“So he is safe,” continued Hamet.  “Yes, he will even have his picture taken.  Yes, he can afford to suffer that.  He will stand in front of the great eye and the machine shall go click, and it will not do him any harm at all.  He has a letter for you.”  Hamet dropped from his enthusiasm over the wonderful immunity of the postman from the dangers of photography into a most matter-of-fact voice.

“A letter for me?  That’s impossible,” cried Hillyard.

But the Arab was thrusting his hand here and there in the load on the donkey’s back and finally drew out a goatskin bag.  Hillyard, like other Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the inefficiency of all Postmasters-general.  A blight fell upon such persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest caricatures of bureaucrats.  It could not be that the postal service was now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance.  Yet the Arab drew forth a sealed envelope and handed it to Hillyard.  And it bore the inscription of his name.

Oh, but it bore much more than that!  It was written in a hand which Hillyard had not seen for seven years, and the mere sight of it swept him back in a glory of recollections to Oxford, its towers and tall roofs, which mean so much more to the man who has gone down than to the youth who is up.  The forest, with its patterns of golden sunlight and its colonnades of trees crowding away into darkness, was less visible than those towers to Hillyard, as he stood with the envelope in his hand.  Once more he swung down the High and across the Broad from a lecture with a ragged gown across his arm.  Merton and the House, New College and Magdalen Tower—­he saw the enchanted city across Christ Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington, and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy used to roam.  For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell.

He tore it open and read: 

“Some one in London is asking for you.  Who it is I don’t know.  But the message came through in a secret cipher and it might be important.  I think you should pack your affs. and hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you.”

Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.

“He will find food in our camp,” he said to Hamet, with a nod towards the postman.  “We may as well go on.”

Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that day.  The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon the camels.  The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to gather.  He had one of the green volumes of “The Vicomte de Bragelonne” in his pocket, but this morning the splendid Four for once did not enchain him.  Who was it in London who wanted him—­wanted him so much that cipher telegrams must find him out on the banks of the Dinder River?  Was this letter the summons to the something more and something different?  Was the postman to Abyssinia the expected messenger?  The miracle of that morning predisposed him to think so.