into the dish one moment and thrust them half-way down his open throat the next. He always clapped his hands when he wanted any attendance. A cotton towel surrounded the tray on the ground, on which they occasionally wiped their hands; then pipes of tobacco followed, and the sheikh became sociable, as he reclined back against a saddle over which some shawls and a barracan were spread, and Allan began to cast about in his own mind how to approach the subject of his departure. He gathered courage from the knowledge that, after eating bread and salt together, or even salt alone, in the East, produces mutual obligations of friendship. The sheikh was a man of great piety, after his own fashion. He said his prayers five times daily, the first time being between daybreak and sunrise, turning towards Mecca, and five times daily he washed his hands. He was a firm believer in magic, and that there existed somewhere in Upper Egypt, Ishmonie, or the Petrified City--so called on account of the great number of statues, representing men, women, children, and animals, with which its silent streets abound--all of which he believed to have been once animated creatures, miraculously changed into stone by a whisper of the prophet, in all the various attitudes of standing, sitting, or falling, but none of which are ever visible save to true believers. He also firmly believed in the miraculous egg laid by a hen after Tel-el-Kebir, on which was inscribed the words--'Arabi has lost the battle because he mutilated the corpses of the enemy. Allah has punished him, but He will give victory to him in the end, if he will keep the commands in the future.' 'Hah!' said he, after a long pull at his chibouque, 'at Tel-el-Kebir your bare-legged men came on as hell will come at the last day.' 'How is that?' 'As the Koran tells us, with seventy thousand halters, each dragged by seventy thousand angels--a power nothing can withstand.'