“D’you know where the boat is—­the Loulia?”

“Somewhere between Luxor and Assouan, I believe.  Armine and his wife are perfect turtle-doves, you know, always keep to themselves and get right away from the crowd.  One never sees ’em, except by chance.  She’s playin’ the model wife.  Wonder how long it’ll last!”

In his laugh there was a sound of cynical incredulity.  When he had strolled away, Isaacson went round to Cook’s office, and took a sleeping compartment in the express train that started for Luxor that evening.  He would see the further wonders of Cairo, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, Sakkara—­later, when he came down the Nile, if he had time; if not, he would not see them at all.  He had not travelled from England to see sights.  That was the truth.  He knew it now, despite the longing that Cairo, the real Cairo of the strange, dimly-lit and brightly-tinted interiors, of the shrill and weary music, of the painted girls and the hashish smokers, and of that voice which cried aloud in the mystic hour the acclamation of the Creator—­had waked in his Eastern nature to sink into the life which his ancestors knew—­the life of the Eastern Jews.  He knew what his real purpose had been.

Yet he left Cairo with regret.  Starnworth had asked him to come on that six weeks’ desert journey.  He longed to do that, too.  With this cessation of work, this abrupt and complete change of life, had come an almost wild desire for liberty, for adventure.  This persistent worker woke to the great, stretching life outside—­outside of his consulting-room, of the grey sea that ringed the powerful Island, outside of Europe, a little weary, a little over-civilized.  And a voice that seemed to come from the centre of his soul clamoured for wild empires, for freedoms unutterable.  It was as if the walls of his consulting-room fell with a noise of the walls of Jericho.  And he looked out upon what he needed, what he had always needed, sub-consciously.  But he could not take it yet.

In the train he slept but little.  Early in the morning he was up and dressed.  From his window he saw the sunrise, and, for the first time was moved by the hard wonder of barren hills in an Eastern land.  Those hills on the left bank of the river, glowing with delicate colours, hills with dimples that looked like dimples in iron, with outlines that were cruel and yet romantic, stirred his imagination and made him again regret his life.  Why had he never been here before?  Why had he grown to middle age encompassed by restrictions?  A man like Starnworth had a truer conception of life than he.  Even now, at this moment, he was not running quite free.  And then he thought of the Loulia.  Was he not really a man in pursuit?  Suppose he gave up this pursuit.  No one constrained him to it.  He was here with plenty of money, entirely independent.  If he chose to hire a caravan, to start away for the Gold Coast, there was no one to say him nay.  He could go, if he would, forgetting that in the world there were men who were sick, forgetting everything except that he was in liberty and in a land where he was at home.