Free The Mask of Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer Page B

quickened my pulse. It was in Egypt that I had met her, and in Egypt that I had learned to love her. But above and beyond even this they held a deeper significance. There is something about Egypt which seems to enter the blood of some of us, and to make that old, secret land a sort of super-motherland. I lack the power properly to express what I mean, but over and over again I have found this odd sort of cycle operating—suggesting some mystic affinity with the “gift of the Nile,” which, once recognized, can never be shaken off.
    “Our Egypt!” Yes, I appreciated what she meant…
    Dr. Petrie had his car waiting, and presently we set out for Cairo. Our pilot, Humphreys, had official routine duties to perform, but arrangements were made for his joining us later.
    The chief, with Nayland Smith and Rima, packed themselves in behind, and I sat beside Dr. Petrie in front. Having cleared the outskirts of Heliopolis and got out onto the road to Cairo:
    “This last job of yours, Greville,” said Petrie, “in Khorassan, has had its echoes even here.”
    “Good heavens! You don’t tell me!”
    “I assure you it is so. I hadn’t the faintest idea, until Smith’s first message reached me, that this extraordinary outburst of fanaticism which is stirring up the Moslem population (and has its particular centre at El Azhar) had anything to do with old Barton. Now I know.”
    He paused, steering a careful course through those immemorable thoroughfares where East and West mingle. Our pilot had just tricked sunset, and we drove on amid the swift, violet, ever changing dusk; dodging familiar native groups; a donkey-rider now and then—with villas shrinking right and left into the shadows, and dusty palms beginning to assume an appearance of silhouettes against the sky which is the roof of Egypt.
    “It may have reached me earlier than it reached the authorities,” Dr. Petrie went on; “I have many native patients. But that the Veiled Prophet is reborn is common news throughout the native quarter!”
    “This is damned serious!” said I.
    Petrie swept left to avoid a party of three aged Egyptians trudging along the road to Cairo as though automobiles had not been invented.
    “When I realised what lay behind it,” Petrie added, “I could only find one redeeming feature—that my wife, thank God! was in England. The centre of the trouble is farther east, but there’s a big reaction here.”
    “The centre of the trouble,” rapped Nayland Smith, evidently having overheard some part of our conversation, “is here, in your car, Petrie!”
    “What!”
    The doctor’s sudden grip on the wheel jerked us from the right to the centre of the road, until he steadied himself; then:
    “I don’t know what you mean. Smith,” he added.
    “He means the big suitcase which I have with me!” the chief shouted. “It’s under my feet now!”
    We were traversing a dark patch at the moment with a crossways ahead of us and a native café on the left. Petrie, a careful driver, had been trying for some time to pass a cart laden with fodder which jogged along obstinately in the middle of the road. Suddenly it was pulled in, and the doctor shot past.
    Even as Sir Lionel spoke, and before Petrie could hope to avert the catastrophe, out from the nearer side of this café, supported by two companions, a man (apparently drunk or full of hashish) came lurching. I had a hazy impression that the two supporters had sprung back; then, although Petrie swerved violently and applied brakes, a sickening thud told me that the bumpers had struck him…
    A crowd twenty or thirty strong gathered in a twinkling. They were, I noted, exclusively native. Petrie was out first—I behind him—Nayland Smith came next, and then Rima.
    Voices were raised in high excitement. Men were gesticulating and shaking clenched fists at us.
    “Carry him in,” said Petrie quietly. “I want to look at him. But I think this man is dead…”
    On a wooden seat in the café we laid