“It’s a very old and, among Easterns, very famous resort of smokers of hashish.  You notice the blackened walls, the want of light.  The hashish smoker does not desire any luxury or brightness.  He wants his dream, and he gets it here.  You would scarcely suppose it, but there are rich Egyptians of the upper classes, men who are seen at official receptions, who go to the great balls at the smart hotels, and who slink in here secretly night after night, mingle with the lowest riff-raff, to have their dream beneath this blackened roof.  There is one coming in now.”

As he spoke, Mahmoud Baroudi appeared in the doorway.  He was dressed in native costume—­very poorly dressed; wore a dingy turban, and a long gibbeh of discoloured cloth.  With the usual salaam, muttered in his throat, he went into the farthest and darkest corner of the cafe and squatted down on the floor.  The old Arab carried to him in a moment a gozeh, a pipe resembling a nargeeleh, but without the snake-like handle.  Baroudi took it for a moment, inhaled the smoke of the hashish, and poured it out from his mouth and nostrils.

“He looks like a poor Egyptian,” said Isaacson, almost in a whisper.

“He is a millionaire.  By the way, didn’t you see him this afternoon?”

“Where?”

“At Shepheard’s.  He drove up just before I saw you in a phaeton.”

“The man with the Russian horses!  Surely, it’s impossible!”

“This afternoon he was the cosmopolitan millionaire.  To-night he sinks down into his native East.”

“Who is he?”

“Mahmoud Baroudi.”

“Mahmoud Baroudi!” repeated Isaacson, slowly and softly.

An old man who had crept in began to sing in a high and quavering voice a song of the smokers of hashish, accompanying himself upon an instrument of tortoise and goat-skin.  A youth in skirts began to posture and dance an unfinished dance of the dreamer who has been led by hashish into a world that is sweet and vague.

“I’ll tell you about him later,” whispered Starnworth.

That night they sat up in the hotel till the third time of the Moslem’s prayer was near at hand.  Starnworth, pleased to have an auditor who was much more than merely sympathetic, who understood his Eastern lore as if with a mind of the East, poured forth his curious knowledge.  And Isaacson gripped it as only the Jew can grip.  He listened and listened, saying little, until Starnworth began to speak of the strange immutability that is apparent in Islam, and of how the East must ever, despite the most powerful outside influences, remain utterly the East.

“Or so it seems up to now,” he said.

He illustrated and emphasized his contention by a number of striking examples.  He spoke of Arabs, of Egyptians he had known intimately, whom he had seen subjected to every kind of European influence, whom he had even seen apparently “Europeanized,” as he put it, but who, when the moment came, had shown themselves “native” to the core.