Surely Bella Donna knew it, spied it from her tower.

Now he heard he knew not where, violent voices of fellahin, of many fellahin talking, as it seemed, furiously in the darkness.  The noise suggested a crowd roused by some strong emotion.  It sounded quite near, but not close.  Isaacson stood still, listened, tried to locate it, but could not.  The voices rose in the night, kept perpetually at a high, fierce pitch, like voices of men in a frenzy.  Then abruptly they failed, as if the night, wearied with their importunity, had fallen upon the speakers and choked them.  And the silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the doura, was startling, was almost dreadful.

Isaacson walked more quickly, fixing his eyes on those lights to the south.  As he drew near to them, he was conscious of a sort of cold excitement, cold because at its core lay apprehension.  When he was very near to them and could distinguish the solidity of the darkness out of which they were shining, he walked slowly, and then presently stood still.  And as he stood still the Nubian sailors on the Loulia began to sing the song about Allah which Mrs. Armine had heard from the garden of the Villa Androud on her first evening in Upper Egypt.

First a solo voice, vehement, strange to Western ears, immensely expressive, like the voice of a mueddin summoning the faithful to prayer, cried aloud, “Al-lah!  Al-lah!  Al-lah!” And this voice was accompanied by a deep and monotonous murmur, and by the ground bass of the daraboukkeh.  Then the chorus of male voices joined in.

As Isaacson stood a little way off on the lonely bank of the Nile in this deserted place—­for the Loulia was tied up far from any village, in a desolate reach of the river—­he thought that he had never heard till now any music at the same time so pitiless and so sad, so cruel, and yet, at moments, so full of a rough and artless yearning.  It seemed heavy with the burthen of fate, of that from which a man cannot escape, though he strive with all his powers and cry out of the very depths of his heart.

Like a great and sombre cloud the East settled down upon Isaacson as he heard that song of the dark people.  And as he stood in the cloud something within him responded to these voices, responded to the souls that were behind them.

Once, one morning in London, besieged by the commonplace, he had longed for events, tragic, tremendous, horrible even, if only they were unusual, if only they were such as would lift him into sharp activity.  Had that longing resulted in—­now?

He put out one lean, dark hand, and pulled at the heavily podded head of a doura plant.  And the voices sang on, and on, and on.

Suddenly, with a sharp and cruel abruptness, they ceased.

“Al—­” and silence!  The name of the dark man’s God was executed upon their lips.

Isaacson let go the podded head of the doura.  He waited.  Then, as the deep silence continued, he went on till the outline of the big boat was distinct before his eyes, till he saw that the blue light was a lamp fixed against an immense mast that bent over and tapered to a delicate point.  He saw that, and yet he still seemed to see Bella Donna upon her tower; Bella Donna, the eternal spy, whose beautiful eyes had sought his secrets between the walls of his consulting-room.