Allan pled hard, and spoke of bribes and ransom, but apparently in vain, and he began to get sorely perplexed by the prospect before him, especially if the tribe took their departure--of which there was every prospect--in search of 'pastures new' further from Grand Cairo, and towards the plain of Muggreh. He was obliged to dissemble his disgust and mortification, and could only hope of finding an opportunity of 'making,' as he thought, 'a clean bolt of it.' A few uneventful days passed, and during these he could not help being struck with the simplicity of the domestic life and manners of the Sheikh Zeid-el-Ourdeh and his family. Though the commander of more than six hundred horse, he did not disdain to saddle and bridle his own steed or to give him his barley and chopped straw. In his humble tent his wife made the coffee, kneaded the dough, and cooked all the victuals, though a kind of princess in the desert and among her people. His daughters and kinswomen attended to the linen, and, closely veiled, went to the wells or springs for water, with classic-looking pitchers of brown ware balanced on their gracefully-carried heads--in ways, manners, and ideas all unchanged from those described by Homer, or as we find them in the history of Abraham and in Genesis. It was while a prisoner thus with Zeid, that Allan heard the strange story promulgated by Arabi, that all Egyptians who fell fighting for the faith would come back to earth as spirits mounted on snow-white horses and armed with miraculous swords to completely exterminate the British--an idea evidently borrowed from the Koran, which ascribes Mohamed's victory at Bedr to his having as allies three thousand spirits led by the angel Gabriel mounted on his horse Haizum. On this subject the Paris _Temps_ recorded that an Arab servant belonging to their correspondent asked the latter whether he had seen any of the returned spirits from Kassassin in recent encounters, and, on being answered in the negative, declared that the correspondent could not see them because he was _not_ an Englishman. CHAPTER XIII. THE LAST OF SIR PAGET. And now to glance homeward at more civilised scenes--to the catastrophe at Hurdell Hall. The terrible tidings were soon made known to Eveline that Sir Paget, on the homeward ride from Furzydown, had been suddenly seized by an unaccountable fit of irritation, and, in defiance of all advice and entreaty, though a bad horseman, had lashed and spurred the bay hunter--a vicious brute--while needlessly rushing it at a high fence, and been thrown with terrible violence. In short, his neck was broken, and he had died on the spot without pain. A door had been procured from an adjoining barnyard, and on this humble bier the body had been brought to the Hall.