Rukhia, Mahkmoud's wife, then appeared, to everyone's astonishment, and told a graphic story of how she was awakened some little time before sunrise, and heard the voices of the stranger and her husband in a heated argument. Mahkmoud then returned, much excited and swearing fiercely. In the morning she noticed the blood-stained shoes and missed the knife from the shelf where it was usually put. Later it was found by the police who searched the house. Mahkmoud, in spite of his protestations of innocence, was found guilty--mainly on the circumstantial evidence of his wife and Abdul. He was sentenced to death, which sentence was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for the term of his natural life. * * * * * It would take too long to follow this miserable but innocent convict through the weary years he spent working out his awful doom. To be able to realize what an Egyptian convict's life is like one must at least have seen the prisons and the hulk. The first five years were spent in the prison at Tourah. The very fact that this man--so strong willed and passionate by nature--was innocent drove him to the verge of frenzy, and having become known as a dangerous and violent convict he found himself confined first in a solitary cell, and then drafted to the prison at Tokar. Here he was compelled to associate with the very worst criminals in Egypt; and, breaking the rules again, he was sentenced to undergo the remainder of his imprisonment on board the hulk in Trinkitat Bay. It is enough to say that this bay is on the Red Sea littoral, a terrible place for any living man, white or black, to have to spend his life. It was in this hulk that the writer saw Mahkmoud. Escape from this floating jail is practically impossible. It is moored some seven hundred yards from the shore, and the water teems with sharks, who do not allow much to escape their observant eyes as they continually cruise round the hulk. Many times poor wretches doomed to this living grave have escaped from Tokar Prison. It is easy, for the prison is only built of mud and wattle, and the warders are very careless. But up to the time I shall describe later no prisoner had been known to get far away. Nomad tribes of Somalis and Arabs (the "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" of the days of our fierce fights at El Teb and Tamai, Tokar and McNeill's Zareba) live and move all round this part of the bush, occupying the few wells there are, right up to the Erkoweit hills. The Government give the head-men of these tribes substantial rewards for each fugitive they capture and bring in, so that the convict's chance of escape is infinitesimal. They must go to these tribes for food and water, or die of hunger and thirst in the desert.