For Mulai Hamed was a negroid Arab, whose ruffianly aspect was rather enhanced by the swaggering way he carried a broad shoulder-belt and brass badge of office. He interpreted his orders literally, being eager to display a certain skill in conducting to an artistic finish any enterprise that savored of guile. As soon as the two quitted the hotel, Royson saw that he was traversing by-paths seldom visited by Europeans. He passed through evil-smelling alleys so shut in by lofty houses that the sun hardly ever penetrated their depths. He caught glimpses of dun interiors when forced aside by a panier-laden mule or lumbering camel, and the knowledge was thrust upon him in many ways that his presence in this minor artery of the bazaar was resented by its inhabitants. The few females he met were swathed from head to foot in cotton garments that had once been white. Dark eyes glanced curiously at him over the yashmak, or veil, which covered nose, cheeks, and mouth from the gaze of strangers. Orange-tinted nails and fingertips, visible occasionally when the loose fold of a robe was snatched from the contamination of touching him, suggested the talons of a bird of prey rather than the slender well-shaped hand for which the Arab woman is noteworthy. Every man, almost without exception, scowled at him. Naked children, playing in the gutter, ran off, half frightened, yet stopped to shriek words which he was quite sure were not kindly greetings. Prowling dogs, the scavengers of the native quarter, shared the general hostility, and scurried out of his path, but sullenly, and with bared teeth. Through occasional sunlit vistas he peeped into main streets in which loitered numbers of Italian soldiers and civilians. Even a few carriages appeared, conveying ladies to the shops or public gardens, now that the intense heat of the sun had subsided. Therefore he found it scarcely credible that in the fetid slums there should be such covert hatred of the white race which held undisputed sway in thoroughfares distant not a stone's throw. And, in puzzling contrast to the evidences of eye and ear, he was conscious of an uncanny sense of familiarity with his surroundings. Before the _Aphrodite_ brought him south by east he had never been nearer Egypt than Paris. Yet the sights, the sounds, the nauseating smell of this dank bazaar appealed to him with the breathless realism that the jingle of hansoms, the steady crunch of omnibuses, the yelling of newsboys and the tar-laden scent of the wood-paved road might convey when next he entered the Strand.