“It seems wilder and more savage than ever to-night,” remarked the American. “It gives me the same feeling of pitiless force that the Atlantic does upon a cold, dark, winter day. Perhaps it is the knowledge that we are right there on the very edge of any kind of law and order. How far do you suppose that we are from any Dervishes, Colonel Cochrane?” “Well, on the Arabian side,” said the Colonel, “we have the Egyptian fortified camp of Sarras about forty miles to the south of us. Beyond that are sixty miles of very wild country before you would come to the Dervish post at Akasheh. On this other side, however, there is nothing between us and them.” “Abousir is on this side, is it not?” “Yes. That is why the excursion to the Abousir Rock has been forbidden for the last year. But things are quieter now.” “What is to prevent them from coming down on that side?” “Absolutely nothing,” said Cecil Brown, in his listless voice. “Nothing, except their fears. The coming of course would be perfectly simple. The difficulty would lie in the return. They might find it hard to get back if their camels were spent, and the Halfa garrison with their beasts fresh got on their track. They know it as well as we do, and it has kept them from trying.” “It isn’t safe to reckon upon a Dervish’s fears,” remarked Brown. “We must always bear in mind that they are not amenable to the same motives as other people. Many of them are anxious to meet death, and all of them are absolute, uncompromising believers in destiny. They exist as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of all bigotry--a proof of how surely it leads towards blank barbarism.” “You think these people are a real menace to Egypt?” asked the American. “There seems from what I have heard to be some difference of opinion about it. Monsieur Fardet, for example, does not seem to think that the danger is a very pressing one.” “I am not a rich man,” Colonel Cochrane answered after a little pause, “but I am prepared to lay all I am worth, that within three years of the British officers being withdrawn, the Dervishes would be upon the Mediterranean. Where would the civilisation of Egypt be? Where would the hundreds of millions which have been invested in this country? Where the monuments which all nations look upon as most precious memorials of the past?” “Come now, Colonel,” cried Headingly, laughing, “surely you don’t mean that they would shift the pyramids?”