"DEAREST HELENA,—Dreadfully disappointed I cannot dine with you to-night, having to go to Alexandria to-morrow, and finding it necessary to begin preparations immediately. "You must really be a witch—your prediction proved to be exactly right—it _was_ about the new Mahdi, the new prophet, my father wished to speak to me. "The Governor thinks the man is making mischief, inciting the people to rebellion by preaching sedition, so with the General’s consent I am to smash him without delay. "Hafiz is to go with me to Alexandria, and strangely enough, he tells me over the telephone that the new prophet, as far as he can learn, is not a firebrand at all; but I am just off to see his uncle, the Chancellor of the University, and he is to tell me everything about him. "Therefore think of me to-night as penned up in the thick atmosphere of El Azhar, _tête-à-tête_, with some sallow-faced fossil with pock-marked cheeks perhaps, when I hoped to be in the fragrant freshness of the Citadel, looking into somebody’s big black eyes, you know. "But really, my dear Nell, the way you know things without learning them is wonderful, and seems to indicate an error of nature in not making you a diplomatist, which would have given you plenty of scope for your uncanny gift of second sight. "On second thoughts, though, I prefer you as you are and am not exactly dying to see you turned into a man. "Maa-es-salamah! I kiss your hand! "GORDON. "_P.S._—Your father would get a letter from the Consul-General suggesting my task, but of course I must go up for his formal order, and you might tell him I expect to be at the Citadel about tea-time to-morrow, which will enable me to kill two birds with one stone, you know, and catch the evening train as well. "Strange if it should turn out that this new Mahdi is a wholesome influence after all, and not a person one can conscientiously put down! I have always suspected that the old Mahdi was a good man at the beginning, an enemy created by our own errors and excesses. Is history repeating itself? I wonder! And if so, what will the Consul-General say? I wonder! I wonder!" Gordon was sealing and addressing his letter when his soldier servant brought in Hafiz, a bright young Egyptian officer, whose plump face seemed to be all smiles. "Helloa! Here you are!" cried Gordon, and then giving his letter to his servant, he said, "Citadel—General’s house, you know.... And now, Hafiz, my boy, let’s be off." *CHAPTER VII* El Azhar is a vast edifice that stands in the midst of the Arab quarter of Cairo like a fortress on an island rock, being surrounded by a tangled maze of narrow, dirty, unpaved streets, with a swarming population of Mohammedans of every race; and the Christian who crosses its rather forbidding portals feels that he has passed in an instant out of the twentieth century and a city of civilisation into scenes of Bible lands and the earliest years of recorded time.