After a while he was brought back to himself by another burst of raucous laughter—the laughter of the servants inside the house—and at the next moment he saw a light running along the ground in the dark market-place below—the light of the trackers who were going off on the wrong scent, with a company of mounted police, in the direction taken by Hafiz. *CHAPTER XVI* Gordon left the Citadel unchallenged and unobserved, and in less than half-an-hour he was climbing the yellow road—white now in the moonlight—that goes up to the Mokattam Hills. By this time he was beginning to see the meaning of that night’s experience. Unconsciously he had been putting Providence to the proof. Unwittingly he had been asking the fates to say if the path he had marked out for himself had been the right one when he had decided to follow Ishmael Ameer to Khartoum, to work by his side, and to come back at last when his sin had been forgiven and his redemption won. Providence had decided in his favour. If destiny had determined that he should not leave Cairo he might have been taken a hundred times. Because he had not been taken it was clear to him that it was intended that he should go. He had tried to see his mother, and if he could have done so he must have stayed with her at all hazards, since she was so ill and perhaps so near to death. He had tried to see Helena also, and if she had not gone to England already he must have clung to her at all costs and in spite of all consequences. On the other hand he had seen his father, and heard from his very lips that nothing—not even the liberty nor yet the life of his own son—could stand between him and his duty to the law. What did it mean that he should be so cut off, so stripped naked, so deprived of his place as son and lover and soldier and man, that all that had hitherto stood to him as himself, as Gordon Lord, was gone? It meant that another existence was before him—another work, another mission. Destiny was carrying him away from his former life, and he had only to go forward without fear. Thus once again on the heights of his great resolve he pushed on with a quick step, not daring to look back lest the sense of seeing things for the last time should be more than he could bear, lest the thought of leaving the city he loved, the people who loved him, his men and his brother officers, his mother and the memory of his happiness with Helena, his father and the consciousness of having wrecked the hopes of a lifetime, should drag him back at the last moment. In the midst of these emotions he was startled by a loud, sharp voice that was without and not within him. "Enta meen?" (Who are you?) Then he realised that he had reached the fort on the top of the hill, and that the Egyptian sentry at the gate was challenging him. For a moment he stood speechless, trying in vain to remember the name by which he was henceforward to be known.