"My dear Isaacson! Is it possible? I should almost as soon have expected to meet the Sphinx in Cleveland Square!"
A tall man, not much over thirty, with light, imaginative, yet penetrating eyes, stood before him, and with a "May I?" sat down beside him, after cordially grasping his hand.
"Starnworth, you're one of the few men--I might say almost the only man--I'm glad to meet at this moment. Where have you just come from, or where are you just going? I can't believe you are going to stay in Cairo."
"No. I've been in Syria, just arrived from Damascus. I've been with a caravan--yes, I'll have some tea. I'm going to start to-morrow or next day from Mena House for another little desert trip."
"Little! How many days?"
"Oh, I don't know," said the newcomer, negligently. "Three weeks out and three weeks back, I believe--something like that--to visit an oasis where there are some extraordinary ruins. But why are you here? What induced you to leave your innumerable patients?"
After a very slight hesitation Isaacson answered: "A whim."
"The deuce! Can doctors who are the rage permit themselves to be governed by whims?"
This man, Basil Starnworth, was an English nomad who for years had steeped himself in the golden East, who spoke Arabic and innumerable Eastern dialects, who was more at home with Bedouins than with his own brothers, and who was a mine of knowledge about the natives of Syria, of Egypt, and the whole of Northern Africa--about their passions, their customs, their superstitions, and all their ways of life. Isaacson had cured him of a malarial fever contracted on one of his journeys. That night they dined together, and after dinner Starnworth took Isaacson to see some of the native quarters of the town.
It was towards eleven o'clock when Isaacson found himself sitting in a small, rude café that was hidden in the very bowels of Cairo. Through winding alleys they had reached it--alleys full of painted ladies, alleys gleaming with the lights shed from solitary candles set within entries tinted mauve, and blue, and scarlet, or placed half-way up narrow flights of whitewashed stairs. And in these winding alleys, mingled with human cries, and laughter, and murmured invitations, and barterings, and refusals, there had been music that seemed to wind on and on in ribands of sound--music that was hoarse and shrill and weary, that was piercing, yet at the same time furtive--music that was provocative, and yet that was often sad, with a strange sadness of the desert and of desire among the sands. Even now, in the maze around this café, there was another maze of sound, the tripping notes of Eastern dance tunes, the wail of the African hautboy, the twitter of little flutes that set the pace for the pale Circassians, the dull murmur of daraboukkehs.