Surely Bella Donna was upon her tower.
He stopped at the edge of a field of doura. What was the use of going further?
He looked to the north, then turned and looked to the south, comparing the two distances that lay between him and his own boat, between him and the Loulia. His mind had said, "If I'm nearer to the Fatma I'll go back; if I'm nearer to the Loulia I'll go on." His eyes, keenly judging the distances, told him he was nearer to the Loulia than to his own boat. The die was cast. He went on.
Surely Bella Donna knew it, spied it from her tower.
Now he heard he knew not where, violent voices of fellahîn, of many fellahîn talking, as it seemed, furiously in the darkness. The noise suggested a crowd roused by some strong emotion. It sounded quite near, but not close. Isaacson stood still, listened, tried to locate it, but could not. The voices rose in the night, kept perpetually at a high, fierce pitch, like voices of men in a frenzy. Then abruptly they failed, as if the night, wearied with their importunity, had fallen upon the speakers and choked them. And the silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the doura, was startling, was almost dreadful.
Isaacson walked more quickly, fixing his eyes on those lights to the south. As he drew near to them, he was conscious of a sort of cold excitement, cold because at its core lay apprehension. When he was very near to them and could distinguish the solidity of the darkness out of which they were shining, he walked slowly, and then presently stood still. And as he stood still the Nubian sailors on the Loulia began to sing the song about Allah which Mrs. Armine had heard from the garden of the Villa Androud on her first evening in Upper Egypt.
First a solo voice, vehement, strange to Western ears, immensely expressive, like the voice of a mueddin summoning the faithful to prayer, cried aloud, "Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!" And this voice was accompanied by a deep and monotonous murmur, and by the ground bass of the daraboukkeh. Then the chorus of male voices joined in.
As Isaacson stood a little way off on the lonely bank of the Nile in this deserted place--for the Loulia was tied up far from any village, in a desolate reach of the river--he thought that he had never heard till now any music at the same time so pitiless and so sad, so cruel, and yet, at moments, so full of a rough and artless yearning. It seemed heavy with the burthen of fate, of that from which a man cannot escape, though he strive with all his powers and cry out of the very depths of his heart.