In less than three days the entire town, Moorish and Jewish, was honeycombed with subterranean revolt.  Even the civil guard, the soldiers of the Kasbah, the black police that kept the gates, and the slaves that stood before the Basha’s table were waiting for the downfall to come.

The Mahdi had gone again by this time, and the people had resumed their mock rejoicings over the Sultan’s visit.  These were the last kindlings of their burnt-out loyalty, a poor smouldering pretence of fire.  Every morning the town was awakened by the deafening crackle of flintlocks, which the mountaineers discharged in the Feddan by way of signal that the Sultan was going to say his prayers at the door of some saint’s house.  Beside the firing of long guns and the twanging of the ginbri the chief business of the day seemed to be begging.  One bow-legged rascal in a ragged jellab went about constantly with a little loaf of bread, crying, “An ounce of butter for God’s sake!” and when some one gave him the alms he asked he stuck the white sprawling mess on the top of the loaf and changed his cry to “An ounce of cheese for God’s sake!” A pert little vagabond—­street Arab in a double sense—­promenaded the town barefoot, carrying an odd slipper in his hand, and calling on all men by the love of God and the face of God and the sake of God to give him a moozoonah towards the cost of its fellow.  Every morning the Sultan went to mosque under his red umbrella, and every evening he sat in the hall of the court of justice, pretending to hear the petitions of the poor, but actually dispensing charms in return for presents.  First an old wrinkled reprobate with no life left in him but the life of lust:  “A charm to make my young wife love me!” Then an ill-favoured hag behind a blanket:  “A charm to wither the face of the woman that my husband has taken instead of me!” Again, a young wife with a tearful voice:  “A charm to make me bear children!” A greasy smile from the fat Sultan, a scrap of writing to every supplicant, chinking coins dropped into the bag of the attendant from the treasury, and then up and away.  It was a nauseous draught from the bitterest waters of Islam.

But, for all the religious tumult, no man was deceived by the outward marks of devotion.  At the corners of the streets, on the Feddan, by the fountains, wherever men could meet and talk unheard, there they stood in little groups, crossing their forefingers, the sign of strife, or rubbing them side by side, the sign of amity.  It was clear that, notwithstanding the hubbub of their loyalty to the sultan, they knew that the Spaniard was coming and were glad of it.