If this business of carrying Chinese under cover had been as productive of adventure as it was of profits, I would have stuck to it indefinitely, but it was so absolutely devoid of excitement that it palled on me. After we had made eight or nine trips, which more than repaid my financial losses ashore, I withdrew from the trade, with the idea of returning to the seductive West Indies, where I imagined there were higher-class operations to be conducted, and more thrilling times to be found. While I was disposing of my ships and finally closing up my Australian affairs, I was in Sydney for several weeks and stopped at the Imperial Hotel, where I met and became well acquainted with Guy Boothby, the English novelist. Though he dreamed away his inborn love of adventure, while I industriously practised mine and made it my life, he was a good deal of a kindred spirit, and in the course of our numerous long talks I told him enough about my experience with the Beautiful White Devil, without going into any of the detailed and intimate facts which have been told in these confessions, so that he subsequently wove a romance about her, using her sobriquet as a title for the story. Accompanied by Leigh and Wilson, who were going only as far as England, I boarded a steamship for London, on my way back to New York. It would have been easier and quicker for me to have returned by way of San Francisco, but I involuntarily selected the roundabout way, to soon find that it led me into a unique and altogether unexpected experience. CHAPTER XIII ADVENTURES ON THE NILE