Chapter III: At Grand Cairo

The Black Watch had barely buried their dead at Tel-el-Kebir before they were sent by railway to Zag-a-zig; a breakdown occurred on the line, and the regiment slept for the night on the slope of the railway embankment. On reaching Zag-a-zig, more fighting was expected; but the Egyptians did not show face, so the Highlanders were marched to Belbeis, from whence Allan despatched the preceding letter.

Belbeis is now a little town, about forty miles from Grand Cairo, situated on the borders of the desert, famous in the Crusade of the twelfth century as the first place captured by the Saracens, and held by them as a fortified magazine for supplies, and to this day it has a trade in corn. In the same century it made a vigorous resistance to Amurath of Jerusalem, and in more modern times it was occupied by the French army to keep open the communication between Cairo and the coast. Here a junction takes place of the canals derived from different parts of the Nile.

It had been reached by our cavalry on the evening of the day Tel-el-Kebir was captured, and after a slight skirmish was taken possession of by Drury Lowe.

The Black Watch was eight days at Belbeis, during which they had scarcely any other food than hard biscuits and a small supply of tinned meat, with muddy water from the canal to wash them down with; and as the knapsacks did not come in from Tel-el-Kebir for five days, neither officer nor private could have any change, but slept in the kilt without blanket or other covering, while nearly driven mad by mosquitoes, sand-flies, and other plagues of Egypt.

Arabi and Toulba Pasha had been taken prisoners, and nothing was spoken of now but the advance on Grand Cairo.

Meantime the surrender of the Egyptian position at Kafr Dowar took place. On its frowning batteries white flags in token of peace were everywhere displayed, and our troops entered without resistance. The terrible lesson taught the enemy at Tel-el-Kebir was not likely to be soon forgotten. Moreover, the firing of the Egyptian infantry was always rather defective, their Remington rifles being sighted much too high for short distances; thus, at the long range, their firing was always better than at close quarters.

From Belbeis General Lowe pushed on towards the capital, keeping on the borders of the desert. At every village he passed through, the swarthy population came pouring forth waving white flags and declaring themselves faithful to the Khedive, while masses of flying fugitives, on seeing our cavalry overtaking them, threw down their rifles and made signs of submission.

Galloping on without drawing rein, our cavalry entered Grand Cairo, after a forced march of fifty miles in thirty hours in heavy marching order, and by that act practically ended the war, and our troops had no adversaries now but the savage and plunder-loving Bedouins, who hovered and hung upon their skirts intent upon rapine and murder, as Allan Graham and some others ere long found to their cost.

The advance to Cairo was headed by the Bengal Horse, led in person by Sir Hugh Macpherson, though General Lowe was in command of the whole.

On the 22nd of the month the Black Watch left Belbeis for Grand Cairo, where the corps arrived in the evening, when the last rays of the setting sun tinted with the hue of blood and saffron the water of the Nile as it wound past the islets near El Ghizeh--flushed and red, as on the evening when, in long ages past, according to Mohammedan legends, Joseph sank Jacob's marble coffin in the stream; and it was with no ordinary emotion of admiration and interest that Allan and his comrades beheld the capital of Egypt basking in the sun ere he went down beyond the hills.

'Skirted by groves and gardens,' says a writer, 'its light airy structures seem to be based upon a mass of verdure; long lines of buildings, white, glittering, and infinitely varied in form, rise beyond each other, and the palace and citadel, cresting a steep projection of the Mokattam ridge, conduct the eye to the vast rocky barrier which protects "the victorious city" from the blasts of the desert.'

Streets of lofty and latticed houses abounding in carved balconies and florid arcades; the mosques, with delicate domes and airy minarets, covered with tracery and arabesques; the houses of beys and grandees; the fortified abodes of the stern old Mamelukes, now those of Egyptian nobles, recalling in their architecture the Moorish glories of the Alhambra and the Alcazar of Cordova--a perpetual dream of the Arabian Nights.

Even with night the bustle in its streets did not cease; the coffee-houses and hotels were filled with light, and, in the warm atmosphere, teemed with outdoor life, for there all who are afoot have lanterns, and there were the tellers of Arabian tales, the Nubian singer with his mandolin, and the Egyptian magician performing such tricks as one might think the devil alone could do; and now once again, as in the days of General Hutchison, the walls and towers of 'the Queen of Cities'--El Kahira of the fatalistic caliphs--re-echoed to the British drum and the Scottish warpipe, as the Highlanders defiled round it to their camp, where the tents were pitched outside the walls.

The soldiers were not allowed to enter the city, except on duty or with a pass, and, as a general rule, the latter was chiefly given to sergeants. This plan did not, of course, apply to officers, thus Allan, Evan Cameron, and some others lost no time in making their way to an European hotel, where something better than the repasts they had partaken of at Belbeis and elsewhere could be procured, and where, amid a somewhat polyglot society, consisting of Greeks and Egyptians, Hungarians and Cypriotes, they supped at an open window on a balcony overlooking a street abounding with bazaars, and lanterns swinging to and fro, crowded by people and innumerable vendors of street goods--turbaned or tarbooshed--the water-seller tinkling his dishes and quoting the Koran; the sellers of melons, of cresses and lily roots, of flowers of henna, wherewith to dye the nails of copper-coloured damsels; little donkeys ambling everywhere, and now and then a huge camel swaying along; and more than once the procession of a harem returning from the evening bath--the women enveloped in black garments and veils, with masks of white linen.

Amid the scenes of warfare the organ of wonder becomes blunted considerably, and thus after a time Allan, soothed by the fumes of a fragrant havannah, and weary, perhaps, with the events of a long day--the entraining and detraining of the regiment, its baggage and stores, and so forth--fell sound asleep in his chair, oblivious of the clatter of voices in the large room of the hotel, and the many sounds in the street below; while Cameron, re-entering the room, idled over an album of views of Grand Cairo and its vicinity.

Allan's short sleep was a restless one, for there came before him a vivid recollection or vision of Hawke Holcroft, and his pale face, with its last expression of horror and despair, as the waves closed over it and sucked him down.

A little cry that escaped him made Cameron look his way, and he saw a man, in the dim light without, regarding Allan with a fixed and hostile expression. He was clad somewhat like a European, but wore a tarboosh, with a blue tassel, and had a voluminous beard; and his eyes seemed savage and sinister in expression.

It is said that there is some mysterious and magnetic force in a long and fixed stare or gaze; and there is, it is also said, 'within us some vigilant quality that is only exercised when every other faculty is at rest, that permits all ordinary sounds to pass unheeded while we sleep, but that instinctively sounds the alarm when anything unusual or fraught with danger is at hand.'

Be all that as it may, Allan suddenly awoke, and started up, and the watcher as suddenly vanished, but not before his pale and sinister face had been seen by the wakener.

Cameron sprang out on the balcony. There was no one there, save his comrade, and it was evident that the lurker must have passed into the hotel by some other window.

'A dream,' muttered Allan, looking rather confused, 'a dream of that wretch Holcroft. Why should his face haunt me? I did not kill him--he drowned himself; and I need have no more remorse for that affair than for pistoling the fellow who shot poor Carslogie.'

'Whether the cause of your dream or not,' said Cameron, who was too genuine a Highlander to be without a considerable spice of superstition in his nature, 'a fellow lurked beside you whose look I little liked.'

'What was his appearance?'

'Difficult to describe in the dim light, but the gleam of his eyes was sinister. Some disbanded Egyptian turned thief, most likely. But he bolted the moment I approached, and you awoke.'

'All this is a strange coincidence,' said Allan, as he lit another cigar; and they turned their steps towards the camp without the walls. 'But I am not much given to dreaming, and our work has been too hard for some time past for indulgence in long naps, yet I had a strange and creeping sense of some evil presence near me, with a pain that was strange and intolerable.'

But Allan had not seen the last of the man with the tarboosh.

Before returning from history to our narrative and the adventures of our friends, it is impossible to omit reference to the impression made on the population of Alexandria by the warlike aspect and stately bearing of the Black Watch and other Highland regiments at the review, in the great square before the Abdin Palace, the official residence of the Khedive, whom our forces had now restored to place and power.

To see our eighteen thousand troops go past, the palace was crowded, not only at every window, but on its flat roof, and the Viceroy's wife, who had shared all his perils, was there with her children, and the closely-veiled ladies of the harem. The streets were lined by multitudes of curious but stolid Egyptians, not more inclined to hiss than cheer, feeling no sense of shame for their recent defeats and humiliation, but only one of quiet amusement and desire to behold a spectacle that did not cost them a piastre.

After the blue jackets, the Guards, and others had passed, the brass bands stopped, and then were heard the pipes and drums, as, led by its one-armed general, the Highland Brigade, every company steady and straight as a wall, the ranks well 'locked-up,' every officer and man looking stately and graceful in his waving tartan, came on at a swinging pace, amid mutterings of _Scozzezi diaboli nudi_.

Their general, Sir Archibald Alison, in honour of the occasion, wore a sprig of his native heather in his helmet. The idea had got abroad, said the _Times_, 'that the Highlanders, who bore the brunt of the fighting, who were the first in the trenches, and who suffered most severely, had been rather ungenerously ignored in official despatches. At all events, the crowd seemed disposed to grant unofficial honours, for the second cheer of the day was accorded to the Black Watch, easily distinguished by their red plumes, and led by Colonel Macpherson, also sporting the heather,' and exciting more interest even than our brown-clad Punjabees or the Belooches, in their black and red uniforms, tall and strapping fellows though they were; and with them came the heroes of Candahar, the Seaforth Highlanders, wearing Mackenzie tartan, covered with medals, and marching past as old Scottish soldiers can.

Then it was that the _Times_ reporter heard an Italian say, '_Poveri Egiziani_! If you had only seen them before, instead of _after_!'

The Black Watch were halted for a minute or two, prior to marching back to camp, when suddenly Cameron said to Allan, in a loud whisper,

'Look--there is the fellow I saw on the hotel balcony.'

Allan turned, and amid a crowd of Egyptians, Italians, and jabbering and gesticulating _bheesties_ and _syces_ (water-carriers and grass-cutters), belonging to our Indian contingent, he saw a man with a fair beard and a pallid face regarding him steadily with keen eyes and knitted brow; but, the moment he turned towards him, the stranger shrank back amid the crowd, and disappeared.

'Hawke Holcroft, by heaven,' exclaimed Cameron.

'Impossible! He is dead,' replied Allan, feeling curiously uncomfortable nevertheless.

'I would I were as sure of a thousand guineas,' said Cameron.

'One reads of such things only in romances--yet the eyes and beard were the colour of those of Holcroft.'

'Truth is always strange--"stranger than fiction," as Byron tells us.'

'Stranger, indeed, should this prove the case. But, if alive, how comes he here, and why does he seem to dog me?'

'I regarded him at first vacantly, then with indistinct recognition, and anon with certainty, though the beard and red tarboosh disguise him so much!'

Allan Graham knew not what to think. If the man referred to was actually Holcroft, by what miracle was he then in Grand Cairo, and how was he rescued from the sea? Strange it was, indeed, that if the lurker at the hotel was he, Allan should dream of him at the moment of his appearance in the balcony.

'There is always a skeleton in every fellow's cupboard, and Hawke Holcroft was the skeleton in mine, poor devil!' said Allan.

'You are still disposed to think and speak of him in the past tense?' observed Cameron, whose mind was made up as to his identity.

'I cannot do otherwise, but the moment the parade is dismissed we shall make inquiries at the hotel.'

They did so, but in vain. No person of that name or appearance was known there.

Instead of being put into the comfortable barracks of Kasr-el-Nil in the city, the Highland Brigade was kept in camp while October and November crept on, and this time was not entirely a peaceable one; for in the former month the Bedouins, who were greatly puzzled with their garb, and conceived them to be the English soldiers' wives all camped in one quarter, thought to make a dash there, and secure a few 'moon faces' to embellish their tents in the desert.

A body of them belonging to the band or tribe of Zeid-el-Ourdeh, the sheikh of Jebel Dimeshk, a mountain range that lies north-eastward of Grand Cairo, came swooping down upon the Highland lines with this view, and a result which very much bewildered them, for the Scottish forces turned out with rifles and fixed bayonets, and in a very few minutes more than forty amorous Bedouins bit their native dust.

On several other occasions the spiteful natives amused themselves by firing at a distance among the tents at random, and one evening a bullet whistled through Allan's tent within an inch of his head, thus necessitating some severe patrol duty.

It was while encamped here that he received Lady Aberfeldie's letter explaining the apparently false position in which the villainy of Holcroft--combined with his spite, avarice, and desperation--contrived to place Olive Raymond.

'Look here, Evan,' said Allan, to his _fidus_ Achates, in a grumbling tone, 'read this letter from the mater. I don't know what to think of this strange story; but, without some other proofs, if she thinks we are going to kiss again with tears as the poet has it, she is very much mistaken. The mater says that Olive's own unruly heart has perhaps made a shipwreck of her life, whatever that may mean. Poor girl, what a fool she was not to confide more completely in me!'

In his tone tenderness was blended with bitterness and regret.

From this little speech Cameron was hopeful that all would come right in the end; but a short time was given them to think or talk over the matter, as both were hurriedly sent with a detachment consisting of about half-a-company--Allan, of course, in command--to a place called Matarieh, near Heliopolis, to take part there in a demonstration against the prowling Bedouins among the mountain ranges that overlook the desert traversed by the disused railway that ran from Cairo towards the plain of Muggreh.

And for this place, which lies some miles north-east of Cairo, they marched accordingly, taking with them provisions, ammunition, and tents, for the modern village was a small one, situated among the ruins of the ancient town, which was deserted far back as the days of Strabo, and is now to be traced only in extensive mounds of earth and a noble obelisk nearly seventy feet in height; and there disasters occurred which Allan Graham was fated never to forget.